Persian Invasion of 480 BC - articles

[Sean Manning]

I'll avoid getting into the debate over specific numbers (I thought that some of the posts above implied support for figures over a million, but was mistaken). In my opinion the current scholarly debate is over the range 100,000 to 500,000 people entering Greeece from Persia, and will probably never be resolved much more closely than that.

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?

17th century states had better harnesses, new crops, more efficient bureaucracies, and smaller, more practical territories. At that their field armies were normally in the tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands. However, they had no ancient tradition of organizing large states and armies. Persian logistics were well organized, but inefficient: important Persians could bring along wives and concubunes in wagons, along with other conveniences. Herodotus likes the term "yoke-animals" in describing the invasion. Seaborne transport would have helped a great deal, on the other hand.

Why must a cavalry army be small?

It musn't, necessarily, but cavalry forces do tend that way. A horse eats three times as much grain as a human, or needs lots of good fodder in the case of a herd of steppe ponies. Cavalry also tend to require good pay or servants, so are expensive in general to support. Thus, if there are supply problems, you can support four infantry or one cavalryman.

Edit: Other thoughts- we have well attested Persian armies of 50,000-100,000 soldiers (by comparing roughly known Hellenic strengths at Cunaxa and Alexander's battles with how much the enemy appear to have outnumbered them). We know Hellenistic kings could raise similar forces. These armies had to be supplied by land, had a smaller recruiting base, and were not the product of years of careful preparation for a great expedition. The Achaemenid army was mostly infantry, based on conscription and land held in exchange for military service, and indeed was infantry-based at this period.