Alexander the Great and his Companion Cavalry (EVA0009)

Companion cavalry: the arm that decided every one of his battles

Alexander is in the middle of it, bareheaded, hair loose, xyston levelled, riding over a Persian who is already going down. Around him the gilded helmets of the hetairoi — the Companions — and a hedge of lance points at the angle of the charge. This is not a portrait of a king. It is a picture of the one weapon that won at Granicus, at Issus and at Gaugamela.

What a wedge does

The Companions charged in a wedge, point forward, and that shape is the whole idea: it concentrates the impact on a single spot in the enemy line and lets the formation change direction by following the leading man. They were not there to fight the enemy army — they were there to go through a gap in it, ideally the one the phalanx had just created by pinning everything in front of it.

The hammer needs the anvil

Alone the Companions would have been an expensive raid. The Macedonian system worked because the phalanx held the enemy line in place, unable to disengage, while the cavalry came round or through. Neither half works without the other — and the phalanx is the subject of plate EVA0051, seen from the receiving end.

The xyston, and why it is not a lance

A cornel-wood shaft, a point at each end. Two points, because the shaft broke on impact often enough that a rider who was left holding half of it needed the half to still be a weapon. It was gripped in the middle and used overarm, downward, into faces and necks — a weapon designed around the certainty that it would break.

Where the king rides

He is at the tip of the wedge or just behind it, and he is not wearing a helmet in this plate — bareheaded, so his own men can see who is leading. The Companions were not a bodyguard; they were the arm he personally commanded in the charge, and their name says the relationship exactly: companions, not subjects. They dined with him, argued with him, and occasionally conspired against him.

What happened to it afterwards

The Companions were an aristocracy on horseback, recruited from a small country. Macedon could not replace them at the rate three continents consumed them, and after Alexander’s death the successor kings raised cavalry from anywhere they could. The arm survived; the thing that made it work — men who had grown up together and would follow one man into a gap — did not.