Carthaginians in Spain 211-206 BC?

[Duncan Head]

So...to the thorny question of Carthaginian shields.
By 215 BCE are the Libyan heavy infantry in Spain carrying a thureos?

Nobody knows.

My current guess would be yes, probably, if only because of the spined oval shields on Barcid warship coins; the harder question is, are they still carrying thrusting-spears or have they already started throwing things? Here is on idea from a site about the Baecula battlefield archaeology.

[rodge]

Thanks. I'll go with the thureos. Off to search for suitable 15mm thureophoroi...

[Jim Webster]

So...to the thorny question of Carthaginian shields.
By 215 BCE are the Libyan heavy infantry in Spain carrying a thureos?

My gut feeling would be yes.
Libyan heavy infantry in Italy at Cannae were virtually indistinguishable from Romans in 216BC
They'd acquired new kit as a result of  Trebia (218 BC) and Lake Trasimene (217 BC)
Now the fighting techniques used with a circular double grip shield or a hoplon seem to have been very different to those used with a thureos and you cannot imagine Hannibal re-equipping and retraining his successful veteran infantry in the middle of a campaign.
So I would assume that Hannibal's African infantry were carrying Thureos in Spain when they left

Would Libyan heavy infantry arriving in Spain from Africa have thureos?
Given that the Spanish had been 'depicting' the shields on vase paintings from the 'middle' of the century onwards.
Hamilcar arrived with his forces in about 237BC, so it could well have been that the thureos/Scutum was the accepted shield in the Carthaginian army by then

[Flaminpig0]

So...to the thorny question of Carthaginian shields.
By 215 BCE are the Libyan heavy infantry in Spain carrying a thureos?

My gut feeling would be yes.
Libyan heavy infantry in Italy at Cannae were virtually indistinguishable from Romans in 216BC
They'd acquired new kit as a result of  Trebia (218 BC) and Lake Trasimene (217 BC)
Now the fighting techniques used with a circular double grip shield or a hoplon seem to have been very different to those used with a thureos and you cannot imagine Hannibal re-equipping and retraining his successful veteran infantry in the middle of a campaign.
So I would assume that Hannibal's African infantry were carrying Thureos in Spain when they left

Would Libyan heavy infantry arriving in Spain from Africa have thureos?
Given that the Spanish had been 'depicting' the shields on vase paintings from the 'middle' of the century onwards.
Hamilcar arrived with his forces in about 237BC, so it could well have been that the thureos/Scutum was the accepted shield in the Carthaginian army by then

Thureos/Scutum would be very easy to source locally which might have been more important than esoteric arguments around tactical use.

[Erpingham]

Trying to keep out of this but curiosity getting the better of me.  Is the Carthaginian heavy infantry sequence hoplite with aspis - hoplite with thureos - imitation legionary with scutum?  Or am I misunderstanding?

Also, Duncan's reconstruction showed thureos and doru.  When did the two-logche armed Carthaginian arise?  Or was this just a theory in the WMWW debate which isn't actually securely evidenced?

Sorry if these questions are a bit noddy but I'm struggling to follow the sequence being plotted.

[Jim Webster]

Trying to keep out of this but curiosity getting the better of me.  Is the Carthaginian heavy infantry sequence hoplite with aspis - hoplite with thureos - imitation legionary with scutum?  Or am I misunderstanding?

Also, Duncan's reconstruction showed thureos and doru.  When did the two-logche armed Carthaginian arise?  Or was this just a theory in the WMWW debate which isn't actually securely evidenced?

Sorry if these questions are a bit noddy but I'm struggling to follow the sequence being plotted.

one of the questions I've been pondering is what, exactly, is an imitation legionary?

It cannot be somebody with a mail shirt? because according to some of our sources they didn't all have them. Also come the civil wars I cannot imagine there was the time or the stockpiles to provide everybody with them

It cannot have been somebody just with a thureos/scutum because all sorts of people used them

Somebody who was primarily a swordsman with a couple of javelins?, which could be of varying weights. (I've just defined some Spanish infantry here, and perhaps 4rd century celts because the very long swords are 3rd century onwards (?)

Somebody who practiced line relief? Which cannot have been very difficult, because when we first hear about it, it's supposed to be carried out by short service city militia

you've asked some damned good questions and I'd love to give you the damned good answers they deserve 

I've often wondered if the first Thureophoroi were 'imitation legionaries' popular because they were more flexible that pikes but pikes still rolled over things in pitched battles.

I note that Pyrrhus was in Italy and on his way back about the same time that Thureophoroi were appearing in Greece.

But there again, Plutarch describes the Achaeans as carrying "light, thin bucklers, too narrow to cover the body."
So sometimes the Thureos was less like the scutum than at other times

I suspect if we could go back and see what was actually happening, we'd discover we were asking entirely the wrong questions 

[Patrick Waterson]

one of the questions I've been pondering is what, exactly, is an imitation legionary?

It is supposed to be someone who is part of an imitation legion.

This implies Roman-style kit and Roman-style tactics, the latter implying Roman-style organisation.  The copy might not be exact - it might perhaps substitute pilum-armed legionaries for triarii - but the essential idea was to fight fire with fire, or rather legions with legions.  Mithridates VI came late to the party but seems to have made a wholesale commitment to the concept after Sulla thrashed the essentially Hellenistic Pontic armies in Greece.

[Patrick Waterson]

Also, Duncan's reconstruction showed thureos and doru.  When did the two-logche armed Carthaginian arise?

If we knew that ...

What we do know is that he was active in 218 BC, when Hannibal fought the Romans at the Battle of the Trebia.  There were, according to Polybius (who can be considered reliable, or as reliable as we are going to get), 8,000 of them.  Backtracking from that point is less easy.  We can surmise their presence at the siege of Saguntum a couple of years earlier, and more tenuously assume they were around when Hannibal took over after Hamilcar's death; it is in fact possible that they had coexisted with the doru-bearing heavy infantry since the First Punic War.

My own thinking, for what it is worth, is that Hamilcar would have found logkhe-using types much more useful than doru-bearing types for his hit-and-run campaigns in Sicily during the First Punic War, so if they did not already exist that would be the time when someone had motive and opportunity to invent them (or borrow them from the wider Hellenistic world; given that Xanthippus was in charge of Carthage's army in 255 BC we have a potential lender).

If this thinking is accurate, Hamilcar would have taken a mix of doru-bearing heavy infantry and logkhe-using peltast types to Spain.  Both types would probably have been using the thureos; if they had not adopted it prior to the First Punic War (e.g. during their alliance with the Romans agauinst Pyrrhus) they would almost certainly have done so during that conflict.

[Jim Webster]

I wonder if Hamilcar didn't switch to a 'imitation legionary' in Sicily. Certainly by the time of the Mercenaries war and after he probably had a pretty free hand to organise armies as he wanted

[aligern]

Mamertines?
Roy

[Jim Webster]

Mamertines?
Roy

Absolutely, but then you're into the territory of Ante bella punica:Western Mediterranean Military Development 350-264 BC, By Alastair Richard Lumsden
And he rather follows Quesada  (who is perhaps summed up with 15. MILITARY DEVELOPMENTS IN THE 'LATE IBERIAN' CULTURE (c. 237-c. 195 BC): MEDITERRANEAN INFLUENCES IN THE FAR WEST VIA THE CARTHAGINIAN MILITARY )

But in Sicily so many cities had been settled by mercenaries, officially and unofficially, and these mercenaries had become citizens and their their descendants relocated to other cities, how Greek were even 'native' Sicilian forces

So whilst we often see Pyrrhus taking back to Greece ideas he'd picked up in Italy, they might equally have been ideas he'd picked up when campaigning alongside the Sicilians

[aligern]

South Italians do appear to be shown using an aspis and a pair of javelins/ light spears and of course hoplites are shown with aspis and javelins. I suspect that Southern Italy could provide mercenary troops that used a pair of longche and that using a thureos came naturally too. As Ian said earlier,na thureos is rather less expensive to make than an aspis and such economies would appeal to a city of Levantine merchants. When you are equipping 20,000 men a small saving becomes a large one.
Roy

[Flaminpig0]

South Italians do appear to be shown using an aspis and a pair of javelins/ light spears and of course hoplites are shown with aspis and javelins. I suspect that Southern Italy could provide mercenary troops that used a pair of longche and that using a thureos came naturally too. As Ian said earlier,na thureos is rather less expensive to make than an aspis and such economies would appeal to a city of Levantine merchants. When you are equipping 20,000 men a small saving becomes a large one.
Roy

I wasn't aware that a thureos was less expensive to make than an aspis but that would explain why hoplites disappeared from Hellenistic armies. In the case of the Carthaginians in Spain it seems likely they would source what they needed locally which would be the same shield as being used by the Spaniards; the troops are mainly being used for 'police actions' etc so their exact equipment possibly doesn't matter that much.  However, as is so often the case with  ancient history once again this is a supposition we have no real proof either way.

As a side issue when I started  ancient wargaming thureophoroi didn't exist!

[Erpingham]

As a side issue when I started  ancient wargaming thureophoroi didn't exist!

When I started wargaming, Carthaginians had big round shields with unscrewable bronze bosses and wore red leather tunics.

[Flaminpig0]

As a side issue when I started  ancient wargaming thureophoroi didn't exist!

When I started wargaming, Carthaginians had big round shields with unscrewable bronze bosses and wore red leather tunics.

Some of their heavy infantry wore a sort of feathered fascinator, at least according to Minifigs.