The Makedonian phalanx -- why such depth?

[Paralus]

While caution must obviously be exercised when interpreting Greek military writing, this is a reductio ad absurdum. The Greeks clearly did appreciate technical precision, but it depends on who is writing and in what context. One could just as easily argue in the future that people today "just did not appreciate technical precision" because, for instance, people commonly call assault rifles machine guns in writing.

Clearly I have overstated the point (the line quoted lifted from a longer letter). I agree that there were technicalities that the Greeks (ancient) used. My view is that we, in an age of utter precision and with the comforting need to label and box in everything ‘just so’, apply a precision to words – or concepts – that the ancients would not see necessary.

Actually, I don’t know that that makes my view much, if any, clearer. Perhaps to quote Peter Green (Ancient Bearings p 257):

Historians, through their successive and partial recreations of past culture, build up, layer by layer, a multifaceted image or icon of the Greco-Roman complex from which all Western civilisation is, ultimately, derived. Our grasp of that civilisation, depends, in the last resort, on successive acts of translation or interpretation. Yet each generation’s interpretation differs: every reading is made from a “distinctive angle of vision”.

And, tellingly, in all three of those cases, those are interchangeable terms for a reason. A phalangite was a hoplite to the ancients, just one that fought in a Macedonian phalanx and not a regular phalanx; we are the ones who take the term hoplite to be something that it's not. Hypaspists were bodyguards, and so using the two terms to refer to the same unit is by no means unclear. Finally, synaspismos refers to bringing shields together - without any sort of reference to what shields are being referred to. Peltai were aspides, just a specific kind.

Absolutely. We, indeed, are the ones (well some of us) who apply such rigid technicalities to a word such as ‘hoplite’. Apside is another. Clearly Polybios is happy to describe Hellenistic phalanxes executing synaspismos: a shield is a shield is a shield. The same might also be said for hypaspist (I believe I have elsewhere): modern love of technical specificity should not render that as ‘80-100cm aspis carrier’. Peucestas, in India, was clearly performing his duty “bearing the king’s shield” (that of Troy).

You are correct with somatophylake. The ancient sources render this term for hypaspists (Diod. 16.93.3; 93. 9; 94.4 for example where Pausanias is described as somatophylake when he is clearly a ‘royal’ hypaspist) and paides basilikoi (17.65.1) where 50 ‘pages’ are somatophylakes. As well, we are familiar with its application to the king’s senior ‘counsel’ or adjutants. All are linked by the one aspect of their roles: protection of the king.

Interestingly, whilst on hypaspists and hoplites, Arrian regularly refers to the Macedonian ‘phalangite of the line’ as ‘hoplite’. He only rarely (by comparison) utilises the term pezhetairoi and, when he does it is in places one would not expect to find them such as his encounter with Diogenes when accompanied by his hypaspists and “foot companions” (pezhetairoi). Evidently if Alexander took along the regiments of the phalanx he will have blocked Diogenes’ sun!

So, to illustrate, one might dogmatically state that, technically, somatophylake refers to the king's seven adjutants. Such dogmatism would result in there being another fifty of them being sent to Alexander and that Lysimachus and Perdiccas were of "the seven" at the time of Philip's murder.

To quote Vinnie Barbarino: "I'm so confused..."