#thorakitai

[yr-hen-ogledd]

I’m seeing if I can clear a bit of space in the old cabinet, so these thorakitai are now up on ebay for those of you in the UK! And very much priced to move. If you want your own bunch of stabby Hellenic dudes, hit the link >>here<<

And they’re gone! That’s a nice chunk of fresh air in the cabinet.

[yr-hen-ogledd]

Stuff I finished in 2018: recent ancients.

[yr-hen-ogledd]

Thorakitai, finished & based. I might sell these somewhere down the road, but for now I have a small but well-armoured fist of stabby gentlemen.

The word thorakitai is generally translated to mean cuirassiers, referring to the armour they wore. A piece of art from the tomb of a soldier buried at Sidon (in modern Lebanon) is the main visual source for these guys and shows a man armed with a spear and thureos-style shield wearing a bronze helmet and a mail shirt, though it is possible that such soldiers might also have worn the linothorax armour that was commonly worn by other sorts of heavy infantry in the Hellenic world. Both the shield and mail were Celtic innovations and entered Greek service after Gallic Celts migrated east through Greece on their way to modern Turkey (where they became known as Galatians).

Though they are sometimes thought of as imitation legionaries, thorakitai were essentially an up-armoured version of the thureophoi, who were supposed to be a tougher form of peltast, who themselves were supposed to be light troops who were a bit more robust in a melee than pure skirmishers. You are essentially looking at the heaviest & most expensive form of a troop type who would normally be expected to hold the flanks of a hoplite or pike phalanx (depending on the era) and prevent them from being rolled up by the first good cavalry attack.

They did, however, see some use as line infantry in their own right. The strength of the pike phalanx is dependent on its maintaining a solid formation and this formation tends to become disrupted in rough terrain (with disastrous results). Thorakitai were much less dependent on a rigid formation for defence, so they would sometimes be used to mount attacks in hilly or mountainous terrain where pikes would fail.

[yr-hen-ogledd]

Continuing to expand my collection of stabby little men from the Hellespont. Another couple of peltasts and a first thorakite.

[yr-hen-ogledd]

A few day-lit images of the thorakitai.

[yr-hen-ogledd]

It turns out that trying to freehand “don’t tread on me” in google-translated Greek on a 1cm square banner was a bridge too far, but you gotta have a go at these things to know!