Persian Invasion of 480 BC - articles

[Mythos_Ruler]

Interesting articles regarding the Persian invasion of 480BC

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

[Eleatic Guest]

The bibliography would make every antiquarian proud. :wink:

[Narukami]

Interesting articles indeed!

Thanks for the link Mythos. :wink:

Narukami

[Idomeneas]

great read! and it shows to me that sometimes some scholars may be lead by their thirst for glory and not love for actual history. There was almost a race of who will say the lesser number of the invading force :lol:
if they continue they would say that Xerxes and some buddies came to greek neighbourhood to smash some greek faces :lol: :lol: :lol:

[taira1180]

Th author isn't completely honest. The arguments of Delbruck were technical. He said if it was a true nightmare in the XIX century to supply an army of 1.000.000 men with railroads and modern roads, it would be impossible in the V century BC with an army of 3.000.000 men. And if he would have reunited such an army, it would be impossible to the little greek armies to resist (remember, the spartans died in Thermopyle). So he calculated that an army between 20.000 and 50.000 men, that would be realistic to maintain by the persians and to be defeated by the greeks.

[Anonymous]

We have a problem with History in that we cannot KNOW all that happened in the past, wherefore we construct theories and then attempt to PROVE our own right and others' wrong. In such circumstances, proof is an illusion. Those who would minimalise the achievements of the Greeks in their Wars with Persia (and, as a by-product, minimalise those of the Persians) may be right, but so may the maximisers. We may never be certain. One thing which strikes me particularly strongly, however, is the observed tendency of historians to assume that we are superior to our forebears ( "..those that preceded him [Herodotos] were one step closer to the primates...") and that we can measure their powers by our own - what we can't do must have been impossible for them - and yet we have many evidences of our ancestors achieving things which we cannot reproduce.

I incline to the maximist view:- 21st century civilization is what it is because we stand on the shoulders of giants; we could not have reached these heights on the shoulders of nanoi.

[hoplite14gr]

Agree with Paul.
We have debunked the 5000000 myth in this forum.
It would benefit the authors or publishers of these articles to read the following threads on this forum
linotorax
Marathon: the run
Othismos true nature.

Many Athos canal works were discovered in 1960 and engineers from Leeds University in 1995 if memory serves me right, managed to measure its exact dimentions and construction method.

The botom line is Greeks won Persian lost.
As I had said before we live in the era of "management" and the ancients lived in the era of "resolve" so many modern people find it hard to stomach the fact that: at that times some folks stood agains ominous prospects and made it through!

Kind regards

[Mythos_Ruler]

I agree with your sentiments, Stefanos.

Many today simply can't fathom what the human race is capable of when we pull together for a common goal - whether it be conquest (Persian invasion) or resisting conquest (Thermopylae). The Persian Empire had enormous resources under its control, not least of which was their PEOPLE. Same goes for Greece - whose only resource was their people. Because a modern U.S. marine requires 3 square meals a day to "survive" doesn't mean ancient soldiers were the same. Sure, the logistics were enormous, but so was the Persian empire.

[taira1180]

Another of the problems is how to feed such an huge army, without the food deteriorating in the summer, and transport that. I'm sorry, I'm not trying to diminuish the Greek achieving, only reducing what i thinks it's an exaggeration. Even the Romans who had a great empire, never recruited such big armies.

[hoplite14gr]

Fabiano, in the "Xerxes 5000000" thread we have argued that this was the real mistake that Xerxes did. He brought an army that could not be sustained easily and that the army colpased under its own weight.
The Greeks were stuborn enough to resist untill the negative factors sprang and time started working against the Persians.
Xerxes campaign had srtiking similarities with Napoleon´s campaign in Russia in mis-calculating resources and ability in their aquisition.

Kind regards

[Sean Manning]

I'll have a look at that thread, but am profoundly doubtful that Achaemenid Persia could do something no other premodern state could by launching an invasion with more than a few hundred thousand men. Field armies over say 50,000 are very rare before the Industrial Revolution, and ones over a few hundred thousand unheard of (well, we hear of them, but we also hear of a god or gods saving the day through miracles). Napoleon invaded Russia with 600,000, drawing on all Europe for manpower, moving in several columns hundreds of miles apart, with the advantage of efficient horse-collars and New World crops. And we know that Greek sources could overestimate the size of Persian armies by an order of magnitude.

[Aryaman2]

Here we are again!
We have discussed this many times, and probably we will in the future. This time I will try to clssify arguments so we can resume several threads of discussion in one.
Minimalistic view (my own)
1) Logistics. Here we make comparisons with armies in which numbers are reliable (muster and pay rolls)
2) Nature of Persian army (This is main Delbruck theory, besides logistics) The size of the Persian empire has nothing to do with his army, that was a "feudal" army composed by the noble persians and their retainers, together with some non Persian vassal lords and their retainers. The basic component was cavalry, so it must be a small army by nature
3) Nature of Greek army. It was an urban levy, its main component infantry, and it was fighting at home, so their logistic problems were lower, so it must be a large army than the Persian.
4) Sources. They are literary and biased, I think no one can´t doubt that, so they are logically unreliable. Delbruck compared them to the Swiss sources on the army of Charles the Bold, and the actual numbers from muster and pay rolls, 10 times lower. My experience with literary sources is always like that, even when they lack bias.

Maximalistic view
1) Persians defied logistics, they assembled a huge army that then starved in the road.
2) The Persian empire was huge, so should be its army
3) The Persians were logistic genius, they did military revolution 2.000 years before modern Europe. There are lots of things they could do in those times we can´t now.
4) Sources. Herodotus millions are not to be believed, but they could be some how a departure point for rational guess.

[Aryaman2]

My personal opinion
We will never know for sure, what is the importance of numbers?
For some it is about the glory of ancient greeks, or the superiority of Western indiduality against Eastern Masses. For me it has a more practical importance. I have been researching for a paper on military revolution and logistics in medieval times, I have concluded that literary sources are almost completely non reliable, that numbers are always grossly inflated, and that there was a big leap in the XVII century with the supply lines system that allow the size of armies to grow to numbers never achieved before. The Persian numbers stand in opposition to that, not alone, they are lots of other testimonies in history about enormous armies beaten by a small one, but in my opinion, based on years of research, they are totally false.

[Sean-Dogg]

I'm not a full fledged historian 'yet' but I do know a few little points that could help here:

Egyptians had stored over 7 years of food for an entire city in biblical stories, since Persia is only a little ways north, it's fair to assume they could have stored food long enough for quite a campaign.

The Greeks knew the invasion was coming long enough in advance to BUILD A FLEET. If the Persians put in anywhere near as much effort over such a long time, they certainly could have moved vast amounts of people and supplies.

If Persia had that many soldiers, I don't see why they couldn't move them. Many people of that area were nomadic to begin with weren't they? As long as they had food, they could do it. I don't see why feeding them in Greece would be much harder, granting the above about filling ships full of food.

I would suspect the majority of the food and supplies would have been ferried over later on the same ships, while the first strike would just be crammed people. Believe me it's disgusting how many people can fit in a three story ship without supplies. I once did a calculation for the volume of the entire human race, six billion people, each human taking up a two foot by two foot square six feet tall. The result is that all of humanity existing now could fit in a box less than one mile on each side! The point is; when necessary, LOTS of people can fit in a tight space. With a few hundred triple stacked ships.... I could see hundreds of thousands without stretching too hard.

[Mythos_Ruler]

I think you're off by an few orders of magnitude in your calculations, Sean-Dogg. It would take a square 31 miles per side to house everyone within a 2x2 square, or roughly 961 square miles (6.9 million people per square mile).