Jean Charl Du Plessis - The Seleucid Army of Antiochus the Great: Weapons, Armour and Tactics

To my wife, the flower of my life.

Weapons, Armour and Tactics

Jean Charl Du Plessis

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by

Pen & Sword Military

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire Philadelphia

Copyright Jean Charl Du Plessis 2022

ISBN 978 1 39909 179 4

eISBN 978 1 39909 180 0

Mobi ISBN 978 1 39909 180 0

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M y eternal gratitude to Professor John Hilton from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. I am grateful for his guidance and support throughout the process of writing my PhD thesis, which was published as this book. His knowledge and expertise were invaluable to say the least. He has taught me a lot about analysing and writing history. It was both an honour and a pleasure to have him at my side whilst taking on the PhD.

To Professor De Souza from University College Dublin, who was instrumental in defining the topic and in laying the foundation for my work. He has a wealth of knowledge on ancient military affairs and brought great clarity and structure to my ideas and thoughts. I am greatly thankful for his kindness and his support.

I am also deeply grateful for the National Research Fund (NRF) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship, which gave me the means to follow my passion and dreams and made it possible to pursue a PhD in Ancient History. It was an honour to be a recipient of the scholarship and I have a deep appreciation for the opportunity I was awarded, one I will forever treasure. Again, this book would not have been possible without their aid.

A special thank you to my editor Philip Sidnell and everyone at Pen & Sword whose hard work and efforts bring all the wonderful history books into existence, including mine.

Lastly, I want to thank my family and friends. To my amazing wife for her continuous support, her positive attitude, encouraging spirit and spending time with our wonderful children when I needed to write. To my mother who always encouraged my passion for history and her assistance in innumerable small things, which freed up time to devote to writing. To Kathy Fielding for her unwavering support on so many levels and her and David Butlers painstaking task of editing my work. To my wonderful children for obliging me to take compulsory breaks to play outside and constantly reminding me of the beautiful world beyond the confines of an office.

T he Seleucid kingdom was the largest and perhaps the most dynamic of all the successor dynasties that emerged following the death of Alexander the Great. Seleucus I Nicator (the Victor) managed to improbably parlay his small satrapy in Babylon, which he reclaimed in 312 BC , into a vast domain that stretched from Anatolia to the Hindu Kush. While the kingdoms boundaries fluctuated, at times wildly, throughout its history, it retained its basic scope into the mid-second century BC . The span of the empire encompassed vast ethnic diversity. Although Seleucid kings granted land to Greco-Macedonian colonists, generally in exchange for military service and established an archipelago of Greek cities through their territory, most of their subjects were native populations who had previously lived under the Achaemenid Empire: Greeks and Jews, Babylonians and Assyrians, Medes and Persians, Phrygians and Lydians, Parthians and Bactrians, and many others.

The Seleucid army was one of the great military institutions of antiquity, whose actions in the field are documented in the works of Polybius and Livy. The largest attested field army, at the Battle of Magnesia in 190 BC , consisted of 72,000 soldiers, and many thousands more likely remained on garrison duty at strong points throughout the empire. Seleucid kings right to rule rested heavily on the notion that they lorded over spear-won land, and their grip on power depended upon their ability to successfully command their forces.

The Seleucid army was a highly diverse force, centered around a core of Macedonian style troops, the infantry fighting in a dense pike phalanx, supported by heavy cavalry. This cadre was supplemented by a wide array of troops, some Seleucid subject peoples fighting in their native styles, others foreign mercenaries, often hired for their specialized capabilities. The Seleucid kings also maintained special, highly intimidating assets: scythed chariots and war elephants, the latter serving as an icon for the kingdom itself.

This tactical diversity was both a strength and weakness, a strength in that the varied weapons, equipment and fighting styles gave Seleucid kings and commanders a wide array of capacities to bring to bear against the enemy. They were a liability in that the complexity of the Seleucid array made it potentially difficult to adequately coordinate and control in battle. At best, Seleucid armies were lethal combined arms forces. At worst including at the disastrous defeat at Magnesia over-complicated battleplans collapsed into chaos.

To lead such armies, Seleucid kings and their officers needed an excellent understanding of the weapons carried by their soldiers, the armor that protected them, their tactical deployment, and how they might interact with other troop types. Thus, the great value of the book before you, examining the weapons, armour, tactics and capabilities of different elements in the Seleucid army, from phalangites to cataphracts to slingers, and in the final chapter considering how these different aspects came together on the field of battle. It has been over forty-five years since Bezalel Bar Kochvas The Seleucid Army: Organization and Tactics in the Great Campaigns (Cambridge, 1976), still a classic work but one which rested largely upon the literary sources. Jean Charl Du Plessis integration of archaeological evidence, including the results of recent experimental archaeology, offers a welcome new perspective on this ancient fighting force.

Michael J. Taylor, December 2021

Assistant Professor of History, University at Albany, SUNY