The stele of Menas (Stele J) provides some more evidence in this matter. The lengthy epitaph on this gravestone reads as follows:

Although a long tomb contains my bones, stranger, I did not shrink back in view of the heavy weight of the enemies. Although I fought on foot, I stood my ground in front of riders among those who fought in the first line when we battled in the plain of Kouros. After I had hit a Thracian in his armour and a Mysian, I died because of my great bravery. For this, may someone praise the swift Menas, the son of Bioeris, the Bithynian, an excellent officer.

One may come and pour tears on the tombs of cowards who have died an inglorious death through illness. But earth has received me, who fought near the flow of the Phrygian river for my fatherland and for my parents, as a man who died while fighting with others before the line, having first slain many enemies. For this, may someone praise the Bithynian Menas, the son of Bioeris, who exchanged light life with bravery.

The battle on the plains of Corupedium in which he met his demise could not have been the famous battle of Corupedium in 281 BC, as has been supposed, because the armament of his dead opponents, shown lying at his feet, and the general character of the stele, indicates a date in the second century. Unfortunately, due to the damage done to this relief, little remains of the upper field carved in relief depicting Menas himself. A helmet lies behind him and he stands on what appears to be a thureos which cannot be attributed to either of the fallen opponents, but it seems unlikely that these are his. Nonetheless, the equipment fits in perfectly with the panoply of the Bithynian thureophoros, and the helmet is very similar to the others shown on Bithynian sources (most notably a mint issued by Prusias II showing a bust of the king wearing an almost identical helmet). The most important aspect of this stele is that Menas was an officer of the light infantry (the promachoi), yet his Bithynian family was both wealthy enough to provide him with a finely carved stele and educated enough to provide an epitaph extolling his virtue and prowess in battle in Homeric verse.

One would ordinarily expect the role of lighter troops such as these to be filled by mercenaries in this period (as they were, according to most evidence, in the Seleucid and Ptolemaic armies ). We may presume then that some sort of system was in place for placement of soldiers within the different branches of the army. Wealth was probably one criterion for placement (as it was in almost all citizen armies in the ancient world), but there must have been others, as it seems unlikely that wealth would vary so drastically within the siblings of a single family so as to require one to join the cavalry and another the “lights.” The next most likely criterion would be age. Perhaps Bithynian “ephebes” served in the light infantry and only with age graduated to the more prestigious and heavier infantry, or from the infantry to the cavalry.

Another Bithynian stele found in Dascyleum (Stele G) also shows varied arms being displayed by an aristocratic Bithynian cavalryman. Unlike the stele of Diliporis, in this case the numerous items displayed on the wall are entirely different from those that the deceased is equipped with in the register below. The man wears a linothorax and his attendant holds his large circular cavalry shield, while the register above shows a large thureos, two of the peaked helmets with wide brims, a muscle cuirass, and a sword. No inscription survives on this gravestone which could indicate if the deceased had any sons to whom these weapons could belong, but judging from the family members portrayed in the upper register, he either did not have any male offspring or they were too young to bear arms. These arms definitely seem to be Bithynian, excluding the option of their being war booty (a practice which was very uncommon on Greek personal funerary monuments), but it seems very unlikely that a man, even one wealthy enough to be able to afford such a stele, would own multiple shields, helmets, cuirasses, and swords. It could be that they were heirlooms, markers of the deceased’s family’s proud history of service in the military. This would mean that at least one ancestor from this élite family had served as a thureophoros, again suggesting that wealthy citizens also served in the lighter elements of the army.

The region of Bithynia has yielded several very unusual military stelai, and the gravestone of Nikasion (Stele K) is chief among them. This stele is actually a combination of two chronologically different stelai. The original stele, with the upper register decorated with a meal scene, was created for Nikasion, but was later altered to make his son more prominent. The changes were presumably made by this son, who also seems to have added the battle scene. This piece is interesting not only for its subject matter, a Hellenistic naval battle, but also for its mixture of figures and their equipment. Scenes depicting warships manned with marines and ready for battle are not uncommon in Hellenistic art, but scenes depicting actual naval skirmishes are very rare.

Nikasion's son is presumably the disproportionately large figure on the left ship. He wears a plumed helmet and a muscled cuirass with an officer's sash and carries a sizeable thureos. One bizarre aspect of his depiction is that the only weapon he seems to carry is a stone, which he prepares to throw in his right hand. His hand may have held a separate metal spear, as was common on reliefs carved more in the round, that is now lost, but his palm appears to be either open or grasping a circular object. Another relief, from Turkey, showing a soldier on a warship carrying a hoplon (the common Greek round shield with an offset rim) also appears to show the man holding a stone.

The other marine on the left ship is unarmoured, wearing only chiton and chlamus, and carrying a thureos. His right hand appears to have been broken off, but he may also have held a stone. On the other ship, a man, depicted nude and having fallen overboard, lies between the steering oars of his own vessel. Another fallen man, facing away from the viewer, lies on the deck of the ship and is being walked over by a marine bearing a hoplon. The thureos beside the ship probably belonged to one of the two fallen men; this type of thureos, with pointed top and bottom, no rim, and a thin spine that does not run the entire length of the shield, seems to have been used predominantly by Galatians. The fallen figure has a few distinct physical characteristic which may allow us to identify his ethnicity. He has overly long limbs, a bulging stomach, and what seems to be spiked-back hair. An Etruscan stamnos from the group of the Bonn Faliscan showing two Celtic warriors (one of the earliest representations of Gauls in Graeco-Roman art) shows a close parallel. One of the two warriors, who is dead, lies back in a very similar pose to the warrior thrown overboard on Nikasion’s stele. His gut is also similarly bulbous and his hair similarly spiked. It seems very likely that this soldier was a Galatian in the service of the navy of one of the other kingdoms on the Black Sea. This is an interesting indication of the use of Galatian mercenaries in the navies around the Black Sea in the Hellenistic period.

It is surprising to see the hoplon in use by the soldiers of the naval corps. Such heavy and large shields, ideal for combat in formation on land but cumbersome when used on the cramped decks of warships, were already being phased out in the context of naval warfare by Iphikrates in the early fourth century BC. Iphikrates, though famous for reforming the infantry of the Athenian army, seems to have tested his revolutionary changes first in the Athenian navy, of which he was appointed general in command upon his return from Egypt. The hoplite marines of the navy were the most active troops in the Athenian military, and so they would have been the obvious choice for testing out a new style of armament. Iphikrates unsurprisingly switched the hefty hopla for lighter “peltai summetroi”, probably oval shields of similar light construction to the thureos. Not operating in a phalanx, the extra width of the hoplon was no longer necessary, and the added height of the thureos provided better defense.

The battle scene on the middle register of Mokazis' stele (Stele A), the scene of combat on Nikasion’s stele (Stele K), and that shown on the surviving register of Stele B are extraordinary due to the number of figures involved in the melées featured on each. Three Bithynians are represented on the stele of Mokazis: a well equipped cavalryman (the deceased himself) and two infantrymen, a thureophoros and a spearman, who presumably are his sons. The two opponents of the sons are clearly represented in the nude; Mokazis’ adversary may also be nude, but that section of the relief has been badly effaced. Ordinarily, it would be assumed that these fallen soldiers were Galatians, who were always a favourite choice to play the part of the vanquished in the art of many of the Hellenistic kingdoms and who traditionally fought in the nude. And while one adversary does carry a sword and a thureos in the Celtic manner, the fact that the adversary of Mokazis’ thureophoros son is carrying a round shield seems to discredit this idea, as the Galatians (or at least their infantry) are not known to have commonly used round shields. The defeated thureophoros could either be a mercenary Galatian in the service of another state, such as the Pontic, Cappadocian, or Pergamene kings, or, in the light of the other nude non-Celtic opponent, he may be some other kind of mercenary or citizen infantryman. His companion bearing a round shield and perhaps wearing a helmet is probably a peltast.

Mokazis himself is an excellent example of the cavalry élite of Asia Minor. He wears a short chiton and chlamus as well as a cuirass, probably a linothorax. Between the mane of his horse and the head of Mokazis himself can be seen a curved line which seems to be the edge of a shield. Finally, he wields a spear overhand.

Of his two sons, the thureophoros is the most interesting; unfortunately, the other son, who wears only a chiton and wields only a spear, is an anomaly. It seems highly unlikely that a soldier would fight in battle with only a single spear, though this may indicate that this man was some sort of light infantryman. His brother, however, is a fine example of the common infantryman which could be found serving in the armies around Asia Minor and the Black Sea in the later third and second century BC. He wields only sword and thureos, but based on analogous evidence we may assume that his regular panoply also included spear.

Stele B provides an incredibly crisply preserved example of this kind of battle scene which is unfortunately missing its right half. Just as in Mokazis’ stele, we see a Bithynian cavalryman rearing back to strike at an enemy who disappeared along with the rest of the scene. The details on this relief are for the most part superb: even the torc worn around the fallen Galatian’s neck and the tiny weights at the corners of the rider’s cloak can be made out. The deceased wears equipment almost identical to Mokazis, though no trace of a shield can be seen behind him. His companion in arms, a footman, is truly unique: he is the only infantryman on any of the reliefs covered in this paper to wear a peaked helmet with a wide brim (identical to the rider’s), but he also carries a large, round, plain, and rimless shield with a sword. This kind of shield can be seen on another Bithynian stele, Stele H, but there it is carried by a cavalryman. It cannot be discerned if he wears any body armour. It is hard to place what kind of soldier this man is; is he perhaps a fellow cavalryman who, due to the conventions of funerary imagery, cannot be depicted on horseback in order to not lessen the heroic appearance of the deceased? If he were simply a regular infantryman in the army, he would have to be some sort of hoplite due to the large size of his shield.

It should be noted that there is no evidence that the Bithynians ever adopted the Macedonian-style phalanx in their army. Being a small state with neither the manpower nor the knowledge and expertise to organize and assemble such a military mechanism, they, like many of the minor states on the borders of the major Hellenistic kingdoms, simply never incorporated it into their military. As such, this kind of soldier would most likely have fought like the hoplites of Classical Greece in a looser formation. Without other similar examples to compare to, it is unfortunately impossible to determine more about this kind of soldier, but he provides tantalizing evidence that there were other, heavier elements of the infantry within the Bithynian army which are not represented in the other evidence.