ividualistic to a fault, and concerned with the fate and fortune of themselves first of all and, secondly, of their state. Athens and Sparta, although by the nature of their societies basically hostile to one another, were large and important enough to realise that co-operation between the two of them was the only possible way in which the Greeks as a people could survive the Juggernaut that had some years ago crushed the freedom of their fellow-Greeks in Asia Minor (Ionia).
Although it is true that Herodotus, who was born some four years after the invasion of Xerxes, had access to all the records available, it is impossible to accept the figures that he gives for the size of the Persian army and of the fleet. If one first of all bears in mind that Herodotus was trying to make his figures square with a famous war memorial that had been set up in the pass of Thermopylae, it is not so difficult to see where his added noughts come from in his computation of the Persian numbers. The memorial in traditional Spartan or laconic style reads :
Against three million men fought in this place Four thousand Peloponnesians, face to face.
The fact is that the Greeks, when it came to numbers beyond their normal usage, tended to use the term ‘myriads’ (tens of thousands) as we, centuries later, loosely use millions or billions - meaning no more than an almost uncountable amount.
The figures as given by Herodotus show an army totalling :
1,700,000 infantrymen, 80,000 horsemen, a camel corps and chariot contingent numbering 20,000, and a mixture of Greeks from Ionia, the islands, and Thrace, to the total of 300,000. Burn adds the dry but apt comment
… finding himself still short of the war-memorial’s three million, he cheerfully doubles the whole total to allow for noncombatants (cooks, drivers, women - the Guards are reported to have brought their women along in wagons) and reaches a grand total of 5,283,220. The most remarkable thing, he adds, with a decent descent into realism, is how such a multitude was fed.
Other scholars and military historians have debated the size of the army - and of the navy - but the most realistic viewpoint seems to be that Herodotus confused the Persian term ?nyriarchs, which meant the commander of 10,000 men, with the other named commanders who, in their lesser sphere, commanded no more than thousands or hundreds. (The Persians worked on the decimal system.) If one removes a nought from all of Herodotus’ figures one comes up with an army of 170,000 infantrymen, 8000 cavalry, 2000 camel corps and charioteers, and 30,000 Greeks and Thracians. This seems a far more likely figure in view of the populations (as far as they can be conjected) at the time. It would still make sense, in that it would nevertheless suggest to a Greek accustomed to battles involving at the most a few thousand men an almost inexhaustible flood of troops.
General Sir Frederick Maurice, who had the opportunity of covering the area of the march of the Great King not long after the First World War, came up with the conclusion that the total of the Persian army was about 210,000. Unlike most desk-bound scholars he had the opportunity to travel the whole area, and had excellent military and logistical knowledge of the terrain. He based his conclusions particularly on his observation of the water-supplies available. Maurice had also had experience of moving British military units together with animal transport, and he reckoned that such a force would probably have needed with them about 75,000 animals. Even at this, he reasons that what has sometimes been taken as an unbelievable comment by Herodotus, ‘except for the great rivers, their fighters drank the waters up’, was probably correct. A river, of course, unlike a pond or even a lake, cannot be drunk dry in one sense, for it is constantly being reinforced. One may also reasonably assume that the rivers in Asia Minor at that time were somewhat larger than they are today. Centuries of the ubiquitous goat, killing saplings, leading to deforestation, coupled with land changes in the earthquake-p