The Army of Atlantis, according to the details given by Plato portrays a force comparable with any of the major empires of the Mediterranean or Middle East.

Even today the U.S. army only numbers around 1.5 million active soldiers. Atlantis had 800,000 foot soldiers, 200,000 horses, 10,000 chariots, and 1,200 ships. Most writers seem to have glossed over the enormous size of the Atlantean war machine although a few such as Wolter Smit have commented on it^(a).

There is no need to maintain an army of that size unless there are potential enemies of similar size. Who were these enemies? If the 9600 BC date is accepted, the size of this Atlantean army seems quite excessive. A fascinating military website^(b) describes how in 2300 BC Sargon of Akkad was hard put to maintain an army of 5,400 men. The same site relates how a thousand years later the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II had a mainly conscript army of 100,000 soldiers to maintain his entire empire and at the end of the Roman Empire an army of 350,000 men controlled their vast territories.

The military numbers presented by Plato do appear inflated in the same way that his dimensions of the Atlantean capital city and the date of Atlantis are. Either the entire story is an invention or Plato felt obliged to embellish an account of a real prehistoric military power with his own numbers in order to emphasise their might. Alternatively, we must consider the possibility that all of Plato’s large numbers are suspect and should be revised downward by a common factor, probably ten!

^(a) http://was-this-atlantis.info/size.html

^(b) http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/gabrmetz/gabr0009.htm