Before and After Alexander

by Richard A. Billows

  —VOLTAIRE

  THIS REFLECTION ON THE NATURE OF THE KINGDOM OF PRUSSIA IN THE eighteenth century, whichever writer/thinker one should properly attribute it to, provides an interesting comparison to the Macedonia of Philip II. A succession of remarkable rulers of the Hohenzollern dynasty—from the “Great Elector” Frederick William (1640–1688) to King Frederick “the Great” (1740–1786)—created one of the most disciplined and feared armies of early modern Europe and used it to transform a mish-mash of inherited lands in northern and eastern Germany and north-central Europe into the tightly knit and tightly controlled kingdom of Prussia, which thanks to its remarkable army and officer corps became one of the great powers of Europe. It was the centrality of the army to constructing, uniting, and controlling Prussia that gave rise to the above reflections.

  Similarly, it was the creation of his remarkable new army, military system, and officer corps which enabled Philip to transform the disunited, weak, and backward territories making up the Macedonian lands into a united kingdom, tightly controlled by the king, and the strongest military power in the eastern Mediterranean region. Like early modern Prussia, therefore, Macedonia under Philip and Alexander was truly “an army with a state,” and a careful study of the creation and nature of the Macedonian army under and by Philip is, therefore, at the same time a revelation of the nature of the Macedonian state built by Philip. During his remarkable twenty-four-year reign, almost every element of the Macedonian army was fundamentally reformed by Philip, creating a new and innovative style of warfare which was highly demanding of the skills of the commander and officers of the army, but virtually unbeatable by any contemporary force or military system. The three most crucial elements of Philip’s new army were a completely new heavy infantry force, a specialized elite force of versatile infantry who were Philip’s main strike force and personal guard in battle, and a reformed and strengthened strike force of heavily armed cavalry. In addition, Philip developed specialized forces of mobile light infantry and light cavalry, which each played important roles in the overall military system; and he developed one of the first truly effective siege trains in Greek warfare, so that his military campaigns would not be stymied by fortifications. Finally, all these reformed and specialized military elements needed highly trained officers to lead them effectively and enable them to operate together on the field of battle under a coherent military plan. We must examine each of these elements of Philip’s “new model army” in turn, and then observe how the whole system functioned together in warfare and battle.

  1. THE NEW MACEDONIAN PHALANX

  In the words of Diodorus, writing about the first year of Philip’s rule: “he (Philip) first established the Macedonian phalanx” (16.3.2). That statement seems clear and determinative, but is in fact highly controversial. Diodorus wrote between about 60 and 30 BCE, some three hundred years after Philip’s day. The quality of his information depends on the source he was deriving it from, and we cannot be sure who that was. Meanwhile, we have another statement about the Macedonian army that seems at odds with Diodorus’ statement, and this other statement comes from a writer contemporary with Philip and Alexander, named Anaximenes of Lampsacus. The late antique lexicographer Harpocration preserves the following fragment of Anaximenes’ work:

  Anaximenes in book 1 of the “Philippica,” speaking of Alexander, says: “Afterwards, accustoming the most notable to serve as cavalry, he called them hetairoi (companions); and dividing the masses and infantry into companies and tens and other commands he named them pezetairoi (foot companions); so that both sharing in the royal hetaireia (companionship), they should remain most devoted.”

  The sense is that a ruler named Alexander established both the cavalry and the infantry and named them his companions. Here it must be noted that in the campaigns of Alexander the Great, the phalanx of Macedonian infantry are named pezetairoi in our sources. Evidently, therefore, the Alexander of Anaximenes’ passage is being credited with organizing the Macedonian infantry phalanx; and since the passage comes from the first book of the Philippica (history of Philip), it is often assumed that one of the two kings named Alexander before Philip’s time must be meant. That is to say, the Macedonian phalanx would have been established by either Alexander I or Alexander II.

  There are problems with either identification. If the Alexander of Anaximenes is taken to be Alexander I, then why is there no sign of a Macedonian infantry phalanx in the campaigns of Perdiccas II in the 420s as described by Thucydides, or in the campaigns of Amyntas III in the 380s/70s described by Xenophon? Neither of these contemporary and well-informed historians knows of any Macedonian infantry phalanx, though if it existed it must have played a part in the wars they describe. For this reason, most historians reject the notion that Alexander I could have established the Macedonian phalanx. That leaves us with Alexander II, but the problem with this ruler is that he ruled only just over a year before being assassinated, and it is not easy to see when he would have had the time or authority to do the work described by Anaximenes. Though one or two notable historians, such as A. B. Bosworth, insist that Alexander II must have been meant, it seems in fact highly improbable that any such radical change to the Macedonian military could have been made by this brief and unsuccessful ruler. But what, then, are we to make of this evidence? Well, the point of Anaximenes’ testimony seems to have been the naming of the Macedonian cavalry and infantry, their inclusion in the royal hetaireia. And indeed, our sources do reveal that under Alexander III (the Great) the Macedonian heavy cavalry were referred to as hetairoi, and the infantry of the phalanx as pezetairoi. Under Philip, conversely, the name pezetairoi was used, as we shall see below, for an elite unit who functioned as the king’s personal guard in battle; while the hetairoi were the king’s personal entourage of elite Macedonian and Greek companions (e.g. Theopompus as quoted by Polybius 8.9: “those who were called Philip’s friends and companions,” about eight hundred in number according to Athenaeus 6.77, who draws on the same passage of Theopompus). Several historians, consequently, have suggested, rightly in my view, that Anaximenes was actually speaking of the Alexander—Alexander the Great—in a forward-looking digression. This will be discussed further in Chapter 5.

  In sum, before Philip, we simply find no indication that any Macedonian phalanx existed, and we should therefore accept Diodorus’ statement that Philip first established it. Why was there no Macedonian phalanx before Philip, and how did he go about creating one? As we have seen in Chapter 1, what had prevented Macedonia from developing a hoplite phalanx like those of the southern Greek city-states was the fact that hoplite warfare was a citizen militia style of warfare: the warrior was responsible for arming himself. This was not a problem for the well-to-do “middling” elements in the Greek city-states, but Macedonia lacked such a well-to-do middle class, and for Macedonia’s poorer herders and farmers, let alone for the serfs, the expense of hoplite armor and weapons was prohibitive. Nor could Macedonian rulers, including Philip, afford the expense of providing ten thousand or more sets of hoplite equipment to poor Macedonians so as to enable them to fight as hoplites. That posed a serious quandary for Philip: he could recruit men, and he could no doubt organize and train them, but they would inevitably be lightly armored—lacking the expensive cuirasses, helmets, and shields of the hoplite warriors—and so, though they might put up a good fight against Illyrians or Thracians if well led and motivated, they could never make a stand against a southern Greek hoplite force. Philip was not content to have an army equal to the Illyrians and Thracians: he wanted outright superiority, and he wanted to match any hoplite phalanx in battle too.

  The solution Philip found to this quandary was as simple and elegant as it was effective. Since there was no way to armor his men in a manner equivalent to southern Greek hoplites, he found an alternative to defensive armor which gave his men a much cheaper form of defense that was at the same time a potent form of offense. He adopted a kind of pike, some sixteen to eighteen feet in leng
th (about five to six meters), called the sarissa (or sometimes sarisa). Probably deriving from the long spears used to hunt boar, a traditional pastime of the Macedonian aristocracy, it was first developed for military use (so far as we know) by Philip, presumably making its debut in the winter of 359/8. The advantages of this weapon were clear. Macedonia was, as noted in Chapter 1, a heavily forested region, and by tradition the ruler of Macedonia controlled the extraction of timber. Philip could thus easily provide as many wooden pike shafts as required at just the cost of cutting the wood. Another resource Macedonia enjoyed was mines: iron and copper were available to make steel spear heads and bronze butt spikes. As with the forests, the mines were a royal preserve, enabling Philip to acquire the necessary metal at low cost. This ready and cheap availability was a huge advantage, enabling Philip to equip thousands of men with this weapon quickly and easily. The second great advantage was the weapon’s reach: since a sarissa, at about seventeen feet in length, was double the length of the hoplite’s eight-foot doru (spear), a band of men equipped with sarissas could hold off a band of hoplites well out of reach of the hoplites’ weapons (see ill. 8), meaning that the Macedonian sarissa men had much less need of defensive body armor: the sarissa served as both offensive and defensive weapon.

  8. Re-enactors show reach advantage of Macedonian sarissa over southern Greek hoplite spear

  (Wikimedia Commons public domain image by Jones)

  The shaft of the sarissa, normally three to four centimeters thick, was fashioned from ash or cornel wood, which provided straight shafts with a tough grain. Since shafts about fifteen feet in length (minus the length of the metal spear heads and butt spikes) were relatively hard to find and very awkward for soldiers to carry, the sarissa shafts were fashioned in two pieces which were carried separately and joined together by a metal cuff just before battle (see ill. 9). The spear heads were leaf shaped, forty to fifty centimeters long (including the shaft attachment: see ill. 9), and made of steel strong enough to penetrate armor with a powerful thrust. At the rear end, the sarissa was fitted with a butt spike which served three purposes. In the first place, it enabled the pike to be firmly fixed in the ground, either when not in use, or to anchor it to face a charging enemy. Because it was often driven into the ground, the butt spike was made of non-corrosive bronze rather than steel. In the second place, should the shaft of the sarissa break in action, the butt end remaining with the soldier could be reversed and, with its spike, would still make a formidable weapon. Thirdly, the butt spike counterbalanced the sarissa by adding weight at the back. The soldier would not want to hold the sarissa in its middle section, where the natural balance point would be, but towards its rear, so that as much as possible of the shaft would project out in front of the bearer: that length was, after all, the point of the weapon. A heavy butt spike would shift the balance point of the sarissa well back along the shaft, and make it much easier to hold the weapon leveled with most of its length projecting, without the weight of all that projecting wood and metal (the spear head) weighing on the soldier’s forward hand and arm and tending to make the spear head droop to the ground.

  9. Head, butt-spike, and cuff of a Macedonian sarissa from the Vergina Museum

  (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

  Wielded two-handed and projecting out some twelve feet in front of the warrior holding it, the sarissa presented a dire threat to an enemy approaching from in front, and at the same time held that enemy well back from being able to harm the sarissa wielder with anything but a missile weapon. On the other hand, the sarissa man was vulnerable to arrows, javelins, or sling bullets; and the unwieldy seventeen-foot pike made him clumsy and slow to turn, so that he was easy prey to an enemy coming from the side or from behind. For protection against missile weapons, some kind of armor was needed; but the poor Macedonians recruited as pikemen could not afford extensive armor: else they would be hoplites. Since the sarissa occupied the left hand as well as the right, holding one of the large, convex, heavy hoplite shields with its double grip—one for the arm, the other for the hand (see ill. 3)—was out of the question even if it could have been afforded. Philip equipped his pikemen with small wooden shields, about two feet in diameter, that were strapped to the left arm leaving the hand free, and controlled by a neck strap. Much smaller and lighter than the hoplite shield, with its one-meter (about forty inches) diameter, the Macedonian shield (ill. 2) nevertheless covered much of the wielder’s torso against arrows and sling shot, and even javelins at a pinch. To protect the head, the Macedonian sarissa men wore relatively light, open-faced helmets of the Phrygian or Chalkidian type (see ill. 10), much cheaper than the full-head Corinthian helmet favored by southern Greek hoplites. Beyond this, the pikeman might wear a padded jacket or corslet of boiled leather or reinforced linen; and if he could afford them, some greaves (shin-protectors).

  10. Macedonian open face helmet from Muzeul de Istorie din Chisinau (Moldova)

  (Wikimedia Commons photo by Cristian Chirita)

  Still, a pikeman operating on his own was slow and easy prey; but the sarissa was not a weapon designed to be used in isolation. The point was to create a dense mass of pikemen, standing in close-order lines one behind the other, presenting to an enemy force a serried mass of pikes like a bristling porcupine. To ensure effective co-operation and co-ordination, the Macedonian pike phalanx was carefully organized and drilled to operate as a unit. The basic organizing sub-unit of the phalanx was the file of men standing one behind the other, each man belonging to a different line of the phalanx. The file of men in the phalanx was called a dekas: literally a group of ten, though the term could be used more generally to refer to a “company” of men (see the Greek Lexicon of Liddell and Scott, s.v.). In the case of the Macedonian phalanx, it seems the dekas was actually made up of eight men, with the front man of the file being the file commander—a position similar to being a corporal in a modern army—and the rear-most man, called the ouragos, also having a kind of “non-commissioned officer” status. Directly behind the file commander, in the second and third places in the file, were two experienced and trustworthy “double pay” soldiers, who would have to step forward to command the file if the front man were to be killed or incapacitated. Thus four of the eight men in the dekas were ordinary rankers, two were essentially (in modern terms) non-commissioned officers in charge of the file, and two were trusted veterans who could take over from the file commander at need. The responsibility of the file commander was to lead the file forward; by maintaining his place in the front line of the phalanx to ensure that the men behind him also occupied their places in their respective lines; and no doubt to call the order to lower or raise the pikes as needed to fight or march. The ouragos’ responsibility was to hold his position and keep the men of the file in front of him, ensuring that they did not turn to flight.

  With a file (dekas) of eight men, it is clear that a standard phalanx depth of eight lines was envisioned; this was also the standard depth of the southern Greek hoplite phalanx. However, there is much evidence to indicate that the Macedonian pike phalanx was in practice often a significantly deeper formation. It was common for two, three, or even four files to be drawn up one behind the other, giving a phalanx of sixteen, twenty-four, or thirty-two lines of men. The number of lines preferred would of course be determined by the equipment and formation of the enemy, the number of pikemen present and the number of men in the enemy formation, and the nature of the terrain. When confronting lightly armed Balkan (Illyrian, Thracian, and so on) infantry formations, a pike phalanx only eight lines deep might well be considered perfectly adequate unless the numbers of pikemen and nature of the terrain dictated a deeper formation; but when encountering the heavily armored southern Greek hoplite phalanx, it seems that a deeper pike phalanx of sixteen or thirty-two lines was definitely preferred.

  In addition to the file or dekas, the pikemen were also organized into lochoi (companies) of several hundred men—the exact details are obscure—each with its o
fficer known as the lochagos. The most important unit of the pike soldiers, however, was the taxis or battalion, about fifteen hundred men strong. Each taxis had its own organization and commander, and formed essentially an independent phalanx; for a phalanx is a formation, not a unit, and the infantry phalanx as a whole was made up of the individual fifteen-hundred-man-strong taxeis drawn up next to each other. Each taxis was recruited locally in the various regions of Macedonia: we know of taxeis from the regions of Tymphaia and Orestis, for example, and Arrian (3.16.11) reveals that when new Macedonian recruits reached Alexander at Susa they were assigned to the infantry taxeis “according to their ethnos,” that is, according to the region of Macedonia they came from. In the army with which Alexander crossed to Asia in 334, which was the army he had inherited from Philip two years earlier, there were twelve thousand Macedonian heavy infantry, while an equal number were left to serve as the Macedonian home army under the regent Antipater. The twelve thousand with Alexander consisted of six taxeis (a total of nine thousand men) plus the three thousand hypaspistai (on whom see section 2 of this chapter, below). This means that eight taxeis of pikemen were left with Antipater (8 x 1500 = 12,000), showing that in Philip’s army there were fourteen taxeis of pikemen altogether.

  Our best account of the superb training and discipline of the sarissa-wielding infantry in their taxeis in phalanx formation comes from the first year of the rule of Alexander, when his army was—let it be said again—the army he had just inherited from Philip, recruited, organized, and trained by Philip. Arrian tells of Alexander’s campaign in Illyria in 335, and of a situation where Alexander’s army was hemmed into a narrow valley overlooked by wooded hills occupied by enemy forces. His account of how Alexander maneuvered the pike phalanx to overawe and defeat the Illyrians runs as follows (Anabasis 1.6):