Persian Invasion of 480 BC - articles

[conon394]

The problem is that the food will roten very quickly in the boats (remember what happened in the invincible armada), and i doubt that the Persians would find food enough in Greece to feed all those men.

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.

But the Persians were not storing their food on boats, merely transporting it. The very existence of Athens in the classical period, where something like over half of its 300,000+ population was dependant upon imported food (and the related market for luxury food items) demonstrate that long distance transport of food was viable.

The Persian King faced basically no financial hurdles; and he had spent 4 years amassing supplies and supply building depots right up to and including Thessaly. Herodotus at (and around) 7.20, 7.22-3, and 7.25-6 provides an impressive list of Persian preparations. The Persians may not have had a good feel for the capability of motivated heavy infantry, but they were quit good at logistics. What substantial leap in technology was outside the Persians grasp that that suddenly occurred in the seventeenth century?

In particular:

Aryaman2

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

Why must a cavalry army be small?