Is it true that there were 300 spartans against 1 million Persian soldiers?
It is believed there really were only 300 Spartans plus 700 Thespian volunteers, but the total number of Persians is unknown. It was believed to be a massive number however. There’s a lot of controversy over this, but here are some thoughts from scholars: Size of the Persian army Xerxes I, king of Persia, had been preparing for years to continue the Greco-Persian Wars started by his father Darius. In 481 BC, after four years of preparation, the Persian army and navy arrived in Asia Minor.[26] A bridge of ships had been made at Abydos. This allowed the land forces to cross the Hellespont. Herodotus of Halicarnassus, who wrote the first history of this war, gave the size of Xerxes’s army as follows: Units Numbers Fleet crew 517,610 Infantry 1,700,000[27] Cavalry 80,000[28] Arabs and Libyans 20,000 Greek puppet troops 324,000 Total 2,641,610 This number needs to be nearly doubled in order to account for support troops and thus Herodotus reports that the whole force numbered 5,283,220 men,
