Ancient army numbers

[Sean Manning]

As I wrote earlier, Herodotus seems to realise that his naval numbers are over the top. With the Greeks - in full-on desperation mode - mustering some 330 ships for Artemesium (and Athens luckily supplying a majority) he felt the need to "rationalise" the Persian fleet. Note that all the ships destroyed are fighting ships (the grain ships and others are "beyond counting") and we are back to some 600 - that recurrent figure.

Lastly, if we are to believe that Xerxes took 1,207 fighting ships to Greece as well as grain ships and others "beyond counting", just what did the coastal states of the eastern Mediterranean do for an entire sailing season? They would seem reduced to trading and sailing in dinghies.

Comparing Herodotus 7.97 and 7.184 is also instructive: a fleet of three thousand ships including triakonters and pentekonters and twelve hundred triremes turns into twelve hundred triremes plus three thousand pentekonters when Herodotus wants to dazzle his audience with numbers. Not only does he add 1200 ships in this way, but he assumes that each light galley had the largest possible crew. As T. Cuyler Young pointed out in “480/79 BCE- A Persian Perspective,” great stories about defeating an invader demand that the invader be as numerous, and the defenders as few, as possible. Until recently, modern writers tended to make Persian numbers as large as possible because they were influenced by this story.