Note 39 — Chapter III · Criticism of The Accepted View
Reading edition
La population française. Histoire de la population avant 1789, I, Paris, 1889, p. 99 ff. Otto Hirschfeld (Sitzungsber. d. Berl. Akad., 1897, p. 1101) also uses this bit of evidence as a basis for calculations. Beloch, however, (Rh. Mus., LIV (1899), p. 414 f.) utterly rejects it, because he insists on taking the word ἄνδρες here as equivalent to fighting men. That is doubtless correct, but as it makes arrant nonsense of the calculation, it should not be ascribed to so well-informed a scientist as Posidonius, but only to the stupid Diodorus, who has thus changed what must have been an estimate only of the total population, into one of the number capable of bearing arms. Beloch’s remark that the ancient Gauls had no idea of the total population, but only of the fighting men, seems to go too far. If one number be known it is an easy matter to calculate the other. Certainly Posidonius was capable of multiplying any figures the Gauls may have given him for their fighting men by 4 or 5, in order to secure an estimate of the whole population. Besides, the Gauls must have had a certain accepted proportion between the total population of a district and the number of fighting men it could produce. They had a great many more occasions to make use of such calculations than any one in modern times would ever have; for questions of life and death depended only too frequently on just such estimates.