This is the second part of the first part of our four part1 look (Ia, Ib, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, V) at the context between the Hellenistic army and its Macedonian phalanx and the Romans with their legions. Last week, we looked at the weapons, organization and fighting style of the Macedonian phalanx, the infantry core of the armies of the Hellenistic world, the heirs of Alexander (and, indeed, of Alexander’s army too). This week, we’re going to turn to the rest of the army, because the Macedonian phalanx never fights alone and isn’t the decisive arm of the army in any event.
Instead, the Macedonian phalanx sat as the core of a larger Hellenistic military system that incorporated cavalry (always shock, sometimes missile), light infantry skirmishers, ‘medium’ infantry (we’ll get to what that means, don’t worry), and dedicated missile troops, sometimes along with gimmick weapons like scythed chariots and elephants. The phalanx wasn’t there to win the battle (though it sometimes did), but rather to provide a stable central base to allow those other elements, particularly the cavalry, to win the battle. Of these elements, only some of the shock cavalry might also be ‘Macedonian’ either in actual fact or as a legal fiction; instead the remaining elements were drawn from a bewildering range of levying local subject peoples and hiring foreign mercenaries. Each Hellenistic state had a different mix of these based on what it could gather up in its neighborhood.
Understanding these elements, in turn, goes a long way to explaining why the ‘simple’ ‘Total War tactics’ that folks suggest to easily beat the phalanx failed and also why the broader Hellenistic army was so damn successful for so long. So we’re going to break down the elements of the broader Hellenistic army and how it generally expected to win battles.
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Alexander-Battle
It sometimes catches folks a bit by surprise when I point out that the Macedonian phalanx never fought alone; indeed as a total proportion of Hellenistic armies it is often less than half. But we rarely teach, even in undergraduate university settings, the full orders of battle for ancient armies. Instead, we’re likely to focus just on the mechanics of the phalanx, relating it either to key military principles (discipline, cohesion, professionalism) in a global military history survey or to key elements of the society (relationship to the king, professionalism again, imperial ethnic hierarchy) in an ancient history course. And so students mostly encounter this creature – the phalanx – alone.
And to be fair, for some armies that kind of almost works. The hoplite phalanx in our sources does seem to operate more or less on its own quite a bit.2 And as we’ll see, you can describe a Roman legion and give a good sense of the army of the Roman Republic because the legion integrates its supporting troops (and the socii seem to have similar compositions). But with Hellenistic armies, this is deceptive, because the supporting troops are really important and are not integrated into the main phalanx.
Now as I already noted, the exact mix of the troops varies from one army to the next, so we’re going to have to talk individually about each of the ‘big three’ Hellenistic powers (and also Pyrrhus of Epirus), but we can set some basic rules here first. All of the Hellenistic armies have their roots in Alexander’s army, either because they were formed from the fragments of his (the big three) or in imitation of him (Pyrrhus’ Epirotes) and so draw some of their tactical principles from that heritage. While he adapts to circumstances, Alexander the Great clearly had a standard battle ‘concept’ which he inherited from his father Philip II (who did basically the same thing at Chaeronea), which I am going to call Alexander-Battle.
The cleanest examples of Alexander-Battle are Issus (333) and Gaugamela (331), the latter of which in particular comes close to the platonic ideal of a battle, taking place in what might as well have been some sort of multiplayer tournament map flat, featureless plain. At Issus, counting from right to left, after Alexander’s last-minute disposition changes, we get on the far right, the Agrianians (light skirmish-capable infantry, his ‘rough terrain’ specialists), then a right wing composed of the prodromi (Macedonian light cavalry, ‘scouts’), backed up by some archers and the Paionians (also light cavalry), then Alexander himself with the Macedonian companion cavalry, supported by the elite infantry agema and hypaspists, whose kit was lighter than the main phalanx (and thus could better keep up with the cavalry), followed by the phalanx in its six taxeis, then Thracian infantry (‘medium’ infantry, I promise I will define this), supported by his Cretan archers, then the rest of his cavalry, but the Greek cavalry from the Peloponnese he has, plus the much more capable Thessalian cavalry.
Total War fans, please note how this is not your standard [cavalry – infantry – cavalry] setup, but rather (now from left to right): cavalry (Greek) – light missile infantry (Cretans) – medium infantry (Thracians) – heavy infantry (the phalanx) – medium elite infantry (agema and hypaspists) – cavalry (the companions) – light cavalry (prodromi and Paionians) supported by light infantry (archers) – light infantry (Agrianians). Likewise, at Gaugamela, Alexander’s disposition (from left to right) is a cavalry wing (mercenaries, Thracians and Odrysians), then a mixed infantry-cavalry formation of Greek cavalry supported by Cretan archers, then the phalanx, then the hypaspists, then the companion cavalry, with light infantry (including the Agrianians) thrown forward of them to screen, then a right wing composed of a mix of light cavalry (prodromi and the Paionians again) supported by infantry (mercenaries and the rest of the Agrianians).
This is not an army where the cavalry truly flanks (as in goes all the way around and strikes the enemy army on the side), and you can tell because the main cavalry striking force, the hammer to this anvil – the Companion cavalry – is never actually posted on a flank. Indeed, once you work out the spacing (see the maps), Alexander’s Companion cavalry (and thus Alexander, because that’s where he is) is more on the right edge of the center (with the center and left of the center, if that makes sense, made up of the elite infantry and then the phalanx) than in the right wing. Instead, Alexander Battle relies on the left wing and the right wing to stall, for the phalanx to hold the center, while Alexander finds a gap to exploit and punches through. Alexander seems to aim at where he might guess the ‘joints’ in an enemy army to be, such as where the enemy right wing meets its center, and then tries to punch through there. It’s not a new trick: under his father’s command, Alexander won the battle of Chaeronea (338) exactly this way. Philip II held with the infantry, while Alexander drove the cavalry through a gap that opened up in the enemy center when the Athenian and Theban phalanxes failed to move in concert.
And that’s exactly what Alexander does at Issus and Gaugamela: he punches through at a position that is around where the center of the enemy army joins with its right wing (so around two-thirds of the way from the left) and then bolts straight for Darius III, aiming to kill or capture the Great King and so bring a swift end to his war (Darius always runs away, causing his army to collapse). And because the cavalry isn’t so much flanking as it is creating a breach, it needs support, which is why there are all of these light- or medium-infantry units deployed with them, be it the Agrianians supporting the light cavalry or the hypaspists and agema supporting the Companions, to be the glue that connects the rapidly advancing cavalry to the slower (but still advancing) phalanx.
Some of that, I should note, is going to change when these armies become symmetrical. Hellenistic armies don’t generally try to use their cavalry to breach the way Alexander’s does. This isn’t because their cavalry is bad or they have less of it (they often have more of it!), I suspect, but because they’re facing armies with equally heavy infantry centers and trying to cavalry-breach into a Macedonian phalanx or close-order infantry anchored on a Macedonian phalanx isn’t going to work. So instead, Hellenistic cavalry tends to deploy actually on the extreme wings, but intends to first smash through the enemy flank and then ideally roll up the enemy army (though all too often they smash straight off the battlefield); it is still not so much looping around as it is dispersing one wing of the enemy army and then ideally capitalizing on that. The role of the phalanx remains the same: to pin the center of the enemy force and provide a solid, durable center for the friendly army around which the other elements can adhere. And the role of the lighter troops is often the same: either to stall in places where the decisive action is not happening (and thus protect the wings of the phalanx) or to be the glue that keeps the cavalry hammer tied firmly to the infantry anvil.
But in all of this we must stress one more thing that absolutely will be true of later Hellenistic armies: it is the heavy (Macedonian) cavalry which is expected to be the decisive arm of the army (though what we call that elite Macedonian cavalry varies, state to state). The phalanx is meant to create an opportunity for the cavalry to exploit, while the remaining arms support it and keep it connected to the cavalry. This is, I will note, in stark contrast to the Romans, who expect the decisive action to come from the infantry of the legions. Hellenistic armies are ‘cavalry first’ armies whose large infantry contingents are meant to enable decisive cavalry maneuver. Roman legions are ‘infantry first’ armies, whose cavalry is intended to screen the infantry as it grinds and then punches its way through the enemy.
Put another way (and we’ll see this again), for Hellenistic monarchs, the fastest way to an enemy’s rear was through (not around) their right flank. For Roman armies, the fastest way to an enemy’s rear was through their front. But if Alexander’s army already seemed complex…well, the Hellenistic armies of his successors are, it turns out, much more so.
Hellenistic Light and Medium Infantry
Two major things change once we get to the successors (though the former was already changing during Alexander’s late campaigns): first, the range of troops these armies can recruit expands dramatically to include new types of soldiers, either because of new developments in Greece leading to different equipment sets, or because the greater reach of these new kingdoms encompass new peoples entirely. And second, the threat these armies are facing becomes symmetrical – they are facing armies just like themselves.
When it comes to the new troop-types, the troops available to each of these empires varies quite a lot because they are often recruiting these ‘ethnic’ contingents (that is how our sources describe them, by connecting their ethnic character to a fighting style and kit) from within and around the borders of their new kingdoms. Still, we can keep track of these different types by breaking them out into basic groups with similar functions.
We can start with light infantry, which in this case generally means troops with little armor, but a shield (generally small), javelins and a sword. These fellows can fight in contact, but without armor, they can’t do it for long; you wouldn’t want to try to stop cavalry with them or oppose a heavy infantry formation. While the Romans use the legion’s integrated light infantry to screen the main body into battle, we see this less often (but not never) with Hellenistic armies, which tend instead to place light infantry towards the flanks to provide ‘connective tissue’ between cavalry forces on the wings and the heavy infantry in the center.
As noted above, Alexander’s light infantry was drawn primarily from the southern Balkans, peoples like the Paionians and in particular the Agrianians (who were a sub-group of them). The Seleucids in particular were able to draw on very large numbers of these fellows to support their armies, pulling from the uplands of Iran, Anatolia and the Caucuses to furnish tough hill warriors. At Raphia (217), Polybius (Polyb. 5.79) notes a body of some 5,000 mixed Dahae, Carmanian and Cilician light troops, as well as 2,000 Agrianians, 500 Lydian javelineers (akontistai) and 1,000 ‘Cardaces’ who also seem in this case to be javelin troops (as opposed to their heavy infantry role in the Achaemenid army). Likewise, at Magnesia (190), the Seleucids have 3,000 Trallian light infantry and 4,500 Pisidian, Pamphylian and Lycian troops Livy calls caetrati (caetra was the Roman word for a small round shield), who seem to light infantry too. Troops like this could be very valuable (as Alexander’s Agrianians showed), though as we’ll see, Seleucid light infantry tends to underperform.
The other kind of light infantry were dedicated missile troops, generally archers. Contrary to the expectation most folks have that these guys would be deployed behind the phalanx, in fact they tend to show up deployed in the line along with other light infantry, although they are often positioned to be near other supporting units of cavalry or medium infantry. From the Greek world, the missile infantry par excellance were Cretans and these show up in all of the successor’s armies; it seems like ‘Cretan’ could be as much a type of mercenary soldier as it was an ethnic designator and our sources also discuss ‘Neocretans’ – there’s no real consensus as to what exactly that means. The Antigonids have a force of 3,000 Cretans at Citium in 171, and both the Ptolemaic and Seleucid armies feature Cretans at Raphia, 3,000 fighting for Ptolemy IV and 2,500 for Antiochus III.
The Seleucids also recruited infantry archers and other dedicated missile troops en masse from their imperial domains. At Raphia Antiochus III has a mixed contingent of 5,000 Medes, Cissians, Cadusians and Carmanains armed as archers, along with the Cretans already mentioned, plus Arab auxiliaries who may too have been archers. At Magnesia Livy reports 2,500 Mysian archers, two detachments of mixed Cyrtaen slingers and Elymaean archers collectively totaling 8,000, plus Cretans and Carians and Cilicians armed like Cretans to the tune of 2,500 men. If you are getting the impression that the Seleucid army in particular operated with a large number of light infantry supporting it, that’s because it did.
Next, we have a category that I am going to call medium infantry. This seems like it should be a really broad category, but it is actually pretty consistent: these fellows tend to be unarmored infantry, equipped with relatively large shields, contact weapons (typically a spear and a sword) along with at least some javelin capacity. As a result, these infantry fall between dedicated light skirmish infantry and the heavy ‘shock’ infantry of the phalanx (or the legion), being able to both engage in some shock combat with their large shields and spears, but also being able to skirmish reasonably effectively as well.
The prototypical example of this sort of troop is the thureophoros (literally thureos-carrier), a type of Greek mercenary that emerges in the third century that becomes absolutely ubiquitous in the Greek-speaking world. These fellows carried the thureos, a variant of the La Tène oval shield which tended to be a bit smaller and lighter than the original (though we do see some larger thureoi too), along with a Greek one-handed spear (the dory), a sword as a backup and frequently have javelins. If this sounds suspiciously like the load out of most La Tène warriors, that’s because it is and the Greeks are adopting it from the Galatians, a La Tène material-culture people who bulldozed through Greece and Anatolia in the early third century.
What that setup gives you is a cheap and decently effective versatile soldier who can both skirmish in open order with javelins and a good shield, but at the same time, with the oval shield and spear, can also close up and fight in close combat (albeit not well, as we’ll see). I should note that we do see in artwork and in our sources efforts to create more expensive, effective forms of thureophoroi by giving them armor (often mail armor, pulling from either the Romans or La Tène material-culture elites), but this was a sufficiently big change that our authors consider them a different kind of medium-heavy unit called thorakitai. It also seems pretty clear from our sources that these armored thorakitai were less common than their lighter thureophoroi equivalents (though they are actually a bit more common in artwork, probably because it is funerary artwork and the higher status men of the thorakitai probably were more the sort of men whose families could commission funerary artwork).
That said, Greek mercenaries were hardly the only source of infantry that could fill this space, precisely because the Greeks seem to have been imitating in this troop type the equipment and fighting style of the ‘barbarians’ of the Balkans and Danube region (both La Tène material-culture Gauls – most notably the Galatians who end up settled in Anatolia – but also Illyrians and Thracians). Gallic mercenaries in La Tène material-culture kit show up in all three major Hellenistic states, especially in very large numbers in the Seleucid army at Magnesia (which was, after all, fighting very near the area of Galatian settlement in Anatolia, so they were readily available). We also see Thracians equipped more or less this way showing up in the Antigonid army, for instance at the Citium review in 171 and the Battle of Pydna (168)3 – we’re told by Plutarch that these fellows carried thureoi but relatively light armor (their tunics are visible to the Romans) and carried the rhomphaia, a heavy two-handed iron polearm distinct to Thrace. We also get Illyrians in the Antigonid army at points,4 and these too seem to be ‘medium’ infantry (with a very interesting tactical use at Sellasia we’ll come to in a moment).
‘Medium’ infantry was clearly handy to have on the battle, a versatile unit that could both skirmish and also potentially try to hold their positions in a shock engagement. That said, these fellows fare poorly if they end up matched against heavy infantry (and you may already be sensing an issue given the Roman legion’s ‘oops, all heavy infantry’ main battle lines). The most common place to put these fellows is on the edge of the phalanx, especially on the dominant, attacking wing (almost always the right wing), in order to provide that connective tissue to support the cavalry and protect the flank of the phalanx. In this sense, they fill the place previously occupied by Alexander’s hypaspists and agema, though I should note that elite Macedonian infantry along those lines (going variously by being called the infantry agema or peltasts) still exist as well.
So the infantry body of these armies isn’t just the phalanx: rather the phalanx has its flanked guarded by progressive layers of medium and light infantry, which in turn connect to the cavalry on the wings. And we should turn to that cavalry next to get a sense of how they fit into this.
Cavalry (and Elephantry)
The decisive arm of Alexander’s army was the elite cavalry formation organized around him. For most Hellenistic armies, this does not change (although we’ll see that cavalry tends to be more decisive in the Ptolemaic and Seleucid armies and less so in the Antigonid and Epirote ones). One thing to look out for when thinking about this question of where the ‘decisive arm’ is, is to ask where the overall commander of the army is – because, as we’ve discussed, in the heat of battle, that commander is likely only going to be able to exert real direction over the unit he is with. Roman generals generally ‘drive’ one of their legions into battle because infantry is the decisive arm of Roman warfare, but Hellenistic kings almost always position themselves with a large body of elite cavalry; the exceptions are both few and notable. So let’s take a look at that cavalry.
First off, we have the “Macedonian” cavalry that these armies all have. Just as the ‘Macedonian’ phalanx was the privileged part of the infantry, so too generally the ‘Macedonian’ cavalry was the elite part of the cavalry. Likewise, just as the ‘Macedonian’ phalanx was often not ethnically Macedonian (but was ethnically restricted), so too the ‘Macedonian’ cavalry might not be ethnically Macedonian, but rather cavalry equipped in Macedonian fashion, which generally means a rider with body armor (tube-and-yoke cuirass or a fancier bronze muscle cuirass), a good helmet, wielding a cavalry lance (the xyston), with a sword as backup, but generally no shield. The horse itself may be unarmored, but it may also have face protection (a chanfron) and chest protection, but as often as not didn’t. The xyston itself was a substantial weapon, probably around 3.5m long (compared to the c. 2.5m dory), with a relatively large counter-weight to allow the weapon to be gripped about a quarter of the spear’s length from the rear, giving a lot of projection to get that tip out in front of the horse. Some Hellenistic cavalry, I should note, do use shields (as Roman equites do), but this seems to be a relatively late shift.
The ‘Macedonian’ cavalry was generally broken into a series of regular regiments (ἴλη, ile a unit of c. 200-300) along with an elite unit (sometimes more than one) which rode with the king. So in the Antigonid army, Livy (Livy 42.66.5) distinguishes between what he calls the alae (he means ile) of regular cavalry and the ‘sacred squadrons’ of the royal guard; the Antigonids have 4,000 cavalry total at Pydna (168). The Seleucids have a cavalry agema and a regiment of Companions (hetairoi), each about a thousand strong; it seems like the hetairoi were drawn from Greek-speakers and thus ‘Macedonian’ while the agema was drawn from Iranian peoples, but both seemingly fighting as Macedonian-style heavy cavalry.5 The Ptolemaic cavalry is harder to parse, again because our one solid order of battle is Raphia and Raphia is odd. There are a few elite cavalry squadrons which seem to get brigaded together at Raphia to make a single composite ‘palace squadron’ of 700, alongside a unit of 2,300 cavalry which Polybius describes as from Libya and Egypt, but which pretty clearly means cavalry drawn from the military settlers in those places, meaning this is the non-elite ‘Macedonian’ cavalry.6
For the Antigonids, that’s mostly it, because they continue to control the Macedonian heartland, they continue to largely use just Macedonian cavalry. But of course the Ptolemies and Seleucids have other options. Antiochus III at Magnesia has some 2,500 Galatian cavalry described by Appian as armored (kataphraktoi, App. Syr. 32; Livy 37.40.13; it’s possible here that Appian is confused); these would likely be mail-clad Gallic elites fighting in their own style and a formidable force on that basis (Julius Caesar was quite fond of recruiting Gallic cavalry whenever he could get it). And then the Seleucids of course also have access to the famously effective cavalry of the Iranian plateau – these are horse archers and of the Hellenistic powers the Seleucids are the only ones to include them in quantity, with 200 Dahae horse archers reported at Magnesia, as well as Arab camel-mounted archers; they don’t seem to have these fellow at Raphia because their control of the Iranian Plateau had slipped in the mid-third century, to be reestablished by Antiochus III immediately following the Battle of Raphia. The Ptolemaic picture is again, trickier; Polybius (5.65.6) notes a body of 2,000 cavalry ‘from Greece’ along with the ‘mercenary cavalry’ together. That makes it sound like there are mercenaries from Greece and then mercenaries from everywhere else, but that’s actually probably wrong. Instead the cavalry misthophoroi (‘mercenary’ literally ‘wage-bearing’) are actually Greek-speaking military settlers in Egypt who had allotments of land but also served for pay in the army who have been brigaded together with actual mercenary cavalry from Greece.
Now it is sometimes suggested that the reason Hellenistic armies were weaker than Alexander’s army was that they neglected their cavalry, so I want to note some numbers here. Alexander’s companion cavalry had eight ile, including his own royal squadron, for around 1,800 heavy cavalry in Alexander’s own striking group. Whereas at Raphia, the striking formations organized around the kings were 3,000 strong for the Ptolemies (the elite 700-man palace grouping (probably originally three ile, two of 200 and one of 300), plus the 2,300 cavalry drawn from the cleruch military settlers, while the matching Seleucid formation is 4,000 cavalry (Polybius does not give many details here), which seems to be 2,000 regular cavalry under the command of Antipater, plus another two thousand which we might guess are the agema and Companions (Polyb. 5.82.9). In short, these cavalry striking forces are much bigger.
For another comparison, Alexander has about 5,000 total cavalry at Issus and 7,000 at Gaugamela. At Raphia the Ptolemies have a total of 5,000 cavalry, the Seleucids 6,000. At Magnesia, the Seleucids have a staggering 11,700 cavalry according to Livy. Even the Antigonids, weakest and poorest of the Hellenistic powers as they are, deploy 4,000 cavalry at Pydna (168). So while it is the case that the rest of the Hellenistic army has gotten much bigger – Alexander never gets close to deploying the c. 70-80,000-man monster armies the Ptolemies and Seleucids can field at Raphia or Magnesia – the cavalry portion has not gotten smaller. Nor, I think, is there any reason to assume it has become less effective, but it is now fighting itself. Those big wings of heavy cavalry at Raphia are going to hit each other; indeed the elite Ptolemaic 3,000 horse organized around Ptolemy IV is placed directly opposite the elite 4,000 Seleucid horse under Antiochus III (an unusual choice for Ptolemy to deploy on the left, but he is evidently hoping to parry what he knows is going to be Antiochus’ crushing blow – it sort of works).
Alexander had the fortune of being able to drive highly cohesive, motivated heavy cavalry into relatively light formations in the Persian army and then exploit the fact that Darius III would run away (and thus fatally demoralize his army) every time he did this. Antiochus III or Ptolemy IV or Philip V all have no such advantages: they are facing a largely symmetrical foe who is going to try to parry their heavy cavalry with more heavy cavalry. Assuming equal amounts of force, to get a decisive breach on one wing, they need to leave the other wing vulnerable, which is exactly what we see play out with these armies as their decisive striking arm (typically on the right) generally wins, but their ‘holding’ force on the left generally finds itself unable to resist their opponents equally crushing blow.
While Achaemenid cavalry was certainly capable of shock actions, they were first and foremost horse archers and while we don’t get a lot of details from our sources (Arrian being the best) one gets the impression they generally skirmished rather than charged. At Issus we seem to get a more extended fight on Alexander’s left (Arr. Anab. 2.11.2). At Gaugamela on the right the cavalry stalling action (because remember, Alexander is not on the far right, so he needs his right flank covered as he advances) s described as a series of attack by squadrons rather than a single intense clash (Arr. Anab. 3.13.4) and on the left Arrian only notes the Persian cavalry resorting to shock action once surrounded (Arr. Anab. 3.15.2). That may well explain why Parmenion’s flank seems to take a while to begin to come apart (thus giving him time to recognize his peril, signal Alexander for help and for Alexander to arrive). I wonder if a determined attack by several thousand Macedonian-style shock cavalry would have given him so much time.
Finally, we have elephants, which we have discussed before. War elephants rapidly become a standard element of Hellenistic armies in the wars of the Diadochoi that start after Alexander’s death in 323, but they get used in a number of different ways which suggests to me that their tactical place in the military system is not quite stable. War elephants seem to be deployed for two major functions: in front of the main phalanx to disorder the enemy phalanx (or to counter enemy elephants seeking to do the same) or as an anti-cavalry system, with the latter being the more common deployment. In the later case, the advantage elephants have is that horses which are not acclimatized to their presence won’t go near them, meaning that a group of elephants can effectively block enemy cavalry.
The Battle of Ipsus (301) actually sees both uses of elephants attempted. The two armies seem to begin with their elephants engaged first, probably in the center (Diodorus XXI.1), and then Demetrius Poliorcetes launches his cavalry action on the flank, crumpling it, but Seleucus I Nicator prevents him from capitalizing on this success by using his elephant reserve to effectively wall Demetrius out of the battlefield (Plut. Demetrius 29.3). At Raphia (217) nearly a century later, we see the elephants deployed on the flank to screen the cavalry as it moves forward, particularly to screen it against other elephants, which in the event ends up being mostly fortunate for the Seleucids, as their Indian elephants were larger than Ptolemy’s African elephants (remember that African war elephants are not the very big African bush elephants, which aren’t tameable, but smaller North African elephants).
The System as a Whole
And so before we close out this part, it is worth looking at the Hellenistic army and its tactical system as a whole to get a sense of how it worked and the scale on which it worked. I should note here at the outset that we’re not going to be quite done with the system here – when we start looking at the third and second century battle record, we’re going to come back to the system to look at some innovations we see in that period (particularly the deployment of an enallax or ‘articulated’ phalanx). But we should see the normal function of the components first.
No battle is a perfect ‘model’ battle, but the Battle of Raphia (217) is handy for this because we have the two most powerful Hellenistic states (The Ptolemies and Seleucids) both bringing their A-game with very large field armies and deploying in a fairly standard pattern. That said, there are some quirks to note immediately: Raphia is our only really good order of battle of the Ptolemies, but as our sources note there is an oddity here, specifically the mass deployment of Egyptians in the phalanx. As I noted last time, there had always been some ethnic Egyptians (legal ‘Persians’) in the phalanx, but the scale here is new. In addition, as we’ll see, the position of Ptolemy IV himself is odd, on the left wing matched directly against Antiochus III, rather than on his own right wing as would have been normal. But this is mostly a fairly normal setup and Polybius gives us a passably good description (better for Ptolemy than Antiochus, much like the battle itself).
I do think it is clear that, almost regardless of how one reconstructs, the Seleucid Army was probably wider than the Ptolemaic one, despite being modestly numerically inferior, because of how much Ptolemaic strength was focused in the phalanx itself with its considerably greater depth.
We can start with the Seleucid Army and the tactical intent of the layout is immediately understandable. Antiochus III is modestly outnumbered – he is, after all, operating far from home at the southern end of the Levant (Raphia is modern-day Rafah at the southern end of Gaza), and so is more limited in the force he can bring. His best bet is to make his cavalry and elephant superiority count and that means a victory on one of the wings – the right wing being the standard choice. So Antiochus stacks up a 4,000 heavy cavalry hammer on his flank behind 60 elephants – Polybius doesn’t break down which cavalry, but we can assume that the 2,000 with Antiochus on the extreme right flank are probably the cavalry agema and the Companions, deployed around the king, supported by another 2,000 probably Macedonian heavy cavalry. He then uses his Greek mercenary infantry (probably thureophoroi or perhaps some are thorakitai) to connect that force to the phalanx, supported by his best light skirmish infantry: Cretans and a mix of tough hill folks from Cilicia and Caramania (S. Central Iran) and the Dahae (a steppe people from around the Caspian Sea).
His left wing, in turn, seems to be much lighter and mostly Iranian in character apart from the large detachment of Arab auxiliaries, with 2,000 more cavalry (perhaps lighter Persian-style cavalry?) holding the flank. This is a clearly weaker force, intended to stall on its wing while Antiochus wins to the battle on the right. And of course in the middle of the Seleucid phalanx, which was quite capable, but here is badly outnumbered both because of how full-out Ptolemy IV has gone in recruiting for his ‘Macedonian’ phalanx and also because of the massive infusion of Egyptians.
But note the theory of victory Antiochus III has: he is going to initiate the battle on his right, while not advancing his left at all (so as to give them an easier time stalling), and hope to win decisively on the right before his left comes under strain. This is, at most, a modest alteration of Alexander-Battle.
Meanwhile, Ptolemy IV seems to have anticipated exactly this plan and is trying to counter it. He’s stacked his left rather than his right with his best troops, including his elite infantry (the agema and peltasts, who, while lighter, are more elite) and his best cavalry, supported by his best (and only) light infantry, the Cretans.7 Interestingly, Polybius notes that Echecrates, Ptolemy’s right-wing commander waits to see the outcome of the fight on the far side of the army (Polyb. 6.85.1) which I find odd and suggests to me Ptolemy still carried some hope of actually winning on the left (which was not to be). In any case, Echecrates, realizing that sure isn’t happening, assaults the Seleucid left.
I think the theory of victory for Ptolemy is somewhat unconventional: hold back Antiochus’ decisive initial cavalry attack and then win by dint of having more and heavier infantry. Indeed, once things on the Ptolemaic right wing go bad, Ptolemy moves to the center and pushes his phalanx forward to salvage the battle, and doing that in the chaos of battle suggests to me he always thought that the matter might be decided that way.
In the event, for those unfamiliar with the battle: Antiochus III’s right wing crumples the Ptolemaic left wing, but then begins pursuing them off of the battlefield (a mistake he will repeat at Magnesia in 190). On the other side, the Gauls and Thracians occupy the front face of the Seleucid force while the Greek and Mercenary cavalry get around the side of the Seleucid cavalry there and then the Seleucid left begins rolling up, with the Greek mercenary infantry hitting the Arab and Persian formations and beating them back. Finally, Ptolemy, having escaped the catastrophe on his left wing, shows up in the center and drives his phalanx forward, where it wins for what seem like obvious reasons against an isolated Seleucid phalanx it outnumbers almost 2-to-1.
But there are a few structural features I want to note here. First, flanking this army is really hard. On the one hand, these armies as massive and so simply getting around the side of them is going to be difficult (if they’re not anchored on rivers, mountains or other barriers, as they often are). Unlike a Total War game, the edge of the army isn’t a short 15-second gallop from the center, but likely to be something like a mile (or more!) away. Moreover, you have a lot of troops covering the flanks of the main phalanx. That results, in this case, in a situation where despite both wings having decisive actions, the two phalanxes seem to be largely intact when they finally meet (note that it isn’t necessarily that they’re slow; they seem to have been kept on ‘stand by’ until Ptolemy shows up in the center and orders a charge). If your plan is to flank this army, you need to pick a flank and stack a ton of extra combat power there, and then find a way to hold the center long enough for it to matter.
Second, this army is actually quite resistance to Alexander-Battle: if you tried to run the Issus or Gaugamela playbook on one of these armies, you’d probably lose. Sure, placing Alexander’s Companion Cavalry between the Ptolemaic thureophoroi and Gallic mercenaries (about where he’d normally go) would have him slam into the Persian and Medean light infantry and probably break through. But that would be happening at the same time as Antiochus’ massive 4,000-horse, 60-elephant hammer demolished Ptolemaic-Alexander’s left flank and moments before the 2,000 cavalry left-wing struck Alexander himself in his flank as he advanced. The Ptolemaic army is actually an even worse problem, because its infantry wings are heavier, making that key initial cavalry breakthrough harder to achieve. Those chunky heavy-cavalry wings ensure that an effort to break through at the juncture of the center and the wing is foolhardy precisely because it leaves the breakthrough force with heavy cavalry to one side and heavy infantry to the other.
I know this is going to cause howls of pain and confusion, but I do not think Alexander could have reliably beaten either army deployed at Raphia; with a bit of luck, perhaps, but on the regular? No. Not only because he’d be badly outnumbered (Alexander’s army at Gaugamela is only 40,000 infantry and 7,000 cavalry) but because these armies were adapted to precisely the sort of army he’d have and the tactics he’d use. Even without the elephants (and elephants gave Alexander a hell of a time at the Hydaspes), these armies can match Alexander’s heavy infantry core punch-for-punch while having enough force to smash at least one of his flanks, probably quite quickly. Note that the Seleucid Army – the smaller one at Raphia – has almost exactly as much heavy infantry at Raphia as Alexander at Gaugamela (30,000 to 31,000), and close to as much cavalry (6,000 to 7,000), but of course also has a hundred and two elephants, another 5,000 more ‘medium’ infantry and massive superiority in light infantry (27,000 to 9,000). Darius III may have had no good answer to the Macedonian phalanx, but Antiochus III has a Macedonian phalanx and then essentially an entire second Persian-style army besides (and his army at Magnesia is actually more powerful than his army at Raphia).
This is not a degraded form of Alexander’s army, but a pretty fearsome creature of its own, which supplements an Alexander-style core with larger amounts of light and medium troops (and elephants), without sacrificing much, if any, in terms of heavy infantry and cavalry. The tactics are modest adjustments to Alexander-Battle which adapt the military system for symmetrical engagements against peer armies. The Hellenistic Army is a hard nut to crack, which is why the kingdoms that used them were so successful during the third century, to the point that, until the Romans show up, just about the only thing which could beat a Hellenistic army was another Hellenistic army.
That said, the Romans do crack this nut, and to start understanding how, we’re going to turn to the tactical system of the Roman legion.
- I get more joy out of writing that sentence than I should
- I should note that Roel Konijnendijk has argued that supporting arms were more common than we might think in Classical Greek Tactics (2017), but that position is, I think, still contested and K. has to try and spot places where light troops might be present but omitted by our (elite, snobby) authors. To be fair to that, we know the Roman legion had integrated light infantry (the velites) and they often drop right out of our battle narratives in favor of the more glamorous heavy infantry, so the idea these guys might be present more often than our sources note is not by any means unreasonable.
- Livy. 42.51.7 and 44.40.2; Plut. Aem. 18.1-5.
- Polyb. 2.65.4, Livy 44.11.7
- Bar Kochva (1976), to which Mariusz Mielczarek, Cataphracti and Clibanarii (1993) agrees.
- On this, see Johstono, op. cit., 4-6
- You can tell how much those Cretans are valued, given that they get placed in key positions in both armies.
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I’m still extremely curious as to how mercenaries were organized, kitted, trained (if they were trained) recruited into armies, kept under control when the interest of the mercenary band wasn’t aligned with their employer, and what they did when there wasn’t a war in their part of the world, etc. I’d like to know more about those operational questions concerning mercenaries specifically. I fully realize that this would be a major digression from the main thrust of the article and don’t really expect an answer, but I thought I’d ask anyway.
Agreed, I’d really like to see that as well – how ancient mercenaries operated could probably be a whole series in and of itself.
In general, warlords seem to have hired local magnates, who brought their followers along. Which is why Gallic or Germanic (or, much later, Hunnish) cavalry is a thing; they arrive at the warlord’s HQ fully formed, organised and equipped in their native fashion, then fought in their native style, but as part of an overall plan.
Usage subject to variation depending on time and place, and the local politics thereof. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that “Huns”, or any other ethnicity you care to name are necessarily one monolithic block.
“Mercenaries of the Ancient World” by Serge Yalichev, Constable & Co., 1997 survey’s the topic is mediocre at best. It doesn’t really provide much specific information on organization. The author appears to assume that the various mercenaries use the organization and fighting techniques that they learned in their various cultures.
Of course this varied a lot through time, there is no one size fits all answer for mercenaries for the whole of antiquity. But very very briefly, and specifically for the Hellenistic period:
“recruited into armies”
Two ways – either as individual volunteers, who in turn might apply to a recruiter of a foreign power in their home city, or travel abroad on their own to the recruiter’s country; or else as whole units recruited under a treaty between two powers.
“organized”
Individuals would be slotted into an existing unit in the recruiter’s army, usually as garrisons. Units would have their own organization.
“kitted”
As above. Hellenistic monarchs tended to provide equipment centrally, so individuals might be kitted out by the employer.
“trained”
Not much evidence on this, though before Raphia for example the Ptolemaic army called in (from garrisons) and trained its mercenaries.
“kept under control when the interest of the mercenary band wasn’t aligned with their employer”
This wasn’t really an issue in this period – mercenary units were following their home state’s foreign policy, and mercenary individuals were professionals, usually without an independent political agenda. Mercenaries, unlike citizens, were considered to be completely loyal to their employer.
There was an episode on Ancient Warfare Magazine Podcast about mercentaries in the ancient world, if that’s of any interest.
https://ancientwarfare.libsyn.com/2009/03
“and the Dahae (a people from the Caucusus).”
Slight correction: My understanding is that the Dahae are actually from western Central Asia, north of the eastern Iranian plateau/Parthia and east of the Caspian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahae
The most notable of their numbers were the Parni tribe, who ended up founding the Parthian Empire.
A seemingly baffling omission in the Seleucid order of battle: troops from the actual heartland of the empire, i.e. Mesopotamia and Syria. That’s a ton of potential manpower to draw from. I’m not very familiar with the Hellenistic cuneiform record, but I know that in Achaemenid times, the Persians drew heavily on local troops recruited via the great temples of Babylonia and “bow fiefs”. Do we assume that those troops existed in the Seleucid army but are counted among the Macedonian phalanx in a similar way to Egypt’s “Macedonians” or is there some other reason they were not deployed in the line of battle?
I’ve read some of Bezalel Bar-Kochva’s work, and he’s very insistent that the Selecuids probably prioritized a smaller but high-morale force of Greek military settlers who fought for “their” rights as the elite conquerors, with military service obligations for all the Greek males in the family. They wouldn’t have wanted to arm the people most able to convincingly revolt and reclaim “their” land, in this theory. It’s similar to how the British in India didn’t really want to arm that many majority Hindus and preferred to recruit Indian Muslims. The Seleucids probably did recruit outlying groups, though.
Note that some of his talk is rather… dated… on this, although perhaps forgiven by English not being his first language. i.e. in “Judas Maccabeus” Bar-Kochva is very insistent that there was very little miscegenation here (yes, that word used unironically, in a book written in 1989!) which means that the Jews in the Maccabean Revolt weren’t facing low-morale half-breed mongrels, but rather glorious Greeks from the prime of Alexander’s days.
[snort]
Yeah, that’s quite a presumption on his part on several levels.
First, the practical level where if you have military settlers coming into a region, then the only way their descendants are truly “unmixed” 300-400 years later is if the settlers make like the Ptolemies and the Habsburgs and have family trees that look like telephone poles.
Second, and I know this assumption is all over twentieth century and earlier historiography, but the idea that the genetic ancestry of your troops affects their combat performance anywhere near as much as the social and political structures that feed them, clothe them, raise them, bring them to the battlefield, and provide them with reasons to fight when they get there…
First, the practical level where if you have military settlers coming into a region, then the only way their descendants are truly “unmixed” 300-400 years later is if the settlers make like the Ptolemies and the Habsburgs and have family trees that look like telephone poles.
I think you’re overestimating how much genetic mixing is a thing, outside of western societies. In some parts of the world, like South Asia and apparently also Ethiopia, extreme endogamy is a thing- groups have remained genetically distinct while living next door to each other, over a time scale of a couple millennia, as documented in (for example) David Reich’s book.
There has been some genetic mixing in South Asia but that’s on a time scale more similar to 3000 years than to 300, and even then there are still groups today which have pretty much zero (for example) Indo-European ancestry.
Given it’s culture, the myth that you’re unmixed works just as well as the reality, with fewer genetic issues.
Not really, an isolated population of tens of thousands can do quite fine for a long time. Mind also that a marginal rate of mixed marriages can leave very subtle genetic traces.
I wouldn’t assume they were truly unmixed, but that argument is rather poor.
+1000 to this: people often make the crude assumption that if some outbreeding is good, more outbreeding is better, which doesn’t hold.
As long as you’re above some minimal threshold of relatedness, you can keep holding to strict endogamy indefinitely, without too much in the way of medical consequences.
Yeah, to be clear, I rolled my eyes at “miscegenation” too, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to talk about – just for reasons of cultural cohesion rather than superior genetics. Like, in modern Syria, Alawites are maybe ~10% of the population, but they’re such big winners by having the Assad family in control that they’re extremely loyal, because they know they’d be the losers with anyone else in charge. And it’s basically “worked”. The Asian Greeks being a local elite set apart who got the best land, good nutrition, training, etc. is legitimate to bring up in that you’d have perhaps fewer soldiers than mass levies would get, but these soldiers would be both effective and fanatically loyal. (Well, loyal to Greek claimants, at least.) Just wish Bar-Kochva had phrased it specifically as that rather than wandering into the bias of the ancient sources that “Asiatics” suck.
It’s similar to how the British in India didn’t really want to arm that many majority Hindus and preferred to recruit Indian Muslims.
I don’t think this was that smart of a calculation. Muslims were a local majority in many areas of South Asia, there were quite a lot of them, and they were a former ruling group (and remained influential) even in some areas where they weren’t a local majority. They had plenty of incentive to revolt (which of course they did- there was considerable Muslim participation in the great 1857 mutiny as well as in other smaller mutinies like the one in 1806, which like the 1857 was partially triggered by joint Hindu-Muslim religious grievances).
I would be cautious about having too much confidence in generalisations. You keep coming across things like this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/03/commemoration-of-british-military-victory-sparks-riots-in-india
I hope I’m not responding too late to get noticed, but this is a well taken statement so I want to be clear about what I’m saying and what I’m not saying. I’m definitely *not* saying that South Asians in the 19th century- or for that matter at any other time before or after- had a unified, broadly shared identity, or vision of themselves, or narrative of history, or approach towards the British, or anything else. I think that’s South Asian peoples are at least as divided among themselves as Europeans are- along ethnoracial, linguistic, religious, caste, and lots of other lines of difference, and India is only a country today because the British chose to make it one (for better or worse).
There were certainly some Indians who were OK with British rule, and there were probably many more who disliked it but also disliked the likely alternatives even more, or equally as much. Since you bring up Scheduled Castes in this context, it’s interesting that one of the founding fathers of Dravidian nationalism, who was also a big activist against caste hierarchy (these two things tend to largely overlap) famously refused to participate in celebrating india’s independence day in 1947, he supposedly said something to the effect that he wasn’t interested in replacing British tyranny with “Brahmin and Bania” tyranny. So yes, it certainly wasn’t a situation where South Asians were unified in wanting to be “free”, they’ve seldom been unified about anything.
The Marathas are interesting in that context because while their actual ruling family *may* have been of peasant origin (i.e. not high-caste, although it’s disputed), by the time of the Anglo-Maratha wars the actual imperial family had been pushed to the side and reduced to figureheads, by the hereditary prime ministers (Peshwas) who were of Brahmin origin.
The point I was making was just specifically that I wouldn’t overstate the role of *religion* specifically in determining how 19th century South Asians thought about colonialism- I think the role of Hindu v. Muslim conflict is often overstated and the role of caste and ethnic differences is often given insufficient weight.
Typo: word of mount should be word of mouth
i choose to believe that was on purpose considering all the cavalry talk going on
i choose to believe that was on purpose considering how much cavalry talk is going on
He got it straight from the horse’s mouth.
One thing I’ve always been interested in how Renaissance-style pike squares differed from Macedonian phalanxes. Both were built around pike-wielding heavy infantry, but the Renaissance iteration seems to have been more flexible and to have had better all-round defensive capability. I think it would be interesting to consider how an ancient equivalent would have fared on the battlefield, against both a Hellenestic-style army and a Roman legion.
One fundamental difference is the form of deployment.
If you have ~5000 pikemen, then deploying “Macedonian style” gets you a formation that’s ~300 files wide and 16 ranks deep. A long wide rectangle. Blocks out loads of space, hard to flank because of distance, etc, all the usual good stuff.
The Renaissance deployment will vary a bit based on the specific type of square, but a reasonable summary would be a square of ~70 men to a side. Far narrower, far deeper. This has some advantages and some disadvantages – moving in column (which is sort of what this is) can be pretty fast, and one distinguishing feature of Swiss squares in particular is the sheer aggression they often show on the field. Another is that it can fight in two directions reasonably well, becoming hard to flank basically by not _having_ flanks.
Also, the obvious: the Swiss Pike (and really all pike of that era) wore higher-quality armor but bore no shield. The armor may have had less coverage depending on the exact time and place. This would make the pikemen far more flexible.
The ‘Push of Pike’ frequently turned into a horrific scene of carnage with spears impaling men left and right, with other caught in the middle and literally crushed to death. Perhaps the additional depth came from the need to keep those front ranks in line.
Also, the obvious: the Swiss Pike (and really all pike of that era) wore higher-quality armor but bore no shield. The armor may have had less coverage depending on the exact time and place. This would make the pikemen far more flexible.
I don’t know about that last sentence. Macedonian pikemen’s shields weren’t that big, and I don’t think they’d provide much of an encumberance.
It changes fighting in several ways. It not only saves weight and encumbrance, but it entirely frees the left arm to better manipulate the weapon. And it might not seem like much, but saving the weight can matter on longer marches. Then factor in fighting on rough ground, where you can maneuver more easily without a shield.
How Macedonian phalanxists managed to wield a pike while simultaneously carrying a shield still confuses me.
It changes fighting in several ways. It not only saves weight and encumbrance, but it entirely frees the left arm to better manipulate the weapon. And it might not seem like much, but saving the weight can matter on longer marches. Then factor in fighting on rough ground, where you can maneuver more easily without a shield.
The Macedonians under Philip and Alexander were noted for moving about rapidly and catching their enemies unawares, so evidently their shields weren’t much of an encumbrance on the march. And any ground that’s so rough a small shield on the forearm will make it hard to manoeuvre is ground you don’t want to be sending any heavy infantry over, whatever shields they’re carrying.
In the abstract you may have a point, but in actual historical fact armies basically dropped all the shields in this era, because they were simply a net negative. While armies did not perfectly converge on the same tactics or strategy, the trend across all of Europe as to discard the shield and go for better, often larger weaponry*. The trend towards higher-quality armor or none began even before the gun began to seriously impact the battlefield, too.
*There’s a corner-case of cavalry and sometimes instances of rodeleros or the like. Still, in the span of a century (1500-1600) the sword and shield alike basically became functionally obsolete on the battlefield.
Late Medieval & Early Modern Pikemen were extremely flexible and fought on every kind of ground, whereas even the Macedonian phalanx seems to have a very hard time with uneven terrain.
In the abstract you may have a point, but in actual historical fact armies basically dropped all the shields in this era, because they were simply a net negative. While armies did not perfectly converge on the same tactics or strategy, the trend across all of Europe as to discard the shield and go for better, often larger weaponry*. The trend towards higher-quality armor or none began even before the gun began to seriously impact the battlefield, too.
They dropped shields because armour had got good enough that shields were no longer necessary, not because shields were some kind of big encumbrance.
Late Medieval & Early Modern Pikemen were extremely flexible and fought on every kind of ground, whereas even the Macedonian phalanx seems to have a very hard time with uneven terrain.
Roman legionaries fought on every kind of ground, and carried relatively enormous shields. Whatever was causing the Macedonian phalanx’s comparative lack of flexibility, it wasn’t the little peltae strapped to their forearms.
Another fundamental difference would be that the Renaissance formations tended to have a layer of swordsmen or halberdiers every few ranks, which would be helpful in a Pydna-type situation where the pikemen became disordered by rough terrain or similar.
I suspect a lot of the Swiss aggression is down to the tactical constraints they’re under. The Hellenistic tactical system as outlined here expects to use cavalry to strike the decisive blow and also use lighter infantry to screen the flanks of the phalanx, which is more of a pinning force.
My perception is the Swiss don’t really have cavalry at all in any meaningful amount, and certainly not cavalry that can engage and defeat Burgundian mounted men-at-arms, who seem to be the primary threat the Swiss tactical system is developed to defeat.
They therefore need to find a way to make their infantry the striking arm, and given that lighter infantry than the pike block is unlikely to be able to stand off Burgundian cavalry, also isn’t going to come unstuck if flanked. Fast-moving pike blocks that can hedgehog to deal with serious cavalry attack or simply change their facing by rotation can function both as hammer and anvil, as we see at Laupen.
Also worth noting that the pike block comes with a ‘sleeve’ of missile troops (at first crossbowmen, later arquebusiers) and has to face artillery. Standing still was not an option (as demonstrated at places like Falkirk), hence a formation built for rapid manoeuvre and swift attack.
Also worth noting that the pike block comes with a ‘sleeve’ of missile troops (at first crossbowmen, later arquebusiers) and has to face artillery.
The sleeves were a later development — the original pike blocks were made up entirely of melee troops.
The sleeve is later, but the pikes (at first halberds) were accompanied from early on by light missile troops – handguns are mentioned from the early 1400s. They seem to have operated as a skirmish line and sometimes a detached flanking unit, according to Charles Oman.
Archers not born on Crete can’t be called Cretan Archers, instead they’re Sparkling Bowman.
And what of the relatively large, flat, rectangular thureos? This form of the word is Greekified from the original, which presumably didn’t end with -eos. It was called a Tür. Large, flat, rectangular wooden thing = door.
So what you’re saying is that “thureophoroi” should really be translated as “doormen”?
It’s the guy who holds the door. So translate it as “Hodor”?
Excellent piece! I don’t think I’ve read anything that explains the system so clearly. Makes a good case from numbers and examples too that the Hellenistic version was as effective or better than Alexander’s variety.
If basically all of the Hellenistic successor kingdoms have access to elephants and know how horses react to them, why don’t any of them take the time to habituate their horses to the elephants? Roman commanders knowing they were facing elephants would do this, making the elephants much less effective as a blocking force. Did the Hellenistic kingdoms just never stumble across the knowledge that horses _can_ be habituated to elephants?
Maybe they did? Ipsus is the most prominent elephant battle, and was fought quite early on in the Successor period, when elephants were still new to Greek warfare. I can’t think of any later occasion when elephants played as important a role in battle, and whilst that might simply be because of source availability, it might also be a sign that the Successors had learnt how to counter elephants, including by habituating their horses to them.
If they hadn’t, the obvious way to run a battle would be to have elephants on the left to counter the cavalry on the enemy’s right. If they didn’t all do this, I might conclude they had all habituated their horses to elephants.
A quick touch on how the phalanx works in actual total war games (on its own and in the context of an army) would possibly be handy.
I do feel like “the phalanx doesn’t fight alone” should be obvious to anyone who played an actual TW title.
Especially for those of us who haven’t played a historical TW game in quite some time.
Though I think the Hellenistic system described here would be instinctive. The difference in Total War is, as noted, it’s trivially easy to flank an army.
If you look at some MP battles in Rome 2 you’ll kinda find that they tend to be not *too* different, you can’t really “just” flank an army without defeating their wings first.
It’s been a while, but the morale mechanics make things a bit funky. To an extent, simply moving a unit around “behind” a battle line can cause a cascading rout. Also, formations are more rigid. You can’t split off the back ranks to face a different direction or even have people turn in place. Additionally, archers can fire over melee units ahead of them with no loss of effectiveness.
But by far the biggest difference is one Dr. Devereaux alludes to briefly in the piece. Even at their widest, Total War formations are much narrower than IRL formations (and the morale mechanics enforce this — you want lots of units *behind* your line to keep said line intact). The archer thing plays into this, since you can plant them behind your melee fighters, further shortening the battle line. This makes a true “flank” like you might do with a modern armored unit possible, whereas there’s no way you could do it IRL without hiding forces behind the enemy before battle was engaged or having one of the enemy commanders pull a sudden betrayal or something like that. The lines are too wide and units move too slow.
Archers shoot worse when placed behind infantry, but not *that much* worse. They also suffer from far fewer friendly fire issues than slingers, unless the elevation and your positioning are bad.
But yeah, total war armies and battlefield are a lot smaller and having some cav swing *around* the entire enemy army is far easier than it would be irl.
As for “the enemy is behind us, FLEE” – that’s actually more likely for a historical army than a TW one.
TW battlefields are narrower, but that’s at least partially outweighed by the fact that the battles themselves are much shorter than real-life battles.
And armies are much smaller.
This is more obvious from Rome 2, but in Rome 1, you are hard pressed as a non-Egyptian successor state (or even a Greek city-state) to find infantry which a) is not a phalanx and b) lasts more than 10 seconds in melee contact with any other organized infantry. Rome 2 helped rectify this by including Thorakitai, which where not in Rome 1. I’m honestly not even sure if Rome 1 had thureophoroi.
“I’m honestly not even sure if Rome 1 had thureophoroi.”
Not by that name, but the “Greek” faction had a unit called Heavy Peltasts, who were basically Thureophoroi in fact if not in name. Heavy shields, javelin tossing, no armor but a decent melee weapon. They were kind of useless in game though, so I rarely built them or fielded them.
It’s interesting to me that your description of Issus and Gaugamela have a lot in common with David Chandler’s interpretation of Marlborough’s basic approach at (particularly at Blenheim). The latter has a more infantry-dominated army and relies on reserves for the breakthrough rather than elite cavalry that are in the “main line”, but there’s still a very strong resemblance.
“History doesn’t repeat; but it rhymes.”
I remember from your elephant posts that the Hellenistic armies thought bringing elephants was a good idea, and Romans mostly didn’t. Is this because Hellenistic armies were cavalry-focused and Roman armies were infantry-focused?
As I recall from the same post it’s a “bang for your buck” problem, as well as the existence of highly reliable anti-elephant tactics.
Basically, elephants can be very handy or useless (or worse!), so low reliability. A small cadre of elephants can be changed out for a lot of heavy cavalry. And lastly, once worked out, anti-elephant tactics are very reliable.
*Some* of the Hellenistic kingdoms have access to elephants (Indian or North African), and so bring them to war. Rome has no such access until after they crush Carthage, at which point Rome likely sees no utility in the war elephant.
Certainly not any utility commensurate with the immense cost of bringing elephants from North Africa to Europe and sustaining them there.
Presumably, if the Romans thought North African elephants were worthwhile, they would have at least used them in North Africa. And if Hannibal brought elephants to Europe, surely the Romans could have as well.
I suspect some issues with the economic use and breeding of tame elephants may have come into play. Carthage likely had a much smaller market in ‘come and look at these exotic animals which are relatively common in this area and you could also see by going outside’. However, the North African Elephant population was so profitable for Roman entertainment or hunting that they went extinct. So I suspect another factor would be that whilst the Romans didn’t see them as an excellent and reliable choice in war, they did see them as a good way to make a quick profit, something likely contributed to by their short terms of office (if you were the one setting up a war-elephant programme, it would never result in you actually getting any war elephants, given you’d have gone home maybe a decade before the first set was established).
I think if they’d been terrifyingly effective, the long term demand for them would have overcome the ability to ship them off to Italy for hard cash, but not having them wasn’t fatal to their armies, so economic incentives probably helped limit the training of elephants in Africa.
> I suspect some issues with the economic use and breeding of tame elephants may have come into play.
Nobody, other than modern zoos, has bred elephants in captivity. They take so long to grow up that the only economical way to get them was to capture wild ones.
This is a crucial difference! Increased demand for, say, horses or sheep means that breeders will make more of them. But increased demand for elephants meant capturing more of them from the wild, reducing their breeding stock.
Wikipedia says that Roman “circuses” killed thousands of elephants during the reign of Augustus alone.
The Roman emperor Claudius took a few elephants to Britain as part of an army, so they did try the experiment. As you write, decided it wasn’t worth it.
Does seem to be something of a coin flip as to whether a particular army / society values elephants or not. In the medieval period Chinggis Khan with an army based around steppe nomad cavalry fought Khawarizmian armies with elephants, won, and decided elephants were a waste of resources and told his new subjects to get rid of them. Timur (Tamerlane) with an army based around steppe nomads fought Indian armies with elephants, won, and incorporated them into his army.
I imagine Tamerlane was closer to the elephant supply than the Great Khan, so elephants would be cheaper for him to use. And if elephants are an anti-cavalry weapon, their utility presumably depends largely on the effectiveness of the other sides cavalry.
Elephants are extinct from North Africa and the Middle East today, and seem to have been extinct since the Roman era, so maybe the “supply” was kind of marginal even then?
The Romans using them for “entertainment” is thought to have been a major contributor to their extinction.
“The Romans using them for “entertainment” is thought to have been a major contributor to their extinction.”
Oh, I’m not questioning that- just suggesting that the Romans using them for military purposes might have wiped out their population just as quickly, or even quicker, as using them for entertainment did.
Notably, elephants keeps being used in warfare in India until, basically, modern times, including by the british. So there’s absolutely something about being closer to the supply there.
The 2019 movie *Panipat* shows elephants being used in the gunpowder era (1761 to be exact), in this case they’re used to tow heavy guns. A quick search seems to indicate the British used them for that specific purpose against the Afghans in 1880 and even against the emperor of Ethiopia in the 1860s (they had to ship them across the Indian Ocean for that).
Hathi the elephant in the Jungle Book, was a veteran of the British army in the original books by Kipling.
I remeber, because the Jungle Book was one of the first books I read by myself as a kid. It puzzeled my a lot how a Indian elephant might fight for Great Britian.
Hence why he is “Colonel Hathi”, and has the entire military schtick, yeah.
I read somewhere that one factor in India was that commanders / aristocrats preferred the prestige of leading from atop an elephant. Maybe an elevated platform was also useful for observation & shouting commands?
Not the only factor, but if usefulness relative to cost was ever a question, prestige might have tipped the balance.
There’s a three-part series on this blog about war elephants, actually! Parts 1 and 2 are about advantages and disadvantages, but more to the point, part 3 is about why one might use elephants regardless of the tactical considerations, especially in India: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/09/collections-war-elephants-part-iii-elephant-memories/
“part 3 is about why one might use elephants regardless of the tactical considerations, especially in India:”
India and the countries influenced by it, especially in Southeast Asia. There’s apparently a semi-legendary account of a single combat on elephant-back between the king of Thailand and the crown prince of Burma in the 16th century, which may or may not have happened, but it’s apparently a cherished enough cultural memory in Thailand that someone was taken to court for questioning the story.
Whether or not that story ever happened, elephant-back single combats were apparently a thing.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/thailand-drops-charges-against-historian-facts-duel-180967881/
There’s a three-part series on this blog about war elephants, actually! Parts 1 and 2 are about advantages and disadvantages, but more to the point, part 3 is about why one might use elephants regardless of the tactical considerations, especially in India: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/09/collections-war-elephants-part-iii-elephant-memories/
That seems like a weak argument to me TBH. Yes, armies replicate the structures of the society they come from, but they also need to actually win battles, or else said society will soon find itself being conquered by others. A desire to show off and be seen on the battlefield may have been a reason for Indian monarchs to use elephants, but if they weren’t able to actually use them effectively, they wouldn’t have the option of using them in the first place.
That seems like a weak argument to me TBH.
Because it is. Out of all the series on this blog, the elephant one is the only that I think genuinely failed to deliver on its premise; the third installment was just intellectual filibustering to conceal the incoherence of Devereaux’s romanocentric stance on the matter and his consequent lack of a fitting argument.
At its heart the argument is just the meme of archeologists interpreting everything as ceremonial, but elephant-flavored. And the reason why that’s a stereotype is, of course, the same one that animates its parallel vis-à-vis the war elephant: it’s the easy way to weasel out of acknowledging evidence that would damage your pet theory.
The argument was that elephants have combat value, but are risky/not quite ideal to be used if a society has no other reason to use them, but are still powerful enough to be worth it if an army has some other reason to use them. (like displaying power, or nearby elephants reducing the cost)
That’s a plausible argument, lots of warfare has situations like this. Absolute, pure combat power or reduced risk is traded for other benefits (coup proofing/controlling instability, working within diplomatic constraints, rules of engagement to reduce civilian losses, paying off favored groups with military decisions), and come out fine, the other benefits might even help in a war more than raw combat power would.
The argument was that elephants have combat value, but are risky/not quite ideal to be used if a society has no other reason to use them, but are still powerful enough to be worth it if an army has some other reason to use them. (like displaying power, or nearby elephants reducing the cost)
The second post in the elephants series is quite clear that, in the author’s opinion, elephants just plain aren’t worth the cost, which is a stronger claim than “risky/not ideal”.
Though a bit more specifically it’s that over time tactics were developed so that they weren’t worth the cost. And also the cost was different depending where you were, so it’s not exactly saying elephants were *never* worth the cost.
More that as time went on their cost/benefit ratio worsened to the point where they weren’t worth it.
Could be. I wonder if another factor might be simply their expense — maintaining any significant number of elephants was ungodly expensive, and while the Hellenistic kingdoms had that kind of wealth, I’m not sure if Rome did; the Roman military system was, after all, substantially based on low-budget mass conscription, rather than paid mercenaries and professional forces, and while that would eventually change toward the end of the Republic, by that point the North African elephants were a non-starter and the Indian ones were in, well, India — not very accessible.
All in all I completely disbelieve the notion that elephants were some sort of “gimmick”; they were clearly and obviously extremely potent combatants, but equivalently costly. Since tame-able elephants couldn’t be found in real abundance almost anywhere but India, they were even more costly elsewhere, to the point of being unaffordable in many cases. In those cases, some amount of jealous belittling is to be expected; but the fact that elephants were in fact used to significant extents so far from their native habitat strongly suggests it to be erroneous.
India, for its part, didn’t stop employing elephants in substantial numbers after Rome “proved” they were a gimmick, not because of some irrational royal-legitimacy bullshit as the finale to Devereaux’s elephant series so weakly implied, but rather because they were very effective, and cost-effective at that. Even when facing military systems fully dedicated to and optimized for defeating them, as Indian armies during the time of their use certainly were by necessity.
_Elephants and Kings_ says that Greek historians recorded minimal if any war elephant use by ancient Indian republics, as opposed to Indian kings. This suggests either (a) republics couldn’t get/afford elephants despite being in India, or (b) elephants were particularly attractive to kings for royal prestige reasons. It also says that SE Asia, despite having local access to elephants, didn’t start using them until ‘Indianized’ kingdoms appear around 1 AD, along with taking royal names in Sanskrit, supporting Indian religions, building in Indian styles with Indian language inscriptions…
If I read my notes right, it also says Ming China didn’t use war elephants, despite being sent elephants as tribute. And while Indian kingdoms protected forests to maintain elephant habitat, earlier Chinese dynasties were happy to clear forest (at the expense of elephants) to support more people.
Also said that the Parthians were indifferent to elephants and cut off the supply to the west, while their successors the Sassanians used them again.
It all does rather suggest that elephants were at best passably useful, not overwhelmingly so. Whereas I don’t think any pre-modern military would pass up using horses in some role if they could, even if the exact roles (light vs. heavy cavalry, horse archers) varied. And pretty much everyone cottoned onto guns at first sight, even if they had to import guns, powder, and bullets.
Was there any use of war elephants in Ethiopia, or by other sub-Saharan states?
I know that African Bush Elephants are supposed to be harder to tame, so maybe not, but it would be interesting to know if there was ever interest in using them in the war context.
According to Arab sources the Axumite Empire of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) marched on Mecca in Arabia in the ‘Year of the Elephant’ 570 (ish) CE. This year is so named because the Axumite army definitely included one elephant, possibly a few.
Military failure because the elephant, anticipating the future rise of Islam, refused to attack the holy city.
_Elephants and Kings_ says that Greek historians recorded minimal if any war elephant use by ancient Indian republics, as opposed to Indian kings. This suggests either (a) republics couldn’t get/afford elephants despite being in India, or (b) elephants were particularly attractive to kings for royal prestige reasons. It also says that SE Asia, despite having local access to elephants, didn’t start using them until ‘Indianized’ kingdoms appear around 1 AD, along with taking royal names in Sanskrit, supporting Indian religions, building in Indian styles with Indian language inscriptions…
So why didn’t the Indian kingdoms get outcompeted militarily by the republics, and why didn’t the Indianised elephant-using states of South-East Asia get outcompeted by the non-elephant-using states?
All else being equal an Indian / SE Asian army without elephants *might* have outcompeted neighbours with elephants, but all else is never equal outside a game.
As this very blog points out frequently, social structure and economics matter. Perhaps the authoritarian hierarchical kingdoms could devote a higher percentage of manpower and/or resources to the army than the republics. Perhaps the structure of the kingdoms meant they became significantly larger than the republics.
If elephants are neither superweapon nor super disaster on the battlefield then their usage, or absence, would be for social reasons, not military efficiency. Which is apparently the theme of Elephants and Kings.
As this very blog points out frequently, social structure and economics matter.
So does actually winning battles. If your army can’t do that, then your society and economy will pretty soon be subjugated by a society whose army can win battles.
If elephants are neither superweapon nor super disaster on the battlefield then their usage, or absence, would be for social reasons, not military efficiency. Which is apparently the theme of Elephants and Kings.
The second post in the elephants series comes down quite clearly behind the position that elephants are, if not necessarily a super disaster, then certainly a bad use of resources which could be used to raise more cavalry/infantry instead.
As I said, “It all does rather suggest that elephants were at best passably useful, not overwhelmingly so.”
Also, without representative structures, monarchy seems to scale better than republics, so a kingdom with elephants and a bunch of soldiers might beat up republics via having more resources, even if it’s less efficient per resource. As for SE Asia, I’m not versed in the history, but there might not have _been_ non-elephant states, e.g. if adopting Indian influences was key to the formation of states at all in the region, and elephants were part of that.
I also wonder about ecological differences. If you live in jungle and have no horses, elephants might have genuine utility they don’t for someone living in Mediterranean biome with various cavalry options.
But you know, it’s not actually an extraordinary concept that kings would spend resources on prestige that doesn’t have direct military use. Look at their clothes, palaces, jewelry, tombs, grave goods. An elephant corps might be sub-optimal on the battlefield, but gold crowns and purple dye are completely useless on the battlefield! And yet kings bought or collected them anyway, rather than maxing out their mercenary corps or something.
“the Axumite Empire of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) marched on Mecca”
Do the Arab sources say how the Ethiopian forces got to Mecca? There’s a Red Sea and a bunch of desert in the way of the direct route, or all of Egypt and then also more desert in the way of the land route.
“Do the Arab sources say how the Ethiopian forces got to Mecca?”
I believe the Kingdom of Aksum had included a lot of territory in Southern Arabia already, so I assume shipping between two friendly ports.
“Do the Arab sources say how the Ethiopian forces got to Mecca?”
Ethiopian polities had invaded and occupied Yemen in the pre-Islamic period- Yemen is only about 16 miles from East Africa across the strait. Presumably they would have advanced on Mecca from the parts of South Arabia that they controlled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bab-el-Mandeb
Ethiopia and (South) Arabia are generally closely interlinked: Both linguistically, culturally, etc. They’re basically right next to each other, and there’s plenty of military adventures going both ways.
Ethiopia and (South) Arabia are generally closely interlinked: Both linguistically, culturally, etc.
this is exactly right- before the spread of Islam and with it the Arabic language, Yemen and Oman spoke “South Semitic” languages more closely related to Amharic, Tigrinya and other Ethiopian Semitic languages. There’s some genetic overlap too.
The North African elephants’ range apparently reached down to the Eritrean coast, so depending on when exactly they went extinct, the Axum army could potentially have been using either the African Savannah species or the North African species,
This might just be me retroprojecting early-modern warfare, but when talking about “flanking” I never take it as just moving around (that happens sometimes, like at Wittstock, but that’s Banér and King doing a hail mary by sending a big chunk of the army on a trip through the wilderness) but rather about trying to smash the forces guarding the enemy flanks so you can then roll upp the centre. Any kind of flank attack almost always involve first having to deal with whatever the enemy has on *their* opposite flank first.
This is even how Total War games tends to play (at least with players involved) since players usually aren’t as dumb as the AI.
And for what it’s worth, all the military elites from India to Europe — who knew how their respective (different!) systems of warfare worked — all decided that the appropriate way to set up chess is with a finite board, and the pieces filling the entire frontage.
Shogi and Xiangqi also fill the full width of a finite board, so I think it’s fair to say that military elites everywhere understood that flanking means breaking a flank force, not marching around the flank.
“This is even how Total War games tends to play (at least with players involved) since players usually aren’t as dumb as the AI.”
Indeed. “Flanking” in the sense of moving around the flanks is something that doesn’t happen in TW nearly as often as implied in the text. Granted, the physical and logistical requirements are very different and make such flanking much easier in TW: in addition to shorter battle lines (which are IMO actually the least important factor), the perfect communication and much higher speed of the units allow for perfect flanking maneuvers in TW which are not really possible (or as easy to pull off) IRL. But precisely because of this, players, and honestly even the AI more some of the time make sure to defend against it. When it happens, it happens after the battle has started and the enemy is no longer able to defend the flank.
Anyone else torn between starting up one of the Rome Total War games or Imperator? Not that either quite model the dynamics explained in this post but it’s almost close enough.
Seems like a time to break out Field Of Glory 2 which will turn based still manages to be more immersive and have more verisimilitude than Total War ever has. I love Total War but I accept that the combat is almost nonsense.
Done and done.
I also think the notion that the macedonian phalanx fought on its own to be really odd; Even back in elementary school when I was pouring over those lavishly illustrated little booklets with diagrams about maniples and such they were always drawn up together with lighter troops and cavalry. It might be a case of that XKCD comic though: https://xkcd.com/2501/
From little comics I’ve read I always knew that cavalry is the decisive force, solely for the fact that Alexander and his companions is there. And of course the comics majority scènes will be on them. “Is phalanx the decisive force of Alexander army” seems like a leading question.
Struck by the apparent absence of any troops from the heartland of the Seleucid empire, i.e. Mesopotamia and Syria, in the order of battle. I know that in Achaemenid times, at least, the cuneiform record shows extensive recruitment via the great temples of Mesopotamia, as well as “bow fiefs”. Do we assume that the Seleucids simply failed to extract their greatest potential source of manpower (whether due to ideology, economics or some other reason), or do we figure Mesopotamian and Syrian soldiers fought as “Macedonians” like in Egypt?
Bar Kochva was also struck by this and assumed that the reason was that these populations were demilitarized as a means of control. The alternative that has been suggested is that they are actually being recruited into the ‘Macedonian’ phalanx and we just can’t seem them clearly there. I don’t know that there is a consensus between these positions.
You’ve talked before about how the main tactic of shock cavalry was charging, feinting, retreating and repeating until the enemy infantry broke. Was that aided or hampered by the allied light infantry trying to stick close to them in case of a breach?
My understanding is that the light infantry don’t directly assist the shock cavalry in fighting. The light infantry are there to stop big gaps forming between the phalanx and the cavalry.
Armoured infantry can run fast, but only in short bursts. Mostly they are walking to preserve formation. Cavalry aren’t usually galloping, but even at a trot they move faster. So with all the charges, feints, and withdrawals they are likely to move ahead / away from the phalanx.
Neither phalanx nor shock cavalry want javelin or bow armed infantry shooting at them from the sides or rear. Yes armour and shields still offer some protection, but it’s easier to defend yourself if you can see the missiles coming at you.
The light infantry can move faster than the phalanx, so even if they can’t keep up with the cavalry they can stay closer, enough to cover the gap. Enemy cavalry could charge through them easily, but in doing so they would expose their own flank to your cavalry. Enemy heavy infantry could move up and force the light infantry to retreat, but then when they turned to attack the phalanx they’d be exposing their flank and rear.
A few unrelated questions:
– Have you played Field of Glory II (the Ancients one)? Curious what you think of the accuracy of that game vs. TW. In general I’ve seen its accuracy in OOBs and tactical reality praised, but the praise isn’t from specialized PhDs in ancient military…
– You may get to this in the Rome segments of the series, but do the Velites or equivalent light infantry persist into the post-maniple* version of the late Republican army, where all the heavy infantry were basically the same?
*A few months ago I would have written “post-Marian” instead, but now I know better 😉
A famous OTL is a Roman author claiming that Alexander would have lost to Rome (of Alexander´s time). A questionable claim.
Just when and how did Hellenistic armies and commanders become better than Alexander and his army?
Over Alexander´s funeral games, classically 323…281? Or the following 64 years, between Corupedion and Raphia?
Because one factor you are giving for improvement is Macedonian armies fighting other Macedonian armies.
Alexander fighting at Corupedion would not have been odd. Antigonos One-Eye commanded, fought and died at Ipsus age 81 (Who of Seleucus and Lysimachus WAS the allied commander at Ipsus?). Lysimachus commanded, fought and died at Corupedion age 79. Seleucus commanded, fought and won at Corupedium age 77. Swat an unlucky gnat and Alexander could have been Antigonos´ age as of the Battle of Beneventum.
How do the tricks and skills of various Diadochi compare with each other, and over their own lifespan? Napoleon complained that his opponents were learning his tricks and figuring replies to them, but he only commanded armies for 19 years and stopped at age of 45 – compare the 77 year old Seleucus who won Corupedion!
Was ANY of the Diadochi good enough to defeat Alexander the Great with a Macedonian army as a rebel against Alexander? After 60 years of getting to know Alexander, his habits and his tricks?
Perhaps some of the Diadochi could have rebelled successfully, but not because they were better commanders. Resources available, loyalty of others, etc, would have mattered more in any case but Alexander the Great really was a brilliant innovative commander.
Evidence is not the big battles against the Persians, the enemy the Macedonians had planned to fight. Instead look at his success (and yes the occasional failure) against other opponents.
Tyre, a city on an offshore island. Nothing similar in the Greek or Macedonian military tradition, but Alexander besieged and captured it.
Jaxartes, battle against Saka steppe horse archers. Alexander, first attempt, defeats the Saka thus persuading them to negotiate instead of plunder.
The Sogdian Rock. We’re in a fortress on top of a mountain, we ‘re not going to surrender to you, wait, how did those guys? Um, let’s talk.
Hydaspes. Elephants! And other new foes. On the other side of a massive river.
“Perhaps some of the Diadochi could have rebelled successfully, but not because they were better commanders. Resources available, loyalty of others, etc, would have mattered more in any case but Alexander the Great really was a brilliant innovative commander.”
Were any of the Diadochi also brilliant innovative commanders?
Antigonos, Seleucus and Eumenes all seem to have been well above average generals. Demetrios Poliorcetes was technically innovative. Ptolemy was a crafty politician and competent commander.
Given the place of the companion cavalry in the Alexander-Battle doctrine (I was disappointed not to see this word) as an armored, highly mobile, including bad-terrain-mobile (as notably contrasted to chariots) type of unit capable of both creating a breakthrough and exploiting those breakthroughs, especially by going after the enemy C&C (Darius), one must ask in jest: is this a tank? (Having a structurally separate rider mounted onto a horse counts as having a turret, right?)
“If you are getting the impression that the Seleucid army in particular operated with a large number of light infantry supporting [sic!] it, that’s because it did.”
The impression I got is that the light infantry didn’t support the Hellenistic armies. It was explicitly mentioned that they weren’t even consistently used to screen other forces. It wasn’t mentioned, but apparently they also weren’t used as a poor man’s cavalry reserve, behind the line. Instead, as illustrated in the analysis of Raphia, these troops who fare poorly in contact (even against medium infantry) were …deployed into the main contact line. And, of course, they eat food, which is definitely a concern given the sizes of these armies.
Particularly given the knowledge that armies would routinely bump into the supply limit, it ought to have been foreseeable that “moar light infantry” was an inefficient way to convert economic surplus into battlefield violence. One reason this couldn’t be acted on, the social structure limiting phalanx recruitment, was already mentioned. Another I expect to be the “cavalry arrogance” of military elites, somewhat similar to its medieval European occurrence. Only military aristocrats can afford to fight as heavy cavalry, and by doctrine a cavalry-cavalry engagement decides the battle, with the victor inexorably rolling up the opposing infantry. “So, our social inferiors (notably including those wannabe-aristocrat phalangites) are helpless space-filling speedbumps, requiring a cavalry cover (i.e. us) to protect them from enemy cavalry (the only threat), right? Then clearly there shouldn’t be a lower bar on equipment on who can be allowed to stand in the line to pad out the frontage, and no disappointment when infantry is impotent. (Also, a successful cavalry charge should be exploited by going after the most dangerous enemy unit — the just-defeated cavalry! Even routed, they pose more danger — they could reconstitute and return to the field! — than the infantry still standing. Therefore, pursue them off the field.)” This is so convenient that it becomes some variation of unactionable, unsayable or unthinkable that infantry could be better.
I would tend to avoid assuming empires that endured for hundreds of years were too stupid to see that heavy infantry beat light infantry in a straight fight on good terrain, or have a sense of logistics limits. Either paying for the light infantry to be reequipped as heavy infantry was too expensive or they saw some tactical advantage in having light infantry. Quite possibly both. Rome certainly thought their own light infantry were worth bringing, even if they didn’t use them as a decisive line.
Certainly; I anticipate some of these factors to be explained in the following weeks.
Obviously, light infantry does have its uses even when heavier would be available — the Romans consistently use their velites to screen the main line. Which makes it especially striking that the Seleucids don’t consistently use their light infantry for the task it is the best at, while they do use it for a task it is poorly suited to.
And yes, there are structural reasons the armies’ composition couldn’t be changed willy-nilly (the way a strategy game player can). Armies always replicate on the battlefield the structures of their societies, so to take the example already explained in the previous installment, if the society runs on “Macedonians rule, everyone else drools”, and a certain style of equipment+organization+deployment is treated as a sign of Macedonianhood, then your already-existing privileged Macedonians will actively ensure (“police”) that nobody else be seen wearing that kit, and/or fighting in that way, lest others mistake those lowly peasants for Macedonians (or be unsure whether the real Macedonians are real). So as king, you risk internal strife if you try to increase your phalangite recruitment pool.
Likewise, if for the previous several centuries the poor hillfolk of Wherever customarily provided a levy of javelineers to the emperor ruling the area, it can be easy for the shahanshah to come to the realization “it would be much more useful if they provided 10% as many people, but equipped as heavy infantry, and theoretically they can do that because they cost the same labor-hours”, or for a strategy-game player to say “now that Wherever has produced a unit of light infantry, next it should produce a heavy infantry” — but for the centuries BC, it is at least verging on the impossible to actually implement that. The hillfolk’s national sport is javelin-throwing, all the teen girls swoon over the yearly national champion, all the teen boys practice javelin-throwing every week, each village holds a local friendly competition every month. And they are subsistence farmers (with a side of transhumant pastoralism) who don’t use money. So what are you suggesting we do, Vizier: tell them that we are “raising the levy” in peacetime, for corvee labor, to get the money with which to equip troops that are probably not theirs? They would revolt at such an insult. That we …somehow… (how?) monetarize their subsistence economy, so that we can tax them in money (to equip troops not theirs)? That we go in, have the levy stand up, make every group of 10 draw straws, and announce “so, um, now the other nine of you are the servants of the one guy, hand over your surplus grain to him so he can sell it to a merchant so he gets money so he can buy armor from
a smitha specialized armor merchant (who never comes here, because nobody ever bought armor here) — what do you mean, ‘why should we go along with that’?”. Also, while javelin-throwing is very culturally embedded, they have somewhere between no and negative established knowledge of several things crucial for fighting as heavy infantry. Being poor subsistence farmers, they only use iron for a handful of edged tools — they never saw a mail hauberk (except as loot they quickly sold to a camp-follower), they don’t know how to maintain it, or even how to determine whether the one the salesman is hawking is actually cheap crap (or expensive crap, for that matter). Nor do they know who to ask that would know. They are also accustomed to fighting as light infantry skirmishers — in a loose order, which is not much of an order — their grandpa’s stories, their aunt’s proverbs, etc. contain a lot of advice on how to do that correctly. (Also, every few years the clan has to fight off some ruffians from the next village over who try to rustle their sheep — in the rough local terrain, and given the “recruiting pool” of the clan itself.So every clan equips all able-bodied males as light infantry on their own initiative anyway.) The more boorish types, when drunk, like to compare the dense formations of flatlanders to flocks of sheep, herded by the officers. Forming up densely, keeping regular intervals somewhat precisely, maneuvering as a “rigid” block-unit (as opposed to as a swarm, where nobody minds if you and Bob switch places during a maneuver) are things which would seem straight-up unnatural to them. An early modern army (with a plentiful at least partly literate officer corps) could drill conscripts into performing well in a few months (by breaking culture-based chafing under “the beatings will continue until the complaining stops”), but the state capacity for that doesn’t exist yet, and also multiple subject nations would revolt at the news of such brutality. In its absence, it would take decades of cultural change — a complete about-face of the narrative for collective self-respect — before the hillfolk could become battle-worthy shock infantry. Longer than the single decade to build up the capital stock of all the heavy infantry armor, which is already far too long.
Given all the above, even an emperor who knew about the problems of having too much light infantry would decide to forget about trying to change it. Even if they don’t mind the drama i.e. revolution risk, nobody has the attention span. (A modern literate bureaucracy would — you can make the Secretariat of the Interior establish the Office of Hillfolk Development — and they occur in heavily monetarized societies, which makes everything else much easier.) Hence the spectrum running from unactionable through unsayable to unthinkable.
There is also that these poor hillhfolk probably spend at least some time raiding each other/their neighbours in a kind of warfare where heavy infantry is a lot less useful. IE: Their main warfighting is actually “First System”, but they’re doing a bit of Second System warfare on behalf of their overlords.
If the light infantry hillfolk are not very useful in battle line and eat food which could be reserved for elite heavy infantry and heavy cavalry, the commander might simply leave the light infantry behind – maybe command them to raid enemy side hillfolk in small detachment, but not be in the way at the main force. Good commanders are often (and controversially) depicted as dismissing camp followers and such noncombatants. So do we hear of commanders who left behind their less-than-elite combatants and marched to battle with just the elites? Did it work? Why, or why not?
A nice argument, but from what I can see of history that sort of mess isn’t entirely necessary: the logical procedure is that a royal messenger turns up in Whatever and informs the local populace that the tax next year will be in coin or kind, not kin. Then some heavy-armed mercenaries find employment.
Inefficient? Certainly. But for heavily-centralized societies already intimately familiar with professional militaries, this is not some sort of insuperable barrier.
Where does the coin come from? Will they dig gold/silver mines and mint them? They mainly produce some agricultural surplus, livestock and craft goods, but not a huge amount. Someone will need to buy that, or directly transport if the state takes a tax of goods rather than money.
However, there presumably already is a tax of goods, which the state transports from Whatever. (Whether the state employs locals directly for transport is irrelevant, that’s just labour as tax.) Increasing the tax and not taking soldiers doesn’t make them produce more, just makes it harder to impossible to meet the quota, and at the same time frees up a pool of military-aged men among a disgruntled people.
As the tax next year is below what you expected and willingness to revolt is above what you expected, while you’re still struggling to find mercenaries to arm (the extent to which news can travel is limited and some of that news is talking shit about your ideas), you decide to scrap the idea and go back to the old ways, accepting that you can’t will away biology.
You’re dealing with a gajillion other problems. Keeping the populace reasonably content (flexing your ethnic superiority as a foreign conqueror doesn’t necessarily go against that) and therefore willing to reduce the number of problems on its own is good for you. Trying to fix what isn’t broken is bad for you.
Good essay Dr. Devereaux, I liked it a lot.
I particularly appreciated that you push back against the declensionist narrative around the Diadochi militaries. It’s been received wisdom in history for so long that the Successor States “declined” from the Philippo-Alexandrian heyday in military terms, and I think a revision of that stance is long overdue. I very much agree that the threat environment of Hellenistic warfare was very much different from what was the case in Philip and Alexander’s day, and the military performance of Hellenistic armies ought to be assessed in their context, not in comparison to Philip and Alexander who operated in a different context.
That being said, I disagree with a few of these points as well.
First of all, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the phalanx wasn’t a “decisive arm” of the Hellenistic army. I think the “hammer and anvil” analogy is misleading in terms of what the phalanx actually did within a Hellenistic army.
Dr. Devereaux argues: “The phalanx wasn’t there to win the battle (though it sometimes did), but rather to provide a stable central base to allow those other elements, particularly the cavalry, to win the battle.”
Well yes, it did provide a stable central base, but how did it do so? The “hammer and anvil” metaphor would suggest that the phalanx was passive. An anvil just sits there while the hammer beats upon it. In fact, Alexander and his Successors used the phalanx offensively: It attacked aggressively. The stable central base came from the phalanx advancing into contact, forcing the opponent to fight for their life in the centre, while the cavalry and flanking troops acted upon one of the wings to roll up the enemy line.
At Gaugamela, Alexander’s decisive attack on the right wing was carried out by his Cavalry, yes, but also in concert with taxeis from his phalanx coming up in support of him. They were a critical part of the attack which broke the Persians. Rather than a hammer and anvil, the cavalry and phalanx I think should be analogized to the blade of an axe: The thin sharp edge which pierces and the heavy weight behind it which gives the edge mass and strength.
The Battle of Raphia, which Dr. Devereaux uses as his example, in fact provides us an example of the phalanx’s engagement being the deciding factor in battle. Both the Ptolemaic and the Seleucid forces attempted to win victory by flank action with their cavalry and support forces, yes. Ptolemy’s plan failed in that regard, but Antiochus’s victory with his cavalry did not win him the battle. He made the elementary mistake of many cavalry commanders and he failed to exploit his victory against the opposing infantry. Ptolemy then marched his phalanx up to the Seleucid phalanx and won the day, by routing the opposing phalanx. The deciding engagement of the battle came with push of pike between the phalanxes. A cavalry victory in itself did not decide the day as Antiochus thought it would.
I don’t think you can say that the phalanx was not an offensive arm or not a decisive arm of the Hellenistic army, because it was clearly both!
Secondly, in regards to the Romans, I’m not sure it’s accurate to say that Roman commanders were infantrymen or that the importance of the Roman infantry is established by the Roman commanders associating with them.
In the Mid-Republic, it was expected that a politician embarking on the cursus honorum would first complete ten years of military service. Polybius tells us both that anyone who wishes to stand for office must complete ten years of service, and that the wealthy young men expected to serve with the cavalry were required to provide ten years of service. Many, perhaps most, of Rome’s aristocratic commanders therefore were likely to have begun their military careers in the Roman cavalry!
And the historical sources are full of incidents of Roman consuls, when they engage in combat, engaging with the cavalry. Gaius Atilius Regulus is killed in cavalry combat at the Battle of Telamon in 225 BC, Scipio the Elder is wounded in the cavalry fight at the Battle of the Ticinus in 218 BC. Marcus Claudius Marcellus wins the spolia opima in cavalry combat with a Gallic king at the Battle of Clastidium in 222 BC, and later both Marcellus and his consular colleague Titus Quinctius Crispinus are both killed in a cavalry skirmish while scouting in 208 BC. Polybius also tells us that Lucius Aemilius Paullus fought in the cavalry action at the Battle of Cannae, before moving to the centre to try to rescue the battle with the infantry when the cavalry fight went poorly.
If we take the position of the commander as an indication of the importance of a branch of the army, evidently Roman cavalry was very important because Roman commanders were often with the cavalry, and got themselves engaged so thickly in the combat that they were often wounded or killed as cavalrymen!
In modern military theory, the fixing force (the anvil) isn’t a passive participant. Rather, its job is to threaten to destroy any of the fixed enemies that try to counter-maneuver against the hammer. That, in turn, requires at least the illusion of a decisive attack should they turn their back.
I have a supplemental curiosity on how the parthians later cracked the nut of the hellenistic army, if you have any insight to that
From what I remember, it was a mixture of Parthian shot making their horse archers more effective and them rarely using infantry in their field armies.
One thing that should be noted is that sometimes it was Rome that had the advantage in Cavalry. Decisively so at the Battle of Zama, where Scipio defeated Hannibal, and at the Battle of the Metaurus River where Claudius Nero* defeated his brother Hasdrubal.
The Carthaginians were also very good at outflanking people. In a way. Part of the battleline was almost always concealed. Something Roman writers are want to refer too as “Punic Treachery”!
(*And yes Consul Nero was a distant relation to the Julio-Claudians)
Total War, Computer games, blah blah blah. Does NO ONE play miniatures wargame battles anymore (you know, with toy soldiers, and well-crafted rules)?
Spent a good part of today walking around CanCon, a major Australian tabletop gaming convention.
Yes, hundreds of people were playing miniature wargames, many different genres, and willing to travel from other Australian cities to be here. I don’t think the overall numbers have decreased or increased significantly from thirty years ago, but now there seem to be more genres, but each has fewer players.
Big winners are fantasy and WarHammer. My city of three hundred thousand people can support multiple Games Workshop stores, each of which offers miniature painting classes and demo games. These are also the competitions with the most players at CanCon.
Miniature gaming still very heavily male. My impression is that historical miniature gaming is now significantly older than the average: the young players are largely in fantasy/W40K/other scifi. Maybe they will become more interested in history as they age.
Well-crafted rules … a mixed bag IMNSHO.
My belief is that the rise of computer gaming has forced tabletop games to become simpler and easier to learn and play, concentrating on essentials and interesting decisions rather than number crunching. Any game that requires detailed stats and calculations is better done with a computer. At least for ancient / medieval wargame rules, the genre I know best.
For fantasy … not so much. I spent a good chunk of time watching a couple of Lord of the Rings: Strategy Battle Game. Apparently “strategic” is a battle with thirty or forty orcs / humans / elves per side. (Assuming the player doesn’t pick something really expensive like a Mumakil, which reduced a Haradrim army to one giant elephant and 18 men.) The games revolved almost entirely around generating the right matchup, this figure vs that figure. Formations don’t matter, figures can move in any direction and turn at will. This especially stood out because the LoTR:SBG games were right next to the ancient/medieval competition, so I had a really good view of the glaring contrast between the formed up lines and columns of historical humans vs the “Hollywood mobs” of fantasy. Now I want a set of LOTR rules emphasising morale, cohesion, and command …
“My belief is that the rise of computer gaming has forced tabletop games to become simpler and easier to learn and play, concentrating on essentials and interesting decisions rather than number crunching. Any game that requires detailed stats and calculations is better done with a computer. At least for ancient / medieval wargame rules, the genre I know best.”
My frame of reference is boardgames not minitures but IMHO depth and complexity have increased massively as boardgames shift towards card driven mechanics. Compare the old classic Republic of Rome to the recent hit Wingspan. RoR took five hours and was considered a complex game. Wingspan only takes an hour but the player faces more decisions in that one hour then RoR had in it’s five. I expect that sooner or later minitures are going to make use of the lessons from boardgames.
Complexity in boardgames is somewhat multifaceted. I would split it into at least two categories: strategic/decision depth and administrative depth. A lot of older complex games are complex in the administrative sense – there are a lot of chits to track and values to update and so on in order to process a turn. But there aren’t necessarily many actual choices to make while doing that processing.
Modern boardgame design emphasises meaningful choices a lot more and tries to avoid complexity that doesn’t directly link to player choices.
In tabletop gaming, “strategy” tends to mean the overall plan and theory of victory, so a chess player might talk about a hypermodern strategy or pawn strategy, while tactics are specific series of moves on the board used to gain positional or material advantage (forks, skewers, pins etc.), For a LotR, 40K etc. player “strategy” would include army selection and deployment, while tactics are used oncecthe game begins to execute the strategy and respond to your opponent.
I wonder whether at times we on this blog are too quick to assume that the military-history definition and application of these terms is the only correct one and all other uses are wrong, while ignoring the (very long!) history of these terms in a gaming context (or indeed in non-gaming contexts, for instance lawyers will talk about strategy and tactics in their cases, as sportspeople will in their field, etc.). Of course when talking about simulationist wargames and in particular “grand strategy” games like CK, TW, the lines are very blurred, and definitely used imprecisely.
But with all of that said I do gate the “Hollywood mob” formations in fantasy gaming and I think it was a terrible crime when Age of Sigmar introduced round basing to WH fantasy.
Thanks Tom, you’re right that tabletop gaming etc can have different meanings for the same words and this isn’t out of ignorance or needs to be “corrected”.
That won’t stop me from snarking about LoTR:SBG though 🙂 A 1:1 scale individual combat game with less than 50 per side isn’t “strategic” and I will die on this hill.
I’d be interested to see Dr Devereaux review the Infamy! Infamy! war-games rules by Richard Clarke of TooFatLardies. They are for large skirmishes (50 to 60 figures per side) of the late Republic and early Empire with one side being Romans and the other Gauls, Britons or Germans. There’s also a campaign system to see how well your Centurion or Chieftain is doing over a year’s campaigning.
Rich Clarke has been promising to further develop the rules to cover the Punic Wars, but as yet those haven’t been published.
The hollywood mob is more realistic.
SBG doesn’t need to strong arm the player with rigid formations to generate formations. Formations are naturally developing.
The main ahistoric part of SBG is that it doesn’t reward depth beyond 3 models at the most (And it’s based off fantasy)
But the idea that a battleline is only ever going to be these static blocks of troops formed in a rectangle is deeply ahistoric and entirely ascetic. Once lines clash, formations flex
“Formations are naturally developing”? So why do so many armies, from ancient Macedonians to Romans to the modern day, have officers NCOs and drills and training exercises?
https://acoup.blog/2024/01/19/collections-phalanxs-twilight-legions-triumph-part-ia-heirs-of-alexander/
OK, this isn’t a historical wargame, “it’s based off fantasy.” But not just any fantasy, the Lord of the Rings and, from the figure designs, the films just as much as the books. Where almost every army fights in formation.
The elves and men always fight in formations, lines and rectangles. Ranks within formations are organised: elves might have swordsmen front rank and archers behind. Gondor cavalry counter-attacking Osgiliath fight in two lines with the front rank heavily armoured, rear rank lighter.
The one evil army that fights as a mob is the army of Sauron before the Black Gates in the opening prologue. Who get their arses kicked.
The Uruk-Hai of Isengard are formed in rectangles.
https://acoup.blog/2020/05/15/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-iii-the-host-of-saruman/
The Isengard formations do break down during the assault, but you can see them trying to reform the line, front ranks with pikes and archers behind, when the reinforcements led by Gandalf and Eomer arrive.
The army of Morgul that besieges Gondor is organised into rectangular formations, and the commander insists on maintaining formations even when under from siege artillery. The Mumakil of the Haradrim are in line formation. I don’t remember seeing Easterlings at the siege/battle around Gondor, but those marching into Mordor through the black gate are in, guess what, rectangular blocks.
Not a fan of the Hobbit movies, but IIRC at the Battle of the Five Armies the elves, dwarves, orcs are all fighting in formations.
LoTR:SBG not having “blocks of troops formed in a rectangle” is untrue to it’s own source material.
Well crafted rules? *Laughs in hex and chit*. I jest, I jest, but I do think that when the focus is often on how the models look as much as how the game itself functions, you’re generally not going to do as well as a game which only cares about the latter.
But it’s true to the history – see all those gaudy uniforms!
Yes, but almost none for historicals. I only just recently got into pike and shotte epic
Can someone explain to me what ‘elite’ (light infantry) means? Are they veterans? Are they the most well-trained? Do these guys get trained specifically as elite light/medium infantry, or are they picked out as the best fighters from other units and then re-equipped? *how does it work???*
My understanding (which OGH may correct) is that they’re not so much “the elites among the light infantry”, but “the light infantry drawn from the (social, economic) elites”. So they may be better equipped because they have more wealth, better trained because they have more leisure to practice warfare rather than economically produce, and be in better shape because they have better diets and health overall; but they’re in a separate category not because they’re necessarily better than other light infantry but because they’re recruited differently.
80,000 people to an army? They must have fantastic logistics.
With regard to thureophoroi and thorakitai, is it thought that they operated on the field as discrete formations, or would the thorakitai have been an “elite” group within the thureophoroi deployment, occupying say the front ranks, or placed in small groups throughout the line to stiffen it? In essence, do we think the thorakitai were actually a “troop type” in their own right, or were they just thureophoroi who were fortunate enough to have a mail shirt?
Jona Lendering (of Livius) has argued that Darius was actually abandoned by his troops at Gaugamela, based on the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries and Diodorus
Just what I thought when I was reading the post. However, it looks like you already went first.
I had even planned to post a link to Livius: https://www.livius.org/articles/battle/gaugamela-331-bce/
If I am not mistaken Arrian’s sources consisted out of propaganda written by Alexander’s own generals; so I suppose that might explain why they contradict those Babylonian Astronomical Diaries.
The article also mentioned that the Achaemenid Army had suffered from poor morale thanks to multiple bad omens. Which makes me wonder whether one of the necessary reasons Alexander’s conquest succeeded was that the Persians believed in astrology.
Funny how the Hellenistic kingdoms all have these very complex armies of distinct units with specific roles trying to get the right match-ups and then the Romans are that one guy who found the OP unit and just A+Moves or F1, F3s through every combat.
Legions OP, pls nerf!
Well to be fair they don’t always A-move, they often win by building a bunch of bridges and fortifications and turning the field battle into a siege.
AIUI, our host’s upcoming book is going to focus on how they won by A-moving with much better macro than their opponents. Recruiting OP; pls nerf!
From the Bronze Age to the Scottish highlanders to Gimli, it seems like people expect to find the strongest warriors in the hills. (Well, aside from when steppe or desert nomads are scarier.) Why is that?
Hills tends to mean pastoralism and that means stealing/raiding those animals (be they sheep or cows or whatever) and even if it doesen’t just basic shepherding/cattleherding tend to foster some military skills (if nothing else wepaon skills like slings)
Tougher life, more constant warfare. It also helps that, being poor, they find mercenary service more attractive. Lastly, the more numerous plains-folk are often more politically sophisticated (read – unreliable). This last was certainly a factor in British imperial rule – Pathans, Dogras, Gurkhas et al helpfully brought their anti-plains-folk prejudices with them. Amusingly, in West Africa the hill peoples were recruited on the same theory but turned out to be less ‘martial’ – they were the defeated who had been driven off the good land.
Amusingly, in West Africa the hill peoples were recruited on the same theory but turned out to be less ‘martial’ – they were the defeated who had been driven off the good land.
Which hill people are you thinking of in particular? I don’t think of West Africa as having a lot of *mountains* in general, unless you’re thinking of Cameroon (which I would consider more Central Africa, though it’s right on the borderline). But there are smaller hills of course (where the Dogon live in Mali, the Fouta Djallon in Guinea, etc.), and I’d be interested to learn about if there was colonial recruitment of those peoples.
I recall reading this in a history of Africa (maybe Basil Davidson?) but can’t track the specific reference.
I’m sure there are a bunch of hill tribes in the Mountains of Kong.
> they were the defeated who had been driven off the good land.
AFAIK this is true of all hill people, though it’s usually a problem of numbers, not necessarily martial skill. The hills are shitty marginal land, and if you’re grazing there and not in the plains, it’s because you’re not quite Mongol-tier yet.
Harder to bring under central control. Consequently they are more free to fight, which means they have to fight more.
The long answer to “why do people expect to find that” is “see Dr. Devereaux’s article series, some years ago, on the Fremen Mirage.”
The related answer is that we often do not remember cases where the hill-fighters turn out not to be very tough after all. And we often identify hill-fighters as hill-fighters without identifying flatland-fighters as flatland-fighters.
Being *literally* physically tougher (i.e. having actual genetic adaptations to deal with high altitude) didn’t end up helping the Incas in the end, or for that matter the Tibetans.
That seems like a straw man. Nobody’s said that physical toughness is the only thing that matters in war, and that technology, numbers, and organisation don’t play any role.
I know, I’m writing in support of the commenter above who noted that there are lots of situations where hill tribes have been defeated by lowland armies.
Altitude adaptations might well be decisive when fighting at very high altitudes, maybe 3km+ at 70% sea level air pressure, but that’s generally not where the pitched battles occur particularly if the mountain residents are fighting in someone else’s army.
Personally I would expect to find the hills remote from fertile croplands and good transport links to be full of poor people who can be cheaply hired, and are not loyal to any large group of people antagonistic to me.
“Athenian and Theban phalanxes failed to move in concert.”
Would not be other allies in the middle?
Joke answer: No, and that’s why it was easy for Alexander to ride between them.
Serious answer: Probably, but the details of which specific polis’s hoplites were at the edge of Alexander’s gap is not really relevant to the point at hand.
Wikipedia acknowldges just three types of elephant: Indian, African and Forest. They don’t mention any North African elephant. And they seem to regard all types of elephant as capable of being tamed/domesticated.
The North African kind went extinct back in Roman times, which is probably why it isn’t mentioned.
The North African Elephant has its own page.
“This is the second part of the first part of our four part look”
That just reminded me my copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide omnibus is labeled “a trilogy in 5 parts”.
Next you need to squeeze 42 and towels somewhere…
I was reminded of the contract scene from “A Night at the Opera”:
Driftwood: Well, I’ve got about a foot and a half. Now it says, “The party of the second part shall be know in this contract as the party of the second part.”
Fiorello: Well I don’t know about that.
Driftwood: NOW what’s the matter?
Fiorello: I don’t like the second party either.
Driftwood: Well you should have been at the first party, we didn’t get home till around four in the morning…I was blind for three days.
Fiorello: Ay…Look, why can’t the first part of the second party be the second part of the first party? Thena you got something!
“Second, this army is actually quite resistance to Alexander-Battle” – resistant.
Hey. wanted to ask you what you are basing this statement on “While Achaemenid cavalry was certainly capable of shock actions, they were first and foremost horse archers […]”
You refer to Arrian further below, but from various descriptions and such I never really got the impression that Achaemenid Persian cavalry were primarily horse archers. I’ve seen descriptions of them using javelins, spears, swords, daggers, and I think bows as well, and being protected by helmets and and light armor.
The focus on skirmishing and probably operating in loose order seems correct, but I’m not really sure about being “primarily horse archers” when referring to Achaemenid Persian cavalry. I get the impression that some sort of mix of missile weapons like javelins and shock action is the case, if I remember it right at Platea for instance Persian cavalry repeatedly attacks and seems to drive off part of the Greek force, it does seem to speak of some kind of melee capability.
There also is the case of Darius III’s huge cavalry force at Gaugamela, which included forces drawn from Bactria and Sogdiana (not Persian of course) which are said to have been heavily armored if I recall correctly, and therefore likely quite capable of melee combat and shock action.
Then when Alexander actually face the Saka, who almost certainly were primarily horse archers, they are described as fighting in quite a distinctive way compared to the Persians (primarily in terms of using mobility and denying pitched battle of course) and then later on we have Alexander invading India and bringing with him contingents of Saka and Dahae (another Eastern Iranian nomadic people) horse archers. When we have horse archers in Seleucid armies as well, they are frequently identified as Dahae.
Basically I just have my doubts that describing Achaemenid Persian cavalry as first and foremost horse archers probably isn’t correct when actually describing the Persians, based on, admittedly spotty, descriptions of how that cavalry was armed and what they did in battle, and because people who did fight primarily in that manner like the eastern Scythians are identified as doing so and continue to be the troops identified as such when in successor armies so far as I know. With the Parthians and their horse archery it is also worth noting that the Parthians were not Persians, in fact they were originally a Dahae tribe whom the name Parthia (a region in northeastern Iran, and a Seleucid Satrapy) got subsequently applied to when they took control of and migrated into it (Parthian-descended nobility and military manpower continued to be a crucial component of later Sassanid military strength as well by the way).
Your description of the battle of Raphia has a couple of plain errors. The key on your diagram reverses the two sides’ colors for cavalry, and “Indeed, once things on the Ptolemaic right wing go bad,” should refer to the Ptolemaic left wing.
Will this series also mention how the Romans fared against the Sassanids, and why the latter proved to be such though opponents?
Achaemenid Persia was conquered by Alexander; yet despite four centuries of warfare, the Romans who had much more resources and manpower and had defeated Alexander’s Macedonian Military System failed to conquer Sassanid Persia. If anything in their last war in the seventh century the Sassanid Persians came closer to defeating Rome (well actually Constantinople by now), than had ever happened in reverse.
On a history forum I had been told this was because of political reasons: Achaemenid Persia was an absolute monarchy, so it was possible, albeit very difficult, to vanquish the empire by taking out the Great King; by contrast, in Sassanid Persia the King of Kings was but the ‘first among equals’ with various Great Houses (I had even read a claim that the Karens were even more wealthy than the Sassanids), so if one takes out the King of Kings there still are like a dozen Great Houses to continue the war.
This theory also (partially) blamed the fall of the Sassanid Empire on the ‘tyrant’ Khosrow II, who tried to turn Eranshahr into an absolute monarchy and angered the Great Houses by centralizing power.
However, reading this post I find myself wondering whether Bret will instead (if he will even talk about it at all) claim that the Sassanids avoided Roman conquest by ‘having lots of heavy infantry and high-quality cavalry’…
Unlikely to be part of this series, as this series is about the Roman *Republican* army and the Sassanid dynasty doesn’t appear until 220 CE, two centuries after Augustus has turned Rome into an Empire.
Oh, right, I had forgotten about the *Republican* part.
I suppose you are likely correct then.
Thanks for working to dispel some of the myths surrounding Alexander’s heirs. There’s this recurrent idea that their military exploits were pale imitations of Alexander the Great, and that compared to their predecessor they lacked innovation. It’s a frustrating fusion of great man theory and pop culture history, and it feels like it’s never been solidly debunked by any mainstream media.
I’m confused about how the cavalry is supposed to use any of its normal advantages when it’s in the same battle line as the infantry. Is it cycle-charging at the same point again and again to use momentum, with the adjacent light infantry trying to run away when the cavalry is gone and come back when they charge? Are they staying pressed to the front of the enemy formation, with the horses only really coming into play when they break through?