The "Fred thread": the Argead Macedonian Army

[Paullus Scipio]

Ruben wrote:

Aelian and Arrian do refer to earlier sources, and they do discuss hoplites as well as phalangites, but as I wrote before, it is widely recognized that they combined and altered earlier sources (i.e. adding in commentary on Roman cavalry alongside discussion of Hellenistic types). Asclepiodotus never mentions any offensive weapon for the heavy infantry other than the "long Macedonian spear." Please point out where Asclepiodotus (and not Aelian or Arrian) makes clear that he is writing about any sort of heavy infantry other than phalangites.

You will know as well as I that the ‘prologue’ describing the earlier works and writers present in Aelian and Arrian is missing from Ascepiodotus, but was almost certainly present originally. The most likely original for the manual was Polybius, via Poseidonius, and it is fairly clear that the ‘prologue’ was probably in that original. All three appear to have been modified by their respective authors. One cannot, I think, take any one version as ‘gospel’.

Some scholars believe Asclepiodotus to be furthest from the ‘original’ e.g.
“P .A. Stadter, CP 73 (1978) 117-118, however, argues that all three authors used Poseidonius directly, but Asclepiodotus introduced a number of modifications.

Poseidonius himself is known to have continued the Histories of Polybius, and it is probable that Polybius' own (lost) tactical treatise provided the basis for the Stoic's tactical work. Certainly the striking resemblance between Polybius 18.29.2-5 and 18.29.7-30.4, on the one hand, and Aelian 14.2-6, Arrian, Tact. 12.6-10, and Asclepiodotus, Tact. 5.1-2, on the other, argues very strongly for Polybius' position as the principal source for the entire tradition.”

FWIW, Asclepiodotus speaks of THE Macedonian shield, and defines it exactly as the others.

Stringent tests while optimum, are not necessary to determine ‘basic’ facts – and the test I suggested earlier is sufficient to establish the necessity of a porpax, and consequent impossibility of using a rimmed ‘Argive aspis’ with sarissa…

Such facts, no matter how "basic" you may think them to be, need to be established through proper tests, and not just supposition.

Why would a test such as I described not be a ‘proper’ way to determine physical limits of reaching around a shield, or what happens to a hanging disk when you thrust ? Just do it !!

…the Pontic Pharnakes shield in the Getty museum does not, in fact, have a diameter of 80 cm ( see below) and the smallest rimmed Argive aspis is about 82 cm.


Your variation is rather loose, and the size range is not as broad as “60-80” cm.The sizes are in fact as follows:-
The Hellenistic manuals : “8 palms” = 66 cm
Dodona (fragmented) : diameter unascertainable
Begora (fragmented, illustrated above) : 66cm
Dion (fragmented) : 73.6 cm
Staro Bonce (3 x fragmented) A) 73-74 cm; B) 72 cm (estimated); C) 66 cm (estimated)
Pergamum (intact); 66 cm
Pontus; 71-73 cm (NOT 80 cm, which is the diameter of the whole thing as displayed in the Getty museum – see photo- including the splayed out triangular pieces and tabs, which originally were bent over the rim to hold the facing in place)
Iconography:
Ptolemaic shield mould: 70 cm ( see attached photo)
Venice ‘life size’ sculpture from Egypt ( illustrated above) : 70 cm
Aghios Athanasius: white; 66 cm aprox; red and blue; 70 cm aprox on main frieze; on entrance 70 cm aprox ( see attached)
Stele of Nikolaos son of Hadymos: ( see attached) 70 cm aprox – note from shield position – flat, extended to left, raised – that it is almost certainly being held by a porpax.

All this demonstrates that the ‘Macedonian shield’, as used by ‘sarissaphoroi’ was around 70 cm (66-74 cm), as Katerina Liampi noted in her study; rimless, concave, and apparently getting more dished over time. The smallest diameter for an extant ‘Argive aspis’ is around 82 cm, and some are over 90 cm.

Firstly, the shield of Pharnaces differs between 79.8 and 81.4 cm in diameter in its current state (Paul Bernard, “Bouclier inscrit du J. Paul Getty Museum au nom de Pharnace I, roi du Pont,” in Bulletin of the Asia Institute 7 (1993): 11), with the former number measuring the diameter between dags, and the latter between the tabs on the axes. The actual diameter, when these were folded in (as on the Pergamon shield), is 78-78.5 cm.

There is something wrong with these figures. To begin with, the ‘dags’ vary quite considerably in size- quite obviously in the photo by a third or more. Blowing up the photo and scaling off shows that many of the ‘tabs’ are around 23-25 mm wide each.This means we must subtract 4.6-5.0 cm from the 81.4 giving some 75-76 cm diameter which must be reduced further if some allowance is made for the thickness of the rim, say an arbitrary 5 mm, giving an original diameter of 74-75 cm or less. By measuring the diameter of the outside circular ridge, one also gets a figure of 75 cm or so, and definitely not 78 cm or more.

Secondly, only the first calculation for the shields from Staro Bonce (73.4 cm) is worth anything; the other two are too fragmentary to give any sort of useful estimate.

That is debateable – the figures I gave came from “ Studies in 3 C BC shields found in Republic of Macedonia” – Piccardo, Amendola et al 2008, and seem to have been calculated from known diameters of the various concentric circles found on shields B and C ( shield A's actual diameter being measurable)

To these I might add:

The painted shields from the Katerini tomb: 72 cm.
The shields in relief from the tomb at Vergina: 70 cm.
The tomb of Lyson and Kallikles: 75 cm.
The shields in relief from the Veroia monument: 73-76 cm.
The tomb of Spelia in Eordaia: 69 and 72 cm.
The shields in relief from Archontiko: c. 62 cm.

Someone has been reading Markle, I see !

What source are you using for the Venice shield's size? My source (Polito's work on weapons friezes) gives a size of 68 cm, not 70

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Don’t recall….someone’s personal measurement, I believe…Many times, one discovers that variation in measurements varies not just with the measurer, but also what exactly is being measured - e.g. like some real shieldss which are not exactly circular, the same may be true of the Venetian example, and both 68 and 70 cm thus be correct......a famous example is the the 'Salaminian metrological relief', initially measured wrongly.

Non-life size iconographic sources are not of much use in this debate, unfortunately, as estimates can vary widely: compared to your 66-70 cm for the Agios Athanasios shields, Chatzopoulos estimates their size relative to the individuals as 71-86 cm!

86cm for the larger shields is impossible…it would imply the figures were over 190 cm/6 ft 3 inches tall ! IIRC, I read somewhere that Macedonians from warrior graves were around 165-170 cm ( 5ft 5 ins-5 ft 7 ins) tall.
Still, I’d agree it is hard to place much reliance on such depictions – the artists, after all, were not making “scale drawings”. Another example is the ‘pair’ of shields from the Spelia tomb – yet one is 69cm the other 72 cm ! The Veria sculptures were presumably also meant to be the same, five sculpted ‘Macedonian’ shields, but vary between 73-76 cm (plus two argive aspides 92-95 cm ). The same for the archontiko heroon/unfinished tomb – and since 62 cm is rather too small to cover the forearm, I would suggest the “aprox 62 cm” is a little under “life-sized”.
When artists/sculptors/sculptors dimensions of the same thing can vary 3-4 cm, such depictions must be taken as approximate at best.

So, we can do a final tally of the "hard" numbers:

Vegora: 65.6 cm
Dion: 73.6 cm
Staro Bonce: 73.4 cm
Pergamon: 66 cm
Pontus: 78 cm
Shield mould from Memphis: 70 cm
Venice relief: 68 or 70 (?) cm
Katerini: 72 cm.
Vergina: 70 cm.
Lyson and Kallikles: 75 cm.
Veroia: 73, 74, 76, 76
Spelia in Eordaia: 69 and 72 cm.
Archontiko: c. 62 cm.

Sizes thus are: 62, 65.6, 66, 68 or 70, 69, 70, 70, 72, 72, 73, 73.4, 73.6, 74, 75, 76, 76, 78.

I don’t accept 62 cm as accurate for the reason I’ve given, and the 78 cm of the Pharnakes example is also clearly incorrect, and in reality closer to 75 cm or so. This narrows the range to 66-75 cm or so.However, we need hardly quibble over the odd few cms! I think we would agree that the 'Macedonian shield' was generally 66-70 cm diameter.....

The spread is almost exactly between 60 and 80 cm, though with an obvious concentration around 70 cm. When these are lined up with the range of sizes for Argive aspides, you get a nice spectrum running from 62 cm all the way up to 100+ cm.

The smallest size for an rimmed aspis I know of is 82 cm. I don’t know of examples over 100 cm either – is this another “approximately life-sized” sculptural example?

As I have said, we can be quite precise about THE Macedonian shield ( see above); the diameter varied only between very narrow limits due to the size of the forearm ( itself clearly implying use of porpax). Further, these shields were not of widely different sizes, some rimless, some rimmed. The existence of shield moulds such as the ptolemaic one ( see attached) shows that these were 'mass produced', as does the fact that Ptolemy could despatch thousands of shields at a time to a Greek state to re-arm, also implying a high degree of standardisation and mass production. ALL the evidence is quite consistent.

Once again, this view is not borne out by the evidence. And we know that shields were mass produced, and yet on the Pydna relief and the Pergamon battle plaque, we see that almost no two shields are alike, with some possessing rims, others none, and varied decoration. There is thus much room for variety even with mass production.

The existence of ONE possible rim, and that doubtful ( see Paul B’s posts, and I agree with him that the shield in question is probably damaged and in fact rimless). If a ‘mould’ was used, decoration could hardly be ‘varied’ and the slight variations seen on the three shields on the Pydna relief are therefore likely to be individual variation of artists…..

As to the idea that a rimmed ‘Argive aspis’ was used with the sarissa, you are relying on a single use of this by Pausanias, writing nearly 300 years after the event, and the probability is that he was mistaken, and his source said simply ‘aspis’, which we have seen from the manuals could be used to describe the Macedonian rimless shield. This likelihood is heightened by Plutarch’s description ( 50 years or so before Pausanias) of the re-arming, for he uses ‘aspis’ only.

I will simply repeat what I wrote before:

Plutarch writes that Philopoemen equipped the infantry with aspis, sarissa, helmets (kranesi), cuirasses (thoraxi), and greaves (periknemisi). Pausanias mentions Argive aspis, long spear (dorasi megalois), cuirasses (thorakas), and greaves (knemidas). It's quite clear that they are both drawing on the same source relating the statesman's life (as also do Livy and Justin), only Pausanias is breaking down the individual pieces of equipment for the reader of his day. That source is, of course, Polybius, who personally knew Philopoemen and was obviously an experienced military man himself. So, Pausanias' source is certainly sound, and it becomes a question then of accounting for the differences between the two accounts, and in this case, as you yourself have noted, nothing is mutually exclusive between them: aspis can refer to the Argive aspis, or to the other round shields in use in the third century.

‘aspides’ need not be round, e.g Xenophon calls Egyptian shields that reach ‘almost to the feet’ aspides….

This is not a case of Pausanias assuming that aspis only referred to the Argive aspis: in 1.13.2, he quotes an epigram that calls Macedonian shields captured by Pyrrhus aspides. The only other time he uses the term Argive aspis, he refers to a monument decorated with them, but it is clear that he specifically mentions their type because the battle it commemorated was supposedly the first in which that type of shield was employed (2.25.7), so he is careful to use this term - elsewhere he uses aspis dozens of times to describe Argive and non-Argive shields in varied contexts without qualifying it. The only difference which needs to be accounted for is the lack of mention of helmets in Pausanias, but this is probably because it was obvious that the hoplites had used helmets before the reform, so it didn't need to be mentioned like the other elements of the panoply which were changed or added did. So, there is no reason to doubt Pausanias' testimony in this case.

…or Plutarch, on exactly the same grounds. It is even possible that Plutarch was Pausanias’ source, in which case Pausanias is clearly in error…

As to the reference to Cleomenes teaching the Spartans to use the sarissa and “to carry their shields/aspides by a strap/ochanus instead of by a fixed handle/porpax”, this does not necessarily mean in battle, and one definition of ‘aspis’ is a shield with a porpax – there is no implication that porpaxes were dispensed with. To muddy the waters further ‘porpax’ is a generic handle ( and can be used of part of a horse’s bridle for instance), not just armband, so the reference could be to the handgrips of ‘thureoi’ for all we know!( if Sparta went through a ‘thureos’ stage like other states ).

This is an incredibly tortured reading. The translation is "he raised a body of four thousand hoplites, whom he taught to use the sarissa with both hands instead of the doru and to bear the aspis with ochane, not with porpax." The implication is quite clear that he is referring to how the men fought with these pieces of equipment. Where do you find that a definition of aspis is "a shield with a porpax"? LSJ simply defines it as shield, without any specific qualifications. And finally, porpax only ever refers to the armband inside the Argive aspis, and not a grip, so the statement is clear.

I won’t argue with your interpretation, save to say that the other is possible. The reason that some think that the defining point of ‘aspis’ is that it has a porpax, not that it is circular, is in part because aspis is used of ‘long’ Egyptian shields….

As to Plutarch’s emphasis, it merely heightens the difference between previous and new ‘Macedonian’ equipment with its ‘ochanus/telamon’ – necessary to help support the weight of the shield in particular, which being rimless and smaller than the Argive aspis, could not be rested on the shoulder….. It does not say the aspis did not have a porpax, and should perhaps be better read as “bear the the aspis with ochanus rather than its porpax”