Ancient authors such as Aelian, Asclepiodotus, and Polybius all mention the Macedonian phalanx adopting a formation called the _synaspismos _in which the files of soldiers are so close together that their shields would overlap. Modern authors such as Walbank, Englishand Matthew argues that such a formation was impossible to assume in a battle scenario and that the ancient writers were mistaken, in its use in combat. Their argument is based on the fact that the manner of bearing the shield (...) (_peltē_) and pike (_sarissa_) does not allow for such a tight formation. Through the use of experimental archaeology, this article however argues that the _synaspismos _formation was indeed a possibility, and that we are mistaken in modern view of how the _phalangite _wielded the _sarissa _pike. (shrink)

Is mathematics a religion at all? Is science? One often hears these days that science is "just" another religion. There are some interesting similarities. Established science, like established religion, has its bureaucracies and hierarchies of officials, its lavish and arcane installations of no utility apparent to outsiders, its initiation ceremonies. Like a religion bent on enlarging its congregation, it has a huge phalanx of proselytizers--who call themselves not missionaries but educators.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hurricane Gloria LAWRENCE DUGAN A screaming northern gale flew past his wild words And slammed the sails, and pulled a wave toward heaven. —Aeneid, i.102–3 (Sarah Ruden, trans.) i. A phalanx of weather tools at the door, A shovel, an ice-pick, an umbrella, A new cane, leaning against each other, Plastic fabricated to resist storms, Reminds me of a storm I rode out years ago, The Nor’easter of (...) 1985, On the twenty-first floor of 5 Penn Center Across the street from where the Fox Theater Spread the bright wings of its marquee, folded Now forever, torn down, and then replaced With a glass-box not unlike the office I looked out of, watching the rain lashing Windows, tearing at the flags hung on poles On other buildings, solitary banners Left up as if to challenge the weather To do its worst, to refute the young storm Tearing northeast out of the Atlantic, Predicted only a few days before As a hurricane, that didn’t happen, But leaving the high-rise building nearly Deserted, with the ticker still running Across the wall; the market had opened Empty office or not, unoccupied Desks giving it that strange quietude Peculiar to such spaces, which the mind Expects to be filled, even while seeing Otherwise. arion 28.2 fall 2020 66 hurricane gloria I felt like a sailor for The only time in my life, stepping off The elevator at 21, and then Walking into the main hall and sensing The building swayed slighty, barely feeling It but knowing it distinctly, hearing It creak exactly as I had heard ships At sea in dozens of movies, and with The sound, the sway, the massive grid of pipes And beams giving and taking. jms Old timers hadn’t warned me about this Although some had ridden out several Storms as bad, real or metaphorical, Not even old Harris who remembered Moving down from Susquehanna county In ’29, to Wall Street and the Crash. ii. Future archaeologists of urban Storms will study pictures of umbrellas Taking flight, wrecked synthetic shapes blooming Against resistant hands, then abandoned, Stuffed into trash cans, twirling down alleys, Pastels, stripes or old-fashioned banker-black, The edge of the story, the windy street’s Last rebuke to those daring to stagger To lunch but caught in the nor’easterly Gale’s grey wall of wind and rain that rattled Doors and buckled windows. The building held Two dozen companies, and I still like To think one fronted for an anchorite, Some isolated individual Up on 24, alone at his desk In a skyscraper office for ten years Praying, sometimes looking down the cliff walls At the peregrine falcons sweeping home Lawrence Dugan 67 To their massive nest stuffed tight in the bronze Lap of a statue seated on City Hall, One of the allegories of Founders And Lenape chiefs placed high over Broad, The hawks diving downward athwart the storm Coming on in grey curtains wavering Over the city and the Delaware Valley. Across the river in Jersey The pines begin, in Camden the street dirt Is sand; halfway to the shore the forest Runs above the expressway, farms below, The pines flourishing in sandy barren Earth lacking nitrogen, incinerating Every dozen years, thousands of acres Blowing away in flames seen at the shore. After that rain those woods were safe for weeks. iii. Ten years and two jobs later I needed Census material and found it online On a rainy day in Center City In a high-rise office nearby, a halfDay ’s work done to my surprise in only Twenty minutes, then realizing as I Stood up from a computer that the view Was familiar. I was back on 21 In my old office; jms had moved But the grey sky cleared with a sweep of wind And the view north and south looked as before Wherever the market’s ticker-tape rolled now. The weather had surprised me again; The only full rainbow I ever saw, The ancient sign that spares the world from floods, A pure unblemished iridescent span, Appeared late in spring, in a sun shower.... (shrink)

It was a characteristic of Macedonian custom that a name was used in a special and in a general sense. For example, ‘Foot-Companions’ was the name of a Bodyguard of Philip and also of the men of the Phalanx-Brigades from Lower Macedonia, and ‘Hypaspists’ was the name of Infantry-Guardsmen of Alexander and also of the men of three Hypaspist Phalanx-Brigades. Geographical names were repeated: there were at least two regions and two cities called ‘Emathia’, two or three regions (...) called ‘Doberus’, four cites called Philippi or Philippopolis, and Alexandrias galore. To a modern mind this makes for confusion. That is certainly the case with the names ‘Macedonia’ and ‘Macedones’, which I shall treat separately in this article. (shrink)

In October 1854, around 150 years ago therefore, François Cantagrel, a disciple of the well-known utopian visionary Charles Fourier, set sail for the New World. He was leader of the first group of French Fourierist settlers emigrating to North America, where they planned to emulate their American co-disciples in establishing new ‘phalansteries’ there and hence to lay the foundations for the ‘phalanx of harmony’ to come. The instigator of the expedition was Victor Considérant, a great propagandist for Fourier's doctrine, (...) under whose mandate Cantagrel was sent out. The region chosen for the founding of the utopian colony was Texas, at that time in the midst of a great surge of settlement. Cantagrel bought a block of land in Houston, then a mere straggling frontier town on the edge of a bayou infested with alligators and mosquitoes, to serve as a staging post. Of more significance was land purchased close to Dallas, then but a village of 400 souls, for it was here in the next few years that a Fourier colony, ‘La Réunion’, was established. It came to number more settlers than the village of Dallas itself. But it resulted in a total disaster. (shrink)

Ii is a well-known fact that the men of the Macedonian phalanx under Philip and Alexander were known collectively asor ‘foot companions’. Our first reference to the name comes from Demosthenes, who in his second Olynthiac tries unconvincingly to disparage the fighting qualities of Philip's mercenaries andDemosthenes adds no explanation, and it was left to commentators and lexicographers to unearth a relevant fragment from thePhilippicaof Anaximenes of Lampsacus.

In Philip of Macedon , as part of a general survey of the development of the art of war in Classical Greece, I briefly adumbrated a view of the nature of hoplite fighting. It was not the conventional one, of which the following statement of Adcock in The Greek and Macedonian Art of War p. 4 is fairly representative: The effectiveness of the phalanx depends in part on skill in fighting by those in the front rank, and in part (...) on thephysical and moral support of the lines behind them. The two opposing phalanxes meet each otherwith clash of shield on shield and blow of spear against spear. Their momentum is increased by the impetus of the charge that precedes their meeting. If the first clash is not decisive by the superior weight and thrust of the one phalanx over the other, the fighting goes on. The laterranks supply fighters as those before them fall. At last one side gains the upper hand. Then the other phalanx breaks and takes to flight and the battle is won and lost. (shrink)

It seems to be widely agreed by modern scholars that when Solon created his four census-classes in early sixth-century Athens he gave to at least three of them – the ππες, the ζευγται and the θτες – names which were in pre-existing use there. But what, if so, did the names signify, before being assigned their new, official, quantitative Solonic sense? The archaic Athenian θτες were presumably recognizably akin to their Homeric and Hesiodic namesakes; and despite the etymological obscurity of (...) the word in any event, in practical terms it will have denoted men who by all relevant social, economic or military tests scored a negligible rating. In the case of higher scorers, however, it becomes important for us to discover precisely which criteria are being applied, and so it is the ππες and the ζευγται who have always posed the main interpretative puzzle. For the ζευγται Ehrenberg put it succinctly enough: ‘the zeugitai can be explained either as those who owned a pair of oxen under the yoke or those who are joined to their neighbours in the ranks of the phalanx’. Both these explanations – for convenience I shall call them the agricultural and the military – have indeed long had, and continue to have, their adherents. Most of the great nineteenth-century students of Staatsaltertümer took the agricultural line, usually without argument; and the standard lexica still do. In 1894, however, Conrad Cichorius made out a strong case for the military explanation, and he has had many followers, both witting and unwitting. (shrink)

The principal aim of this work, which is a combination of revised versions of essays that have appeared elsewhere together with some new material, is considerably broader than the title might suggest. Rather than specifically focusing upon Hegel’s relation to romanticism or the vicissitudes of his Grecophilia, the real thrust is nothing less than an attempt to place Hegel’s theory of the state within its historical and systematic context, to rescue it from the many misappropriations and misinterpretations which it has (...) suffered, and to sound out its implications for contemporary political theory and practice. If one were to single out a limited number of the most important themes that serve to unify this collection of essays, at least the following would have to be mentioned. First, Kelly insists at the outset that Hegel’s political philosophy can only be adequately understood within the context of his broader systematic project. Specifically, Hegel’s theory of the state must be approached from out of the more general problematic of his views on the systematic interrelationships between philosophy, politics, history, and religion. Though the author’s discussion of the complex issues lurking in the interstices here will seem to many Hegel scholars much too brief and superficial, particularly given Kelly’s own insistence upon their crucial importance, his discussion at least suffices to allow him to make the point that Hegel’s theory of the state cannot be easily assimilated into either the liberal, conservative, or radical traditions, as understood either in the pre- or post-Hegelian context. Rather, Hegel’s thought contributed to an important shift in the fundamental conceptual constellations which governed political discourse in his own time and which formed the bridge to our epoch. On this basis, Kelly proposes to examine Hegel’s theory of the state, both on its own terms and with an eye to the implications which it might yet have for understanding political phenomena. In both respects, the key notion is that of ‘the neutral state’ which knows "how to compose man’s spiritual strivings and intellectual curiosity... in a stable social whole", a dialectical ‘unity-in-diversity’ "checked by the monarchy from above and the people organized in corporations from below", and ballasted by an impartial legal system and a dedicated phalanx of educated civil servants. For Kelly, Hegel’s idea of the ‘neutral state’ was too soon "buried" in the post-Hegelian reaction, with the result that an original source of insight into the modern political problematic, if not of answers to contemporary political conundrums, was unfortunately and unfairly discredited. Kelly carries through with this idea by showing how Hegel’s theory of the state can serve to shed light on the history and current state of American politics and how it can lead to a renewed reflection upon the meaning and significance of history for contemporary thought. Kelly is at his best at those points where he contrasts Hegel’s political thought to other positions in the context of the modern intellectual and political milieu but is a bit weaker when issues arise which seem to require a shift from political theory to philosophical presuppositions. Nonetheless, especially when read together with the contributions of Avineri and Shklar, this work is helpful in the current re-evaluation of the importance and contemporary relevance of Hegel’s political thought.—J.P.S. (shrink)

This book is an admirable addition to the genre of books which concentrate on a single Platonic dialogue so as to exhibit the mutual dependence of the overt logos and the interlocutors' historically situated characters. The overt logos of the second half of the Laches is an aporetic discussion of courage, and Schmid shows how Plato portrays the different character flaws of the famous generals, Laches and Nicias, as hindrances to further investigation. Through a fine treatment of the relevant sections (...) of Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War, Schmid makes clear how these flaws also led to the failures of courage by Laches at the battle of Mantinea and by Nicias in the Sicilian campaign. He maintains that the secondary literature has failed to appreciate sufficiently not only that Laches' definition of courage is thoroughly traditional, deriving from Homer and Tyrtaeus, but also that Nicias's definition is not Socratic but rather sophistic and Promethian, connected with Periclean humanism. Laches defines courage as "the endurance of the soul" who fears disgrace, especially in reference to soldiers in a phalanx, but his definition omits the element of boldness, for instance, of a general who formulates an unexpected and even unpopular plan of attack or retreat. Nicias defines courage as "the knowledge of dreadful and emboldening things" which, for instance, enables a general to lead soldiers to victory. His definition not only denies the unavoidable contingency of life, and especially of war, but also overlooks the endurance of soul which is required to control one's fear of this contingency and to pursue one's plan. (shrink)