Hello fellow History enthusiasts and regular historians. Recently I have been reading some books on the Seleucid Empire especially during the reign of Antiochus the 3rd ( John Grainger and Sekunda) and I am also reading Dr David Parrott revolutionary work on logistics and military procurement in early modern Europe. The similarities between systems are staggering and it raises a lot of questions on the validity of ancient sources. Just the matter of financial "technology" alone raises serious doubts on ancient sources and makes them look like complete fantasy when it comes to military matters. And when you get into agricultural output, population dynamics and logistical networks, I find it very hard to believe any ancient army could be larger than 50,000 troops! I have been reading a lot of research papers on these issues and I can't help to notice what appears to be a lack of critical thinking in the approach to works like Livy, Plutarch or Arrian. Sure they are our best sources of the period but save for a few exceptions it seems like there is little application of our modern knowlege of logistics and mathematics to create more plausiible scenarios of what did go on (without political interference).

The Battle of magnesia for instance is one sich case where the figure of 72,000 Seleucids is taken by almost everyone as gospel and is borderline impossible when you look at it through modern lenses considering the technological level of the time (A Spanish historian wrote a piece ages ago for Ancient Warfare where he was able to remove roughly half the numbers just by checking for inconsistency between ancient sources for instance and it seems almost no one else is doing the same -that i could find).

When you consider the strategic situation, this figure is ludicrous imho. With an army that big, Antiochus III could have split it in two and envelope the Romans. Also, the Romans were the ones looking to engage and not the other way around so the balance of forces to be different. Also, the logistical implications for such an army would be nightmarish. Sure soldiers carried a lot of their food and kit with them to increase mobility but that basically had to be replenished. And a literal army of baggage carts would be necessary just to keep such a force moving let alone in fighting condition. The other thing is that early European field armies with over 1,000 years of technological advances were rarely over 30,000 strong due to logistical implications and Command and Control issues once the battle started.

So my first question is why is there a seemingly lack of this multidisciplinary approach to ancient sources?

And my second question is what are your opinions regarding ancient sources and their validity or lack of there off? I know a lot of ancient history is based on educated guesses and these few sources are extremely precious but shouldn't we question them way more intensely than what we do now? Even if proven wrong, we can still take a lot of information from them as in "this definitely did not happen" and that could point historical research in a much better direction imho.