solidity, and rendered it still more effective. He
introduced the large oval buckler and a larger and heavier spear. When
the phalanx was closed for action, each man occupied but three square
feet of ground: as the pikes were twenty-four feet in length, and
projected eighteen feet beyond the front, the formation presented an
array of points such as had never been seen before. The greatest
improvement effected by Philip, however, was the adoption of standing
armies instead of the militia heretofore in use throughout the Grecian
States. He also attached great importance to his cavalry, which was
composed of the flower of the nobility, about twelve hundred in number,
all covered with defensive armor; these he formed into eight squadrons,
and constituted them his body-guard. The usual formation of the regular
cavalry was in the form of a wedge, so as to penetrate and break the
enemy's line,--a manoeuvre probably learned from Epaminondas of Thebes,
a great master in the art of war, who defeated the Spartan phalanx by
forming his columns upon a front less than their depth, thus enabling
him to direct his whole force against a given point. By these tactics he
gained the great victory at Leuctra, as Napoleon likewise prevailed over
the Austrians in his Italian campaign. In like manner Philip's son
Alexander, following the example of Epaminondas, concentrated his forces
upon the enemy's centre, and easily defeated the Persian hosts by
creating a panic. There was no resisting a phalanx sixteen files deep,
with their projecting pikes, aided by the heavily armed cavalry, all
under the strictest military discipline and animated by patriotic ardor.
This terrible Macedonian phalanx was a great advance over the early
armies of the Greeks, who fought without discipline in a hand to hand
encounter, with swords and spears, after exhausting their arrows. They
had learned two things of great importance,--a rigid discipline, and a
concentration of forces which made an army a machine. Under Alexander,
the grand phalanx consisted of 16,384 men, made up of four divisions and
smaller phalanxes.

In Roman armies we see a still further advance in the military art, as
it existed in the time of Augustus, which required centuries to perfect.
The hardy physique and stern nature of the Romans, exercised and
controlled by their organizing genius, evolved the Roman legion, which
learned to resist the impetuous assaults of the elephants of the East,
the