Was disappointed to see that it wasn't being shown in the museum when I went there 1.5 years ago. The penis room was also closed, not sure what was worse.

I was there a week ago and it still wasn't back. The penis room was wide open though.

When I to the Naples Archaeological museum website, I get the following.

NOTICE

The Epigraphic, Egyptian, Gems and Numismatics sections will remain closed to the public until further notice, for reorganization and extraordinary maintenance work.

From Monday 20 January 2025, room XXXVIII of the Campania Romana Section, rooms XXV, XXVI, XXVII and XXVIII of the Farnese collection and will be closed until further notice for extraordinary maintenance work. We apologize for the inconvenience

I hope the mosaic will be available in May of this year.

From article: "Here, in the Battle of Issus, Alexander's army of 75,000 Greeks faced Darius' vastly superior force of approximately 600,000 Persian troops."

From Wikipedia: "Modern historians find Arrian's count of 600,000 men highly unlikely. They argue that the logistics of fielding more than 100,000 soldiers in battle was extremely difficult at the time."

Basically, the ancient agricultural landscape would be unable to feed an army of more than 100,000.

Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" podcast mentions this in almost every episode. Numerical values in historical documents are always to be greeted with LARGE amounts of suspicion if not outright disbelief.

The next paragraph, or actually next sentence adresses this immediately:

> These ancient written sourced troop numbers are likely greatly exaggerated as more modern accounting of the battle puts the numbers much lower, but it is how the story was told for the better part of 2,300 years.

Macedonian war propaganda, still going strong 2K years later.

Yeah 600k seems pretty outsized for battles of that time, even compared just "reported" numbers.

After "The Macedonian" conquered Persia, he combined his army with the largely intact Persian forces, but unsurprisingly there was friction between the comands, and Alexander admonished his own generals, pointing out that the so called greek and persian languages, were mutualy comprehensable. The most ancient history of greek/persian origins is that they were the same tribe long long ago, but there was a dispute, exactly what is lost, but even to this day greeks carry a grudge and persians give them the piss. There is more, much more to the combined history of the greek and persian tribes, but what with the present fantasy landscaping of the past, its an unpleasant slog to try and comunicate.