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Dis Manibus James Randi

Canadian by birth, American by choice James Randi died on 20 October 2020 at the age of 92. He was an escape artist, author, TV and radio personality (getting his start as a guest with Long John Nebel in New York State), and skeptical investigator who humiliated fraudsters Uri Geller and Peter Popoff and triggered... Continue reading: Dis Manibus James Randi

Dis Manibus David Graeber

Anthropologist and activist (not always easy to separate in the United States) David Graeber has died at the age of 59 in Venice. He is probably best known for his book Debt and his involvement in the Occupy movement. I first got to know one of my regular thoughtful correspondents while talking about one of... Continue reading: Dis Manibus David Graeber

Laudatio Ed Brayton

From Birger Johansson: Ed Brayton, humanist and scienceblogs.com founder, is dying in hospice in the United States after a long struggle with various health problems. His last post is at https://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2020/08/10/saying-goodbye-for-the-last-time/ I am with T. Greer: when a Snorri Stirluson comes to tell the tale of the death of the open Internet, they will spend... Continue reading: Laudatio Ed Brayton

Dis Manibus Kelly Bert Manning

My father, Kelly Bert Manning, has died at a hospice in Canada at the age of 66 from complications related to multiple myeloma. He was diagnosed in spring 2016. At that time, my passport was at a foreign embassy; at this time, travel was not practical for other reasons. I am told that the hospital... Continue reading: Dis Manibus Kelly Bert Manning

Dis Manibus Anton Powell

Anton Powell, Welsh ancient historian and publisher, died on 11 June 2020. As a researcher, organizer of conferences and editor of books and serieses, he helped launch a transformation in understandings of early Sparta away from the moralistic gossip from Roman writers like Plutarch and hoary fables about Lycurgus to focus on what contemporary texts,... Continue reading: Dis Manibus Anton Powell

Dis Manibus Arthur Keaveney

Classicist and Roman and Achaemenid historian Arthur Keaveney, retired from the University of Kent, died of covid-19 at the age of 68 on 23 June 2020. Non fuit, fuit. Non est, non curat. You can find testimonies from his colleagues at https://www.kent.ac.uk/european-culture-languages/news/12944/in-memoriam-arthur-keaveney and from his wife at https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jul/10/arthur-keaveney-obituary

Some Terrifying Numbers

St. Felix in the armour of roughly 1400 with a red surcoat with a white cross on it — St. Felix (probably not the bishop of Nola?) From a polyptych by Battista da Vicenza (b. ca. 1375, d. 1438), Vicenza, Museo Civico, inv. no. A 18-22

So a lot of us have spent the past month or two staring at some scary numbers and working out their implications. These numbers are based on counts, even if the authors had to make some assumptions and do some arithmetic to turn something they can count into what they want to know. I spend a lot of time staring at Greek numbers for barbarian armies, and if they were based on counts they are hard to understand:

If we have multiple sources, they give numbers which vary widely, even if they all drew on the same earlier writers
The smallest Greek number for a barbarian army, 100,000, is as big as the largest army we can document in western Eurasia before the Napoleonic Wars, even if we are very generous about what counts as ‘documentation’ (hard-hearted historians would say we need archives so no army strength can be known until about a thousand years ago)
The smallest Greek number for a barbarian army is about as many as the biggest army which any Near Eastern ruler claims to have commanded.
Either there are no numbers for individual units, or the numbers given add up to a much smaller number than the grand total
Usually, no source for the numbers is given: we are not told whether they are an estimate by scouts or by the enemy’s clerks.
Such vast armies could not march, camp, and fight in the usual fashion or on the described battlefield.

If we assume that these numbers are based on counts, we have to chose one of the figures in our different sources, then ‘correct’ it by adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing until it fits our expectations. As a fellow named Whatley said in 1920, these theories often sound convincing until you read the next article with another ingenious theory that contradicts the first one. So assuming that these numbers are based on counts has not lead to new knowledge that people with different perspectives can agree on, it has just lead to endless arguments and speculation.

So a few years ago, I asked myself what would we expect to see if these numbers are drawn from something other than counting. And instead of looking at different writers’ figures for the same army, I looked for the same number in stories about different armies. Have a look at the fifteen lines on this table and decide if you see what I see.

Text	Date	Summary
RIMAP A.0.102.10, iii:15-16	845 BCE	Šalmanessar III crossed the Euphrates with 120,000 men
Judges 8:10	Debated	Gideon and his 300 soldiers kill 120,000 Midanites
Hdt. 2.158.5	5th century BCE	120,000 Egyptians die building a canal for pharaoh Necho
Ctesias F. 13.28, 30 Lenfant	4th century BCE	120,000 Persians attack Plataea, 120,000 Persians die after Xerxes retreats from Greece
Xen. Anab. 1.7.11-13	4th century BCE	Deserters claim that Artaxerxes II has 1,200,000 men
Xen. Hell. 1.5.21	4th century BCE	An interpolator says that the Carthaginians invaded Sicily with 120 triremes and an army of 120,000 men
Xen. Cyr. 1.2.15	4th century BCE	“They say that the Persians are about 12 myriads”
Xen. Cyr. 8.6.19	4th century BCE	An elderly Cyrus commands 120,000 cavalry and 600,000 (5 × 120,000) infantry
2 Chronicles 28:6	4th century BCE?	Pekah of Remaliah slew 120,000 valiant men in Judah in a single day
Jonah 4:11	4th century BCE?	There are more than 120,000 persons in Nineveh, and also many cattle
Judith 2:15	2nd century BCE?	Holofernes gathers an army of 120,000 men and 12,000 cavalry
I Maccabees 11:45	c. 100 BCE	The 120,000 people of Antioch rise up against their king
Justin, Epitoma Pompei Troagi, 41.5.7	1st century CE (original 1st century BCE)	Arsaces, the second Parthian king, fought Antiochus with 100,000 infantry and 20,000 cavalry
Plut. Vit. Sulla 22.4	2nd century CE	Sulla says that he defeated a Pontic army of 120,000 men at Chaeronea
Plut. Vit. Lucull. 7.4	2nd century CE	Mithridates trained 120,000 infantry in the Roman fashion and invaded Bithynia

Cross-Post: Dis Manibus Paul ‘Xenophon’ McDonnell-Staff (12 March 2020)

From pothos.org Hi all, Just a note to say that regular contributor and poster Paul McDonnell-Staff – “Xenophon” as members would know him – died on March 12th. Paul suffered from an illness, which I won’t go into here, for the last five years of his life. Though it did not always look like it... Continue reading: Cross-Post: Dis Manibus Paul ‘Xenophon’ McDonnell-Staff (12 March 2020)

Dis Manibus Steven Johansson (20 September 2019)

Some time in the late 1990s “Guys! The first time one of us dies, we have to give them an all-black cover on the magazine.” “I see what you are doing, you just want a promise before you step in front of a bus and get the coveted cover spot. Munchkin!... Continue reading: Dis Manibus Steven Johansson (20 September 2019)

Dis Manibus: Matthew Trundle (12 July 2019)

Garrett G. Fagan died of pancreatic cancer in March 2017. His collaborator Matthew Trundle has also died of cancer. From the Canadian Classical Bulletin: Matthew Trundle (12 October 1965–12 July 2019) obtained his PhD from the Department of History, McMaster University in 1996. He then taught at Glendon College in Toronto before being appointed as... Continue reading: Dis Manibus: Matthew Trundle (12 July 2019)

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