The "Fred thread": the Argead Macedonian Army

[MeinPanzer]

Where did you get "long abandoned" from? I don't think I said this....most of the city states seem to have changed one by one from hoplite arms to thureophoroi sometime after the Gallic invasions, c. 275 BC onward.....

That quote was from Fred - I was simply responding to both your statements.

It was the Aetolians success with missile armed peltasts/psiloi, and the relative failure of hoplites against the dreaded Gauls that likely caused a switch in the armament of citizen Militias from hoplite to a peltast-type 'intermediate' infantry, supposedly able both to fight as missile troops (requiring open order) and to be able to close up for hand-to-hand combat, though in reality they seem only to have fought hand-to-hand with their own kind, generally,and at the same time to adopt the Gallic-style thureos/oval shield.

I doubt that the switch can be attributed to the Aetolians' success specifically - we have no evidence for the adoption of the thureos prior to the mid-250s BC, and we have no idea when it was adopted in between. They clearly did change some time between 279 and 250 or so, but there could have been any number of reasons why by the time they finally made the switch.

You are being a little selective by only referring to one of our sources. Plutarch simply says 'heavy' aspis and 'long' dory - presumably the Macedonian 'sarissa', Polybius refers to these Achaeans as 'peltasts'. We have in fact had a detailed discussion of these reforms here on RAT in early 2008 "Pausanias on Achaean armament ca. 200 BC", which is still available in rather butchered form since the changeover to the latest version of RAT. Here is a quote from a previous post of mine on that thread.
[color=#0000FF]"First, Pausanias was living in a Roman Province, and probably came from Lydia.He wrote his 'Tour of Greece' between 174 and 180 A.D. He does not show particularly good classical or scholarly knowledge, and when writing of the past tends to rely on 'tradition' and 'what he was told'.

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.

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.

It is also clear that in 208 BC, Philopoemen reformed the whole Achaean citizen phalanx into Macedonian sarissaphoroi, from thureophoroi. There is no evidence,AFIK, that Achaea fielded traditional hoplites armed with 'dory/Argive aspides' at that time

It is well known from inventory accounts that shields could be stored in the hundreds in temple treasuries, for decades or even centuries. These were considered somewhat like arsenals, so that, much like treasuries located in temples, if the need arose, withdrawals could be made. If round shields were needed to arm citizen troops on wide scale quickly, they could easily have drawn on the hundreds (or even more) of Argive aspides which had been in use up until less than a century earlier and easily converted them into suitable shields by simply popping off the porpakes and adding on telamones.

And I can assure readers that it IS impossible to effectively wield a two-handed sarissa and a rimmed shield 85-90 cm in diameter ( the Argive aspis), from personal experience and that of Peter Connolly and other re-enactors, and this is so even if the porpax is not used and the shield simply hung from the neck ( which is impractical in itself anyway). See Connolly's various articles for how the neck-strap/[i]telamon was used in fact to support both sarissa and shield.
An "aspis with a neck-strap" in our sources probably means the Macedonian style pelta,(60-70 cm diameter) the reference to the neck-strap being used to distinguish it from other 'aspides' such as the traditional Argive one (85-90 cm diameter)

I think that, as with all reconstructive tests, they need to be widespread and they need to take all variables into account. It needs to be remembered that rather than two distinct types of shields, Macedonian pelte and Argive aspis, there is in fact a spectrum, both of size and shape, ranging from 60 cm in diameter, shallow, and rimless, up to 100 cm in diameter, dished, and with an offset rim. Shields between 60 and 80 cm are typically called Macedonian, those between 80 and 100 cm in diameter Argive, and yet we find numerous hybrids, like larger Macedonian shields with small rims, or smaller hoplite shields with small rims. I'd like to see thorough tests conducted with shields of all types so far known, so that it could be established, for instance, when a shield became too large/dished/large-rimmed to be able to employ with a sarissa.

Certainly, traditional hoplite panoplies did not disappear immediately with the appearance of the Macedonian one, and existed into the 3 C BC, even in Macedonia ( see Markle: A Shield monument from Veria), but we cannot rely on iconography for continued use of traditional argive aspides. As an attribute of Gods and Heroes, it continued to appear in art, on coins and in sculpture right into Imperial Roman times - but I doubt anyone would suggest that it continued in use in those times! I don't believe there is any certainty as to when the traditional Argive aspis finally disappeared, other than 'sometime in the 3C BC'.

I was only commenting on the appearance of the Argive aspis in non-heroic depictions. Nonetheless, there is sufficient evidence, epigraphical, iconographic, and perhaps textual (though I've not taken the time to look) to prove their continued existence after the Galatian invasion.