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Subject:
A bit of history: 11 August 480 BC: Remember The Battle of Thermopylae and speak with honour
tjkhan
8/10/2006 4:57:02 AM
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| Let me start with a quote from the Greek poet Kavafis who wrote the poem entitled "Thermopylae" in 1903:
Let honor be to those in whose life
it was set to guard Thermopylae.
Never moving away from duty;
Just and equals in all of their acts
But with sadness and compassion
Brave once they are rich and when
They are poor, again brave
Coming to aid as much as they can;
Always speaking the truth
But without hate for those who lie.
And even more honor they deserve
When its predicted (and many predict)
That Ephialtes will appear in the end
And the Medes will finally pass through
So now from Wikipedia:
Background
Size of the Persian Army
Xerxes I, king of Persia, had been preparing for years to continue the war against the Greeks started by his father Darius. In 481 BC, after four years of preparation, the army and navy of Xerxes arrived in Asia Minor and built a bridge of ships across the Hellespont at Abydos to march his troops across. Herodotus gives Xerxes' army as follows:
Fleet crew: 517,610
Infantry: 1,700,000
Cavalry: 80,000
Arabs and Libyans: 20,000
Total 2,317,610
This number needs to be at least doubled in order to account for support troops giving thus at least 5,283,220 men, which is obviously excessive. Herodotus also wrote that the army drank entire rivers and ate the food supplies of entire cities. The poet Simonides estimated four million. Ctesias of Cnedus who was Artaxerxes Mnemon's personal physician and wrote a history of Persia according to Persian sources (that unfortunately has not survived) gives 800,000 as the total number of the original army that met in Doriskos which is repeated by several later historians. Some modern historians have gone the other way in underestimating the Persian troops. Sir Frederick Maurice [1], who was a British general in World War I, claims that the army could not have surpassed 175,000 due to lack of water. Others have given numbers as low as 60,000-120,000.
It is possible to make an estimate. At the battle of Plataea the Persian army numbered according to Herodotus 300,000 troops which is considered realistic for two reasons: First of all it gives a realistic 3 to 1 ratio with the 110,000 Greek army. Secondly Herodotus, as Munro and Macan have pointed out, also gives the name of 6 superior commanders and 29 leaders of baivarabam [2].
The baivabaram, basic unit of the Persian infantry, numbered 10,000 strong [3]. If there was loss of troops due to attrition the Persians preferred to dissolve baivabarams and fill the ranks of others [4]. Also another force that included Xerxes' personal bodyguard, The Immortals, that has been estimated at sixty thousand, left along with its leader after the battle of Salamis [5]. Adding casualties of the battle and attrition due to the need to guard cities and strategic passes this gives an estimate of over 400,000.
The Persian empire of the Achemenids did not have any trouble raising this size army. By 492 BC it had an area of over 4,000,000 square kilometers, and it is estimated that its population in the 4th century BC was about 70,000,000 inhabitants [6]. Xenophon, who was an eye-witness, reports that at the battle of Cunaxa, Cyrus had a troop of over 100,000 while king Artaxerxes had over 1,000,000 [7]. While it is possible that he exaggerated the size of the enemy force, there is no reason to do so for his own, which we must remember was from only one of the thirty satrapies. Darius at the battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC had a troop that numbered according to the smallest number given (by Curtius) 45,000 cavalry and 200,000 infantry drafted from forces of Armenia, Mesopotamia, Persia and the Eastern satrapies which was not all that even this fragment of the empire could give since Alexander the Great later faced 20,000-40,000 infantry at the Persian Gates, drafted from one year's soldiers of Persia alone 30,000 troops, and fought significant forces in the Eastern satrapies [8]. The supply of Xerxes' troops was very well taken care of until the frontier of the Persian empire, which in 480 BC was Macedonia [9] by five depots that had been set up on the path. After all according to Herodotus it took only 13 days to go from the last depot at Therme to Thermopylae.
It must be noted the 110,000 Greek troops of Plataea did not include forces from Thebes, Thessaly and the northern Greek kingdoms, which, from a belief of inevitable Greek defeat and desire to save their land from destruction or hope for a change in the political status in Greece that would put them on top, defected to the Persian side after the Persian army advanced to their region. Had they not, the Greek army could have matched Maurice's number. But even if it did not, with a 1.5 to 1 ratio the Greek army could have sought battle on an open field with a very realistic chance of defeating the invaders, since during the Ionian Revolt and the battle of Marathon the phalanx formation showed that it |
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