02-13-2012, 11:41 AM
Herodotus seems to be very careful in his calculations in VII.184-187. He is also rather sober when it comes to the logistics required. He isn't just blurting out numbers; he is really thinking about them.
But the science of people-counting is very inexact. This still happens today. For example, for decades the press would talk about the 500,000 people who would go see the Indy 500 every year. (The race organisers would never say attendence figures.) Just a few years ago, an enterprising reporter actually counted all the chairs to discover that the speedway had only 257,325 seats. So even into the twenty-first century, with all our computers and statistics and crowd-monitoring cameras, estimates of crowds were off by a factor of two.
But the science of people-counting is very inexact. This still happens today. For example, for decades the press would talk about the 500,000 people who would go see the Indy 500 every year. (The race organisers would never say attendence figures.) Just a few years ago, an enterprising reporter actually counted all the chairs to discover that the speedway had only 257,325 seats. So even into the twenty-first century, with all our computers and statistics and crowd-monitoring cameras, estimates of crowds were off by a factor of two.
David J. Cord
www.davidcord.com
www.davidcord.com
