Hi! Glad people are still listening to those old podcast episodes. I had a lot of fun discussing this battle with /u/400-rabbits.

At first glance, the numbers at the Nemea (394 BC) do seem pretty extreme. The combatants were, according to Xenophon (Hellenika 4.2.16-17):

• A Spartan-led force of 13,500 hoplites, 700 cavalry, 700 archers and slingers;

• A coalition army of 24,000 hopites, 1,550 cavalry and "a greater number" of light troops.

We get very different numbers from Diodoros 14.83.1-2, but these are less plausible. At the time of the podcast I think I may have understood the Xenophon passage to give 23,500 hoplites on the Spartan side, but this was an error on my part.

Either way, these ratios seem pretty lopsided. In the Spartan army there were nearly 20 hoplites for each horseman. In the coalition army, which contained cavalry from Athens, Boiotia, Chalkis and Lokris, there were still over 15 hoplites per horseman. Meanwhile there were only a handful of specialist light infantry in the Spartan army (including 300 Cretan archers), and an apparently only slightly greater number with the anti-Spartan coalition. It seems hard to explain this.

But these numbers are misleading. They are not representative of some tactical ideal. There are a couple of important things to bear in mind.

Firstly, these are militia armies. They are not professional forces or armies drawn from warrior aristocracies. They do not represent a well-prepared military elite but a cross-section of society. The Greeks did have leisure-class men who generally fought as cavalry (the Spartans being a major exception), but the general population either fought as heavy infantry, or, if they couldn't afford the spear and shield, as a lightly armed mob. The resulting armies were very large, as these numbers show: 4 small towns in the Argolid turn out as many as 3,000 hoplites between them. And this isn't anywhere near the full levy of any of the states involved, with the possible exception of the 7,000 Argive hoplites. The numbers were huge, but they were not huge numbers of tactically optimal troops (like the Sasanian cavalry or the English longbowmen you mention).

Indeed, the reason why there seems to be a huge overrepresentation of hoplites against light-armed troops is probably because the commanders of these armies had already done the best they could to optimise their forces by either not calling up, or otherwise leaving aside, the light-armed part of the levy. In earlier battles we sometimes hear of huge masses of light infantry accompanying the hoplites and cavalry; where we get numbers for this part of the levy, they outnumber the hoplites. At Delion in 424 BC, for example, the Boiotian levy consisted of 7,000 hoplites and more than 10,000 light-armed troops. But these masses rarely proved very useful in battle, since they were just ordinary people without proper organisation or training. By the 4th century the Greeks seem to have abandoned the use of these light levies in combat in favour of smaller units of skilled specialists, like the Cretan archers and Western Peloponnesian slingers in the Spartan army. It is notable that Xenophon says there were more light troops in the coalition "because the Ozolian Lokrians, Malians, and Akarnanians were with them"; these were all peoples from central and western Greece which were known to produce capable skirmishers.

So that's point one: there are few light-armed troops compared to the hoplites because the hoplites were the lowest "tier" of militia that was considered useful enough to bring to battle. Point two is that the totals seen in this force are not representative of the ideal levy. Many individual contingents consisted exclusively of hoplites (as Xenophon tells it), skewing the ratio toward the heavy infantry. When you look only at the contingents with a cavalry component, you find very different ratios. The Spartans brought 6,000 hoplites and 700 cavalry, for a ratio of less than 9:1. The Athenians had 6,000 hoplites and 600 cavalry (a neat 10:1). The Boiotians, famed for their horsemen, brought 5,000 hoplites and 800 cavalry (about 6:1). The Lokrians brought no hoplites at all, but did provide 50 horsemen along with their light-armed levy. Other states are likely to have leaned on these communities to provide the mounted force, as the Spartans used to do in the Peloponnesian War. But it shows that the actual ideal was to have something closer to a 10:1 than a 20:1 hoplite-to-horseman ratio. It is only in these very large levies that the lower common denominator - the hoplite - wins out.

Point three is that actually, when you consider the size of the communities that mustered them, these numbers of horsemen are really not small at all. I wrote a chapter on cavalry in the recent Brill's Companion to Greek Land Warfare Beyond the Phalanx (2021) in which I point out that Classical Greek mounted forces were, in fact, unusually large when seen in the context of the available resources. The ratio of 10:1 is quite common throughout antiquity (with a few exceptions, such as the army of Alexander the Great) - but that includes vast empires with the freedom to raise any troop type they liked. Even those who could, then, would rarely muster more horsemen per footsoldier. For the Greeks, matching this ratio required major investment and deliberate political decisions. Consider the Spartans: until 424 BC they had no cavalry (for complex reasons), but just 30 years later they field a force of 700, exceeding the 10:1 ratio. Many other Greek states similarly went out of their way to muster as many horsemen as possible. The Athenians suffered enormously in the Peloponnesian War, and their citizen population is estimated to have been cut in half; even so, the paper strength of their cavalry in the 4th century was the same as it had been before the war. In other words, they splurged on a vast mounted force that doubled in size relative to the rest of their levy.

It is hard to overstate the limits of the Greek militia system; to a large extent, tacticians and generals were forced to play the hand they were given. It was not a hand with a lot of cavalry in it, and it often had few effective light troops either. But they did what they could to boost the number of both, even at the expense of the hoplite levy, because they were perfectly aware of the benefits of tactical flexibility and the use of combined arms. The Nemea is a great example of a battle where those who had horsemen, flaunted them, bringing more than their fair share; the rest simply didn't have any significant numbers of these troops to offer. But several of them would field their own mounted forces within decades of this clash.