Talk:Battle of Aquae Sextiae

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	France Portal Battle of Aquae Sextiae is within the scope of WikiProject France, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to France on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please join the project and help with our open tasks.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the Project's quality scale. (If you rated the article please give a short summary at comments, explaining the ratings and/or suggest improvements.)

	This article is within the scope of the Military history WikiProject. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see lists of open tasks and regional and topical task forces. To use this banner, please see the full instructions.
Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the quality scale.
Additional information and associated task forces: This article has been checked against the following criteria for B-Class status: Referencing and citation: criterion not met Coverage and accuracy: criterion not met Structure: criterion not met Grammar: criterion met Supporting materials: criterion met Associated task forces (periods and conflicts): Classical warfare task force (c. 700 BC–c. 500 AD)

[edit] Number of barbarians involved in the battle

The Roman tendency to exaggerate the number of barbarians involved in a battle seems to have carried through to this article. The Teutons, Ambrones, Cimbrii, Vandals and Harudii all came from the Jutland peninsula. Given that only the Teutons and the much smaller contingent of Ambrones were involved in this battle a total headcount of 110000 is implausible. The book 'The Barbarians - Goths, Franks and Vandals' (Malcolm Todd)makes a similar point - 'Armies of several thousands would have joined battle only in the course of a mass migration......'. Another perspective would be to look at village sizes of the time - A typical village having 80-100 inhabitants, admittedly somewhat more if near the coast - 'Die Ersten Deutschen' (The First Germans - S. Fischer-Fabian). A headcount of 110000 would have emptied 1000 villages. Subtract from this the number of people left behind. The Cimbrii, who parted company from the Teutones somewhat earlier, the Vandals and Harudii and one gets the sense that Jutland must have had a village every few yards! Zooming into the Ambrones, one reads that they came from the island of Amrun (see last reference) - an island of some 40 square kilometers and five villages. Bottom line: I would propose a 'combatant headcount of <5000' HagenFranziska 14:59, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one article was rated and this bot brought all the other ratings up to at least that level. BetacommandBot 02:29, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Broken link

Footnote #1 (actually the only footnote here) to St. Jerome's letter has the link "http://www.ccel.org/fathers/NPNF2-06/letters/lette123.htm". Apparently CCEL.org has rearranged their site, but by rummaging around a while, I found that letter: its new link is "http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.v.CXXIII.html". 208.66.124.31 00:31, 7 October 2007 (UTC) (Randall)