Persian Invasion of 480 BC - articles

[Sean Manning]

You think the ancients were better able to withstand privation than early modern peasants?

No, I think they were better able to withstand privation than modern soldiers. I hadn't considered early modern armies as a point of comparison. What exactly do you mean by the term?

By "early modern" I was speaking rather broadly, say the 16th to 18th centuries, with an emphasis towards the end of the period. In this period soldiers were mostly ill-paid professionals raised from the poor, and frequently badly treated as leaders either saw soldiers as expendable or raised more men than they could properly feed and clothe. Marshal DeSaxe's (an 18th century French general) Reveries Upon the Art of War casually assumes that soldiers will be treated badly unless an army undertakes reforms. (The author has some eccentric suggesions). By Napoleonic times several organizational advances had occurred which made somewhat larger field armies possible, while late medieval armies were mostly rich amateurs (eg. Flemish militias, some men-at-arms) or professionals of a rather higher status (eg. English longbowmen, Swiss pikemen, some men-at-arms) and therefore had to treat most of their soldiers reasonably well.