Arms and Society in Antiquity 3A perpetual following of 54,000 men no doubt gave the great con
queror an assured superiority over any local rival; hence his thirty-four
victorious campaigns. But to keep such a force in being also required
annual campaigning, devastating one fertile landscape after another in
order to keep the soldiers in victuals. Costs to the population at large
were obviously very great. Indeed Sargon’s armies can well be com
pared to the ravages of an epidemic disease that kills off a significant
proportion of the host population yet by its very passage confers an
immunity lasting for several years. Sargon’s armies did the same, since
the diminished productivity of the land that resulted from such plun
dering made it impractical for an army of similar size to pass that way
again^3 until such time as population and the area under cultivation had
been restored.
But just as an epidemic disease will become endemic whenever
interaction between the infectious organism and the host population
becomes sufficiently massive and intimate, so also in war. Hence if we
shift attention from the time of Sargon to the time of the Achaemenid
Empire (539–332 B.C.), we see that war had become less destructive
to a great king’s subjects during that long interval of time. When
Xerxes determined on his famous invasion of Greece (480–479 B.C.),
for example, he issued commands from his palace at Persepolis, in
structing his agents to gather food supplies from territories under
their control, and deliver them to stations along the intended route of
march. As a result, Xerxes was able to march into Greece with an
army a little larger than Sargon’s without devastating the landscapes
through which he passed. To be sure, he could not maintain such a
force for more than a few weeks in a land as poor in local food supplies
as Greece. So, when a handful of Greek cities in the extreme south
refused to submit, the Great King had to withdraw a substantial part of
his invading force, because there was no way he could feed the entire
army in the field over the winter.^4
As far as we can tell, the passage of Xerxes’ army did not interrupt
- In the words of a contemporary:
Against Kasalla [a neighboring region] he marched, and
he turned Kasalla into mounds and heaps of ruins;
he destroyed (the land and left not) enough for a bird
to rest thereon.
L. W. King, ed. and trans., Chronicles concerning Early Babylonian Kings (London, 1907),
pp. 5–6. - Herodotus is of course the basic source for the Persian campaign, but his figures
for the size of Xerxes’ forces are hopelessly exaggerated. My understanding of the
logistics of Xerxes’ campaign derives primarily from G. B. Grundy, The Great Persian
War (London, 1901) and Charles Hignett, Xerxes’ Invasion of Greece (Oxford, 1963).