This week on the blog we are starting what is a planned four-part series looking at the twilight of Hellenistic warfare and the triumph of the Roman legion. Our core question is a really common one: why was the Roman legion able to decisively defeat the Hellenistic sarisa-phalanx?
It's a question that crops up on social media frequently, usually in the form of someone tweeting or posting something along the lines of this:
And of course a lot of folks use that as an opportunity to give joke answers (machine guns! cruise missiles!), but what struck me was that on the original tweet and both my response to it (where I posited the answer was 'Romans') many of the responses confidently asserted suggestions or solutions which simply do not match up much at all to the actual battle record of these armies. A lot of it was what I am going to term 'Total War tactics' - the sort of very simple tactics (flank them, pummel them with ranged fire) that everyone knows but which rarely decide the outcome of battles, in part because everyone knows them and so armies are well-prepared for them.
At the same time, as we're going to see the answer to this question has some complexity to it. On the one hand, we may note one clear historical fact: from 200 to 148 BC, the Romans win every single major land engagement fought against a Hellenistic power - most of them lopsidedly so. On the other hand, all of those victories have their own quirks. None is quite a perfect model set-piece battle, as we'll see later in the series. And moreover, this staggeringly lopsided Roman success was relatively new: Rome had fought Pyrrhus of Epirus' Hellenistic-style army in three major engagements from 280 to 275 and didn't decisively win any of them, though none of Pyrrhus' victories were anything like as decisive as the parade of Roman triumphs during the second century, despite Pyrrhus being regarded in our sources as the finest general of his generation (and we have reason to think he is, in fact, being tactically innovative).
So we're going to go through this question. First, today, we're going to look at how the Macedonian phalanx functioned, but also how the Hellenistic armies it was embedded into were structured, because the Macedonian sarisa-phalanx never fights alone. Then we're going to address some of what I consider myths about the weaknesses of this form of the phalanx when applies to the whole tactical system it functioned it, namely that it was weak against flanking, weak against archery (horse or foot), or that it was merely a pale imitation of the supposedly greater version of the system used by Alexander and Philip.
Then we're going to look at the Roman army of this period, the manipular legion. While I'd normally assume this was a pretty well-understood military, looking at the responses to the tweets above, it seems pretty clear that most folks don't actually have a good sense of how the Romans fought in any period. So we're going to look at the manipular legion, its weapons and tactics and consider the peculiarities that might give it an edge on the Hellenistic military system.
The having done that, we're going to look at the battle record itself, particularly what we know of the Pyrrhic Wars (280-275) - which is, alas, not much - as well as the much better attested and much more decisive run of Roman victory in the second century that eventually lead to the slow but seemingly inexorable death of the Hellenistic military system, trying to tease out along the way both why the Macedonian phalanx (and the larger Hellenistic armies) were so successful for so long and also why they failed so suddenly against the legions of Rome.
Now I have to note, those are the units of this series as I have planned them. I am, however, in the final stages of getting a chapter done for an edited collection and quite close to the deadline (writing was badly delayed by a mix of job market stuff and illness in November and December), so I am likely going to have to break up a lot of these parts over multiple weeks. Rather than leave you with nothing, what I'm planning doing is rolling these out each week in segments and then knitting the whole thing together again at the end when it is done. That does mean this is going to be a bit more 'work in progress' than usual, so you will have to bear with me a bit as I may have to go back and edit earlier parts and so on.
So this week, we're going to look at the Macedonian phalanx itself, whereas next week, we'll get to what I'd argue is actually more important for this question, which is placing the phalanx in the context of the larger Hellenistic army in the field, which included many other kinds of troops.
But first, if you want to take part in the ACOUP military-tributary complex, you can support me and this project on Patreon! Like the Hellenistic kingdoms, I prefer tribute in coin rather than in kind (please do not send me bulk grain) and also like Hellenistic kingdoms, I will most likely use your tribute to finance military activity, in this case to waste use it to buy swords as well as financing my lavish court lifestyle. If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings, assuming there is still a Twitter by the time this post goes live. I am also on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social).
(Bibliography Note: There are a number of recent, public-facing works on this topic, perhaps most notably M. Cole, Legion vs. Phalanx (2018) and C. Matthew, An Invincible Beast (2015). I'm afraid I have substantial issues with both titles and in particular find Matthew's work deeply flawed to the point that I do not feel I can recommend it. Instead, for a popular treatment of both armies, I suggest P. Connolly, Greece and Rome at War (1981), which, while old, is reliable. On Hellenistic arms and armor, T. Everson, Warfare in Ancient Greece (2005) is a good summary, though not so strong as the Bishop and Coulston is for the Romans. On the armies of the successors, the best work on the Antigonids is M. Hatzopoulos, L'organisation de L'armée Macédonienne sous les Antigonides: Problèmes Anciens et Documents Nouveaux (2001), both available only in French and also quite hard to get a hold of even in French. More accessible, but with some problems (some we will discuss) is Sekunda, The Antigonid Army (2013). On the Seleucids, the standard work remains Bar Kochva, The Seleucid Army (1976), but it is increasingly dated and due for replacement. The Ptolemaic army's situation is much better (we must be at Raphia), with not one but two quite capable recent monographs. I recommend starting with P. Johstono, The Army of Ptolemaic Egypt, 323-204 BC: An Institutional and Operational History (2020), but also note Fischer-Bovet, Army and Society in Ptolemaic Egypt (2014). Further articles are cited below.)
What Sort of Phalangite?
We should start then with the phalanx. Remember the phalanx? This is a post about phalanxes.
However, we need to distinguish what sort of phalanx because this is not the older hoplite phalanx in two very important ways: first, it is equipped and fights differently, but second it has a very different place in the overall tactical system: the Macedonian phalanx may be the 'backbone' of a Hellenistic army, but it is not the decisive arm of the system.
So let's start with the equipment, formation and fighting style. The older hoplite phalanx was a shield wall, using the large, c. 90cm diamter aspis and a one-handed thrusting spear, the dory. Only the front rank in a formation like this engaged the enemy, with the rear ranks providing replacements should the front hoplites fall as well as a morale force of cohesion by their presence which allowed the formation to hold up under the intense mental stress of combat. But while hoplites notionally covered each other with their shields, they were mostly engaged in what were basically a series of individual combats. As we noted with our bit on shield walls, the spacing here seems to have been wide enough that while the aspis of your neighbor is protecting you in that it occupies physical space that enemy weapons cannot pass through, you are not necessarily hunkered down shoulder-to-shoulder hiding behind your neighbors shield.
The Macedonian or sarisa-phalanx evolves out of this type of combat, but ends up quite different indeed. And this is the point where what should be a sentence or two is going to turn into a long section. The easy version of this section goes like this: the standard Macedonian phalangite (that is, the soldier in the phalanx) carried a sarisa, a two-handed, 5.8m long (about 19ft) pike, along with an aspis, a round shield of c. 75cm carried with a arm and neck strap, a sword as a backup weapon, a helmet and a tube-and-yoke cuirass, probably made out of textile. Officers, who stood in the first rank (the hegemones) wore heavier armor, probably consisting of either a muscle cuirass or a metal reinforced (that is, it has metal scales over parts of it) tube-and-yoke cuirass. I am actually quite confident that sentence is basically right, but I'm going to have to explain every part of it, because in popular treatments, many outdated reconstructions of all of this equipment survive which are wrong. Bear witness, for instance, to the Wikipedia article on the sarisa which gets nearly all of this wrong.
Wikipedia's article on the topic as of January, 2024. Let me point out the errors here.
1) The wrong wood, the correct wood is probably ash, not cornel - the one thing Connolly gets wrong on this weapon (but Sekunda,
op. cit. gets right).
2) The wrong weight, entirely too heavy. The correct weight should be around 4kg, as Connolly shows.
3) Butt-spikes were not exclusively in bronze. The Vergina/Aigai spike is iron, though the Newscastle butt is bronze (but provenance, ????)
4) They could be anchored in the ground to stop cavalry. This pike is 5.8m long, its balance point (c. 1.6m from the back) held at waist height (c. 1m), so it would be angled up at something like 40 degrees, so anchoring the butt in the ground puts the head of the
sarisa some 3.7m (12 feet) in the air - a might bit too high, I may suggest. The point could be brought down substantially if the man was kneeling, which might be workable. More to the point, the only source that suggests this is Lucian, a second century AD satirist (Dial Mort. 27), writing two centuries after this weapon and its formation had ceased to exist; skepticism is advised.
5) We'll get to shield size, but assuming they all used the 60cm shield is wrong.
6) As noted, I don't think these weapons were ever used in two parts joined by a tube and also the tube at Vergina/Aigai was in iron. Andronikos is really clear here, it is a talon
en fer and a douille
en fer. Not sure how that gets messed up.
Sigh. So in detail we must go. Let us begin with the sarisa (or sarissa; Greek uses both spellings). This was the primary weapon of the phalanx, a long pike rather than the hoplite's one-handed spear (the dory). And we must discuss its structure, including length, because this is a case where a lot of the information in public-facing work on this is based on outdated scholarship, compounded by the fact that the initial reconstructions of the weapon, done by Minor Markle and Manolis Andronikos, were both entirely unworkable and, I think, quite clearly wrong. The key works to actually read are the articles by Peter Connolly and Nicholas Sekunda. If you are seeing things which are not working from Connolly and Sekunda, you may safely discard them.
Detail from the Alexander Mosaic, showing the
sarisae in the background. Notably, we see no tubes being used to join halves of the
sarisa. Connolly, however, notes that the artist has taken care, even with the perspective, to show that the
sarisa taper over their length, an important element in keeping the point of balance in the right spot.
Let's start with length; one sees a very wide range of lengths for the sarisa, based in part on the ancient sources. Theophrastus (early third century BC) says it was 12 cubits long, Polybius (mid-second century) says it was 14 cubits, while Aclepiodotus (first century AD) says the shortest were 10 cubits, while Polyaenus (second century AD) says that the length was 16 cubits in the late fourth century. Two concerns come up immediately: the first is that the last two sources wrote long after no one was using this weapon and as a result are deeply suspect, whereas Theophrastus and Polybius saw it in use. However, the general progression of 12 to 14 to 16 - even those Polyaenus' word on this point is almost worthless - has led to the suggestion that the sarisa got longer over time, often paired to notions that the Macedonian phalanx became less flexible. That naturally leads into the second question, "how much is a cubit?" which you will recall from our shield-wall article. Connolly, I think, has this clearly right: Polybius is using a military double-cubit that is arms-length (c. 417mm for a single cubit, 834mm for the double), while Theophrastus is certainly using the Athenian cubit (487mm), which means Theophrastus' sarisa is 5.8m long and Polybius' sarisa is...5.8m long. This is tapered, thinner to the tip, thicker to the butt, to handle the weight; Connolly physically reconstructed these, armed a pike troupe with them, and had the weapon perform as describe, which I why I am so definitively confident he is right.
Via Wikipedia, a phalangite from the 'Great Tomb' of Lefkadia in Lefkadia, Greece. The figure wears a tube-and-yoke cuirass in the normal color (white), along with an aspis and a sarisa which is tall enough to be out of frame at the top. No metal joining tube is visible, though it might have also been 'out of frame.'
Of all of the things, the one thing we know for certain about the sarisa is that it worked.
Next are the metal components. Here the problem is that Manolis Andronikos, the archaeologist who discovered what remains our only complete set of sarisa-components in the Macedonian royal tombs at Vergina/Aigai managed to misidentify almost every single component (and then poor Minor Markle spent ages trying to figure out how to make the weapon work with the wrong bits in the wrong place; poor fellow). The tip of the weapon is actually tiny, an iron tip made with a hollow mid-ridge massing just 100g, because it is at the end of a very long lever and so must be very light, while the butt of the weapon is a large flanged iron butt (0.8-1.1kg) that provides a counter-weight. Finally, Andronikos proposed that a metal sleeve roughly 20cm in length might have been used to join two halves of wood, allowing the sarisa to be broken down for transport or storage; this subsequently gets reported as fact. But no ancient source reports this about the weapon and no ancient artwork shows a sarisa with a metal sleeve in the middle (and we have a decent amount of ancient artwork with sarisae in them), so I think not.
Polybius is clear how the weapon was used, being held four cubits (c. 1.6m) from the rear (to provide balance), the points of the first five ranks could project beyond the front man, providing a lethal foward hedge of pike-points. As Connolly noted in his tests, while raised, you can maneuver quite well with this weapon, but once the tips are leveled down, the formation cannot readily turn, though it can advance. Connolly noted he was able to get a English Civil War re-enactment group, the Sir Thomas Glemham's Regiment of the Sealed Knot Society, not merely to do basic maneuvers but "after advancing in formation they broke into a run and charged." This is not necessarily a laboriously slow formation - once the sarisae are leveled, it cannot turn, but it can move forward at speed.
The shield used by these formations is a modified form of the old hoplite aspis, a round, somewhat dished shield with a wooden core, generally faced in bronze. Whereas the hoplite aspis was around 90cm in diameter, the shield of the sarisa-phalanx was smaller. Greek tends to use two words for round shields, aspis and pelte, the former being bigger and the latter being smaller, but they shift over time in confusing ways, leading to mistakes like the one in the Wikipedia snippet above. In the classical period, the aspis was the large hoplite shield, while the pelte was the smaller shield of light, skirmishing troops (peltastai, 'peltast troops'). In the Hellenistic period, it is clear that the shield of the sarisa-phalanx is called an 'aspis' - these troops are leukaspides, chalkaspides, argyraspides ('white shields' 'bronze shields' 'silver shields' - note the aspides, pl. of aspis in there). This aspis is modestly smaller than the Hoplite aspis, around 75cm or so in diameter; that's still quite big, but not as big.
Via Wikipedia, Macedonian arms and armor from the Tomb of Lyson and Kallikles, c. 250 BC. The equipment seems to be painted at life-size and the shields painted there (there is another in addition to the one shown) are 73 and 75cm in diameter.
Then we have some elite units from this period which get called peltastai but have almost nothing to do with classical period peltastai. Those older peltasts were javelin-equipped light infantry skirmishers. But Hellenistic peltastai seem to be elite units within the phalanx who might carry the sarisa (but perhaps a shorter one) and use a smaller shield which gets called the pelte but is not the pelte of the classical period. Instead, it is built exactly like the Hellenistic aspis - complete with a strap-suspension system suspending it from the shoulder - but is smaller, only around 65cm in diameter. These sarisa-armed peltastai are a bit of a puzzle, though Asclepiodotus (1.2) in describing an ideal Hellenistic army notes that these guys are supposed to be heavier than 'light' (psiloi) troops, but lighter than the main phalanx, carrying a smaller shield and a shorter sarisa, so we might understand them as an elite force of infantry perhaps intended to have a bit more mobility than the main body, but still be able to fight in a sarisa-phalanx. They may also have had less body-armor, contributing that the role as elite 'medium' infantry with more mobility.
Finally, our phalangites are armored, though how much and with what becomes really tricky, fast. We have an inscription from Amphipolis setting out military regulations for the Antigonid army which notes fines for failure to have the right equipment and requires officers (hegemones, these men would stand in the front rank in fighting formation) to wear either a thorax or a hemithorakion, and for regular soldiers where we might expect body armor, it specifies a kottybos. All of these words have tricky interpretations. A thorax is chest armor (literally just 'a chest'), most often somewhat rigid armor like a muscle cuirass in bronze or a linothorax in textile (which we generally think means the tube-and-yoke cuirass), but the word is sometimes used of mail as well. A hemithorakion is clearly a half-thorax, but what that means is unclear; we have no ancient evidence for the kind of front-plate without back-plate configuration we get in the Middle Ages, so it probably isn't that. And we just straight up don't know what a kottybos is, although the etymology seems to suggest some sort of leather or textile object.
In practice there are basically two working reconstructions out of that evidence. The 'heavy' reconstruction assumes that what is meant by kottybos is a tube-and-yoke cuirass, and thus the thorax and hemithorakion must mean a muscle cuirass and a metal-reinforced tube-and-yoke cuirass respectively. So you have a metal-armored front line (but not entirely muscle cuirasses by any means) and a tube-and-yoke armored back set of ranks. I would argue the representational evidence tends to favor this; we most often see phalangites associated with tube-and-yoke cuirasses, rarely with muscle cuirasses (but sometimes!) and not often at all in situations where they have the rest of their battle kit (helmet, shield, sarisa) as required for the regular infantry by the inscription but no armor.
Via
Wikipedia, a tube-and-yoke cuirass painted on the Tomb of Lyson and Kallikles. Scholars disagree about the material, but to me this reads as organic (leather or textile) as the torso is made of the same material (some color of paint) as the pteryges, which have to be made from a flexible organic material.
Then there is the 'light' reconstruction which instead reads this to mean that only the front rank had any body armor at all and the back ranks only had what amounted to thick travel cloaks. Somewhat ironically, it would be really convenient for the arguments I make in scholarly venues if Sekunda was right about this...but I honestly don't think he is. My judgement rebels against the notion that these formations were almost entirely unarmored and I think our other evidence cuts against it.
Detail from the Alexander Mosaic showing Alexander wearing a reinforced tube-and-yoke cuirass; you can see that there are metal scales covering the belly just above the pteryges and possibly metal elements on the shoulder-guards and over the upper-chest. The Alexander Mosaic, while a late-second century mosaic, seems to be a copy of a fourth or early third century painting, and is generally very accurate in its depiction of Hellenistic military equipment (less so for the Persian stuff).
Still, even if we take the 'heavy' reconstruction here, when it comes to armor, we're a touch less well armored compared to that older hoplite phalanx. The textile tube-and-yoke cuirass, as far as we can tell, was the cost-cutting 'cheap' armor option for hoplites (as compared to more expensive bell- and later muscle-cuirasses in bronze). That actually dovetails with helmets: Hellenistic helmets are lighter and offer less coverage than Archaic and Classical helmets do as well. Now that's by no means a light formation; the tube-and-yoke cuirass still offers good protection (though scholars currently differ on how to reconstruct it in terms of materials). But of course all of this makes sense: we don't need to be as heavily armored, because we have our formation.
The Formation
Polybius (18.28-30) actually explains how this formation works in practice, which is really useful to us, because he is a contemporary observer of it. Each soldier is holding the sarisa with their leading hand four cubits (1.6m) from the rear, which as Peter Connolly notes, if you reconstruct the weapon correctly, puts the leading hand basically on the point of balance. That causes the rear of the weapon to project more than a meter behind the user, but still gives them 10 cubits (4.17m, 13.6ft) of projection beyond their leading hand. Since each soldier occupies a space 90cm square in the formation, you can get the leading tip of the fifth sarisa about half a meter in front of the leading soldier in each file. That in turn means the first five ranks can all usefully get their sarisae into battle. You can see the basic layout in both the normal 'compacted' formation and the ultra-tight synaspismos formation below (note that it is the 'compacted' not the synaspismos formation that is the standard fighting formation):
But there's more to it than this. As I've noted before, the hoplite phalanx was not tactically sophisticated; it was in most cases an 'unguided missile' - the general hit 'fire' and hoped for the best. By contrast, the Macedonian sarisa-phalanx was capable of more - a lot more. It had to be - these men have to fight in concert in order to be effective.
The first step to that is developing some coordination and that means officers. And the Macedonian phalanx has a lot of officers. The basic unit of the Macedonian phalanx is the syntagma; this isn't a maneuver unit, but an organizational one, but still we can start here. The syntagma in standard battle formation is quite simple: it is a 16 by 16 block of soldiers (the Macedonian phalanx generally deploys 16 soldiers deep, double the most typical depth of the hoplite phalanx). Each file (that is, a line of soldiers, front to back) is led by a file leader (a lochagos, if he isn't a more senior sort of officer), who has under his command a file closer (an ouragos) a half-file leader (a hemilochites) and two quarter-file leaders (two enomotarches), along with eleven regular soldiers. Every other spot where you'd have a lochagos, you instead have a dilochites, who commands two files (so is senior to the lochagos to his left) and every other spot you'd have a dilochites, you get a tetrarches who commands four files. Finally you have a taxiarchos who commands half the unit and a syntagmatarches who commands the whole unit.
Diagram the organization of a Hellenistic Syntagma. Note that in the chain of command, the bold arrows show where I have followed the chain all the way down, but the various thin, right-hand-side arrows lead to complete chains that I am not showing (so, for instance, the Tetrarch subordinate to the Syntagmarch would have the same number of men in the same organization as the Tetrarch on the left, and so on). We should be cautious that this system comes to us via
Asclepiodotus, who we might expect,as a philosopher, may have embellished the system (as writers of military manuals are wont), but in the broad outlines, we see good evidence that this was, more or less, the system in use.
That's a LOT of officer, but the number and their position makes a lot of sense when you imagine how this creature needs to function in combat. This is a formation designed to function at a range of variable depths, which is made possible by the nested command system. What to halve the depth and double the width? Then the hemilochites move up to the front, bringing the back half of their file with them. Want to go the other way and double your depth? Easy, the lochagoi just move their files in behind the file of their dilochites. I should note I'm not speculating here on the purpose: Asclepiodotus says this is what this is for (Asclep. 2.1). It's also probably important for the basic task of forming from column into line, because unlike armies at 6 or 8 man depth which can do the 'turn right' trick and army that fights with a standard depth of 16 is going to need men to find their places, which is easier when every man is in a sub-unit of four, led by an office: now you can march with a standard width of four or eight and still easily get into formation.
What these officers do not seem to be doing, however, is independently maneuvering; the syntagma is not a maneuver unit. That said, unlike the hoplite phalanx, which often had almost no maneuver capabilities, the Macedonian phalanx does have maneuver units smaller than the whole line. In Alexander's army (and thus presumably in Philip's) these were the taxeis (singular, taxis), units of variable size (around 1,500 or so) made by bolting a bunch of syntagmata together. Our narratives of Alexander's battles, especially in Arrian, keep track of these units so we can see them clearly (e.g. Arr. Anab. 2.8.4; 3.11.9-10); that these units could maneuver independently was actually crucial at the Battle of Gaugamela both for enabling Alexander's tactic of refusing his left but also in creating a nearly catastrophic opening gap in the phalanx as two of the left-most taxeis were unable to stay in contact with the rest advancing to their right without losing contact with the supporting troops on their left (Arr. Anab. 3.14.4-5).
These sub-units are less visible in our later sources and you will sometimes see it insisted that the Macedonian phalanx becomes less flexible under Alexander's successors, but I don't think this is so (indeed, I am going to argue here comprehensively that arguments that the Hellenistic army was somehow a pale shadow of Alexander's army are, in fact, wrong: this was not a degraded form). As we're going to see, Pyrrhus had no problem creating an 'articulated' phalanx by putting other units in the 'joints' between the units of his phalanx (probably taxeis, but we're not told, Polyb. 18.28.10; we'll come back to this 'articulated' phalanx later - Pyrrhus isn't the only fellow with this idea), the Seleucid phalanx at Magnesia could still pull fancy maneuvers like forming square (App. Syr. 35), and Perseus' army at Pydna clearly consists of distinct 'phalanxes' which in turn seem like they were in subdivided units as well. We hear in our sources of 'chiliarchies' (units of c. 1000, actually 1,024, Asclep. 2.10; that's four syntagmata) and the troop-counts at Pydna make a lot of sense if you assume both of Perseus' phalanxes (the leukaspides and chalkaspides) each have 10 chiliarchies in them. Those might be maneuver units as well; the leukaspides and chalkaspides clearly maneuver totally independently and the narrative of the breakup of the phalanx (we'll get to it) implies some independent maneuver within those lines as well.
Consequently this Macedonian phalanx is not so inflexible as the hoplite phalanx. Individual taxeis can advance or hold position independently. They can also clearly wheel in formation, although only with the sarisae up; once they're leveled to fight, the formation can only move forward, an interesting limitation Peter Connolly's experiments exposed.
We'll get into the combat role of this formation a bit more next week, but one thing I want to note here is just how much protection these troops have, because it's going to help to explain why a lot of 'Total War tactics' approaches don't necessarily work. The 75cm diameter aspis is sufficient to cover each soldier's entire torso, from the upper legs to the shoulders and of course behind that is likely that textile tube-and-yoke cuirass, and each phalangite has a helmet to protect the head. Moreover, the leveled sarisae out front are going to make it hard for enemies to get close enough to use most contact weapons or to be able to get attack angles with those weapons around the aspis.
Light missile attack - regular javelins and arrows - are no solution either. On low trajectories, most missiles will hit the aspides of the front rank and the legs of the front rank are likely to be protected by greaves, making the areas where an arrow-strike might actually produce a disabling result very small indeed, mostly just the face and a small portion of the upper legs. Attempting to solve this by firing over that more heavily armored front ranks runs into new troubles, both in that the rear ranks also have aspides, but also that all of the pikes are in the way, a feature Polybius actually notes (Polyb. 18.30.3). Arrows are not bullets and an arrow that glances off of a pike shaft is going to lose a lot of its momentum and penetrating power. This surely won't stop all arrows, but between the sarisae and the armor and the aspides, this is a formation that really is very, very resilient so long as it can keep enemies at pike's reach and in front of it.
Now if you are thinking, "ok, then we'll just flank it' - next week we'll be exploring why that is so hard to do when we get to the tactical function of the phalanx as part of a larger army. But before we do that, I want to discuss...
Who is in the Phalanx?
You may have noticed a pattern whereby I keep referring to Hellenistic armies but a Macedonian phalanx. This is intentional. The armies the Macedonian phalanx operated in were composite, multi-ethnic forces effectively from the very beginning. Alexander's army at Issus, for instance, has Thessalian (along with Macedonian) cavalry, Greek hoplites, light infantry from Thrace, Illyria and the Agrianians (a people from what today would be western Bulgaria), along with archers, some of whom are Cretan (Arr. Anab. 2.9.2-3). That, of course, only becomes more true when we get to Alexander's successors, who find themselves in control of huge populations of non-Macedonians and non-Greek speakers and who, unsurprisingly, begin incorporating those peoples into their armies. We'll talk about where these folks fit in next week.
But our sources position the phalanx itself as distinctively Macedonian, often contrasting in later Hellenistic armies the Makedones (Μακεδόνες, 'Macedonians') of the phalanx with the many other ethnic contingents of other peoples in those same armies. And I think it is worth actually stopping for a moment to ask where the men in the Macedonian phalanx come from because this actually is going to be one of its weaknesses, in an odd sort of round-about kind of way.
For the armies of Philip II and Alexander III ('the Great') this was easy: the men of the phalanx, the pezhetairoi ('foot companions') came from Macedon, drawn from the peasantry of the country (while the elite served in the hetairoi, the companion cavalry). And for the later Antigonid kingdom, which maintained control over Macedon proper, that largely remained true. Notably in Antigonid armies, allied Greek-speakers show up outside the phalanx, frequently equipped as lighter thureophoroi, a type of troop we'll get to next week (e.g. Polyb. 2.65.1-5; Livy 33.14.5), but they are separated out of the phalanx even when "equipped in the Macedonian fashion" as with the thousand Megalopolitans at Sellasia in 222 (Polyb. 2.65.3). For the Antigonids, even Greek-speakers showing up with sarisae were not in the phalanx proper, but grouped with allied heavy infantry. 'The phalanx' as a unit rather than a formation was for Macedonians.
For the Seleucids, of course, the matter was immediately more complex. Their empire, which stretched across much of what today would be Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran (inter alia), included precisely zero indigenous Macedonian communities. What they did have was both a chunk of Alexander's army as well as a bunch of new Greek-speaking settlements populated mostly by folks we'd call Greeks but also some Macedonians. Early Seleucid rulers intensified this system, creating new poleis and settler-colonies (called katoikiai) in their domains (taking the land from the locals to do so) and offering land grants (kleroi) to entice Greek and Macedonian settlers to live there on the understanding that having one of these kleroi came with an obligation for military service. These settlers in turn were legally understood as 'Macedonians' (even if they were, in fact, ethnic Greeks) and so when our sources describe Seleucid armies and list the 'Macedonians' (before listing all of the other contingents; e.g. Livy 37.40) they are technically correct that these fellows are legally Macedonians. In turn, service in the phalanx itself seems to have remained restricted to these settlers, locking in its 'Macedonian' identity. It doesn't seem like local subject peoples ever really filter into the 'Macedonian' legal category in the Seleucid Empire, though to be fair that may just be a lacuna in our evidence; if our sources for Ptolemies were as thin as those for the Seleucids, we'd think the same thing about them.
Which brings us to the rather more complex picture of the Ptolemies in Egypt. The bulk of the manpower used for the Ptolemaic phalanx was generally produced the same was as for the Seleucids: the Ptolemies hired Greek-speaking mercenaries and then paid them in part by settling them on kleroi which in turn locked them in to serving for the Ptolemies. The documentary evidence lets us know a lot more about these settlers and they are from a pretty wide range of places, often from well outside areas the Ptolemies actually controlled. What becomes quite clear here is that 'Macedonian' in Egypt was a legal category at best only loosely tied to one's actual origins. While nine of out every ten soldiers on surviving infantry roles has the legal status of 'Macedonian,' when we have evidence for the origins of military settlers, we find actual ethnic Macedonians only around 18%, and Greeks around 29% (with another 12% from Cyrenaica, who we might also count as Greeks, the descendants of Greek settlers there), with large numbers of Thracians (15%; probably Hellenized, Greek-speaking Thracians) and smaller portions of other groups.
Complicating this picture further, we have another ethnic category in Ptolemaic armies, that of 'Persians.' The Ptolemaic army has a place for most Egyptians, they fight as machimoi, get paid less than 'Macedonians' and don't (usually) serve in the phalanx. But then we have soldiers noted as being 'Persians.' These are not, clearly, actual ethnic Persians or any sort of Iranian peoples - there really aren't any of those in Egypt. Instead 'Persian' too is a fictional legal status. Under Alexander, there was briefly a program of training local youths (mostly elites) in Macedonian warfare and customs and the products of these programs were called 'Persians,' which fits into Alexander's other failed efforts to try to fuse his Macedonian ruling-class with a broader Persian (and related peoples) ruling class. While those programs get shut down basically everywhere after Alexander's death - as his successors instead set up ethnic hierarchies where Macedonians (and Greek-speakers) rule and all other people are ruled - it seems like it ran a little longer in Egypt, producing a class of ethnic Egyptians who were Hellenized in their customs and fighting style and legally coded as 'Persians.' In the second century, some number of Egyptians also earned 'Persian' status through military service and it seems like several generations in, some of those original 'Persians' end up reclassified as 'Macedonians.'
For such a system, I must quote Johstono's assessment that, "something as nonsensical as an origin marker unrelated to the marked origin almost most come from the military world."
That said, compared to the 'Macedonians,' these Hellenized Egyptian 'Persians' seem to have made up a relatively small slice of the 'Macedonian' Ptolemaic phalanx (something sub-10% or so). So on the one hand, the makeup of the phalanx is a mess of origins, but on the other hand for a state that rules perhaps 3-4m indigenous Egyptians but then has a phalanx which is three-quarters drawn from either European Greeks, Greek settlers in Africa or Hellenized Thracians suggests a pretty strong program of ethnic recruiting aimed at excluding all by a select group of Hellenized Egyptian 'Persians' from the most prestigious (and best paid) positions in the army. This was still an exclusionary institution.
And then we get to the late second century and the Fourth Syrian War (219-217) fought between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. The Ptolemies, on the back foot, recruit Egyptians directly into the phalanx in large numbers (20,000 of them, though these may have built on reforms longer in the making), which our main source, Polybius (5.62ff), connects to the subsequent 'Great Revolt' (a major Egyptian revolt against Ptolemaic rule) in c. 207/6. As clear from above, the Ptolemies had always had some Egyptians ('Persians') in the phalanx, though never this many and many more Egyptiams (machimoi) in the army in lower-prestige and lower-pay positions. Christelle Fischer-Bovet has argued that it is a mistake to see the great revolt as connected as Polybius does, mostly due to the time gap, but I actually think its fairly plausible to suppose that the troops recruited for Raphia may have supposed that being in the phalanx would mean social and economic rewards matching those of their 'Macedonian' comrades and it may have taken time for the revolt to fully brew once they realized those rewards were not forthcoming. In either case, the Great Revolt marked the real beginning of Ptolemaic decline and the Ptolemaic phalanx, with or without Egyptians in it, would never really get a major 'face off' with Rome, as by the time the Romans really arrive, Egypt is too weak to be a real opponent (though Caesar does smash a Ptolemaic army in 47 as part of an intervention into a Ptolemaic civil war).
We'll come back to this but one thing I want to tag is how the cultural and ethnic chauvinism of these regimes makes this part of their armies brittle. Now we can largely understand why the Antigonid kingdom - small, poor and with fractious, difficult to control Greek neighbors - was relatively weak. But the Seleucid and Ptolemaic problem is more striking precisely because these were big, wealthy empires. But they were empires built on an assumed ethnic hierarchy in which the fruits of empire went to an ethnic elite drawn from Greece and Macedon. Neither empire was ever willing to truly abandon this system; even after Raphia, Egyptian soldiers in the Ptolemaic army get paid less (and revolt more, what a surprise). Unwilling to treat non-'Macedonians' as equals in peacetime, it was dangerous to do so on the battlefield. But there were only so many 'Macedonian' (the legal category) settlers to go around - a major defeat could deplete the supply for years, especially since holding these empires by force of arms (rather than by gaining local support) required a lot of military force to be diffused into garrisons. Consequently, whereas Rome and Carthage can roll with punches, a major defeat means that a Hellenistic kingdom has to spend a few years recovering. That's not a catastrophic problem when facing other Hellenistic states who also struggle to capitalize on victory for the same reason, but against Rome the defect suddenly becomes fatal.
(I should note that this brittleness is not restricted to the successors. Alexander invaded the Persian Empire with one army and left another at home with Antipater, but that was effectively all the force he had. Had one of Alexander's narrow victories at Granicus, Issus or Gaugamela been a defeat instead, he had no real second force to fall back on (in stark contrast to Darius who can incompetently lose army after army and still live long enough to be assassinated by his own furious nobles). Alexander never has to pay the price for a brittle army because he doesn't lose, but this goes back to what is going to be one of my major contentions here: Alexander's army wasn't necessarily better, it just faced weaker opponents.)
In all three cases, the phalanx remains 'Macedonian' although the sense in which it is so is increasingly attenuated into largely fictive legal categories. But the phalanx didn't exist alone nor was it ever supposed to. The Macedonian phalanx was never intended to be the decisive arm of the army in which it served. Instead it was a key component of a larger Hellenistic army, the remaining parts of which were every bit as important as the phalanx, but both far less 'Macedonian' and far less discussed.
And that's where we're turning to next week.
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