Persian Invasion of 480 BC - articles

[Aryaman2]

[Ok, I would like to hear what are your ideas on the subject, what do you think is a reasonable number for a field army based on logistics? and on what grounds?

I think we tend to view all such questions through the dark glass of a modern mind. Even using medieval or earlier records as a starting point seems to me to be likely to produce distortions. I think slaves and servants in the Persian army would have made a contribution as combatants as well as bearers; I think ancient warriors were accustomed to minimal home comforts when they were at home and therefore were able to cope with great hardships on campaign; I think their generals were quite at ease with the idea that their men might be half-starved and exhausted by the end of a campaign, as this was only to be expected; I think they were also happy to send unfit men into battle, as they were great believers in the theory of the big battalions (i.e., that God is on their side); I think that they were also ruthless in exploiting the territory through which they marched; I think that their need to garrison conquered territory would be much reduced, given the fact that they took the conquered nation's manpower with them on their further march; I think they would have rested the sick and injured in garrison roles, as every army does; I think the shock troops would have been kept in peak fighting trim, with special rations, at the expense of the "dory-fodder"; I think the Persians planned long and carefully before committing their Empire to the campaign and they prepared long-range advance depots, as well as using their naval superiority to re-supply from the sea ( "10-100 times cheaper"). My reasoning is based on Herodotos, whom I do not perceive as totally discredited, although I would still not accept his figures as necessarily 100% accurate.

What figure would I put on the size of the Persian army, then? I can't put a figure on it without a lot more data; which is one of the reasons for my challenging the willingness of others to assert that it must have been a great deal smaller than claimed. You grudgingly concede that a top figure of 100, 000 might be possible, but then immediately slash the fighting force by half.

I think what people would like to know is; How many men fought for the Persians at Thermopylae? Every part of the Greek strategy was aimed at reducing this number to something they might conceivably cope with, so they may have hoped that the kind of problems you cite would have the effect you propose. However, being forced to let the largest area of top-quality farmland in all of Greece, fall into enemy hands, doesn't quite accord with this. So what conclusions do I draw? Xerxes could raise and move a huge army, given the resources available to him. An army in the rangeof 100,000 to 300,000 should not be ruled out. How many of these were combatants? Insufficient data for a conclusion. I do think that the defenders of Thermopylae may have been outnumbered at a rate of 16:1 and up to 50:1. Figures of up to 300,000 for the army have been regarded as acceptable by people who have gathered as much data as they can. It seems that we differ in that your top estimate, which allows for exaggeration by a multiple of [b]30[/b], is my bottom one.

1) I can´t share your opinion that ancient soldiers somehow were tougher than medieval or modern soldiers, the pains that French soldiers endured in Russia, for instance, have little parallels, and there were plenty of armies that starved to death
2) Figures lower than 100.000 combatants have been regarded as acceptable by many senior scholars
3) You accept 300.000, so you are willing to accept that Herodotus greatly inflated figures, why stop at 300.000 once Herodotus numbars are discarded?