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Recently I have been reading alot of historical accounts of battles taking place in the ancient world. One of the things that strikes me is the size of the armies that fought. During Xeres invasion of Greece he had an army of between a million and four million depending on the source. Alaxander the great had an army of perhaps sixty thousand. At the battle of Cannae the Romans could field a force of around ninety thousand men. And there are numerous other examples of very large armies fighting between 1,000 BC and 500 AD.
But how could this be the case? especially considering that armies during the middle ages, and even into the late ninteenth century (French Revolutionary armies excluded) rarely exceeded twenty thousand men?
Are the record exagerated to make the battles seem bigger than they were? Or did ancient armies rely heavily on conscripts serving for a few months before going back to their farms?
Really my specialty is more the nineteenth century and onward and these figures seem a little extreme so I am a little skeptical at accepting the figures given by the accounts.