Could the Persian Empire logistically support an army several million strong?

[Prufrock]

It seems to me quite plausible - though probably unprovable - that:

Yes, possible. Certainly unprovable. (Unless someone who new the Histories better than me could point to a reference in the text. But the set of all possible explanations is very, very large.

But Herodotus does a lot of quoting anecdotes or stories, "learned men say," and so recycling fiction is another possibility.
I would prefer it not to be, since its a solitary source for so much stuff, but...?

A question that occurred to me: assuming a OOB ended up in Greek hands along Duncan's suggestion, how likely is it that Herodotus would have used it? He stands more-or-less at the start of Greek historiography - presumably nobody in 479 would have thought to keep the document for the future benefit of a profession not yet invented. And if it were kept in some archive somewhere, would Herodotus have gone looking for it? His basic MO were autopsy and interview, not archival studies, right?

At the beginning of his Histories Herodotus mentions 'Persians best informed in history', 'Persian learned men' - λόγιοι having the sense of a) versed in tales or stories; b) learned, erudite (most common usage); or c) skilled in words, eloquent.

b) fits the context here. This implies writing. If Herodotus had access to Persian historical accounts the natural conclusion is that he would have looked for written records of Xerxes' campaign. He was a Persian subject and the fact that he was able to travel so much indicates his family were well off and well-connected. He was related to Panyassis. I think it natural he would have been able to lay his hands on what he was looking for.

Interesting that there seem to be quite different standards of proof depending on whether things fit or don't fit your argument, Justin! 

[Justin Swanton]

It seems to me quite plausible - though probably unprovable - that:

Yes, possible. Certainly unprovable. (Unless someone who new the Histories better than me could point to a reference in the text. But the set of all possible explanations is very, very large.

But Herodotus does a lot of quoting anecdotes or stories, "learned men say," and so recycling fiction is another possibility.
I would prefer it not to be, since its a solitary source for so much stuff, but...?

A question that occurred to me: assuming a OOB ended up in Greek hands along Duncan's suggestion, how likely is it that Herodotus would have used it? He stands more-or-less at the start of Greek historiography - presumably nobody in 479 would have thought to keep the document for the future benefit of a profession not yet invented. And if it were kept in some archive somewhere, would Herodotus have gone looking for it? His basic MO were autopsy and interview, not archival studies, right?

At the beginning of his Histories Herodotus mentions 'Persians best informed in history', 'Persian learned men' - λόγιοι having the sense of a) versed in tales or stories; b) learned, erudite (most common usage); or c) skilled in words, eloquent.

b) fits the context here. This implies writing. If Herodotus had access to Persian historical accounts the natural conclusion is that he would have looked for written records of Xerxes' campaign. He was a Persian subject and the fact that he was able to travel so much indicates his family were well off and well-connected. He was related to Panyassis. I think it natural he would have been able to lay his hands on what he was looking for.

Interesting that there seem to be quite different standards of proof depending on whether things fit or don't fit your argument, Justin! 

Not really. I'm being hesitant here. Very little is known about Herodotus' life or circumstances. I can't really go any further than Duncan: it's feasible/reasonable that Herodotus could have seen or at least heard translated Persian records of the campaign, but it can't be proven that he did.

[Prufrock]

If Herodotus had access to Persian historical accounts the natural conclusion is that he would have looked for written records of Xerxes' campaign. He was a Persian subject and the fact that he was able to travel so much indicates his family were well off and well-connected. He was related to Panyassis. I think it natural he would have been able to lay his hands on what he was looking for.

That's you being hesitant? Really?

Compare this to your response to assertions contrary to your argument by Maurice, a career military man, whose expertise you dismiss with a 'what's he been smoking', and to a ship's captain, whose considered opinion on time and manpower needed to unload cargo you dismiss on the basis of your having unloaded a delivery van or two...

[Prufrock]

Just for some practical considerations regarding the unloading process, I asked my brother who skippers a deep sea fishing vessel out of Australia about the feasibility of unloading a 50 ton vessel in a day. He reckons a crew of 58, working shifts of one hour on and half an hour off for maximum efficiency, using nets and a pulley system capable of lifting 500kgs at a time, and with foremen who knew what they were doing, could unload 50 ton of cargo from ship to dock in 12 hours. Done chain gang style, with no nets or pulleys used, he reckons you'd need double the number of men.

As for unloading via smaller ships ferrying goods to a beach, it would depend how far off shore the vessel was moored, but he reckoned you'd struggle to unload 50 tons in a day. In his opinion, for a modern vessel you'd need something like twelve dinghies / tenders per ship working in constant relays, good weather and sea conditions, and 150 men for the job. You could use fewer ferrying vessels for a ship which mooring closer to the beach, but you'd still need the same number of trips.

Interesting to know, Aaron, although as Jim's useful and practical information on amphorae suggests, unloading amphorae is a bit different to unloading fish.  Not sure if that is a full enough response, but as Jim and Justin indicate, the trawlerman's estimate might be a bit on the time- and labour-intensive side.

My question was how big a working party he would consider necessary to unload 50 ton of foodstuffs by hand from a docked ship in 12 hours, and how feasible he would consider it to ferry 50 ton of materials from a moored ship to a beach in the same time frame. His answers regarding dock unloading times match those of the Ostia website link I posted earlier.

[Justin Swanton]

If Herodotus had access to Persian historical accounts the natural conclusion is that he would have looked for written records of Xerxes' campaign. He was a Persian subject and the fact that he was able to travel so much indicates his family were well off and well-connected. He was related to Panyassis. I think it natural he would have been able to lay his hands on what he was looking for.

That's you being hesitant? Really?

Compare this to your response to assertions contrary to your argument by Maurice, a career military man, whose expertise you dismiss with a 'what's he been smoking', and to a ship's captain, whose considered opinion on time and manpower needed to unload cargo you dismiss on the basis of your having unloaded a delivery van or two...

'Natural' doesn't mean 'proven'. The fact that Herodotus has so much to say about the details of the campaign does suggest he used written sources, or at least listened to people who read from those sources or had comprehensive knowledge of them.

As for Maurice, I'm sorry Aaron, but he's talking nonsense if he thinks a British army camp, squeezed as tight as possible to facilitate getting supplies from a railway line, needed 620 square metres per man. We have a pretty accurate idea of how compact a Roman camp was and it wasn't 16 men per hectare. Estimates put it between 480 and 1180 men.

He's also impossibly out in his estimation of the output of the Scamander. He didn't have a remotely accurate method for calculating its flow but affirms he did. I conclude that as an army officer he had a certain set of skills but these did not include calculating the area covered by a camp or the rate of flow of a river. There's a lot more I could say about Maurice but we can leave it at that.

Your brother calculated the rate of unloading a ship by dividing the cargo into loads of half a ton each, which requires nets and a pulley system: tricky and I think slow. My take is that if you split the load into units a man can handle - say 50kg - unloading will go much faster. One really has to try out both techniques and see how fast they actually are.

A delivery van of course is not a ship, but I think the comparison is a fair one. The hard part is getting the cargo over the side to the men in the water below - something like a 3-metre drop. If the grain is in amphorae you just lower it with a rope; if it's in a sack then maybe you use a net, I don't know. In any case taking your brother's estimates (which I did), landing the necessary supplies by beach remains feasible for the Persian fleet.

[Patrick Waterson]

Interesting to know, Aaron, although as Jim's useful and practical information on amphorae suggests, unloading amphorae is a bit different to unloading fish.  Not sure if that is a full enough response, but as Jim and Justin indicate, the trawlerman's estimate might be a bit on the time- and labour-intensive side.

My question was how big a working party he would consider necessary to unload 50 ton of foodstuffs by hand from a docked ship in 12 hours, and how feasible he would consider it to ferry 50 ton of materials from a moored ship to a beach in the same time frame. His answers regarding dock unloading times match those of the Ostia website link I posted earlier.

And the Ostia times are presumably also derived from 21st century estimates, based on 21st century techniques.

Would it be possible to ask him to make the same estimate for a Phoenician vessel using classical period techniques?  I have this difficulty seeing Phoenician traders turning up at a beach in the Casseritides, taking 2-3 days to offload their trade goods, then another 2-3 days to get their new goodies on board one trading is concluded.

The modus operandi I have in mind for the Achaemenids is this: ship anchors in shallow water offshore, hoists amphorae onto boats in a fairly steady stream; boats pull for shore, beach; willing hands on shore help boat crews lift amphorae over the gunwales; crews get boats back into water and row back for the next amphora or two or four or whatever.  The tempo is going to be that of military operations rather than that of dock persons who traditionally feel that haste is a waste of earning opportunity.

[Patrick Waterson]

That's you being hesitant? Really?

Compare this to your response to assertions contrary to your argument by Maurice, a career military man, whose expertise you dismiss with a 'what's he been smoking', and to a ship's captain, whose considered opinion on time and manpower needed to unload cargo you dismiss on the basis of your having unloaded a delivery van or two...

I must second Justin's reservations about Maurice's conclusions: yes, he was a career military man, and very knowledgeable concerning what he wrote about, it is just that what he wrote about bore no relation to the 5th century BC.

[Patrick Waterson]

In an idle moment, I thought I'd maintain the flow of new information by looking up the weather in the Aegean in summer

This website for yachtsmen is quite interesting.  The Meltimi or Etesian winds make for a more unpredictable sea state than has been suggested before and would be something to be factored into any cross-Aegean nautical conveyor belt.

In Herodotus, one gets the impression that the weather is either fine for everything the navies want to do or it is very bad.  Very bad essentially means a storm and a storm creates absolute havoc (and two fo them did).  The Etesian Winds were of course a known quantity and their effect on transit would be built into schedules.

My impression of Thucydides is that we see much the same pattern: either there is a storm, which interferes (sometimes drastically) with operations, or nothing interferes.  There seems to be no middle state of uncertainty or partial effectiveness except in human decision-making.

For the Humongous Herodotusian Army Hypothesis (HHAH) to be even slightly plausible I think we need to demonstrate the following.
1.   An extensive empire wide bureaucracy and police/security service with  the authority and ability to enforce policy compliance on any recalcitrant nobles/tribal leaders

This is a fairly safe bet.

2.   A huge regular logistics corps able to set up large and effective supply dumps able to store food stuffs for years at a time. Oh, and ensure quality compliance.

We actually only need an organisation capable of this as opposed to a 'regular logistics corps' - we can surmise its existence from the long preparation times leading up to Achaemenid campaigns.

3.   An extensive mapping service able to provide planned routes across country for multiple columns of men which also ensures they can reach the above.

An interesting attestation to the existence of maps occurs during Herodotus' account of the Ionian revolt, in which (Herodotus V.49) Aristagoras of Miletus , trying to convince the Spartans to support the revolt, produces

"a bronze tablet on which the map of all the earth was engraved, and all the sea and all the rivers."

4.   A sort of Persian Ofsted capable of monitoring the extensive apprentice scheme needed  to produce a large number of effective sailors and ships captains. The service would need to be multilingual  to deal effectively with locals who don't or claim they cant speak Persian.

The reality seems to have been somewhat simpler:

"Then Darius attempted to learn whether the Greeks intended to wage war against him or to surrender themselves. He sent heralds this way and that throughout Hellas, bidding them demand a gift of earth and water for the king. [2] He despatched some to Hellas, and he sent others to his own tributary cities of the coast, commanding that ships of war and transports for horses be built." - Herodotus VI.48

Each coastal city provided its own ships and crews, and these would be as good as the others habitually produced by that city (nobody would deliberately build a sub-standard ship that he would have to sail in).  Communication would be in the usual manner by which the Empire was governed.

[Prufrock]

Maurice is coming apart for me. I'm willing to read Young - any chance of sending me the relevant pages as scans?

I don't have a copy of the Young article, but Mark K kindly quoted some of it on a yahoo group, which I will requote here (and do note the size of the force he is considering):

Though I can well imagine that many will have been glad to see no mention of this topic lately, I cannot restrain myself from mentioning another article: T. Cuyler Young, Jr., "480/479 B.C – A Persian Perspective" (1980), 15 Iranica Antiqua 213.


Young calculates some logistical and transport requirements for a hypothetical Persian force of 210,000 men and 75,000 horses, based on the assumption that each soldier required approximately 3 pounds of grain per day, and each pack and cavalry animal 10 pounds of grain and 10 pounds of straw or other fodder.  At pp. 225-227, for example, he considers the advance from Therma to Thermopylae :

Hide message history
"Once having departed from Therma we may reasonably assume that the Persians were marching through hostile country, and had left territories which they had been able to supply with stores before the campaign began. [Footnote 31: Persian control before the start of the campaign could hardly have extended much south of Therma. Certainly it reached no further south than Tempe, for early in the campaign season of 480 B.C. Greek troops, under Spartan command, had been active that far north. For details see Burn 1962: 339-345.] In other words, from Therma on they had either to carry their grain supplies with them (by pack-horse, or by sea), or to live off the Greek harvest, or both. There would have been no prepared grain supplies along the route of march.



"The chronology of this march is subject to various interpretations, but the figures offered by Maurice are reasonable: the march itself took thirteen days, and the Persians were some six days at Thermopylae . [Footnote 32: Maurice 1930: 233.] While in the latter position, supply by sea would have been both possible and relatively easy, since the navy could control the approaches to the bay of Lamia . The situation was much different along most of the route of march to Thermopylae , however, and it is on this stretch that the Persian Quartermaster Corps would have been severely tested. The army divided and marched south from Therma by at least two, if not three, different roads (following perfectly the Napoleonic maxim to march divided, fight combined). [Footnote 33: For an excellent map of the Persian routes of march south from Therma v. Burn 1962: 340.] Only one of these routes was along the coast, and even then contact with the sea was easy only for about the first thirty miles. This left a total of one hundred and ten miles for that column to march on an inland road before reaching Thermopylae, and the other two columns were inland the whole distance from Terma [sic] to Thermopylae . Thus, the coastal column was out of touch with the sea for about ten days, and the rest of the army could not be supplied by ship for the whole thirteen days of the march south to the pass where Leonidas was to win his niche in history.



"Let us return to some plain facts and figures of military reality with this march in mind. An army of 210,000 men and 75,000 horses required a total of 1,380,000 pounds of grain a day (fodder and water needs may be left aside to simplify the discussion). A single pack-horse can carry about two hundred and fifty pounds of grain, but we must remember that the pack-horse itself eats ten pounds of grain a day, so its effective carrying capacity beyond its own needs is two hundred and forty pounds [Footnote 34: Engels 1978: 19 and Table 1.] A simple calculation reveals that 5,750 pack-horses would be needed to carry south from Therma the grain necessary to feed for one day an army which ate 1,380,000 pounds of cereal a day (1,380,000 divided by 24). For a two day march one would need 12,000 pack-horses to carry 2,760,000 pounds of grain, a two day supply for the army with each horse now able to carry only 230 pounds because that horse would itself eat twenty pounds of grain in two days. If one continues with this straightforward calculation to cover a ten day march, the minimum amount of time the one coastal column would have been out of touch with the sea and hence unable to be supplied by ship, on that tenth day the army would require 4,710,000 pack-horses to provide a total of 706,560,000 pounds of grain which is what the troops and animals would have eaten in the ten days of marching.



"Even if: (1) we assume that at least half of the army's grain needs were met from the Greek countryside, and (2) we ignore the transportation which would have been required to move that foraged grain to the troops, one is still left with an impossible demand on the Persian Quartermaster General to move grain forward from Therma. The only reasonable conclusion from these calculations is that the Persian army which marched to Thermopylae did not even come close to numbering 210,000 men and 75,000 animals."

Young goes on to assert that similar considerations would apply to limit the size of the Persian force that could have moved from Thermopylae to Athens , and the size of the Persian force at Plataea .

[Jim Webster]

The modus operandi I have in mind for the Achaemenids is this: ship anchors in shallow water offshore, hoists amphorae onto boats in a fairly steady stream; boats pull for shore, beach; willing hands on shore help boat crews lift amphorae over the gunwales; crews get boats back into water and row back for the next amphora or two or four or whatever.  The tempo is going to be that of military operations rather than that of dock persons who traditionally feel that haste is a waste of earning opportunity.

remember that grain transported in amphora is still a claim, the only evidence anybody has been able to provide is that grain was moved in sacks or bulk

[Justin Swanton]

Maurice is coming apart for me. I'm willing to read Young - any chance of sending me the relevant pages as scans?

I don't have a copy of the Young article, but Mark K kindly quoted some of it on a yahoo group, which I will requote here (and do note the size of the force he is considering):

Though I can well imagine that many will have been glad to see no mention of this topic lately, I cannot restrain myself from mentioning another article: T. Cuyler Young, Jr., "480/479 B.C – A Persian Perspective" (1980), 15 Iranica Antiqua 213.


Young calculates some logistical and transport requirements for a hypothetical Persian force of 210,000 men and 75,000 horses, based on the assumption that each soldier required approximately 3 pounds of grain per day, and each pack and cavalry animal 10 pounds of grain and 10 pounds of straw or other fodder.  At pp. 225-227, for example, he considers the advance from Therma to Thermopylae :

Hide message history
"Once having departed from Therma we may reasonably assume that the Persians were marching through hostile country, and had left territories which they had been able to supply with stores before the campaign began. [Footnote 31: Persian control before the start of the campaign could hardly have extended much south of Therma. Certainly it reached no further south than Tempe, for early in the campaign season of 480 B.C. Greek troops, under Spartan command, had been active that far north. For details see Burn 1962: 339-345.] In other words, from Therma on they had either to carry their grain supplies with them (by pack-horse, or by sea), or to live off the Greek harvest, or both. There would have been no prepared grain supplies along the route of march.



"The chronology of this march is subject to various interpretations, but the figures offered by Maurice are reasonable: the march itself took thirteen days, and the Persians were some six days at Thermopylae . [Footnote 32: Maurice 1930: 233.] While in the latter position, supply by sea would have been both possible and relatively easy, since the navy could control the approaches to the bay of Lamia . The situation was much different along most of the route of march to Thermopylae , however, and it is on this stretch that the Persian Quartermaster Corps would have been severely tested. The army divided and marched south from Therma by at least two, if not three, different roads (following perfectly the Napoleonic maxim to march divided, fight combined). [Footnote 33: For an excellent map of the Persian routes of march south from Therma v. Burn 1962: 340.] Only one of these routes was along the coast, and even then contact with the sea was easy only for about the first thirty miles. This left a total of one hundred and ten miles for that column to march on an inland road before reaching Thermopylae, and the other two columns were inland the whole distance from Terma [sic] to Thermopylae . Thus, the coastal column was out of touch with the sea for about ten days, and the rest of the army could not be supplied by ship for the whole thirteen days of the march south to the pass where Leonidas was to win his niche in history.



"Let us return to some plain facts and figures of military reality with this march in mind. An army of 210,000 men and 75,000 horses required a total of 1,380,000 pounds of grain a day (fodder and water needs may be left aside to simplify the discussion). A single pack-horse can carry about two hundred and fifty pounds of grain, but we must remember that the pack-horse itself eats ten pounds of grain a day, so its effective carrying capacity beyond its own needs is two hundred and forty pounds [Footnote 34: Engels 1978: 19 and Table 1.] A simple calculation reveals that 5,750 pack-horses would be needed to carry south from Therma the grain necessary to feed for one day an army which ate 1,380,000 pounds of cereal a day (1,380,000 divided by 24). For a two day march one would need 12,000 pack-horses to carry 2,760,000 pounds of grain, a two day supply for the army with each horse now able to carry only 230 pounds because that horse would itself eat twenty pounds of grain in two days. If one continues with this straightforward calculation to cover a ten day march, the minimum amount of time the one coastal column would have been out of touch with the sea and hence unable to be supplied by ship, on that tenth day the army would require 4,710,000 pack-horses to provide a total of 706,560,000 pounds of grain which is what the troops and animals would have eaten in the ten days of marching.



"Even if: (1) we assume that at least half of the army's grain needs were met from the Greek countryside, and (2) we ignore the transportation which would have been required to move that foraged grain to the troops, one is still left with an impossible demand on the Persian Quartermaster General to move grain forward from Therma. The only reasonable conclusion from these calculations is that the Persian army which marched to Thermopylae did not even come close to numbering 210,000 men and 75,000 animals."

Young goes on to assert that similar considerations would apply to limit the size of the Persian force that could have moved from Thermopylae to Athens , and the size of the Persian force at Plataea .

Two things come to mind:

1. I don't see why the Persian army needed to be inland for longer than five days at any time. It starts out from Therma and follows the coast to Phila. It then moves inland along the valley of the Tempe river. That part is brutal, moving through a hilly pass for about 10km to the plain beyond but from what I can see from Google maps and street views, it's doable. It's then four days to the coast again at Pagasae. After that the army can then split into two halves, one half following the coast the other half going inland and both meeting five days later on the broad valley of the Spercheus river before Thermopylae.

2. Grain is harvested in Greece in June, just in time for the arrival of the Persians. Over the Tempe river pass there is a broad fertile plain and they can take all they want: food for the locals' needs for twelve months. Foraging parties would strip the area, giving the army more than enough for its requirements during its passage.

[Flaminpig0]

In an idle moment, I thought I'd maintain the flow of new information by looking up the weather in the Aegean in summer

This website for yachtsmen is quite interesting.  The Meltimi or Etesian winds make for a more unpredictable sea state than has been suggested before and would be something to be factored into any cross-Aegean nautical conveyor belt.

In Herodotus, one gets the impression that the weather is either fine for everything the navies want to do or it is very bad.  Very bad essentially means a storm and a storm creates absolute havoc (and two fo them did).  The Etesian Winds were of course a known quantity and their effect on transit would be built into schedules.

My impression of Thucydides is that we see much the same pattern: either there is a storm, which interferes (sometimes drastically) with operations, or nothing interferes.  There seems to be no middle state of uncertainty or partial effectiveness except in human decision-making.

For the Humongous Herodotusian Army Hypothesis (HHAH) to be even slightly plausible I think we need to demonstrate the following.
1.   An extensive empire wide bureaucracy and police/security service with  the authority and ability to enforce policy compliance on any recalcitrant nobles/tribal leaders

This is a fairly safe bet.

2.   A huge regular logistics corps able to set up large and effective supply dumps able to store food stuffs for years at a time. Oh, and ensure quality compliance.

We actually only need an organisation capable of this as opposed to a 'regular logistics corps' - we can surmise its existence from the long preparation times leading up to Achaemenid campaigns.

3.   An extensive mapping service able to provide planned routes across country for multiple columns of men which also ensures they can reach the above.

An interesting attestation to the existence of maps occurs during Herodotus' account of the Ionian revolt, in which (Herodotus V.49) Aristagoras of Miletus , trying to convince the Spartans to support the revolt, produces

"a bronze tablet on which the map of all the earth was engraved, and all the sea and all the rivers."

4.   A sort of Persian Ofsted capable of monitoring the extensive apprentice scheme needed  to produce a large number of effective sailors and ships captains. The service would need to be multilingual  to deal effectively with locals who don't or claim they cant speak Persian.

The reality seems to have been somewhat simpler:

"Then Darius attempted to learn whether the Greeks intended to wage war against him or to surrender themselves. He sent heralds this way and that throughout Hellas, bidding them demand a gift of earth and water for the king. [2] He despatched some to Hellas, and he sent others to his own tributary cities of the coast, commanding that ships of war and transports for horses be built." - Herodotus VI.48

Each coastal city provided its own ships and crews, and these would be as good as the others habitually produced by that city (nobody would deliberately build a sub-standard ship that he would have to sail in).  Communication would be in the usual manner by which the Empire was governed.

Thank you for taking the time and effort to write a response

In order .
1. Can you produce any evidence for this Cheka style organisation? for example  is it mentioned by any writers contemporary to the Persian empire
2. What would this organisation capable of replicating the work of a 'regular logistics corps' and able to organise the feeding of several million men be.
3. The Bronze tablet would it be accurate enough and be of  the right scale to lead people to a supply dump bearing in mind they are travelling across country in a land they have never  seen before and do not have the benefit of GPS. Are such Bronze tablets common and is map reading a common skill within the Persian Empire
4. Which simply goes to prove that the invasion army was of a  reasonable  size as opposed to the HHAH that is to say there is no evidence for the creation unusual number of sailors and the like

For me the problem is that you and Justin start from the assumption that Herodotus must be right about the size of Xerxes army and then work backwards to create the conditions that allow for its existence, it is not falsifiable.  Without wishing to be rude the Persian Empire that you need to depict is a totalitarian society with a magical ability to collect, analyse and disseminate  information- it has more in common with the worlds of M A R Barker or Clarke Ashton Smith  than than an actual ancient society.

[Flaminpig0]

Maurice is coming apart for me. I'm willing to read Young - any chance of sending me the relevant pages as scans?

I don't have a copy of the Young article, but Mark K kindly quoted some of it on a yahoo group, which I will requote here (and do note the size of the force he is considering):

Though I can well imagine that many will have been glad to see no mention of this topic lately, I cannot restrain myself from mentioning another article: T. Cuyler Young, Jr., "480/479 B.C – A Persian Perspective" (1980), 15 Iranica Antiqua 213.


Young calculates some logistical and transport requirements for a hypothetical Persian force of 210,000 men and 75,000 horses, based on the assumption that each soldier required approximately 3 pounds of grain per day, and each pack and cavalry animal 10 pounds of grain and 10 pounds of straw or other fodder.  At pp. 225-227, for example, he considers the advance from Therma to Thermopylae :

Hide message history
"Once having departed from Therma we may reasonably assume that the Persians were marching through hostile country, and had left territories which they had been able to supply with stores before the campaign began. [Footnote 31: Persian control before the start of the campaign could hardly have extended much south of Therma. Certainly it reached no further south than Tempe, for early in the campaign season of 480 B.C. Greek troops, under Spartan command, had been active that far north. For details see Burn 1962: 339-345.] In other words, from Therma on they had either to carry their grain supplies with them (by pack-horse, or by sea), or to live off the Greek harvest, or both. There would have been no prepared grain supplies along the route of march.



"The chronology of this march is subject to various interpretations, but the figures offered by Maurice are reasonable: the march itself took thirteen days, and the Persians were some six days at Thermopylae . [Footnote 32: Maurice 1930: 233.] While in the latter position, supply by sea would have been both possible and relatively easy, since the navy could control the approaches to the bay of Lamia . The situation was much different along most of the route of march to Thermopylae , however, and it is on this stretch that the Persian Quartermaster Corps would have been severely tested. The army divided and marched south from Therma by at least two, if not three, different roads (following perfectly the Napoleonic maxim to march divided, fight combined). [Footnote 33: For an excellent map of the Persian routes of march south from Therma v. Burn 1962: 340.] Only one of these routes was along the coast, and even then contact with the sea was easy only for about the first thirty miles. This left a total of one hundred and ten miles for that column to march on an inland road before reaching Thermopylae, and the other two columns were inland the whole distance from Terma [sic] to Thermopylae . Thus, the coastal column was out of touch with the sea for about ten days, and the rest of the army could not be supplied by ship for the whole thirteen days of the march south to the pass where Leonidas was to win his niche in history.



"Let us return to some plain facts and figures of military reality with this march in mind. An army of 210,000 men and 75,000 horses required a total of 1,380,000 pounds of grain a day (fodder and water needs may be left aside to simplify the discussion). A single pack-horse can carry about two hundred and fifty pounds of grain, but we must remember that the pack-horse itself eats ten pounds of grain a day, so its effective carrying capacity beyond its own needs is two hundred and forty pounds [Footnote 34: Engels 1978: 19 and Table 1.] A simple calculation reveals that 5,750 pack-horses would be needed to carry south from Therma the grain necessary to feed for one day an army which ate 1,380,000 pounds of cereal a day (1,380,000 divided by 24). For a two day march one would need 12,000 pack-horses to carry 2,760,000 pounds of grain, a two day supply for the army with each horse now able to carry only 230 pounds because that horse would itself eat twenty pounds of grain in two days. If one continues with this straightforward calculation to cover a ten day march, the minimum amount of time the one coastal column would have been out of touch with the sea and hence unable to be supplied by ship, on that tenth day the army would require 4,710,000 pack-horses to provide a total of 706,560,000 pounds of grain which is what the troops and animals would have eaten in the ten days of marching.



"Even if: (1) we assume that at least half of the army's grain needs were met from the Greek countryside, and (2) we ignore the transportation which would have been required to move that foraged grain to the troops, one is still left with an impossible demand on the Persian Quartermaster General to move grain forward from Therma. The only reasonable conclusion from these calculations is that the Persian army which marched to Thermopylae did not even come close to numbering 210,000 men and 75,000 animals."

Young goes on to assert that similar considerations would apply to limit the size of the Persian force that could have moved from Thermopylae to Athens , and the size of the Persian force at Plataea .

Two things come to mind:

1. I don't see why the Persian army needed to be inland for longer than five days at any time. It starts out from Therma and follows the coast to Phila. It then moves inland along the valley of the Tempe river. That part is brutal, moving through a hilly pass for about 10km to the plain beyond but from what I can see from Google maps and street views, it's doable. It's then four days to the coast again at Pagasae. After that the army can then split into two halves, one half following the coast the other half going inland and both meeting five days later on the broad valley of the Spercheus river before Thermopylae.

2. Grain is harvested in Greece in June, just in time for the arrival of the Persians. Over the Tempe river pass there is a broad fertile plain and they can take all they want: food for the locals' needs for twelve months. Foraging parties would strip the area, giving the army more than enough for its requirements during its passage.

Is that several million men moving along the Valley of the Tempe River and through the hilly pass?

[Dangun]

At the beginning of his Histories Herodotus mentions 'Persians best informed in history', 'Persian learned men' - λόγιοι having the sense of a) versed in tales or stories; b) learned, erudite (most common usage); or c) skilled in words, eloquent.

Its possible. A long list of things are possible.
But historiography, public libraries, scientific method - all that good stuff - were a work in progress.
So when Herodotus writes, "Persian's say," is it a sailor's tale over a glass of akraton at his local pub?

Or for example, Herodotus writes "Corinthians say, and the Lesbians agree" - so he's double-checked it right? Two sources? But they agree that Arion rode to Taenarsus on the back of a dolphin. So is that exemplary of his incredulity?

While very helpfully Herodotus sometimes refers to other authors' histories, does that mean he is going without in the vast majority of times he does not? Who knows.

[Prufrock]

What was the Greek word for fact, and it's entomology?

Please explain the relevance of the study of insects to this discussion.

To be fair to Mark, he's clearly been messed around by spellcheck / text prediction / automatic text correction or some unholy alliance of the three. As a regular victim of the same myself, he has my sympathies!