Writing For SHM

[Tiglath]

Has anyone visited the Society of Ancients (SOA) site?

It's not a public forum, but a forum nevertheless, and it stands alone like one of those houses you see, spared by a hurricane or volcanic eruption, intact yet surrounded by destruction.

It's a real hit of fresh air... People being nice to one another, criticism couched in bales of cotton wool, and yet rare is the thread or post that doesn't have interesting, if not thoroughly engaging, prose, if you like history.

Complaints about the decline of writing standards in the young seem obligatory for every generation to make about the next. The people of Sumer complained about it in clay tablets and the whining has never stopped since.

No point being stern and censorious then about the way posters write here, except for the undesirable effects the medium itself has on good prose.

It's not syntax or punctuation, or the mush we see from the careless, it's the slow erosion of the qualities of classical prose and the difficulty avoiding bad habits. Exhibit 1.

Why the hedging? The constant hedging.

"Apparently," "in part," "to some extent," "almost," "nearly" .... you know...

And, "I would argue." That's a good one. I must mean that you'd argue something if you had a better argument, but for now what follows is all you can manage - a pathetic premise.

~99% of posts are hedging posts, including mine.

All made necessary because, before long in places like this, posters discover that one has to write not classic prose where the reader and writer are viewed as equals, and the writer is just directing the reader's gaze towards some truth, she hadn't noticed before, but that now she can see and understand for herself. No, that is not possible. Posters need to write as if posts were legal documents. A statement in a legal document WILL be interpreted adversarially, without the assumption of cooperation that governs a normal conversation; so every exception must be spelled out.

Hedging is sometimes justified, but it's a choice not a tic. And a tic is what posters soon develop here. It is a bad habit, because a classic writer counts on the common sense and the ordinary charity of his readers, just as in everyday conversation we know when a speaker means 'in general,' or 'all other things being equal,' without saying it.

This allows a normal writer to phrase subordinate points precisely, but without the promise that they are technically accurate. The convention between writer and reader is that the writer is not to be challenged in those points, because they are mere scaffolding.

We keep learning and forgetting that any adversary who is unscrupulous enough to give the least uncharitable reading to an unhedged statement, will find an opening to attack the writer in a thicket full of hedged ones anyway.

Examples abound, no names necessary.

No wonder that after more than twenty years in SHM, I can only think kindly of a handful of people. It's not really the people, if you discount geocentrists, it's the medium. It brings out the worse in us. We knew it all along, but it took Facebook to amplify the phenomenon enough to make it plain to see.

A good explanation for 'the good old times' is usually a faulty memory, but I still think there were a few good times here too, let's not forget.

"To some extent."

[David Read]

Post by Tiglath
Has anyone visited the Society of Ancients (SOA) site?
It's not a public forum, but a forum nevertheless, and it stands alone like one of those houses you see, spared by a hurricane or volcanic eruption, intact yet surrounded by destruction.
It's a real hit of fresh air... People being nice to one another, criticism couched in bales of cotton wool, and yet rare is the thread or post that doesn't have interesting, if not thoroughly engaging, prose, if you like history.
Complaints about the decline of writing standards in the young seem obligatory for every generation to make about the next. The people of Sumer complained about it in clay tablets and the whining has never stopped since.
No point being stern and censorious then about the way posters write here, except for the undesirable effects the medium itself has on good prose.
It's not syntax or punctuation, or the mush we see from the careless, it's the slow erosion of the qualities of classical prose and the difficulty avoiding bad habits. Exhibit 1.
Why the hedging? The constant hedging.
"Apparently," "in part," "to some extent," "almost," "nearly" .... you know...
And, "I would argue." That's a good one. I must mean that you'd argue something if you had a better argument, but for now what follows is all you can manage - a pathetic premise.
~99% of posts are hedging posts, including mine.
All made necessary because, before long in places like this, posters discover that one has to write not classic prose where the reader and writer are viewed as equals, and the writer is just directing the reader's gaze towards some truth, she hadn't noticed before, but that now she can see and understand for herself. No, that is not possible. Posters need to write as if posts were legal documents. A statement in a legal document WILL be interpreted adversarially, without the assumption of cooperation that governs a normal conversation; so every exception must be spelled out.
Hedging is sometimes justified, but it's a choice not a tic. And a tic is what posters soon develop here. It is a bad habit, because a classic writer counts on the common sense and the ordinary charity of his readers, just as in everyday conversation we know when a speaker means 'in general,' or 'all other things being equal,' without saying it.
This allows a normal writer to phrase subordinate points precisely, but without the promise that they are technically accurate. The convention between writer and reader is that the writer is not to be challenged in those points, because they are mere scaffolding.
We keep learning and forgetting that any adversary who is unscrupulous enough to give the least uncharitable reading to an unhedged statement, will find an opening to attack the writer in a thicket full of hedged ones anyway.
Examples abound, no names necessary.
No wonder that after more than twenty years in SHM, I can only think kindly of a handful of people. It's not really the people, if you discount geocentrists, it's the medium. It brings out the worse in us. We knew it all along, but it took Facebook to amplify the phenomenon enough to make it plain to see.
A good explanation for 'the good old times' is usually a faulty memory, but I still think there were a few good times here too, let's not forget.
"To some extent."

Wow! I look in at shm again after another period of absence and see this. This is a real blast from the past for me, and I haven't looked at the Society of Ancient website for years either. Thanks for reminding me. Both myself, John Sloan and, I think, Ed Schoenfeld occasionally referred to the SOA on shm some twenty or so years ago. John and I certainly used to be subscribers to their magazine, "Slingshot". We tried to explain what it as all about to members here and, on at least one occasion, a quotation by me from one of their book reviews caused no end of bother from some of the usual suspects.

Cheers,

David Read

[D. Spencer Hines]

Post by Tiglath
Has anyone visited the Society of Ancients (SOA) site?
It's not a public forum, but a forum nevertheless, and it stands alone like one of those houses you see, spared by a hurricane or volcanic eruption, intact yet surrounded by destruction.
It's a real hit of fresh air... People being nice to one another, criticism couched in bales of cotton wool, and yet rare is the thread or post that doesn't have interesting, if not thoroughly engaging, prose, if you like history.
Complaints about the decline of writing standards in the young seem obligatory for every generation to make about the next. The people of Sumer complained about it in clay tablets and the whining has never stopped since.
No point being stern and censorious then about the way posters write here, except for the undesirable effects the medium itself has on good prose.
It's not syntax or punctuation, or the mush we see from the careless, it's the slow erosion of the qualities of classical prose and the difficulty avoiding bad habits. Exhibit 1.
Why the hedging? The constant hedging.
"Apparently," "in part," "to some extent," "almost," "nearly" .... you know...
And, "I would argue." That's a good one. I must mean that you'd argue something if you had a better argument, but for now what follows is all you can manage - a pathetic premise.
~99% of posts are hedging posts, including mine.
All made necessary because, before long in places like this, posters discover that one has to write not classic prose where the reader and writer are viewed as equals, and the writer is just directing the reader's gaze towards some truth, she hadn't noticed before, but that now she can see and understand for herself. No, that is not possible. Posters need to write as if posts were legal documents. A statement in a legal document WILL be interpreted adversarially, without the assumption of cooperation that governs a normal conversation; so every exception must be spelled out.
Hedging is sometimes justified, but it's a choice not a tic. And a tic is what posters soon develop here. It is a bad habit, because a classic writer counts on the common sense and the ordinary charity of his readers, just as in everyday conversation we know when a speaker means 'in general,' or 'all other things being equal,' without saying it.
This allows a normal writer to phrase subordinate points precisely, but without the promise that they are technically accurate. The convention between writer and reader is that the writer is not to be challenged in those points, because they are mere scaffolding.
We keep learning and forgetting that any adversary who is unscrupulous enough to give the least uncharitable reading to an unhedged statement, will find an opening to attack the writer in a thicket full of hedged ones anyway.
Examples abound, no names necessary.
No wonder that after more than twenty years in SHM, I can only think kindly of a handful of people. It's not really the people, if you discount geocentrists, it's the medium. It brings out the worse in us. We knew it all along, but it took Facebook to amplify the phenomenon enough to make it plain to see.
A good explanation for 'the good old times' is usually a faulty memory, but I still think there were a few good times here too, let's not forget.
"To some extent."

Interesting Post...

D. Spencer Hines
Lux et Veritas et Libertas

[Tiglath]

Pleasant surprise! David & David in from the cold... I hope you are doing great, guys.

Historians Fred E. Ray and Justin Swanton and a few SOA members are helping with my history project that for the first time includes serious field work.

It's not Hastings, sorry.

It's Sardis-Thermopylae. _Xerxes: The Recount_ project - trying to show Herodotus figures for Xerxes' army feasible, by retracing Xerxes march from a logistical point of view.

It's also a shot against 19th and 20th century historians, some of them with military careers, who saw ancient warfare through Napoleonic eyes. And their followers, who to this day continue to disregard and disrespect ancient sources, as if they knew better.

There is no archeology involved for reasons much too deep. The ground Persians and Spartans fought on at the Thermopylae pass, for example, lies 66 feet below today's ground level, though the site is still well worth a visit.

The stretch after crossing the Hellespont is the tricky segment of the march, where the Gallipoli campaign was fought. British Major-General Sir Frederick Barton Maurice wrote a paper 100 years ago on Xerxes' army, and some still recognize it as the last word on the subject. He concludes that water supply and Chersonese topography would have made it impossible for Xerxes' army to be larger than 200,000. He was probably wrong.

I'll find out next summer, Covid permitting. I'll be flying drones to complement the satellite images already available.

Maurice's calculations of the discharge of rivers appear terribly wrong, and he seemed to think that armies could only advance along roads and paths, a la Grande Armée , when it's a fact that ancient armies advanced cross country as well. Xerxes' march was no Hannibalic Alpine crossing. I know the Turkish Aegean coast well, and it's mostly a land of vacation grade spots. Xerxes' feat in 480 BC, was a relatively short march during spring and summer through friendly territory. Unprecedented huge numbers were the only difficulty.

I'll stop now, as I could go on and on... this lovely subject... completely off-topic par the course.

Kind regards

[D. Spencer Hines]

Pleasant surprise! David & David in from the cold... I hope you are doing great, guys.
Historians Fred E. Ray and Justin Swanton and a few SOA members are helping with my history project that for the first time includes serious field work.
It's not Hastings, sorry.
It's Sardis-Thermopylae. _Xerxes: The Recount_ project - trying to show Herodotus figures for Xerxes' army feasible, by retracing Xerxes march from a logistical point of view.
It's also a shot against 19th and 20th century historians, some of them with military careers, who saw ancient warfare through Napoleonic eyes. And their followers, who to this day continue to disregard and disrespect ancient sources, as if they knew better.
There is no archeology involved for reasons much too deep. The ground Persians and Spartans fought on at the Thermopylae pass, for example, lies 66 feet below today's ground level, though the site is still well worth a visit.
The stretch after crossing the Hellespont is the tricky segment of the march, where the Gallipoli campaign was fought. British Major-General Sir Frederick Barton Maurice wrote a paper 100 years ago on Xerxes' army, and some still recognize it as the last word on the subject. He concludes that water supply and Chersonese topography would have made it impossible for Xerxes' army to be larger than 200,000. He was probably wrong.
I'll find out next summer, Covid permitting. I'll be flying drones to complement the satellite images already available.
Maurice's calculations of the discharge of rivers appear terribly wrong, and he seemed to think that armies could only advance along roads and paths, a la Grande Armée , when it's a fact that ancient armies advanced cross country as well. Xerxes' march was no Hannibalic Alpine crossing. I know the Turkish Aegean coast well, and it's mostly a land of vacation grade spots. Xerxes' feat in 480 BC, was a relatively short march during spring and summer through friendly territory. Unprecedented huge numbers were the only difficulty.
I'll stop now, as I could go on and on... this lovely subject... completely off-topic par the course.
Kind regards

Correct Figure For Xerxes' Army Is __________________?

DSH

[Tiglath]

On Thursday, October 14, 2021 at 3:25:27 AM UTC-4, D. Spencer Hines wrote:

Hello Spencer. Good to 'see' you.

Post by D. Spencer Hines
Correct Figure For Xerxes' Army Is __________________?

Correct Figure For Xerxes' Army Is ~1,800,000.

That's the short answer. Enough?

Not for me.

I am interested in the number Xerxes actually counted, first and foremost. If that is feasible, then we can consider more.

Herodotus tells how Xerxes' army arrives in Doriscus, a Persian base in Thrace, built by his father during the Scythian campaign. He stopped there several days and counted his combatants. He filled an enclosure with 10,000 soldiers (possibly The Immortals) and then filled it again a total of 170 times. Herodotus quotes also 80,000 cavalry and an unspecified number of camels and chariots. I round it up to 100,000 riders, for a reasonable approximation.

The bottlenecks were the Hellespont bridges, build over triremes. That is, a 30-meter wide passage. If you run the numbers, with people crossing at a good clip (under the lash according to Herodotus) for seven days and nights continuously, as the story goes, you get a total very close to the 1.8 million. A point against fabrication. And there are other points of consistency as well, but this is the most important.

Another consistency point is the Thasian Dinner. The prosperous people of Thasos received Xerxes and gave a feast for him and his army. The single meal costs the Thasians 400 talents. An Attic talent is equivalent to 6,000 drachmae, and a half-drachma could feed a family of three for one day. So, doing the sums, 400 talents supplies a day's minimum sustenance to 14,400,000 men. That number can be brought down somewhat by assuming the soldiers were fed more than the bare minimum and by the cost of feeding the Persian VIPs with fancier food along with the gold and silver cups and bowls, but we are definitely not in the 100,000 or 200,000 man category (a talent consists of 26 kg of silver so most of the 400 talents - 10.4 tons of silver - did not go into the tableware).

The Persian army had a role during the march, provisioning and ferrying, but otherwise Persian Navy numbers are not part of the project, sorry.

The land army included also many attendants, of course, and pack animals. Herodotus SUPPOSES attendants were as numerous as the army. I will consider attendants if and when the combatant numbers seem plausible.

Alexander had one attendant for every three soldiers. Xerxes would have fewer, because most of in his army were not elite phalangites, but recruits from all corners of the Persian empire, poorly armed and equipped, most likely sans servants.

And then there were camp followers, wives, concubines, whores and lovers of opportunity. I am sure they were numerous, but I count them out, as their keep surely wasn't the Great King's concern. They may well have died in droves.

Most people come to this question with wrong assumptions. They believe the Xerxes March was a complete success. I don't think it was or could be, though In his favor he had a few salient facts.

- He had almost FIVE years to prepare for the expedition, laying food depots along the way.
- At the time, Persia controlled Egypt (the Mediterranean's granary) AND the Fertile Crescent.
- Anatolia and Thrace had good forage at that time of the year. The Greek harvest would be ready on arrival.
- Many rivers and lakes lie along the march. See Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, maps 51 and 56.
- AND (something Maurice didn't know), 480 BC was near a maximum of precipitation in the middle of a hot and wet 100-year period.according to Greenland ice-cores.
- Grain, if dry, lasts for years.
- The march was never far from the coast. So if people missed the chow line, they could always fish or get coastal seafood.

An over-fished Mediterranean today caters for many populous countries full of seafood lovers and the millions of tourists that descend from Europe. It must have been even more bountiful 2500 years ago.

Against him, Xerxes had an unprecedented situation. Chains of supply must have failed at times, miscalculations, incidents and accidents surely took a good toll, even though most people on the march must have been fit as fiddles having walked all the way from far east. So, he must have failed in part and for many unfortunate people it didn't go well at all from the start, though Herodotus doesn't report it.

You can almost see two marches. One from Sardis to Therme, to show off the King's power with millions moving north. And then the actual invasion force into Greece, a subset of the entire host. Still numerous because Xerxes conscripted all in his path.

I want to see what Maurice talks about when he says that Gallipoli could not accommodate the numbers. It's not flat but it's nothing like the Alps.
Our species has lived 90% of its existence as hunter gatherers, moving cross--country with no more than goat paths. The idea that Persian foot soldiers could only negotiate the Chersonese a few files abreast doesn't hold water, no matter what General Maurice says. There is a QED moment in the making, I think. So...

It's not just a number, but many. The crux is in how you orchestrate them.

[David Read]

Pleasant surprise! David & David in from the cold... I hope you are doing great, guys.

Getting older, kids grown-up, a hat-full of grandchildren, health in good shape, finances stable.

Yaay.

Or even, yaaaay!

Historians Fred E. Ray and Justin Swanton and a few SOA members are helping with my history project that for the first time includes serious field work.

Cool. Not really my period, so I looked up the names quickly.

Fred Ray - https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2012/2012.10.53

Justin Swanton - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ancient-Battle-Formations-Justin-Swanton/dp/1526740060

It's not Hastings, sorry.
It's Sardis-Thermopylae. _Xerxes: The Recount_ project - trying to show Herodotus figures for Xerxes' army feasible, by retracing Xerxes march from a logistical point of view.

OK.

It's also a shot against 19th and 20th century historians, some of them with military careers, who saw ancient warfare through Napoleonic eyes. And their followers, who to this day continue to disregard and disrespect ancient sources, as if they knew better.

Presumably beginning with Hans Delbrück.

I'm not so sure that it a case of Delbrück and others disregarding and disrepecting ancient sources, but rather calling them into question and re-examining them.

There is no archeology involved for reasons much too deep. The ground Persians and Spartans fought on at the Thermopylae pass, for example, lies 66 feet below today's ground level, though the site is still well worth a visit.
The stretch after crossing the Hellespont is the tricky segment of the march, where the Gallipoli campaign was fought. British Major-General Sir Frederick Barton Maurice wrote a paper 100 years ago on Xerxes' army, and some still recognize it as the last word on the subject. He concludes that water supply and Chersonese topography would have made it impossible for Xerxes' army to be larger than 200,000. He was probably wrong.
I'll find out next summer, Covid permitting. I'll be flying drones to complement the satellite images already available.
Maurice's calculations of the discharge of rivers appear terribly wrong, and he seemed to think that armies could only advance along roads and paths, a la Grande Armée , when it's a fact that ancient armies advanced cross country as well. Xerxes' march was no Hannibalic Alpine crossing. I know the Turkish Aegean coast well, and it's mostly a land of vacation grade spots. Xerxes' feat in 480 BC, was a relatively short march during spring and summer through friendly territory. Unprecedented huge numbers were the only difficulty.
I'll stop now, as I could go on and on... this lovely subject... completely off-topic par the course.

The numbers game with regard to the size of medieval armies has been played out over and over again on shm, e.g. Hastings, Bannockburn, Towton, Carolingian armies, Byzantine armies and Hunnic armies. They're just the ones I recall. Delbrückian and modified Delbrückian methodology argues for much smaller forces than contemporary and near contemporary medieval sources state (and such sources are often wildly in conflict with each other). But there have been more recent scholars arguing against Delbrückian methodology, to bring the sizes back up again, e.g., Bernard Bachrach for the Carolingians and Warren Treadgold for the Byzantines. Then there are those who counter them, such as Guy Halsall who argued that Bachrach's methodology was inferior to that of Delbrück, and Mark Whittow who argued for very small Byzantine armies.

I don't know where academia currently stands on these matters in general, but I suspect Delbrück is still proving to be a hard nut to crack.

Anyway, enjoy your own personal anabasis, and maybe you'll get your findings published. I can see a beautifully illustrated travelogue in prospect, at least.

Kind regards

Cheers,

David Read

[Tiglath]

Post by David Read
Getting older, kids grown-up, a hat-full of grandchildren, health in good shape, finances stable.

Good for you and happy to hear.

My daughter, who lives in Brighton, keeps me appraised of life in the UK, which I still miss very much.

I thought that when it came time to retire, colleges would have churned out enough IT graduates to deny old timers good jobs. WRONG!

There aren't enough of us yet, so if you have experience in the latest way of producing software (DevOps), they beat a path to your door. Consequently, I'm still in the game and loving it. Now I can pick and choose and do only what I enjoy. At the moment at Verisign (we run the Internet, or better said the .com, .net, and .gov domains and a few others for the whole planet). Good company. Security is of the belt and suspenders type, times ten. They also make money hand over fist, and it's a technical paradise, if you like that sort of thing...

I tried retiring in 2013 but i just can't ride my bike and play my guitar all day... or travel a lot like some do... I did all that in my misspent youth. I missed doing what I've been doing for so long, never mind leaving good money on the table, when I am lucky enough, as you are, of being blessed with a long life and little or no decrepitude so far.... So...

Yaaaay!

Post by David Read
Yaay.
Or even, yaaaay!
Presumably beginning with Hans Delbrück.

He's one of them, a real bad-tempered baddy too.

Post by David Read
I'm not so sure that it a case of Delbrück and others disregarding and disrepecting ancient sources,
but rather calling them into question and re-examining them.

That's how it's being justified. Just think for a moment, some guy in the year 4,521 disputes WITHOUT HARD EVIDENCE Churchill on WWII, or Mr. Hines on Vietnam, or even you or me, who I take know quite a bit about those wars. The sheer nerve... How would we feel?

Modern historians rarely have evidence for ancient battle numbers, they just decide mostly with the gut that they couldn't have been that big; as if saying so made it so. In the back of their minds they must believe ancient Sapiens couldn't organized a piss-out in a brewery. It's an awful mannerism.

If the Pyramids were gone, materials totally reused and such... Who would believe that people BEFORE the Bronze Age, built a pyramid 150 meters tall, bringing granite blocks for the royal chamber from Aswan, some 600 miles up-river. And that it remained the tallest building until the English built a taller cathedral around 1300? Fortunately, we can stand on the Gizah plain and see them for ourselves still.

It's not only Herodotus, but they disrespect also Xenophon, Arrian, Livy, and Polybius (Polybius!) and Tacitus (Tacitus!). At the same time they show excessive reverence for Thucydides, who is far from perfect.

Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BC) published what he wrote about the army of Xerxes some 50 years after the events. He roamed around a lot and used Greek and Persian sources. Imagine, a writer today trying to fool readers about the size of the armies of the Vietnam War making out they were ten times the real number. He would be laughed at, because people still remember. That is what those pesky historians accuse Herodotus of. Conversely, I am not saying all Herodotus wrote should be believed, he obviously couldn't check all his sources on every detail and he was human.

Herodotus is kind of a sole source for this, which is unfortunate, but his numbers have internal consistency in his own account, and there are two other contemporary sources who corroborate him in magnitude, if not exact numbers. Those are: Aeschylus (525 – 456 BC, who fought at Salamis) in his play The Persians, and Simonides of Ceos (c. 556–468 BC) whose engraved epitaph on a commemorative stone placed on top of the burial mound of the Spartans at Thermopylae.monument, gave 3 million as the size of the Persian army.

From Wikipedia's entry for Thermopylae: (my notes)

"Herodotus, a contemporary writer, put the Persian army strength as one million (incorrect) and went to great pains to describe how they were counted in groups of ten thousand at a review of the troops. Simonides went as far as to put the Persian number at three million. Today, it is considered to have been much smaller. Scholars report various figures ranging between about 100,000 and 150,000 soldiers (incorrect, the range is much wider, some put it at five figures only !!!!) ."

Post by David Read
The numbers game with regard to the size of medieval armies has been played out over and over again on shm, e.g. Hastings, Bannockburn, Towton, Carolingian armies, Byzantine armies and Hunnic armies. They're just the ones I recall. Delbrückian and modified Delbrückian methodology argues for much smaller forces than contemporary and near contemporary medieval sources state (and such sources are often wildly in conflict with each other). But there have been more recent scholars arguing against Delbrückian methodology, to bring the sizes back up again, e.g., Bernard Bachrach for the Carolingians and Warren Treadgold for the Byzantines. Then there are those who counter them, such as Guy Halsall who argued that Bachrach's methodology was inferior to that of Delbrück, and Mark Whittow who argued for very small Byzantine armies.

Yep, so you know what I'm talking about. Mediaevalists guilty too.

Post by David Read
I don't know where academia currently stands on these matters in general, but I suspect Delbrück is still proving to be a hard nut to crack.

Depends on the claim. He is not alone. Theodore Ayrault Dodge on Cannae is terrible.

C. Whatley put it best: "Modern writers take up modern books on strategy and rewrite ancient wars in the light of them. The result is magnificent, but it is not ancient war."

Post by David Read
Anyway, enjoy your own personal anabasis, and maybe you'll get your findings published. I can see a beautifully illustrated travelogue in prospect, at least.

Book publishing is not for me. Writing a book is like having a child, you can't stand anyone criticizing your baby. They say that if you correct a wise man you make him wiser, but if you correct a fool you make him your enemy. I learned that the hard way, when I corrected Fred Ray on Hannibal several times, and other authors. Best avoided. Luckily, Mr. Ray is no fool, but he didn't like it a bit, I could tell.

Plus, just like the music industry makes you hate music, if you let them, it seems publishers do something similar to writers.

I have a web site ready for the findings of Xerxes: The Recount. The excellent Dutch magazine Ancient Warfare may be interested in quoting it. We'll see.

Disregarding my advice to refrain, Fred intends to write for Ancient Warfare... Myths of the Second Punic War... articles praising Roman consul Terentius Varro's battle plan at Cannae... he feels Varro has been unduly demonized..<sigh>. He used the phrase 'almost brilliant' about his plan. What balls, right? Varro, the Plebeian who lost FOUR consular armies (8 legions) in half a day... And for seconds an article putting down Fabian Tactics... which all they did is delay Rome's final victory, according to Ray... It must be the historical equivalent of suicide by cop... I'm dying to see the comments to such articles if he goes ahead with them - but I digress.

I've been working on this project for over a year and I have until the summer to get ready.

Obviously, I would like Herodotus to be right, but to balance my bias I have Fred Ray, who believes Maurice, Delbruck, et al., and Justin who believes Herodotus. I have similar others from SOA. So I hope they keep me honest. Whatever I find, I will say. I have a large program to work out logistic figures based on the metrics given by Donald Engels' excellent, 'Logistics of the Macedonian Army.' I chose Fred Ray because he is not only a historian, but also a geologist, retired from the oil industry. His ideas on where the Battle of Cannae site must really be, given the fluid alluvial plain on which it took place, are really interesting. However, Fred Ray in his own books - ssshhhh - is the worst offender reducing numbers. Never seen anyone like him - Delbruck move over.. for Fred Scissorhands...

Whatever the findings, I envision no bad outcomes. At the very least I'll have a whole lot of fun, after the Papillon life I've led for two years.

--

What are actually your periods of interest, anything medieval? And why?

[David Read]

<snippage of real life updates>

Post by Tiglath

Post by David Read
Presumably beginning with Hans Delbrück.

He's one of them, a real bad-tempered baddy too.

Alex Milman used to be our primary local sword bearer for Hans Delbrück at shm, and David Brewer posted this on 23rd February 1999:-

"Hank Delbruck again...
the examples of HD quoting sources and contradicting them are
*legion*. Indeed, he ridicules them with greatly enjoyable gusto,
so much so that I'd recommend his work for the humour value alone."

So, bad-tempered? I'm not so sure. The only volume I've read of his History of Warfare is volume two, but that was back in the early nineties.

Post by Tiglath

Post by David Read
I'm not so sure that it a case of Delbrück and others disregarding and disrepecting ancient sources,
but rather calling them into question and re-examining them.

That's how it's being justified. Just think for a moment, some guy in the year 4,521 disputes WITHOUT HARD EVIDENCE Churchill on WWII, or Mr. Hines on Vietnam, or even you or me, who I take know quite a bit about those wars. The sheer nerve... How would we feel?
Modern historians rarely have evidence for ancient battle numbers, they just decide mostly with the gut that they couldn't have been that big; as if saying so made it so. In the back of their minds they must believe ancient Sapiens couldn't organized a piss-out in a brewery. It's an awful mannerism.
If the Pyramids were gone, materials totally reused and such... Who would believe that people BEFORE the Bronze Age, built a pyramid 150 meters tall, bringing granite blocks for the royal chamber from Aswan, some 600 miles up-river. And that it remained the tallest building until the English built a taller cathedral around 1300? Fortunately, we can stand on the Gizah plain and see them for ourselves still.
It's not only Herodotus, but they disrespect also Xenophon, Arrian, Livy, and Polybius (Polybius!) and Tacitus (Tacitus!). At the same time they show excessive reverence for Thucydides, who is far from perfect.
Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BC) published what he wrote about the army of Xerxes some 50 years after the events. He roamed around a lot and used Greek and Persian sources. Imagine, a writer today trying to fool readers about the size of the armies of the Vietnam War making out they were ten times the real number. He would be laughed at, because people still remember. That is what those pesky historians accuse Herodotus of. Conversely, I am not saying all Herodotus wrote should be believed, he obviously couldn't check all his sources on every detail and he was human.
Herodotus is kind of a sole source for this, which is unfortunate, but his numbers have internal consistency in his own account, and there are two other contemporary sources who corroborate him in magnitude, if not exact numbers. Those are: Aeschylus (525 – 456 BC, who fought at Salamis) in his play The Persians, and Simonides of Ceos (c. 556–468 BC) whose engraved epitaph on a commemorative stone placed on top of the burial mound of the Spartans at Thermopylae.monument, gave 3 million as the size of the Persian army.
From Wikipedia's entry for Thermopylae: (my notes)
"Herodotus, a contemporary writer, put the Persian army strength as one million (incorrect) and went to great pains to describe how they were counted in groups of ten thousand at a review of the troops. Simonides went as far as to put the Persian number at three million. Today, it is considered to have been much smaller. Scholars report various figures ranging between about 100,000 and 150,000 soldiers (incorrect, the range is much wider, some put it at five figures only !!!!) ."

Post by David Read
The numbers game with regard to the size of medieval armies has been played out over and over again on shm, e.g. Hastings, Bannockburn, Towton, Carolingian armies, Byzantine armies and Hunnic armies. They're just the ones I recall. Delbrückian and modified Delbrückian methodology argues for much smaller forces than contemporary and near contemporary medieval sources state (and such sources are often wildly in conflict with each other). But there have been more recent scholars arguing against Delbrückian methodology, to bring the sizes back up again, e.g., Bernard Bachrach for the Carolingians and Warren Treadgold for the Byzantines. Then there are those who counter them, such as Guy Halsall who argued that Bachrach's methodology was inferior to that of Delbrück, and Mark Whittow who argued for very small Byzantine armies.

Yep, so you know what I'm talking about. Mediaevalists guilty too.

Post by David Read
I don't know where academia currently stands on these matters in general, but I suspect Delbrück is still proving to be a hard nut to crack.

Depends on the claim. He is not alone. Theodore Ayrault Dodge on Cannae is terrible.
C. Whatley put it best: "Modern writers take up modern books on strategy and rewrite ancient wars in the light of them. The result is magnificent, but it is not ancient war."

Post by David Read
Anyway, enjoy your own personal anabasis, and maybe you'll get your findings published. I can see a beautifully illustrated travelogue in prospect, at least.

Book publishing is not for me. Writing a book is like having a child, you can't stand anyone criticizing your baby. They say that if you correct a wise man you make him wiser, but if you correct a fool you make him your enemy. I learned that the hard way, when I corrected Fred Ray on Hannibal several times, and other authors. Best avoided. Luckily, Mr. Ray is no fool, but he didn't like it a bit, I could tell.
Plus, just like the music industry makes you hate music, if you let them, it seems publishers do something similar to writers.
I have a web site ready for the findings of Xerxes: The Recount. The excellent Dutch magazine Ancient Warfare may be interested in quoting it. We'll see.
Disregarding my advice to refrain, Fred intends to write for Ancient Warfare... Myths of the Second Punic War... articles praising Roman consul Terentius Varro's battle plan at Cannae... he feels Varro has been unduly demonized..<sigh>. He used the phrase 'almost brilliant' about his plan. What balls, right? Varro, the Plebeian who lost FOUR consular armies (8 legions) in half a day... And for seconds an article putting down Fabian Tactics... which all they did is delay Rome's final victory, according to Ray... It must be the historical equivalent of suicide by cop... I'm dying to see the comments to such articles if he goes ahead with them - but I digress.
I've been working on this project for over a year and I have until the summer to get ready.
Obviously, I would like Herodotus to be right, but to balance my bias I have Fred Ray, who believes Maurice, Delbruck, et al., and Justin who believes Herodotus. I have similar others from SOA. So I hope they keep me honest. Whatever I find, I will say. I have a large program to work out logistic figures based on the metrics given by Donald Engels' excellent, 'Logistics of the Macedonian Army.' I chose Fred Ray because he is not only a historian, but also a geologist, retired from the oil industry. His ideas on where the Battle of Cannae site must really be, given the fluid alluvial plain on which it took place, are really interesting. However, Fred Ray in his own books - ssshhhh - is the worst offender reducing numbers. Never seen anyone like him - Delbruck move over.. for Fred Scissorhands...
Whatever the findings, I envision no bad outcomes. At the very least I'll have a whole lot of fun, after the Papillon life I've led for two years.

I haven't read Donald Engels' book, but his methodology has had an influence on other historians writing outside the Greek/Macedonian period. e.g., Bernard Bachrach for the Carolingians and John Haldon for the Byzantines, I had a brief exchange on this and other matters with Ed Schoenfeld back in 1999, in a thread called "Carolingian army".

The main problem with accepting ancient and medieval sources which claim extraordinarily large numbers for armies is that one then has to explain how the logistics for maintaining those forces worked, plus a whole host of other factors besides, including paper strength versus actual strength, field army size versus entire armed forces size, composition, population, rates of march, command and control, and so on and so forth.

The main problem for those denying such numbers is that they are then asked if those numbers are incorrect, what were the actual numbers? If they commit themselves at all, even after all the analysis they can bring to bear, the answer often seems to be nothing more than pulling a figure out of a hat. One sometimes comes across the 10% theory, where ancient or medieval sources are argued to have probably inflated the actual numbers tenfold.

Post by Tiglath
--
What are actually your periods of interest, anything medieval? And why?

Primarily Late Antiquity, say, circa 300-600 CE, and the Napoleonic Wars. But other periods catch my eye too, particularly with regard to military and agricultural history.

Why? Hmmmm. The periods look good aesthetically to my eye, and I guess that is what first attracted me. Then there are the personalities, the huge social upheavals, and the constant switching in balances of power that all go towards their being of particular interest.

Cheers,

David Read

[Tiglath]

Thanks for your reply.

Post by David Read

Post by Tiglath
He's one of them, a real bad-tempered baddy too.

Alex Milman used to be our primary local sword bearer for Hans Delbrück at shm, and David Brewer posted this on 23rd February 1999:-
"Hank Delbruck again...
the examples of HD quoting sources and contradicting them are
*legion*. Indeed, he ridicules them with greatly enjoyable gusto,
so much so that I'd recommend his work for the humour value alone."
So, bad-tempered? I'm not so sure. The only volume I've read of his History of Warfare is volume two, but that was back in the early nineties.

It was tongue-in-cheek. I have read only one of Delbruck's books on ancient warfare and I enjoyed it very much, but in the last two years I've read also lots of smaller publications and papers from JSTOR, the Encyclopedia Iranica, Perseus, etc., and many historians definitely don't like Delbruck. One described him attacking and insulting other writers viciously, I can't recall who at the moment, but I'll quote him when I find it.

Post by David Read
The main problem with accepting ancient and medieval sources which claim extraordinarily large numbers for armies is that one then has to explain how the logistics for maintaining those forces worked, plus a whole host of other factors besides, including paper strength versus actual strength, field army size versus entire armed forces size, composition, population, rates of march, command and control, and so on and so forth.

Indeed. If claims don't conform to reason they should be rejected. But it takes work to find out what is reasonable and feasible, case by case, and unsexy logistics is where it's at. I would not attempt it if the enterprise looked foolish. Xerxes had many advantages other armies never had, as I listed in another post, in his trek up the Aegean garden, and had no worries about meeting any opposition until he got to Thermopylae, as all Greeks up to there joined him. I did preliminary calculations for food and water requirements, given the discharge of rivers and the size of lakes, and the space required for large grain stores and camps, for millions of people and associated horses, mules, and camels, carrying food for the march between watering spots, and water would not have been a problem, and food less so with years of preparation and a large navy shadowing the land army. All needs to be corroborated on site, as best I can, taking into account nature's impact in the last two millennia.

Herodotus mentions a talking donkey and sea monsters attacking sailors. This is the sort of thing that objectors hang on when they dub him 'The Father of Lies." On the latter, I wonder what a shark attack would look like to ancient non-sailor witnesses. On the donkey... well... I am sure Herodotus could make great conversation, as well-traveled people often do, and after a few beers, what's a Greek-speaking donkey between buddies, eh? He gets a mulligan on this one. 8-)

After my calculations, many objections Maurice has begin to look a bit silly. I am less than impressed with his numbers - as was T. E. Lawrence when he used Maurice's staff figures to plan a raid by his Arab forces; he introduced modifications based on practical experience and slashed the logistical requirement to about a third of the calculated figure.

Maurice also maintains that a British force of 72,000 men with 22,000 animals camped as close together as possible and occupied an area of 20 square miles. That's 45 square kilometers or 478 square meters per man/animal. To put it colloquially, what was Maurice smoking? Romans left a 100-200 meter zone vacant inside the camp's perimeter to absorb missiles coming over, and even with this, by Maurice standards, Roman soldiers in their camps must have been perched on each other's shoulders.

Post by David Read
The main problem for those denying such numbers is that they are then asked if those numbers are incorrect, what were the actual numbers? If they commit themselves at all, even after all the analysis they can bring to bear, the answer often seems to be nothing more than pulling a figure out of a hat. One sometimes comes across the 10% theory, where ancient or medieval sources are argued to have probably inflated the actual numbers tenfold.

That's right. It's good to read with a questioning attitude. But before you discard a figure you must have something more reliable to offer, and it seldom is.
That's why my quest is not to prove Herodotus right. He may have lied of fallen pray to bad sources or data, and the numbers may still show to be feasible. I'll be quite happy if they turn out not to be impossible, so next time I hear they are a fantasy, I can bury the casual speaker alive in a pile of good data, just for fun... 8-)

Post by David Read

Post by Tiglath
What are actually your periods of interest, anything medieval? And why?

Primarily Late Antiquity, say, circa 300-600 CE, and the Napoleonic Wars. But other periods catch my eye too, particularly with regard to military and agricultural history.
Why? Hmmmm. The periods look good aesthetically to my eye, and I guess that is what first attracted me. Then there are the personalities, the huge social upheavals, and the constant switching in balances of power that all go towards their being of particular interest.

That's interesting. I have books on Byzantium that languish on shelves unread... Different folks...

[Tiglath]

Maurice also maintains that a British force of 72,000 men with 22,000 animals camped as close together as possible and occupied an area of 20 square miles. That's 45 square kilometers or 478 square meters per man/animal. To put it colloquially, what was Maurice smoking? Romans left a 100-200 meter zone vacant inside the camp's perimeter to absorb missiles coming over, and even with this, by Maurice standards, Roman soldiers in their camps must have been perched on each other's shoulders.

WRONG! I copypasted from the wrong page in my notes...

Correction: 20 square miles = 51.8 square kilometers, and 551 square meters per man or animal. A square of 23 meters per side.

Even allowing for large areas for communal use and transit, it's ridiculous.

That is almost 6,000 square feet per man or animal. The Sopranos' mansion in New Jersey was 5600 sq. ft. And the average London flat is 860 sq. ft. Viva Maurice.

I won't even bother to quote the per man footage in Roman and other military camps...

[David Read]

Maurice also maintains that a British force of 72,000 men with 22,000 animals camped as close together as possible and occupied an area of 20 square miles. That's 45 square kilometers or 478 square meters per man/animal. To put it colloquially, what was Maurice smoking? Romans left a 100-200 meter zone vacant inside the camp's perimeter to absorb missiles coming over, and even with this, by Maurice standards, Roman soldiers in their camps must have been perched on each other's shoulders.

WRONG! I copypasted from the wrong page in my notes...
Correction: 20 square miles = 51.8 square kilometers, and 551 square meters per man or animal. A square of 23 meters per side.
Even allowing for large areas for communal use and transit, it's ridiculous.
That is almost 6,000 square feet per man or animal. The Sopranos' mansion in New Jersey was 5600 sq. ft. And the average London flat is 860 sq. ft. Viva Maurice.
I won't even bother to quote the per man footage in Roman and other military camps...

Perhaps we should give Frederick Maurice the benefit of the doubt and apply the 10% rule, i.e., 2 square miles instead of 20. That would make a lot more sense. Maybe it was a goof on his part or even a misprint.

Cheers,

David Read

[Tiglath]

Post by David Read
Perhaps we should give Frederick Maurice the benefit of the doubt and apply the 10% rule, i.e., 2 square miles instead of 20. That would make a lot more sense. Maybe it was a goof on his part or even a misprint.

Perhaps I should, after all he can't defend himself. But I keep hearing similar things every time I corner a historian. That's when they bite.

"it's a mistranslation."

Then I go to the trouble of finding the Koine (Polybius) or Ionic (Herodotus) Greek and its various translations, and they come back...

"The pious monk who copied it from papyrus to parchment must have been half blind.... or high on Chartreuse."

Then when I prove that such monk had no vices...

"That's what he wrote, but that is not what he meant."

You just can't catch that chipmunk...

[Tiglath]

Post by David Read
Primarily Late Antiquity, say, circa 300-600 CE, and the Napoleonic Wars.
But other periods catch my eye too, particularly with regard to military and agricultural history.

I like agricultural history too. In 2009 I visited Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia. It was a riot... A ~7000 BC city with no streets, roofs were it. Amazing.

Loading Image...

I wanted to see also Göbekli Tepe, a much older city, ~10000 BC, but it was to close to Syria for comfort.

[Tiglath]

Post by David Read
Primarily Late Antiquity, say, circa 300-600 CE, and the Napoleonic Wars.
But other periods catch my eye too, particularly with regard to military and agricultural history.

I like agricultural history. In 2009 I visited Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia. It was a riot... A ~7000 BC city with no streets, roofs were it. Amazing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk#/media/File:MUFT_-_Catal_H%C3%B6y%C3%BCk_Modell.jpg

I wanted to see also Göbekli Tepe, a much older city, ~10000 BC, built by hunter-gatherers, but it was too close to Syria for comfort.

I have this idea about agriculture... in the unscholarly category of "I can't prove it, but I know it's true."

From running around all day, people suddenly preferred to sit down and lie about... Why?

Climate change, I hear, as if rabbits and gazelle, the main meats, had become extinct and people had no choice but to invent agriculture. Nope.

It was BEER. Forget about, 'it was produced by accident as a by-product of making bread' or 'It was used for religious purposes to honor ancestors.' No way.

Running Man, became first semi-sedentary. Mixing beer and running for a while, an uneasy mix, but it was not long before the lure of barley wine convinced them to go the full sedentary monty. Breaking their backs carrying water to irrigate didn't matter, the monotonous diet didn't matter. The first tyrannical agricultural potentates didn't matter, the fact that Paleolithic beer was probably porridge-like gruel didn't matter, just fill another one just like the other one and sip away... That's why we stopped running. I know it in my heart. And that is still why many people barely walk, never mind run, today...

The oldest brewery in Israel places beer much before the first civilization of Sumer, In the Upper Paleolithic before the Mesolithic. So I may be right after all.

American beer sucks, in case you didn't know...

[David Read]

Post by Tiglath

Post by David Read
Primarily Late Antiquity, say, circa 300-600 CE, and the Napoleonic Wars.
But other periods catch my eye too, particularly with regard to military and agricultural history.

I like agricultural history. In 2009 I visited Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia. It was a riot... A ~7000 BC city with no streets, roofs were it. Amazing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk#/media/File:MUFT_-_Catal_H%C3%B6y%C3%BCk_Modell.jpg
I wanted to see also Göbekli Tepe, a much older city, ~10000 BC, built by hunter-gatherers, but it was too close to Syria for comfort.
I have this idea about agriculture... in the unscholarly category of "I can't prove it, but I know it's true."
From running around all day, people suddenly preferred to sit down and lie about... Why?
Climate change, I hear, as if rabbits and gazelle, the main meats, had become extinct and people had no choice but to invent agriculture. Nope.
It was BEER. Forget about, 'it was produced by accident as a by-product of making bread' or 'It was used for religious purposes to honor ancestors.' No way.
Running Man, became first semi-sedentary. Mixing beer and running for a while, an uneasy mix, but it was not long before the lure of barley wine convinced them to go the full sedentary monty. Breaking their backs carrying water to irrigate didn't matter, the monotonous diet didn't matter. The first tyrannical agricultural potentates didn't matter, the fact that Paleolithic beer was probably porridge-like gruel didn't matter, just fill another one just like the other one and sip away... That's why we stopped running. I know it in my heart. And that is still why many people barely walk, never mind run, today...
The oldest brewery in Israel places beer much before the first civilization of Sumer, In the Upper Paleolithic before the Mesolithic. So I may be right after all.

It would have made the telling of stories, singing of songs, oral histories and family genealogies told around the hearth a lot more fun too.

Post by Tiglath
American beer sucks, in case you didn't know...

I did, but micro-breweries everywhere are doing a pretty good job of improving things. And as William Cobbet wrote in "Cottage Economy"(pub.1822):-

"In former times, to set about to show to Englishmen that it was good for them to brew beer in their houses would have been as impertinent as gravely to insist, that they ought to endeavour not to lose their breath; for, in those times, (only forty years ago,) to have a house and not to brew was a rare thing indeed. Mr. Ellman, an old man and a large farmer, in Sussex, has recently given in evidence, before a Committee of the House of Commons, this fact; that, forty years ago, there was not a labourer in his parish that did not brew his own beer; and that now there is not one that does it, except by chance the malt be given him. The causes of this change have been the lowering of the wages of labour, compared with the price of provisions, by the means of the paper-money; the enormous tax upon the barley when made into malt; and the increased tax upon hops. These have quite changed the customs of the English people as to their drink. They still drink beer, but, in general, it is of the brewing of common brewers, and in public-houses, of which the common brewers have become the owners, and have thus, by the aid of paper-money, obtained a monopoly in the supplying of the great body of the people with one of those things which, to the hard-working man, is almost a necessary of life."

Cheers,

David Read

[Tiglath]

Post by David Read
It would have made the telling of stories, singing of songs, oral histories and family genealogies told around the hearth a lot more fun too.

Post by Tiglath
American beer sucks, in case you didn't know...

I did, but micro-breweries everywhere are doing a pretty good job of improving things. And as William Cobbet wrote in "Cottage Economy"(pub.1822):-

True. I don't drink, but I like the taste of beer, and I still put port in the fruit salad and Marsala in the stew.

Is great to hear from you David, history brother. I won't mortify you with more off-topic, off-period ancient stuff, my thing but not yours really.

If Facebook dwindles - good luck with that - a few people may come back to this place (and probably find 'text only' too challenging), who knows. It's been in intensive care for so long that soon SHM will need a respirator. But as I said, it's good to touch base with the good old crowd any day.

Cheers.