'Some Terrifying Numbers"

[Prufrock]

A post by Sean Manning on numbers in barbarian armies. It's another post Patrick would have enjoyed responding to, and includes a tribute to him by Sean.

https://bookandsword.com/2020/03/28/some-terrifying-numbers/

[Erpingham]

very interesting but then Sean manning often is.  I think we should say at this point that Herodotus justifies his numbers for Xerxes invasion from a count and even tells us how it was counted.  Doesn't make the figures accurate but he had clearly asked "And how do you know the army was so big"? 

There is another interesting factor which is are smaller numbers more accurate?  Is the traditional figure for the size of Xerxes fleet (1207)  more accurate because someone might be considered more capable of counting 1200 large objects rather than a crowd of 20,000?  And is accuracy dependent on the perceived significance of what you are counting?  In the Middle Ages we have plenty of counts of hundreds or low thousands of knights alongside very large numbers of common foot.  Are both figures equally accurate or even arrived at in the same way?

[Imperial Dave]

thanks for the link Aaron. Good summary I thought

[aligern]

Is Herodotus account of the numbering of the Persian host believable or does it make his eventual number more believable?  Many of these troops had marched some thousands of kilometres and must have been fed on the way.  That would mean someone going ahead of the contingent to requisition the appropriate number of rations. If that is so then at the very least each contingent leader must know his troop numbers. The Persians had plenty of scribes and no doubt grain had to be accounted for. When the units reached the muster, again they would have to be fed. Even at the low numbers that many of us believe for Xerxes army it will likely take more than one beach to feed the army so someone has to balance the numbers being fed from each point. That again means counting.
Creating an enclosure for  10,000 men and having it repeatedly filled is pointless, a waste  of time when the numbers already exist and just need to be aggregated.

As to barbarian armies, it beggars belief that they could deploy 90-100,000 men with their primitive commissariat.
Roy

Roy

[RichT]

Yes SM is always interesting. I look forward to seeing his book (presumably on Achaemenid armies).

Numbers are a strange thing. I've been inclined of late to go a bit meta and wonder about why numbers matter, and why people now are so interested in them. Some articles on ancient battles largely come down to working out how big each army was and what size all its contingents were, but in many ways that is the least interesting question to ask about an ancient battle or an ancient army. People tend to like quantifiable things like numbers but they aren't necessarily very important, in practice. Either Xerxes' army was millions strong, in which case being so large didn't help, so numbers don't matter; or it was some much smaller but now unknowable size, in which case there wasn't a great size discrepancy v. Greeks, so numbers don't matter.

I think it's interesting to think about why modern commentators are so often obsessed with numbers; and why and in what circumstances ancient authors quoted numbers and knew numbers, and why and in what ways they distorted numbers, and whether they even knew they were distorting them, assuming they were. Mythologised versions of more recent conflicts invariably see the good guys (us) standing up against and overcoming enormous odds (them). Which is strange in a way, because saying the enemy were numerous and lost anyway also means saying they were a bit rubbish, which in a sense lessens the achievement of beating them. But the desire to be seen as (or to see oneself as) the underdog seems to be a very common human trait.

And also to add that if you do accept 1200 ships you must also accept 200,000 or more rowers to move them.

[Erpingham]

And also to add that if you do accept 1200 ships you must also accept 200,000 or more rowers to move them.

Yes.  You don't have to accept this number of course but, even if rejecting it, it is hard to cut it back too much, if we accept the Greek figures for their own fleet (in the 370s).  This fleet must have taken a considerable effort to keep in action - just finding beaching spots with sufficient water would be hard work, let alone resupply tasks (rowers consume a lot of calories).

[aligern]

I believe that the focus on numbers  and contingents is part of the historians' rejection of the 'battle-porn' school of history ( bows are bent saddles empty, steel rings against steel) which led to a dominance of logistical studies because administrative history was without the taint of triumphalism.
I was recently re reading Philip Rance's article on Taginae, it has a substantial section on numbers, fully referenced and demonstrating that its a branch of history with its own historiography, mostly traced back to the challenging ideas of Delbruck.
Numbers, of course are an important component reconstructing a  battle. Issus is a very different battle if  the Persians only just outnumber Alexander overall as opposed to having say  twice as many men.  Gaugamela is an example where the sheer size of the outnumbering army hinders it, but to understand the respective  tactics it is necessary to know the numbers and the frontage that the various bodies occupy.
Roy

[RichT]

Numbers, of course are an important component reconstructing a  battle. Issus is a very different battle if  the Persians only just outnumber Alexander overall as opposed to having say  twice as many men.  Gaugamela is an example where the sheer size of the outnumbering army hinders it, but to understand the respective  tactics it is necessary to know the numbers and the frontage that the various bodies occupy.
Roy

Yes true, but trouble is, we don't. We don't know the numbers of the Persian army, and we can only guess at their frontages. Intervals of Persians - unknown; depth of Persians - unknown; gaps between units of Persians - unknown; numbers of Persians - unknown. We can make intelligent guesses, but reconstructions in the strict, detailed sense are out of the question.

[aligern]

We can make  some sensible deductions . However, there is almost always  one or more links in the chain that lack sufficient support to fall definitely one side or the other. I am  happy that Persians had a decimal structure and fought ten deep on foot , so a unit of 1000 would have a frontage of 100 men and assuming a width of a  yard per-man then  that unit has a frontage of 100 yards.  That sort of logic , agreed with assumptions, can lead to a frontage for Darius' army at Gaugamela. We can make assumptions about where the wings stop because when Alexander rides off there is a point at which Bessas has to follow so that gives a terminus to the left hand deployment and the right of the line is likely to project beyond Parmenio, but how far. I recall Tarn did the work  and gets to a number. Now that could be a wrong number but it should not be that far wrong because it relates to Alexander's frontage and we have a good idea of Macedonian numbers and depths.  That should enable us to get to an estimate of Persian numbers that is there or there abouts. I suggest that the same chains of logic, can be built  for many classical battles. One can get a fair idea of numbers and balance of forces for Taginae abd Ad Decimum and for tge Hannibalic and Sucdessor battles.   Of course, where we have little help in battles in The Heptarchy  or Europe in the Early Middle Ages, but then isn't chewing over such imponderables a part of the remit of a Society such as ours.

Roy

[RichT]

I don't disagree with you Roy, but the assumptions are at every point of the chain - ten deep for Persians, one metre frontage for Persians - and that's just infantry. Even the Macedonians require a lot of guesses - how deep was the phalanx, how strong was the phalanx, where did the Greek allies form up, were the flank guards at 90 degrees or some other angle, what was the frontage of the Companions etc etc. Bold efforts have been made to calculate Macedonian frontage very precisely (eg Marsden); but even to take that as a starting point for guessing Persian numbers, we might easily be out by 100 percent either way.

I agree that it's possible to make intelligent surmises about all this stuff - we all do - but I also suspect that trying to quantify everything may be a dead end, and just gives a spurious sense of exactness. It might be better to accept that numbers are an unknown (outside of very broad generalisations such as that the Persians outnumbered the Macedonians, if even that is a safe assumption) and try to understand other aspects of battle instead (eg 'face of battle').

[aligern]

Now I worry about the 'Face of Battle ' approach. It revived historians interest in warfare, avoided the pornography of war and gave the study of battle a revived respectability. However, it is based upon assumptions about men's mental states that may or not be accurate. Certainly Ancients are a long way from the modern military experience  for which we have live or at least recent witness.  My grandfather described assaukting out of a trench in WW1. Before the whistle went men were throwing up and literally shitting themselves. Once he climbed out of the trench he felt calm and just walked forward whilst the bullets and shells whizzed overhead.  I do not know if the experience of others was similar or whether this was something particular to that generation or to the peculiar circumstances of the trenches, the waiting, the building tension, the invisible enemy and most of all the expectation of severe casualties.  Descriptions of battles with Dervishes , Zulus and Tibetans show similar behaviours under fire. troops get to a certain distance and halt under fire Their officers cannot motivate them to go forward. Eventually they retire, but in a slow dignified fashion. 
Do these paradigms work for Ancients ?  They do not advance into such an intense missile storm, the volume of casualties is much less. Do we know how the individual perceived the risks involved or reacted to the close physical proximity of comrades.  The WW1 soldier experienced combat individually because his safety did not directly depend upon those around him in the way a medieval or ancient soldier acted as part of a team. Even the Napoleonic soldier  is is  only individually involved even though his comrades are close to him. So I suspect that the FoB approach  is too liable to the notions of the historian who can elaborate the military experience from his own thoughts.
Roy

[Mark G]

Interesting thought Roy.

My readings lead me to conclude that there is a huge psychological shift with battlefield gunpowder, and a second with high explosive.

I think it is inadvisable to compare psychology across those two boundaries,

pre gunpowder( which includes medieval as the guns were so rare ), war was basically getting up next to each other ( or damn close if you had a bow), and then hitting the chap you saw over the head until they ran away.

Once gunpowder became common, there was a lot more emphasis on scaring the chap in front of you until he ran away.

And with high explosives, you had no idea who was in front of you, and death seems to come from everywhere, which you had to overcome and hope the other chap ran away.

High explosive is also the first real era where running away was likely to be safer than staying, as it's the first time that pursuit wasn't where the main casualties came from.

[RichT]

Ah we obviously mean slightly different things by FoB - I mean the 'mechanics of combat' aspects of it, not the 'universal soldier' aspects, which I agree are problematic in the extreme (and getting way off the theme of this thread, if that matters). I agree that gunpowder and explosives changed warfare enormously not least in making death random, unforeseeable and inescapable - face to face combat at least offers the illusion, even if it is only an illusion, that if you fight well, you can survive, but industrialised war is a lottery. Plus there are all the cultural and societal differences.

By FoB I mean understanding the nuts and bolts and mechanics of combat, through comparative stuff where appropriate but mainly through ancient accounts. Psychology comes into it, but it should be ancient psychology. My reading of Keegan is that this is what he meant by FoB too - it's interesting that the understanding has become so altered.

[Erpingham]

While I entirely agree with Richard about the original direction of FoB (I was writing a very similar reply), we do have the usual issue of how much can be recovered of the soldier's eye view of battle in our period of interest.  But the part of Keegan's technique - taking battle passages talking of heroic sweeping moves in stirring prose and saying "but how?" - is of value to us.  Trying to draw out universals of soldier behaviour is harder, simply because behaviours are frequently culturally derived.  I'm sure there are universals (humans get tired, hungry, fearful, enraged etc.) but actually meaningfully interpreting how these came through the cultural filter is tough.

[Erpingham]

Coming back to the issue of numbers, it continues to me to be of interest, even if I think Richard has a point that in many cases it is not vitally important in the understanding of battle.   I've been searching about for online pieces on assessing army numbers, triggered by this discussion, and turned up this article, which contains a section on numbers.  This highlights an alternative numbers issue;  the size of early medieval armies and the contention between the small army and large army advocates.  This has a wider impact beyond military matters into how we view societies.  Were, for example, Merovingian and Carolingian armies based round a univeral levy of free warriors or a more select levy of the followers of the nobility?  It takes you to the roots of social organisation.