The Dacians: Rome\'s Greatest Enemy?

[Nathan Ross]

Also, the Romans most likely brought most of the 100,000 soldiers together for the final battle at the Dacian capital.

But where do you get that figure from? One hundred thousand men is a vast army - a force that size would consume 240 tons of food every day, and the produce of 1400 acres of arable land every week. Caesar conquered Gaul with a considerably smaller force, and Plautius invaded Britain with probably half that number. I think you would struggle to find many reliable sources describing a Roman campaign army of that size (battles like Philippi involved a lot of legions, but most of them were severely understrength!).

Besides which, as I've said before, gathering a force of that size would strip the entire Danube frontier of men and leave the border effectively undefended for the course of what could be a very protracted war. That's not even considering how effective such a large number would be in practice: as Alexander the Great allegedly said, a force of greater than forty thousand is not an army but a mob!...

At the risk of repeating myself (!), there is no firm evidence for the total size of Trajan's army, but no contemporary describes it as being the largest, or even one of the largest, ever fielded by Rome. Way back here I roughly estimated a total number of 55,600 men - this is a hypothetical figure (and still very high), but it is to some degree based on inscriptional evidence. To my knowledge none of the very much higher estimates are based on any solid foundation.