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The text and the meaning of Arrian vii 6.2–5
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2013
Extract
The text of this passage was regarded as correct until recently. Then one sentence was held to be corrupt, and three separate and mutually incompatible emendations were made, of which no one commands general approval. Before emendations proliferate, it seems appropriate to consider whether the text is not sound as it stands. Let us begin with that assumption and come later to the emendations.
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- Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1983
References
1 The following abbreviations are used:
Badian: Badian, E., ‘Orientals in Alexander's Army’, JHS lxxxv (1965) 160 f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bosworth: Bosworth, A. B., ‘Alexander and the Iranians’, JHS c (1980) 1 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brunt: Brunt, P. A., ‘Alexander's Macedonian cavalry’, JHS lxxxiii (1963) 27 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Griffith: Griffith, G. T., ‘A note on the Hipparchies of Alexander’, JHS lxxxiii (1963) 68 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hammond: Hammond, N. G. L., ‘Some passages in Arrian concerning Alexander’, CQ xxx (1980) 455 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hammond Alex.: id., Alexander the Great: King, Commander and Statesman (New Jersey 1980).
2 See Arrian's proem.
3 Their accounts are given ais ὡς λεγόμενα μόνον according to the proem. Sometimes Arrian has to distinguish between two groups of authors, one of which includes his chosen authors. Then he notes the fact, e.g. at ii 12.3–6 λέγουσί τινες . . . ταῦτα μὲν Πτολεμαῖος καὶ Ἀριστόνουλος λέγουσι· λόγος δὲ ἔχει . . .
4 A. used similar criteria in selecting Asiatics for the feast of reconciliation at Opis (vii 11.8).
5 The phrase ἐπὶ τούτοις means ‘as well as this’; so too at v 25.5, cited in my text. This phrase is not dependent on προσγενομένη; for if it were it would be in the simple dative or with πρός and not ἐπί Yet Brunt 43 translates ‘a fifth hipparchy which had been added to these’. A worse defect of this translation is that τούτοις refers to the men who had been selected, and it seems senseless to say that a fifth hipparchy was added to them. The tacit understanding in the translation is ‘added to these (hipparchies)’, but for that one needs not τούτοις but ταύταις. In any case the word ἱππαρχία has not been used in the preceding part of Arrian's text.
6 This has to be added as the partitive genitive is alien to us.
7 Compare Xen. Hier. 9.5 ἄρχοντες ἐφ᾿ ἑκάστῳ μέρει ἐφεστήκασιν.
8 See n. 12.
9 One imagines a scene such as the Trooping of the Colour.
10 The katalogos is, as in Athens, the register for service; this is different from the ceremonial embodiment, which is expressed here by the verb καταλοχίζειν.
11 As in Anaximenes FGrH 72 F 4.
12 Hammond 465 ff.
13 ἡ ἵππικόν and τὸ ἱππικόν are the body of Companion Cavalry. I was the admissions to this body which upset the Macedonians. There is no mention of accessions to the other cavalry forces under A.'s command, and if there had been they would have been irrelevant to the matter under consideration, the grievances of the Macedonians.
14 The significance of προσ- seems to have been overlooked by Badian 161 ‘it was then, after the Gedrosian disaster, that Orientals were first admitted to the agema’, Bosworth 13 ‘the list is intended to be exhaustive’ and in the argument of Brunt 44. The first mention which implies admission to the agema is that of Oxyathres, mentioned later in my text. That was in 330 BC, and the προσ- confirms what was clearly probable, that a number of selected Asiatics were admitted between 330 and this year, 324. The significance of this further infusion is that they were young men—sons of Mazaeus, Artabazus, Phrataphernes and Oxyathres—who were taking this privileged position pari passu with the sons of men like Cratcrus, Coenus and Polyperchon.
15 The provision of weapons was no problem, since the 30,000 Epigoni had been equipped with Macedonian weapons.
16 This term, the Greek equivalent of a Persian title (see Xen. Cyr. vii 7.85), seems to have been adopted for Asiatics who were admitted to the closest association with A. in the Cavalry Guard and the Infantry Guard. The Persian Apple-Bearers had served as the Royal Infantry Guard of Darius, 1,000 strong. A. did not include them as fighting troops in the infantry agema, but he mixed them in the ranks of the Macedonian infantry, i.e. in the phalanx. Arrian here mentions things which he had read in his sources but not included in his narrative.
17 Justin uses the terms which were significant to the Roman reader. In the Roman army the legionary force of Roman citizens was distinct from the non-Roman troops, the ‘auxilia’. Justin here describes a fusion of the two, which did not happen in a Roman army.
18 This general statement suggests that it is correct to see the Macedonian weapons at Arr. vii 6.5 as being given to all who were transferred to the Companion Cavalry.
19 ‘The Paeonians’ and ‘The Thracians’, as named cavalry units, had been inherited from Philip by Alexander; they do not appear after 331 BC. This was one of many changes which he made in ‘the military system handed down from his ancestors’ (Curt. v 2.6). See Hammond, Alex. 164 fGoogle Scholar. Arrian iii 16.11 was dealing with a different matter, as Brunt observes in his Loeb edn p. 279 n. 14, namely the enrolling of the newcomers from Macedonia in the phalanx-brigades ‘by races’, i.e. the men of Old Macedonia to the brigades of pezhetairoi and the men of the cantons of Upper Macedonia to their particular brigade of asthetairoi (see Hammond, Alex. 154Google Scholar).
20 Not including the agema; see Hammond 465 ff. So too Brunt 43 ‘the mention of the new fifth hipparchy implies that somewhat before its creation there had been only four (presumably excluding the agema)’, and Berve, H., Das Alexanderreich i 111Google Scholar, ‘die Zahl der Hipparchen auf vier zusammengeschmolzen war’. Arrian assumed probably that his reader was aware that the Companion Cavalry consisted of these four hipparchies and the agema.
21 Arrian uses οἱ and δέ to mark off the units, as I have shown them above, one unit from Bactria, one from Sogdiana–Arachosia, one from Drangiana–Areia–Parthyaea, and one from Persis. If the size of the unit was 500 troopers, as suggested for the unit from Bactria in Hammond, Alex. 209Google Scholar, these four units matched in numbers the four hipparchies of the Companion Cavalry, before any transferences were made.
22 So too Badian 160: ‘it refers not to India … but, as the emphatic πᾶσα makes clear, to the whole of what we call “Alexander's expedition”’.
23 The size of a hipparchy is uncertain; for my arguments see Hammond, Alex. 189, 207Google Scholar and n. 95.
24 This contrast in Arrian's unemended text is unexpressed. Literally the passage may be translated ‘not barbarian entirely but (barbarian in part) for with the increase’ etc. Bosworth 21 cites a good example from Arr. v 13.2.
25 That is, not to a mutiny; but this was an important stage in the building up of the indignation which did eventually result in mutiny.
26 Arrian here uses ‘Persians’ to include Cossaeans and Tapurians; such wider meaning of the word should be borne in mind at Arr. vii 11.3 and 9.
27 As in Hammond 465 ff.; Brunt 45 and in his Loeb edn of Arrian p. lxxiii ‘by 324 the number (of hipparchies) had again been reduced to 4 or 5’.
28 One fallacy which has arisen is the idea that these selected men were organised as four hipparchies; this is not what Arrian is saying at vii 6.3 by any stretch of the imagination.
29 Bosworth cites Arr. v 25.3 and Ind. 3.9 and 10.9 for Arrian's use of ἐς ταὐτό. In the first two passages one may supply χωρίον. In the third passage the meaning seems to be ‘this happens to the same extent’.
30 This article owes much to the comments of the Editor's advisers, to whom I express my gratitude. The treatment of Arr. vii 6.3 in Tarn, W. W., Alexander ii (Cambridge 1948) 164 fGoogle Scholar. has not been cited, as it is unhelpful.