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07/06/11(Wed)12:46 No.15492476>>15492407 I'd say it would depend on how much of their force was auxiliary cavalry. Conveniently, we know that the man in charge of this expedition was fucking Crassus, who had a force with enormous cavalry support for a Roman army of his day, because he knew he was going to be fighting Parthians. However he ended up in China and then America, that means he's got a good, diverse stock of horse, with more probably drawn from Bactria and the verious Hellanistic and Persian demikingdoms in that region.
So assuming total manpower including support personnel, slaves and whores in the baggage train totals out to about 50,000, horsepower and mules should probably number in the region of 20,000. Mules, of course, are sterile, so when they're done they're done, but there also might be civilian donkeys to breed (they did have to pass through Asia Minor...) chickens were usually kept with the army for the officers, cows are a longshot but conceivable, as milk was believed helpful for the wounded, and pigs are a moot point since the west coast is fucking made of boars.
They'll probably manage. The biggest threat to Roman survival right now is the potential of disease. The Black Death hasn't happened yet, nor has Smallpox, which were the two major killers of the natives. Obviously tedious shit like the flu and the measles will probably kill umpteen million of them, but what if something hits them back? The Romans did not have as sound of a grasp of medicine or disease as the historic European colonists did, after all. |