Lochos

The lochos (plural lochoi) was a tactical sub-unit of the armies of Classical Greece, and the name survives in the modern Greek army. The word comes from the Greek term for an ambush and the men who carried one out, but in practice it meant a war-band, a body of armed men, and it is the word often used for the Sacred Band of Thebes. Its size changed with the city-state and the century: it could mean a file of 8 to 16 men, or in Xenophon's account of Sparta in the fifth century BC a body of 640 men, four pentekostyes of 160 split into enomotiai of about 40, with two lochoi making up one mora. Units of around 300 men recur in Greek records and are close to the smallest force able to form a usable phalanx. The Byzantine army later used the word for a section of about 16 men under a lochagos, and the modern Greek military has revived it for a company-sized command.