Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

People give Herodotus a bad rep for all sorts of reasons, especially the size of the Persian army.

He often gets mocked for this.

Yeah, but specifically I want to bring that up because he is the first person to criticize that narrative.

He actually says when he goes through this, towards the end when he gets to a total of over 5 million, he says, but...

I don't really know if I should believe this because I don't think they could have fed that many."

When you're looking for criticism of Herodotus, you've got to start with Herodotus.

I love that about him.

He's just very open about his thinking.

It just creeps in every time.

Yeah, 300,000 words, you mean?

There's no way to say this in a short way, but all of these armies, you have to at least double the size of the fighting force just to include, and this is what Herodotus does as well, simple math.

He basically just doubles the numbers to give a rough approximation of how many people are there just to support the effort.

They're just camp followers and servants and attendants and entertainers and whatever else.

So we're definitely talking about an enormous number of people, but whether we should be closer to 200,000, 300,000, I mean, we really don't know.

And there's not going to be any additional evidence that it's going to solve this decisively for us.

It's certainly going to be more in that ballpark, though, than Herodotus' 5.5 million.

It's probably about right.

Let's just go with that.

It's fine.

As long as you're not meaning 250,000 fighting men, because that is obviously a big distinction to make.