The Strength and Organization of the Persian Army at Plataea

[Sean Manning]

Dear Peter,

What is the source of your information on counting in the Ottoman army, and why should we think that these Polish observers were correct? Rhoads Murphy has done a lot of archival research on the Ottoman army, and he has found plenty of counts of specific types of troops or draft animals. I see no reference to any counts of every man and beast to make one grand total. Interestingly enough, he estimates that Ottoman armies in the "janissaries, sipahis of the porte, and timariot cavalry" phase could be up to 65,000-70,000 soldiers at the beginning of a campaign led by the sultan. Considering that cavalry are harder to supply than infantry, this fits fairly well with the evidence that ancient armies never had much more than 100,000 soldiers at any one place or time!

He has also found many cases where intelligent foreign observers vastly overestimated the strengths of Ottoman armies implied by the documents. I suspect that part of the problem is that armies with lots of light cavalry are hard to count, and part of the problem is that they were influenced by the literary trope that Turkish armies had to be countless. I can only access scholarship in English, German, and Latin not Polish but it does seem that the best way to learn how Ottoman armies were administered is to look at Ottoman archives.

[Sean Manning]

Hi Macedon and Sean,

Dear Peter,

Doing arithmetic on Herodotus' figures for Xerxes' army can be fun, but I personally don't think this is a good approach, because its so unlikely that they have any systematic relationship to the truth, and if they do there is no way to find out. I think that the fleet strengths and Free Greek hoplite numbers are more likely to have some connection to the truth, because while very high they are less so, and because Herodotus would have found it easier to find evidence for them.

I also am not sure that Mardonius would have believed that his men were mostly inferior to the free Greeks. He probably thought back to the land fighting of the Ionian Revolt, about which we know very little. We aren't even certain that the Greeks fought in ranks and files by 480! Both sides behaved cautiously during the Plataea campaign, suggesting that they respected each other's fighting abilities.

Well sorry for resurrecting a very old thread but I think I had a good reason to do this (and it's better to resurrect old threads than creating new threads which are exactly the same, IMO). :wink: Regarding the credibility of numbers given by Herodotus - I found one article written by prof. Livio C. Stecchini which defends Herodotus and his credibility as a historian:

http://www.iranchamber.com/history/artic..._wars5.php

http://www.iranchamber.com/history/artic..._wars8.php

It is a very interesting article to read even if the author is wrong in his judgements. But he seems to have some good points. On the other hand he doesn't explain the casualty figures for both sides given by Herodotus (which are actually much more ridiculous than his strength figures).

There are also other possible explanations of numbers given by Herodotus, without accepting the theory that he was simply a liar and / or a Greek propagandist. For example, he might have given figures of so called "paper strength" - while real strength could be much smaller than "paper" one (especially at Plataea, considering that diseases were almost always taking heavy toll in all armies before 19th century). Another possibility is that Persians counted their "strength" in a smiliar way as later Ottoman Turks did.

The problem is that armies of two million men are too big to be paper strengths, too big to be soldiers and camp followers, and too big to be soldiers, camp followers, and pack animals. Even if we assume an army of 200,000 men, twice the size of any ancient army we have actual evidence for, that still requires is to allow eight camp followers or draft animals per soldier, which is impossible. A 20th century historian (Peter Green? Hignett?) suggested that someone mistranslated the Persian word for a unit of a thousand men for a unit of a myriad men, but there is no direct evidence for this and it would leave us with a paper strength and no way to find the real strength of Xerxes' army.

As I pointed out in the other thread, the prior probability that a foreign army strength in a narrative source is correct is low, particularly when its a Greco-Roman source talking about barbarians. There is no way to test it other than comparative and logistical evidence, and both argue against his figures. So do the figures for barbarian armies in other Greco-Roman historians, which are almost all very high, very vague, and very diverse from one another. Therefore, rationalizing Herodotus' numbers is not a good approach, because it is much more likely that his figures are somebody's guess or joke than that they are related to the truth in some systematic way.

Somehow, its always those who want to defend Herodotus' figures who throw around the word "liar" not those who reject them. Numbers are not just used as precise measures of quantity, even numbers that look "exact" to us, and knowing how many men are in an army is really hard even for that army's own clerks. T. Cuyler Young's "480/479 BCE: A Persian Perspective," Iranica Antiqua 15 (1980) is good on the rhetorical and narrative aspects of Herodotus' story, although he makes some odd mistakes in his logistical calculations.