Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Armour Plates" to "Arundel, Earls of"

called upon to provide armies for continuous service on distant expeditions. When, after the earlier campaigns of the Peloponnesian War, the necessity for such expeditions arose, the system was often strained almost to breaking point, (e.g. in the case of the Athenian expedition to Syracuse), and ultimately the states of Greece were driven to choose between unprofitable expenditure of the lives of citizens and recruiting from other sources. Mercenaries serving as light troops, and particularly as _peltasts_ (a new form of disciplined "light infantry") soon appeared. The _corps de bataille_ remained for long the old phalanx of citizen hoplites. But the heavy losses of many years told severely on the resources of every state, and ultimately non-national recruits--adventurers and soldiers of fortune, broken men who had lost their possessions in the wars, political refugees, runaway slaves, &c.--found their way even into the ranks of the hoplites, and Athens at one great crisis (407) enlisted slaves, with the promise of citizenship as their reward. The Arcadians, like the Scots and the Swiss in modern history, furnished the most numerous contingent to the new professional armies. A truly national army was indeed to appear once more in the history of the Peloponnesus, but in the meantime the professional soldier held the field. The old bond of strict citizenship once broken, the career of the soldier of fortune was open to the adventurous Greek. Taenarum and Corinth became regular _entrepots_ for mercenaries. The younger Cyrus raised his army for the invasion of Persia precisely as the emperors Maximilian and Charles V. raised regiments of _Landsknechte_--by the issue of recruiting commissions to captains of reputation. This army became the famous Ten Thousand. It was a marching city-state, its members not desperate adventurers, but men with the calm self-respect of Greek civilization. On the fall of its generals, it chose the best officers of the army to command, and obeyed implicitly. Cheirisophus the Spartan and Xenophon the Athenian, whom they chose, were not plausible demagogues; they were line officers, who, suddenly promoted to the chief command under circumstances of almost overwhelming difficulty, proved capable of achieving the impossible. The merit of choosing such leaders is not the least title to fame of the Ten Thousand mercenary Greek hoplites. About the same time Iphicrates with a body of mercenary _peltasts_ destroyed a _mora_ or corps of Spartan hoplites (391 B.C.).