Epariti
elite 4th c. BCE Arcadian military unit
Epariti (Ancient Greek: ἐπάριτοι), was an elite military unit of the Arcadian League. The name was of Arcadian origin and meant "selected", "picked".
Diodorus Siculus called them ἐπίλεκτοι ("selected", "picked", "elite").
Hesychius of Alexandria called them ἐπαρόητοι.
Stephanus of Byzantium called them ἐπαρῖται but is a misquotation and also misunderstood them as an Arcadian tribe from the town Eparis (Ἔπαρις).
This unit was formed after the defeat of the Spartans at the Battle of Leuctra and its role was to preserve the independence of the Arcadian towns and defend the common interests of the League. They were 5,000 and were paid by the state.
Xenophon wrote in detail about this unit.
“Epariti” enters the record as elite 4th c. BCE Arcadian military unit. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Epariti, elite and Arcadian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 22, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q9254252. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Epariti” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.