Quote:3rd century was a time were the tradition of the citizen soldier had declined.
Many city states started relying heavily on mercenaries.
Not sure how you mean this, At least for Athens I was talking about the surviving citizen forces in the Hellenistic era, not mercenaries.
Quote: And yes olympic champions have flaws like everybody else and the writers you mention complain about individuals not about the habit of getting extra points for being an athletics champion.
True, and I don’t dispute that victories in the games could lead to fame and influence, I don’t know they would necessarily suggest one would be a good officer though. Looking at the careers of the fairly well know Athenian Generals who were solely military specialists (like Lamachus, Phormio, Demosthenes, etc), two things strike me: they do not appear to have been Olympic victors, and military experience seems to be the key factor in advancing up the ranks as it were. So I guess what I was trying to get at was while being a victor at the one the games might indeed raise your status, I’d hesitate to turn that around and suggest it was likely that a general had been an athletic victor.
Quote: Classic Attic pottery shows Skythian archers supporting hoplites.
Yes they served as police but it seems that they also helped whacking Masistios cavalry in Platea.
In general pot/art motifs do not necessarily imply reality, else one could very well assert the Greeks fought largely nude. But if I am not mistaken the pots with the hoplite archer combinations are dated to the era of Peisistratos, before the democracy (540/30 BC to maybe 500 BC on the out side). In other words the pots are very much likely to be providing images of Peisistratos mercenary army not the citizen army of the Democracy.
Overall I simply see no good reason to think the Athenian archers of Herodotus were Scythian slaves, and not Athenians…
Herodotus never describes them as Scythians only as archers (Diodorus provides no help here) even though they would represent a very unique and odd force, just the kind of anomaly that would attract his attention.
Using a core of slave warriors would represent an exception to Athenian practice in during the rest of her history. In general Athens used slaves en-mass as soldiers only when they had been enfranchised or offered freedom for service, or as the individual servants of citizens (and frankly I find the current CW a bit overwrought on this point.).
Thucydides can really be taken in no other way but to suggest that in 332/1 the Athenians had 1600 citizen archers, and the Scythians are conspicuously absent in Pericles’ list of military assets.
Both Aeshines (2.173-4) and Andocides (3.5-6) put the introduction of Scythians in a fairly nebulous time from after Salamis but possibly as late as building of the long walls. Both men also differentiate the Scythians from the large bodies of citizen archers the also existed (1200 according to Aeshines).
The plays of Aristophanes provide any number of references to the Scythians, but always in the context of a police force, never as a military force.
The Suda references are vague and seem to me to be more supportive of a police role than any military use.
Simonides’ Epigram (Greek Anthology 6 2) praises the Athenian bow for killing Persian horseman (well ok it is more vague really the bow in Athena’s temple) – which I seen cited as referring to Athens). I just can’t see Siminides writing for a band of Scythian slave archers.
The Themistoclese Decree implies something like at least 800 archers could be raised from the citizen population of Athens, for use on ships before Plataea.
Even if the Athenians did use the Scythians in the Persian wars they at best represented only a relatively small part of Athens’s overall force of archers.
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