Ancient Logistics and ancient warfare

[Paralus]

Herodot does not lower the numbers of the Persian fleet. He directly says that at Salamis they had as many ships as they had at the beginning. This is what his sources claimed, this is what he reports. His numbers regarding the events before the battle are also those that were reported to him. For the ancients the numbers were not "unbelievable" concerning the navy. This is why he does not criticize the use of such a fleet while he does the use of a land force as great as was reported. He clearly portrays the land army as a mistake of Xerxes. He does no such thing regarding the fleet.

He must have had concerns regarding the numbers of ships. This is plain to me from his reduction of those numbers (even after adding the 120 of 7.185) prior to Artemesium. Here 600 are removed by storms thus reducing the size (on his received figures) to 727. The telling sentence is 8.13:

All this was done by the god so that the Persian power might be more equally matched with the Greek, and not much greater than it.

Note Herodotus claims that Persian numbers are now more equal to the Greeks'. "More equally" does not, to me, imply two or three to one. Interesting also is the supposed conversation after Thermopylae before Xerxes impales Leonidas' head. Here Demaratus advises sending 300 ships around the Peloponnese (7.235.1). Achaemenes disagrees noting that Persian naval superiority will be lost (236.2):

...if after the recent calamity which has wrecked four hundred of your ships you send away three hundred more from your fleet to sail round the Peloponnese, your enemies will be enough to do battle with you; while your fleet is united, however, it is invincible, and your enemies will not be so many as to be enough to fight

727 is closer to my preferred figure and far and away more preferable to 1,327. If, then, there were not less than 1,200 at Salamis, whence came the 500-600 extras in so short a time?

I guess we will never agree on the numbers. On the idea that the Greeks were much more experienced in naval warfare and better "trireme fighters" than the Phoenicians and others in the Persian navy, I'll leave that to Thucydides (1.14.1-3):

These were the most powerful navies. And even these, although so many generations had elapsed since the Trojan war, seem to have been principally composed of the old fifty-oars and long-boats, and to have counted few galleys among their ranks. Indeed it was only shortly before the Persian war and the death of Darius the successor of Cambyses, that the Sicilian tyrants and the Corcyraeans acquired any large number of galleys. For after these there were no navies of any account in Hellas till the expedition of Xerxes; Aegina, Athens, and others may have possessed a few vessels, but they were principally fifty-oars. It was quite at the end of this period that the war with Aegina and the prospect of the barbarian invasion enabled Themistocles to persuade the Athenians to build the fleet with which they fought at Salamis; and even these vessels had not complete decks

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Those triremes which Athens built for the invasion clearly far outnumbered anything the city had possessed prior. It logically follows that the crews were, for the great part, inexperienced (indeed Cimon is reported to have urged his fellow "knights" to lay down their bridles and take to the ships - Plut Cim. 5.2-3) and many of the hoplite class will have had to row (thus the reduced fleet so Athens could send her army to Plataea). Indeed, of the eventual 180 ships Athens sent to Artemesium, more than a few were manned by the Plataeans who do not strike one as experienced "trireme fighters".