Originally Posted by
paulus
The first thing to note is how arbitrary the titles are. Two youths engaged in the "thureos with machaira" hoplomachy (a competitive event that became increasingly popular in the Hellenistic era) aren't necessarily "machairophoroi". Salmas of Adada, the first reference you linked, is probably to be classified as a thorakites, not a thureophoros, because of his armor, although without knowing which regiments they were assigned to and those regiments full names we can't really know. Many of the Sidon stele show, unsurprisingly, a mixture of weapons among men who were almost certainly in the same regiment. Most thureophoroi probably had a spear and a sword, as in the stele of Hekataios. The stele of Kartadis seems to show a javelin and a sword.
Anyway, judging panoplies by a few stelai is rather difficult. The images are of course selective. Some warrior images form stelai show no weapons at all, some show a lot of weapons (a stele from Pantikapaion shows a thureos, bow and quiver, looped javelin, and longsword, a dizzying "panoply" that may depict not what the horseman always carried but what he might carry in different occasions. But we do have depictions of thureos-equipped soldiers with javelins, like Dionysios the Bithynian from Alexandria, whose panoply included at least a thrusting spear and two javelins (probably a sword, too). A good bit of late Hellenistic-early Roman Bosporan evidence shows javelins + spears or javelins + swords. The Nilotic combat scene from some painting fragments in Toronto also seems to show a mixture of javelins + spears + swords, and so on.
Then there's the account of the Achaian army reforms in Plutarch's Philopoemen 9, which emphasized the use of javelins ("small spears") by the thureophoroi of the Achaean army, who had committed themselves to peltastike discipline since the Late Classical era, but re-equipped with thureoi in the 3rd century while retaining the multi-use small spears and the tactics. Of course Polybius' account of Caphyae suggests the extent of Philopoemen's reform was not so all-encompassing, or at least that the Achaean infantry included three types of thureophoroi, from euzonoi to thorakitai, and at least some of these carried javelins.
So the truth is there is a decent bit of evidence for javelins usage by men carrying thureoi. The exact lines between thureophoroi, thorakitai, euzonoi, etc. are a lot fuzzier than we can make them in a game, and the panoplies men might carry day to day more flexible than we can really show. Hope that helps.
Historical Question regarding panoply of Thureophoroi/Thorakitai.
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