Quote Originally Posted by Red Harvest
I wasn't completely joking, more like thinking out loud. I'm not sure that the families would travel with the peasant units. Some portion, yes. It's not a big deal, just trying to consider some of the likely side effects.
In that case then, yes, a whole caravan of people followed in the wake of armies: Wives, slaves, cooks, ladies of convenient morals, men of dubious character, merchants, vendors, repairmen, etc., etc. One of the reason we don't know more than we do about ancient logistics is that much of it was done by "third-party vendors" and "free agents."

Soldiers would loot a town and be able to sell clumbersome items to vendors before the smoke cleared in a razed town. Captured inhabitants could be sold into slavery readily, just like the livestock.

In fact, the camp followers of regular soldiers would be bigger than the train of a a bunch of poor souls who were forced into service with little training.

It sounds looney now, but made since back then. It remained true in European armies until well until the 19th century. David Chambers (I think that's the correct name.) wrote an excellent history of the Napoleonic campaigns. He makes note that Napoleon lost precious days after leaving Moscow because the camp followers were carrying so much loot and there were so many of them. Napoleon should have had a couple of days of hard forced-marching just to shake off this burden, the author wrote.