Paul Johstono

I guess that makes me an ancient-military-history primitivist (which is odd - I'm a pretty unabashed modernist on econ. and law.). But I tend to assume if we don't have evidence for some kind of tactical/organizational sophistication, that's because it didn't exist.

I don’t know that that is a safe assumption when you have such a bad paucity of source material. The history of ancient warfare feels to me like one long string of lacunae.

We do have some arguments from silence, weak as they are. Xenophon describes Spartan formation drill in 3 different works, but never gives a hint of drill for out-running. Given the limited time for training perioikoi, drill would have to be minimal. &c.

But doesn’t this fall into the same category as your fantastic quote “Herodotus doesn’t mention the archers at Marathon either?” Surely there were dozens of collateral duties expected at least of perioikic hoplites (and maybe of homoioi) that go unmentioned? Or mentions lost?

This is why I mentioned peltasts and Skiritai at first. For those groups we have explicit mention of such duties. For hoplites it made no sense; others would do it better (ekdromoi in narrative accounts ALWAYS fail). Why formalise an ineffective stopgap?

For precisely the scenario at Lecheum - when you lack light infantry support. This raises a bigger question I’ve wondered about for a while, but it’s hard to think about because Pausanias is considered ahistorical and it provides the first example of a Sphacteria-like defeat 1/x

It's important to stress how rarely a hoplite force would have no support troops at all. The sources give just 2 examples: Marathon and Sphakteria. That is it. Ask any Greek author: this is emphatically NOT supposed to happen.

But at Sphakteria surely the Helot psiloi are going unmentioned? They’re there. We just don’t see them.