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
Thracian language the gospel all met in the church of the Greeks, where they celebrated the essential part of the sacrifice in Greek, and communicated all together..."" Thracian language The Thracian language () is an extinct Indo-European language, spoken in ancient times in South-east Europe by the Thracians. The Thracian language either belonged to the satem group of Indo-European languages, or was a centum language that had been strongly influenced by satem languages. A contemporary, neighboring language, Dacian is usually regarded as closely related to Thracian. However, there is insufficient evidence, regarding both languages, to enable the nature of this relationship to