Aetolian and Achaean armies

[Paullus Scipio]

A timeline ( a brief one) may be helpful to give a skeleton to the 3 C BC changes to troops in Greece following the 'Alexander' period.....

279 BC : Gauls invade Greece under Brennus. He defeats combined Greek force at Thermopylae, later invades Aetolia where we hear of him beating a force including 'a few Achaean Hoplites' (probably mercs). Brennus sacks Delphi, before retreating in the face of the full Boeotian and Athenian levies , sorely harassed by Aetolian, Phokian and Lokrian light troops/peltasts. The Aetolian army at this time ( as at Thermopylae) consisted of 7,000 Hoplites, 800 or so light troops and a few cavalry - a force optimised for defence of the pass, for Aetolia's home levy would include many more light troops.The Aetolian army included elite 'epilektoi', led by an 'epilektarchos'.

c.277-275 BC: Boeotia becomes the first City State to re-arm Hoplites as 'Thureophoroi' ; after experience in Gallic invasion. Mercenaries too seem quick to re-arm with the Thureos, and a standard type soon evolves, armed with 'Thureos', helmet, no body armour, two longchai/short dual purpose throwing/thrusting spears, or sometimes doru/long spear and javelins. These Thureophoroi continue to be referred to as 'Hoplitai' on many inscriptions. We have iconographic evidence for this change e.g. the tomb of Euboulos, depicting a Boeotian helmet and Thureos.Feyel (Polybe et l'histoire de la Beotie) discusses Boeotian inscriptions that describe young citizens being recruited into the thureophoroi - dating from about the 270s to 240s. It is likely that others, such as the Aetolians, heavily involved against the Gauls, also re-armed with the Thureos at this time or shortly after.

Also around this time the Achaean League underwent reforms, and may have adopted 'Thureophoroi' in place of polyglot forces of Hoplite militia and Mercenaries.

c.245 BC : Boeotia suffers defeat at the hands of Aetolia, and either before in anticipation of the conflict, or after, following alliance with Makedon arms 'Macedonian fashion' becoming 'peltophoroi'/sarissaphoroi. ( as Ruben recounts above - I too think it more likely the change came after, following failure of Boeotia's Thureophoroi against Aetolia's)

227 BC: King Kleomenes III of Sparta succeeds in carrying through Land Reforms, and creating a New Army by distributing these 'kleroi' to 4,000 newly created citizens, who are joined by some 2,000 or so Helots/serfs able to buy their way in. Kleomenes arms these 6,000 men in 'Macedonian' fashion. We have no record of a 'Thureos' phase at Sparta.

219 BC: The Achean league finds itself unable to hire Mercenaries, and a call-up of the citizen trops is invariably too slow to catch Aetolian raiders and some of the Achean cities raise a 'private' force of 30 foot and 50 horse as a 'fire brigade'. This embarrasses the League into re-organising its Military Forces in 217 BC when we hear of a new 'standing army' of 8,000 Mercenary foot and 500 horse, plus 3,000 Citizen foot (including 500 Megalopolitan phalangites)and 300 Horse. A citizen force of this size existed previously and fought at Sellasia in 222 BC. 1,000 Exiles from the ransacked city of Megalopolis were armed as Phalangites by the Macedonians in 222 BC also. Phalangites are mentioned at Kaphyai in 220 BC, but may not have been Achaean ( the 1,000 Megalopolitans did not arrive in time).
In 208 BC Philopoeman re-armed the Acaean citizens as Phalangites, though some Thureophoroi may have been retained. Plutarch speaks of the Achaean Thureophoroi thus( Life of Philoepomen IX) :

In the first place, however, he changed the faulty practice of the Achaeans in drawing up and arming their soldiers. For they used thureoi which were easily carried because they were so light, and yet were too narrow to protect the body; and spears which were much shorter than the Macedonian pike. For this reason they were effective in fighting at a long distance, because they were so lightly armed,[presumably carrying javelins too, or perhaps more likely, using the dual purpose longche/short spear] but when they came to close quarters with the enemy they were at a disadvantage. Moreover, a division of line and formation into cohorts was not customary with them, and since they employed a solid phalanx without either levelled line of spears or wall of interlocking shields such as the Macedonian phalanx presented, they were easily dislodged and scattered.

The army at this time also included a variety of mercenaries -'Tarantine' cavalry, Illyrians ( who would have been armed in native fashion as 'peltasts' with round shields from the south, or 'Thureophoroi' if from the north), Thracian cavalry in 197 BC, Cretans ( in 192 BC ), Cretans and Thracians in 183 BC.