The Number Problem in the Persian Wars 480-479 BCE

[CaesarAugustus]

The argument is interesting, but in modern reconstructions there are a lot of bias. First of all is to think that the ancients were incapable of planning and organizing.

Hi Marco,

  No, the argument is that the Persians were not able to solve problems which no other army before the Napoleonic Wars solved, and that armies of 80,000 men or 160,000 men behave in ways which Xerxes' army in Herodotus does not.  In science, we call this uniformitarianism and avoiding special pleading.

  I don't know the Chinese and Indian sources as well as the Near Eastern and European, but every time I try to back up claims for armies of hundreds of thousands of men in ancient China, I find the kind of things that if they were written in Akkadian or Latin nobody would take seriously, its all round figures in stories. 

  Comparative evidence for food requirements varies, but only within limits (and we actually have ancient Greek rules of thumb in Herodotus and Thucydides, and earlier Mesopotamian ones, we can compare them to the ones used in recent handbooks).  To support armies in the high tens of thousands, Romans and Hapsburgs and Turks had to store supplies along their route in advance, transport supplies by water, and forage.  Those let them feed and move armies of tens of thousands of men, but not hundreds of thousands of men.  In world history, the first good evidence for armies of hundreds of thousands of men seems to be around the Napoleonic Wars (contemporary documents are good evidence.  itemized lists of contingents by a contemporary supported by other sources is good evidence.  round numbers in a famous writer long afterwards are not good evidence).

  The only way we know that Greek fleets were outnumbered is Herodotus and the early poets, and more than a hundred years ago Hans Delbrück pointed out that almost everyone says they were outnumbered by the enemy (I am sure that if you asked the Gauls or the Britons, they would say that the Romans outnumbered them, but that is not what Caesar says).  Herodotus seems to have got his numbers for the Persian fleet from Aeschylus who probably got them from Homer's Catalogue of Ships (so the Persians having 1,200 ships tell us that Asia invading Europe was just as important as Europe invading Asia long ago, the story Herodotus begins the Histories with ... Thucydides also begins his history by arguing that his war is at least as important as the Trojan War).

I repeat, in your same references you can read that what you suggest makes little sense and is plausibly wrong.

If you search for certainties, you are wasting your time. If you want to suggest that the huge persian empire was going to invade Greece with an army of stragglers, you are wasting our time.

As your same sources tell us, we can safely assume that:
- Persians needed a massive army
- to feed the army it was possible to count on at least three channels
-- pillaging
-- local and close allies
-- supply columns (and we know that the Persian fleet was enormously preponderant)

If you want to deny this points, honestly you should change the thread title and open a topic of fantastic history.

PS in the Parthian campaigns Rome moved armies well over one hundred thousand soldiers (without counting followers), in arid or semi-desert territories. Should it be a problem to move a large army a few kilometers from the sea, with fleets available to disembark supplies?