Dr. Graham Wrightson

speaker

123 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2025 last heard May 2025

Dr. Graham Wrightson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Ancients · Successors of Alexander the Great · 25 May 2025 podcast

We have a lot of disagreements about stuff, but he has an awesome book on the Egyptian army through pen and sword. So it's very available. It's very good. And so we know a lot about that. And we have this one interesting text here.

Later in the period, the infamous Battle of Raphia, where the Ptolemies fought the Seleucids in this huge battle in the 320s, where Polybius, another Greco-Roman historian who I have an ongoing dispute with, he has this whole text where he describes the Ptolemaic army completely reforming itself. And they go to Greece and ask Polybius,

for Greek mercenaries, generals to come and reform and perfect the Egyptian army because it's not as good as it used to be. And so we have names of these generals and he gives description of their training methods and how they were divided into different units and all this different stuff, which we don't have for our other armies.

So for the most part, our knowledge comes from a few battle descriptions that where they describe the sizes of the units, and at the very least, the type of unit that is involved. So the most part of all of these, from Philip II onwards, is the Sarissa Phalanx, which is my special area. My research was involving reconstructing

48 actual Sarissas and then training people to march around as a phalanx to see how easy it was to do that and how quick you could become a functioning phalanx and walk up hills and over rivers and stuff. And that book, I haven't quite finished yet, but it'll be out in a couple of years. So they're all Sarissa phalanx.

So the main contingent of all of these Hellenistic armies, all the way through down to even Mithridates of Pontus fighting the Romans in the first century, their main unit is their Sarissa phalanx. And so most of our armies...

throughout the holistic world regardless of your country that's what they're built on and then they add on to the side of it you know your light cavalry your heavy cavalry your archers your javelin men all these other different components right and my book on combined arms talks about how this integration happened through the macedonian system and then takes place in the holistic area

So almost all of the armies are very similarly constructed. We know that from their heritage and from these battles that they take place. And they also integrate elephants and the Seleucids have side chariots, much to their cost. And so we know sort of what the unit types are.

We can somewhat trust our sources when they give us numbers for these units, although numbers in ancient sources are problematic in general. What we don't have is how you recruited these in all the different places, how they trained, how long they trained for, if the recruitment matches the name of the unit.

If we say this unit is called this region, does that mean all its soldiers come from that region, or is it just a name that they've inherited because it originally came from that region? We don't know for sure. The officer levels, that's what I work on right now, is trying to piece together.

If we can associate that, we don't even know the size of the basic regimental unit and all these different things. There's still dispute about the size of even regiments in Alexander's army. So we have evidence for some staff, and then there's very sparse evidence for other aspects of armies. Well, when you look at, say, the Roman army, for example, we know how they trained.

We know how they were gathered. We know how their muster worked. We know how they were commanded, where they came from, how they camped, how many people went into each tent and all this different stuff, right? We don't know any of that for the Macedonian ones. So as you say, when it comes to marching over these massive areas, the logistics...

is crazy to comprehend because we do not know really how these armies marched in these areas. And there's great books on logistics famously by Engels on Alexander's army. And for other different campaigns, we have some evidence like the analysis for Xenophon of the 10,000 marching back from from Asia Minor back to Greece and the logistics that go into that.

So we know some of it, and we can comparative look at other armies, as I and other scholars do, to compare how much fodder does a horse need, how many camp followers are coming with you. So when we talk about armies marching, I focus on embattled of the 70,000 soldiers, and you forget that there's at least another 70,000 people marching

in the army going with them as slaves or attendants or their families going on. We know the families were there because at the famous battle between Eumenes and Antigonus, the two greatest generals of the successors, Eumenes wins the battle, but he gets handed over to execution by his own soldiers because Antigonus captures the baggage train and he captures the families of Eumenes' soldiers.

And so to get their families back, they give up their general. So we know these armies on campaign are marching with massive numbers of tagalongs, right? Whatever you want to call them. And that's not just in the ancient world. That happens throughout history. It's often not written about. But when an army is on campaign, it has a massive train of people going with it.

Even the Seleucid Empire in itself that goes from Jerusalem at one point out to India is the biggest of all these successor kingdoms. And it's just huge. And they start being unable to control their distant territories that become independent because it's just too big.

Yeah, so the navy is very interesting. There's big naval battles like they're happening throughout the Greek world. The Peloponnesian Wars was a big fight between... naval powers in the end, right? And that's what decides it between Athens and Sparta.

But because of the economics of these countries, that they are huge, they have access to the Silk Route now, their own connections, and more merchants, more trade, more wealth in general than the smaller Greek cities. They can put out huge navies and they have huge armies to go with it. And so we start to see this inclination that bigger is better, as you say.

And so we get these presentations of Demetrius, the besieger in particular. We'll come back to his sieges in a minute. But for Navy purposes, he is famous in our historians, even in the Roman historians, for building massive ships. Normally, you get your tri-rings, which are your three-decked oars. By the time we get to the 4th century, we have five oars.

Showing 81–100 of 123 · page 5 of 7