ProjectSeleukid - the first 28mm units, phalangites and Galatians

While my work on Project Seleukid has, for the most part, been pretty theoretical to date, Andrew has been forging away at his usual pace and has already brought two units together, both Victrix kits. The first of these is one of the three phalanxes that we will need for our Magnesia order of battle. The following text has been lazily lifted from something I wrote back in 2014 when I was building my 6mm phalanx units. However, the points raised still stand, so worth repeating.

The centre of any Hellenistic monarch's battle line was generally composed of 'Macedonians'. That is to say, those fighting in the Macedonian fashion, equipped with small round pelte (shields) and wielding long pikes in both hands, fighting in a massed phalanx between 16 and 32 ranks deep.

For the Seleukids, you probably shouldn't let the pseudo-ethnic Macedonian title lead you astray. There is every reason to believe that a high proportion of men serving in the ranks of a third century Seleukid phalanx were, genetically speaking, very far from being Macedonians. We can assume that there was a core of Greco-Macedonian colonists (or rather their decendants) which was almost certainly supplemented by non-Greeks who had received a Greek education and training.

Alexander the Great had provided Macedonian training and Greek education to 30,000 epigonoi, non-Greek youths who were to form the basis of his future phalanx and Eumenes and Antigonos Monophthalmos are both recorded as having employed pantodapoi, phalangites of mixed origins during the late fourth century BC. There is no compelling reason why the Seleukids would not have found it expedient to do the same thing.

While indigenous contingents from all around the periphery of the empire are found in the Seleukid army, there is never a mention of native Syrians or Mesopotamians from the geographic centre. I'd wager that the proposition often put forward - that the Seleukids did not want to arm their oppressed indigenous serfs - is a pile of tripe. I accept that they may not have wanted the native Syrians to raise 'independent' units with a national identity (such as the Kyrtian slingers, Elymaiote archers or Kilikian and Lydian javelineers for example), but that is not to say that they would not employ the man power available in a way that created an effective core of heavy infantry while at the same time spreading all the joys of the government message about loyalty to the king.

Writing of Antiochos VI of Kommagede in the first centruy AD, Josephus states: "At this time Antiochos Epiphanes arrived with a large force of heavy infantry and a bodyguard of so-called Macedonians, all just out of their teens, tall and trained and equipped in the Macedonian manner - hence the title, though few of them bore much resemblance to that martial race!" It is clear that here a unit of non-Macedonians was trained to fight in the Macedonian manner and I suspect the same to be true about earlier Seleukid armies.

Regardless, there seems to have been two basic bodies of phalangites: the agyrispides (silver shields), and the katoikoi (colonists). The prevailing theory is that the best young men of any village, colony or city would head off to Apameia, the military headquarters in Syria, and be trained up as agyraspides - an elite body of pikemen and the core of the professional army. After their period of service was up, they would be replaced by other youths and head back home to form a trained reserve. Any army called up for a campaign would then have the active argyraspides who were permanently in arms, supported by reservist katoikoi, mobilised only for specific campaigns.

Andrew's second unit are an unruley bunch of nudie Galatians - more than are required for Magnesia, but that just allows other options for the future. By the 220s BC the Galatians had been in Anatolia for a couple of generations. There aren't too many records around their equipment around 190 BC other than the fact the Kappadokian contingent were equipped in a similar way - whatever that means. On the balance of probability I suspect they probably didn't dash into battle naked by then (think of the sunburn!), although Angus McBride famously depicted them like that in a depiction of the Ptolemaic army...