Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Armour Plates" to "Arundel, Earls of"
7. _Alexander._--The reforms of Alexander's father, Philip of Macedon,
733 words | Chapter 15
may most justly be compared to those of Frederick William I. in Prussia.
Philip had lived at Thebes as a hostage, and had known Iphicrates,
Epaminondas and Pelopidas. He grafted the Theban system of tactics on to
the Macedonian system of organization. That the latter--a complete
territorial system--was efficient was shown by the fact that Philip's
blow was always struck before his enemies were ready to meet it. That
the new Greek tactics, properly used, were superior to the old was once
more demonstrated at Chaeronea (338 B.C.), where the Macedonian infantry
militia fought in phalanx, and the cavalry, led by the young Alexander,
delivered the last crushing blow. On his accession, like Frederick the
Great, Alexander inherited a well-trained and numerous army, and was not
slow to use it. The invasion of Asia was carried out by an army of the
Greek pattern, formed both of Hellenes and of non-Hellenes on an
exceedingly strong Macedonian nucleus. Alexander's own guard was
composed of picked horse and foot. The infantry of the line comprised
Macedonian and Greek hoplites, the Macedonians being subdivided into
heavy and medium troops. These fought in a grand phalanx, which was
subdivided into units corresponding to the modern divisions, brigades
and regiments, the fighting formation being normally a line of battalion
masses. The arm of the infantry was the 18-foot pike (_sarissa_). The
peltasts, Macedonian and Greek, were numerous and well trained, and
there was the usual mass of irregular light troops, bowmen, slingers,
&c. The cavalry included the Guard ([Greek: agaema]), a body of heavy
cavalry composed of chosen Macedonians, the line cavalry of Macedonia
([Greek: hetairoi]) and Thessaly, the numerous small contingents of the
Greek states, mercenary corps and light lancers for outpost work. The
final blow and the gathering of the fruits of victory were now for the
first time the work of the mounted arm. The solid phalanx was almost
unbreakable in the earlier stages of the battle, but after a long
infantry fight the horsemen had their chance. In former wars they were
too few and too poorly mounted to avail themselves of it, and decisive
victories were in consequence rarely achieved in battles of Greek versus
Greek. Under Epaminondas, and still more under Philip and Alexander, the
cavalry was strong enough for its new work. Battles are now ended by the
shock action of mounted men, and in Alexander's time it is noted as a
novelty that the cavalry carried out the pursuit of a beaten army. There
were further, in Alexander's army, artillerymen with a battering train,
engineers and departmental troops, and also a medical service, an
improvement attributed to Jason of Pherae. The victories of this army,
in close order and in open, over every kind of enemy and on every sort
of terrain, produced the Hellenistic world, and in that achievement the
history of Greek armies closes, for after the return of the greater part
of the Europeans to their homes the armies of Alexander and his
successors, while preserving much of the old form, become more and more
orientalized.
The decisive step was taken in 323, when a picked contingent of
Persians, armed mainly with missile weapons, was drafted into the
phalanx, in which henceforward they formed the middle ranks of each file
of sixteen men. But, like the third rank of Prussian infantry up to
1888, they normally fought as skirmishers in advance, falling into their
place behind the pikes of the Macedonian file-leaders only if required
for the decisive assault. The new method, of course, depended for
success on the steadiness of the thin three-deep line of Macedonians
thus left as the line of battle. Alexander's veterans were indeed to be
trusted, but as time went on, and little by little the war-trained
Greeks left the service, it became less and less safe to array the
Hellenistic army in this shallow and articulated order of battle. The
purely formal organization of the phalanx sixteen deep became thus the
actual tactical formation, and around this solid mass of 16,384 men
gathered the heterogeneous levies of a typical oriental army. Pyrrhus,
king of Epirus, retained far more of the tradition of Alexander's system
than his contemporaries farther east, yet his phalanx, comparatively
light and mobile as it was, achieved victories over the Roman legion
only at the cost of self-destruction. Even elephants quickly became a
necessary adjunct to Hellenistic armies.
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