Bret Devereaux

There’s a presumption that the Persians couldn’t stand up to Greek heavy infantry due largely to being outmatched in terms of arms & armor (and lighter arrows - both heads and shafts). I wonder if this is sufficiently challenged. The Persians weren’t fools. 1/5

They had plenty of contact with the Greeks and the money and smarts to adopt heavier shields/armor, longer spears. They had Cretan arrows and heads, they could have copied them. Why didn’t they? Or is the reporting we have misleading? I question “failure to adapt” as legit 2/5

Was some of this due to the levy system? Hard enough to get troops to show up, let alone arm correctly. Maybe easier to rely on Greek subject troops who were already armed/trained as needed? Xenophon and Strabo both report Persian “hoplites” (karadakes) in training corps 3/5

Was some of it due to staff-level officers being veterans of wars in “India,” Bactria, Sogdiana, Egypt, the Scythian steppe, and Iranian plains against lighter-armed opponents and being influenced by that experience? 4/5

I know I’m not the first person to ask about this, but I wonder if enough people are tackling it aggressively enough. Seems like we could have a better picture of what actually happened across the 6th-4th C’s BC. 5/5

The way I teach this is that the system is culturally embedded, both in the tight-knit polis-community (provides necessary cohesion for non-professional shock infantry) and in the different structure of agriculture in Greece (more medium-sized freeholders who can afford kit).

How confident are you in that hypothesis? How much of the disparity do you think it accounts for?

Fairly confident? Our evidence is not great, but I think it largely tracks. Much of the Achaemenid military was hard-to-change legacy systems and I just can't imagine that in, say, 340, it felt absolutely necessary to change.