Ancient Macedonian army at 4,500, asserting it was closer to 5,100 horsemen. The army led by Alexander the Great into the Persian Empire included Greek heavy infantry in the form of allied contingents provided by the League of Corinth and hired mercenaries. These infantrymen would have been equipped as hoplites with the traditional hoplite panoply consisting of a thrusting spear ("doru"), bronze-faced "hoplon" shield and body armour. In appearance, they would have been almost identical to the hypaspists. In battle, the Greek hoplites had a less active role than the Macedonian phalangites and hypaspists. At Gaugamela, the Greek infantry formed the defensive rear
Ancient Greek verbs three tenses are used, and they distinguish aspect only, not time: The optative mood likewise uses these three tenses, but there is also a future optative, used mainly to report indirectly what would be a future indicative in direct speech. Ancient Greek has no perfect progressive or past perfect progressive. Thus, the meaning "he has been doing" is typically expressed with the present tense, and "he had been doing (earlier)" is expressed with the imperfect tense: For further information on the endings, see Ancient Greek grammar (tables). Dictionaries of Ancient Greek usually give six principal parts for any verb. For