The Number Problem in the Persian Wars 480-479 BCE

[Sean Manning]

Well, for Mark Anthony's army we have the number of soldiers, it is very likely that the number in men was greater because a roman army does not include just the soldiers but also the non-combatants.

Marco, I am looking at numbers of soldiers because nobody counted everyone, so if I tried to compare numbers of heads I would be comparing one calculation to another calculation. So Herodotus claims that there were many noncombatants in addition to his 1,800,000 soldiers, 1,207 triremes, and 3,000 smaller ships, but he does not claim to know how many there were, he shows his reader how he estimates them (and because we can read cuneiform, we know his assumptions were wrong: Mesopotamian armies did not have a servant for each soldier, they had central groups of cooks, leatherworkers, and so on). The same for the size of the Greek army at Plataea: he only claims to know the number of hoplites, Helots, and unarmed Thespians, he says he is estimating the rest.

Whereas if we compare numbers of soldiers, we can start from numbers in sources (although who gets counted is still an issue).

Its important to compare numbers for the same thing, because generally the number of soldiers in a war is greater than the number present in any one army, and the number who start a campaign is always greater than the number present in the main army months later. People often use the first kind of number to argue that the second kind of number could have been higher than we ever see.

But, apart that, the topic round around the possibility to support big numbers for the persian army (and as usual, when a similar topic start the point is to deny similar figures for all ancient armies... don't ask me why I don't like similar topics).

Spend some time looking through ancient sources in different languages for armies of more than 100,000 soldiers. I think you will find that there are fewer than you think, and they are in the Old Testament, a few Late Antique writers who knew the Old Testament, stories about barbarian invaders who the writer never saw, and the Roman civil wars which ended with Augustus becoming emperor.