And, it should be noted, both the Achaean military, with which Polybius was intimately familiar, and its neighbours (as in, e.g., the Aitolians) employed both thureophoroi and thorakitai, so there is good reason to think that his testimony is accurate.First and foremost, literary sources, good as they may be for getting a picture of the people at that time can't be considered 100% accurate, as writers of that time would call things with one name, whereas they would be called something different by another. This must not be the case with Polybios, as he was Hipparchos of the Achaike Sympoliteia (Achaian League) from 170-169 BCE.
This is irrelevant because only Greek troops are referred to as thorakitai in the literary sources. We are dealing with a clear description of a battle group composed of homogeneous units, and not a mixed rabble.This is further complicated when one takes into account that when a "barbarian" faction would assault, it would sometimes incorporate in its host heavy infantry, lighter infantry, gaesetae (naked men with just a thureos), spearmen and swordsmen, all of them combined. How do you call them? I guess one would have to pick by either percentage of each composing element, or their role in the battlefield. This would have been a challenge to the historian back then, that is for sure.
And yet we, for instance, have a representation of a javelineer, clearly a light soldier, who wears a metal muscled cuirass on an Alexandrian funerary stele. His only armament is a handful of javelins and a cuirass, so would he be a heavy soldier?Then, something unimaginably simple comes along... Archaeological finds.
When you have thureos (meaning literally door in ancient greek) carrying troops who are clad in muscle cuirass like the following...it is difficult to classify them (found in present day Anatolia IIRC) as NOT heavy. The fact that they carry the thureos and are armored (thorax in greek) would deffinitely mean that they are thorakitai.
I did, but I must explain why I think this whole debate is fundamentally flawed. Thorakitai and thureophoroi are just terms from the literary sources. We clearly have archaeological evidence that shows units carrying thureoi, and so we somehow have to attempt to match these up with the archaeological record. We do not have any sources, such as funerary stelae, which directly link up any representation of a soldier with either of these titles, as far as I am aware.
In the aforementioned passage in Polybius (10.29), he mentions a unit composed of thorakitai and thureophoroi. Now, we must deduce from this that though these soldiers were similarly armed, there was a distinction between them that warranted giving them different names. Since, presumably, being armed with a thorax and a hoplite's shield would make you a hoplite, and being armed with a thorax and a pelte would make you a peltast (as in Iphicrates' peltasts, or the definition of the peltast described by Asclepiodotus), it follows that the reason these men are called thorakitai is because they were armed with a thorax and a thureos, a new combination of arms that required a distinct name. Therefore, we can deduce from the literary evidence that what distinguished the thureophoros from the thorakites was a cuirass. Some authors may have used thureophoros as a blanket term to describe unarmoured and armoured men carrying thureoi, but if you are employing both terms, as the EB does, it only makes sense to keep them as mutually exclusive, or else the entire sense of the word thorakites is lost.
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