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Short description

Thracian Peltasts are a versatile unit, speed and mobility making them excellent for skirmishing, though they can also hold their own in close combat.

Description

Thracian Peltasts are lightly armed soldiers that make up the majority of Thracian armies. They are excellent on missions that requir quick movement and action, like scouting, skirmishing, ambushing, and protecting camps, strongpoints, and marching columns. This made them very popular as specialist mercenaries for various powers in the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Their armament is attested quite early in 6th – 5th century Attic pottery as well as in the accounts of Herodotus and Xenophon. It is comprised of the crescent-shaped light shield, called pelte (thus peltast = pelte-carrier), javelins (akontia) with throwing thongs, and a short sword (machaira) or knife for close combat (Hunt, ‘Military forces’, in: Sabin & Whitby, The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare. Vol. 1 (2007), p. 120). In order to be able to move quickly on the battlefield, they wear no heavy armour or equipment, and are thus only dressed in tunics, colourful mantles, hats of felt or fox skins, and sturdy boots (Hdt. 7.75). Contrary to what was common among Greek light troops, Thracian peltasts often engaged in close combat, even with heavy infantry and cavalry, as they often accompanied their own cavalry into battle.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The Thracians were perceived as wild, ferocious, and repeatedly referred to as warlike peoples (Thuc. 2.98.3; Arr. Anab. 2.7.1; Liv. 39.1). Constant intertribal fighting led to a specialisation in mobile warfare, with a bigger focus on both cavalry and javelin-armed infantry – the peltasts – named after the light shield (pelte) that protected them. This specialisation made them quite appealing to the poleis of southern Greece, whose forces were mainly made up of heavily equipped infantry (hoplites), few non-professional skirmishers, and only a handful of aristocratic cavalry, if any at all. However, the Thracians were not the only ones with such a specialisation. Their Greek neighbours on the Chalkidike were also often employed as peltasts in this same period, probably due to regular engagements with the neighbouring Thracians. Already in the first years of the Peloponnesian War (431 – 403 BC), Athens asked their ally, the Odrysian King Sitalkes, to send them cavalry and peltasts (Thuc. 2.29.5), whereas Brasidas recruited a number of Chalkidian peltasts into his expedition force (Thuc. 4.123.4). In the course of the war, the effectiveness of Thracian peltasts became indispensable for the war effort on both sides, who continually added them to their armies (Athens: Thuc. 4.129.2; 7.27.1; Sparta: Thuc. 5.6).

Since the term ‘peltast’ referred to the small wicker shield these men carried, the term could be applied to several infantry types that were equipped with such a shield, like the Dioi swordsmen (machairophoroi) that Athens hired during the Peloponnesian War. Their versatility was demonstrated after they plundered their way through Boiotia and were intercepted by Boiotian cavalry, whereupon they formed a defensive formation with javelinmen in the middle, a tactic that would have been quite helpful to the Athenians to deal with the Syracusan cavalry during their expedition (Thuc. 7.30.2). Though the Dioi came too late to be shipped over to Sicily, Thracian DNA that can be connected to the 5th century BC army of Sicilian Himera has been found, demonstrating how far Thracians travelled to be employed for mercenary service (Reitsema et al., The diverse genetic origins of a Classical period Greek army (2022), p. 7).

This versatility stimulated the Greeks to establish their own peltast contingents throughout the war. It has even been argued that no Thracian mercenaries were recruited in the 70 years leading up to Alexander the Great’s Persian campaign, though this is a disputed topic (Griffith, Mercenaries of the Hellenistic World (1935), p. 239; Best, Thracian Peltasts and their influence on Greek Warfare (1969) pp. 110-119; Hunt (2007), p. 120). Nonetheless, the Thracians remained experts in their field. Both Xenopon’s Hellenika (Xen. Hell. 3.2.2-4) and Anabasis (6.3.6; 7.4.14-19) demonstrate the effectiveness of Thracians in their native role of peltasts. The Greek mercenary army of the Ten Thousand started out with roughly 13.000 soldiers, among whom were around 2.000 peltasts and skirmishers, 800 of them being Thracians. By the 6th book, only 1.000 peltasts remain, but still 700 of them were Thracians, showing how well they survived the hardships of the campaign up to that point. In the Spartan campaign in Bithynia, the commander Derkylidas got separated from his Odrysian allies, making his heavy infantry forces easy targets for the Bithynian Thracian-style peltasts. Xenophon emphasises the effectiveness of their mobility in combat against hoplites, saying: ‘The Greeks were shot down like cattle shup up in a pen’. (Xen. 3.2.3-4). The same thing happened to the section of the Ten Thousand that was exclusively made up of hoplites, after the army had split up into three parts. They were trapped and then continually harassed by Bithynian peltasts and cavalry and had to be saved by the other sections of the army (Xen. Anab. 6.3.6-23).

Both the Thracians’ (Xen. 7.4.1) and Bithynians’ (Hdt. 7.75) dress are described exactly the same: fox-skin caps, tunics, loose cloaks or mantles, and heavy boots of deer skin. It protected them against the weather of their native land while still allowing them to move freely and quickly over the battlefield. This typically Thracian dress can be seen on a variety of iconographic sources, for instance on a number of Attic vases from the 6th to 5th centuries BC (Beazly’s Archive no. 205278; 43664, 28761, 13447), as well as on the coinage of the Dentheletai tribe (Phrygian cap, pelte, and machaira, 4th century BC, in: Stoyas, ‘Two Peculiar Thracian coin issues’, in: HPAKΛEOYΣ ΣΩTHPOΣ ΘAΣIΩN (2012), pp. 143-186). The javelins that Thracian peltasts used had spearheads of 16-25 cm in length (Stoyanov, ‘Warfare’, in: Valeva et al., A Companion to Ancient Thrace (2015), p. 428). Their role as javelinmen was more emphasised in Arrian (Anab. 1.14.1; 1.28.1; 3.13), who calls them akontistai rather than peltasts (akontia = javelin). In Polybios and Livy they still appear as light armed mercenaries in the Macedonian, Pontic and even Bosporan army (Pol. 5.7.9: rearguard in Philip’s army; Liv. 32.25.10: javelinmen; 33.4.4: “caetrati”, i.e. peltasts at Kynospehalai, Dio. Cass. 36.9.3: Thracians formerly in mercenary service under Mithridates betraying the Romans; Diod. 20.22.4: 2000 Thracian mercenaries in the army of the Bosporan Satyros). As peltasts, they are not really seen in the service of the Roman legions, who mainly used Thrace as a recruitment ground for cavalry (Plut. Luc. 28; App. BC. 4.14.108).