Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of ancient warfare answers with me.

Murray, I've got a question today about the Battle of Pidna, which is very exciting, a fabulous

battle, a very important battle, one with great consequences for the former Macedonian kingdoms, of course,

fought in the second century BC in 168 on June the 22nd, in fact.

So this is not quite an anniversary in any way.

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back us at any of those levels now today's question as i said is about the battle of pidna it's from

gregorio garrillo has asked us about the battle of pidna two questions actually about the battle of

pinner at different points in time one saying what was the sacred squadron that fought of the Battle of Pidna? How were they equipped and organized? And the second, can you please tell me what really happened at the Battle of Pidna and are the casualty rates that the sources give us correct? So, thank you, Gregorio. Now, the interesting thing, of course, about the Battle of Pidna is that it's normally used as the battle which ends the dominance of the Macedonian phalanx and shows the ascendancy of the Roman Legion. And in a way, that's true, but in another way, it's a bit of an oversimplification

of what happens at the Battle of Pidna. In a nutshell, at the Battle of Pidna, Lucius Amelius Paulus

fights Perseus of Macedon, the son of Philip V, who'd lost the previous battle of Kynoskephalai in 197,

and rough terrain essentially

destroys the unit cohesion of the Macedonian phalanx, the Romans get in the middle,

and destroy it, and that basically is the end of the phalanx.

Now, in a way that is true indeed, that seems to be what happened, but in another way, the reasons

for the demise of the phalanx

because of that aren't the phalanx's fault, depending on the source, and our best sources

are Livy and Plutarch, Livy's book 44, and Plutarch's life of Amelia's Paulus. paulus interestingly polybius who we know wrote about

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