A reference in another thread to the battle at Thermopylae reminded me of a question I had about that battle. Supposedly the Persian force was something like 200,000 or 300,000 men. Is that plausible? I’m just wondering about the logistics involved in such a large deployment. How did they manage to feed, equip and move such a large force?
And for that matter, what about the Greek fleet sent to Troy, and the mythical thousand ships. Is that close to accurate or an exaggeration? Again, I wonder about the logistics, along with the process of building that many ships.
There is an excellent book I can recommend about Thermopylae. Although it is told mostly from the Greek point of view, it does deal with some of the logistics of the Persian army.
The Trojan War is further back in time and so historical accuracy may be harder to come by. I don’t have a book suggestion there.
The question of the actual size of the Persian army has been debated for quite some time. Herodotus pegs it in the millions, while other sources place it in the upper 100,000’s. Naturally, the Greeks had a motive for overestimating the size of the enemy they (eventually) defeated, but the size of the Persian army was routinely considered to be larger than expected even to the time of Alexander. Still, the numbers are too fantastic to believe; in the past 100 years there has been among scholars substantial agreement that the army Xerxes brought across the Hellespont numbered between 50,000 and 100,000 combatants.
The logistics in such a deployment are indeed problematic; for one they require a very large and secure supply chain. Herodotus notes this throughout book VII: The Persians set up supply posts north of Greece long before the start of the war, (VII.25), inhabitants were drafted into grinding the grain into flour, cattle were bought, herded, and fattened along the route, and coops for poultry were set up (VII.119).
Herodotus thinks that the problems of this supply chain were the reason the Persians failed in Greece. Aeschylus is very specific when he puts these words into the mouth of ghostly Darius(Persians 788-):
No more 'gainst Greece lead your embattled hosts;
Not though your deep’ning phalanx spreads the field
Outnumb’ring theirs: their very earth fights for them…
With famine it destroys your cumbrous train.
One should note that the Persian army retreated without ever facing a substantial Greek force on land.
I’m not sure about how all of the logistics would be handled for an army that size, but the number 200,000 - 300,000 is based on evidence and logical extrapolation so its probably pretty acurate. The unbelivable numbers can be left to Herodotus, who listed the Persian army at somewhere around 2,000,000 troops.
The battle of Salamis, which followed shortly after Thermopylae, involved nearly 1000 ships, 600 Persian and 370 Greek, so the construction and handling of 1000 ships is beliveble. Homer’s Iliad on the other hand is doubtfully more than embelishment of a relatively mundane war with the city-state of Troy.
When the original site of Troy was discovered, it turned out to look less like the great cities of Middle Eastern Antiquity than it did the Branch Davidian compound.