The "Fred thread": the Argead Macedonian Army

[MeinPanzer]

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.

Stadter is the only one to postulate that Asclepiodotus modified Posidonius' work while Arrian and Aelian did not, because he thought aht Asclepiodotus was modifying his teacher's work while the latter two were merely copying from a canonical text. To me this seems way off the mark though, as it is apparent that Arrian and Aelian were more than happy to modify their manuals to suit their (and their audience's) tastes. Devine has shown, thanks to the survival of much of Polybius' writing on the Macedonian phalanx in his histories, that all manuals specifically drew on or copied from his work to write on the phalanx, and this clearly included the writing on the Macedonian shield.

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.

What are you working from to derive these numbers? That photograph you posted before? If so, that's an off-centre picture, and is hardly suitable for estimating such measurements. Bernard's article provides an excellent large head-on photo of the shield. The dags don't vary considerably in size, they are simply bent at various angles so that in your photo they appear to be of different sizes. You are also overestimating the size of the tabs, which project out barely over 2 cm. And if the Pergamon shield is anything to judge by, then there was next to no "rim" on this kinds of shield, so no more than a few milimetres is necessary there (working from Peltz's drawing of the shield in profile in his article on its restoration, I would estimate maybe two or three millimetres). So, we may estimate 2.1 cm x 2 = 4.2 cm + the .2 for the rim deducted from the 81.4 cm = 76.7 cm for total diametre - a little less than my previous rougher estimate, but still larger than any other shield found.

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)

Vera Bitrakova Grozdanova, “Makedonian shield from Bon?e,” in Scripta Praehistorica in Honorem Biba Teržan, ed. Martina Ble?i? et al. (Ljubljana: Narodni muzej Slovenije, 2007) and Pierre Juhel and Dushko Temelkoski, “Fragments de “boucliers macédoniens” au nom du roi Démétrios trouvés à Staro Bon?e (République de Macédoine),” in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 162 (2007) both state that the remains were too rough of the other two shields to estimate.

Someone has been reading Markle, I see !

Chatzopoulos, actually, who provides a more comprehensive list.

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.

Chatzopoulos states that he assumes their height to be 170 cm, and 172 cm is actually the average height of Hellenistic males of military age based on skeletal evidence, but it just goes to show you that there's plenty of wiggle room in measuring such images.

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.....

I've not seen the original report on the Archontiko shields, so I can't comment on the actual measurements, but I don't see why a 62 cm shield would be too small to cover the forearm. As for the Pharnaces example, I've shown above that its diametre is 76.7 cm, and so we have a range from 62 to 76.7 cm, with the majority of examples falling around 70 cm in diametre.

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?

Schwartz, in "Reinstating the Hoplite," 31, mentions a shield facing from Olympia which measures 120 cm in diametre.

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…..

Yet again, you are ignoring the smaller rim seen on the shield at far right as well. And if the artists of the Pergamon battle plaque and Pydna relief embellished these shields with their own fanciful decorations, then why should we trust any details of the shields? It simply makes sense given the numbers of shields which would have been necessary to arm a large phalanx that shields were manufactured with differing moulds, resulting in a phalanx which possessed shields with varied decoration.

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

It can refer to any number of different shields, but, once again, since they are clearly drawing from the same source, "aspis" in this case refers to the Argive shield.

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

That's highly implausible. If an ancient author could get easy access to direct and accurate accounts (Aratus, Polybius), why would he drawn on a contemporary?

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 ).

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….

Aspis was a generic term which referred to all kinds of shields of all shapes and sizes, including thyreoi, so this line of reasoning makes no sense.