I have been listening to podcast lecture on Alexander the Great and Macedonian battle tactics. The lecturer explained the Macedonian "anvil and hammer" principal, which was a departure from earlier Greek warfare. The way I understand it, Philip and later Alexander would typically place their shock cavalry on the right side of the line, and attempt to break the enemy's left so that they could flank the enemy and pin the enemy's army between the cavalry and the rest of the Macedonian cavalry.
The right/left placement piqued my curiosity. I believe that the lecturer said that the cavalry would come from the right (enemy's left) because it was harder for the enemy to defend. Is that because we are dealing primarily with right handed soldiers? If so, were Philip and Alexander essentially using the same principle developed years later in American football--that of the elite edge pass rusher who comes off the right side of the defense in an attempt to hit the quarterback (again, typically right-handed) in his unprotected backside?
If so, how else did handedness play into ancient battle tactics? Did anybody ever put a battalion of left-handed soldiers on the left side to try to counter these flanking maneuvers?
Do you have a link to the podcast? Here's a couple of points:
The Macedonian "anvil and hammer" principle, which was a departure from earlier Greek warfare.
Alexander the Great made no innovations to battle tactics. All his deployments and battle plans derived from Classical Greek practice. The specific concept of "hammer-and-anvil" tactics, generally meaning the use of infantry to pin down the enemy and cavalry to knock him out, was used by the Persians against the Greeks at the battle of Malene in 493 BC; the Greeks themselves tried to use such tactics at least as early as the battle of Potidaia (432 BC), a full century before Alexander's campaigns.
Unfortunately, the nature of Classical Greek battle tactics is not widely understood, and nearly every textbook will tell you that Alexander's tactics were revolutionary. I can't really blame your source for getting this wrong. However:
Philip and later Alexander would typically place their shock cavalry on the right side of the line
We have no description of any battle from the military career of Philip II of Macedon with enough detail to allow us to say what he typically did with his horsemen. In fact I don't think we have any secure source to show what he ever did with any of his horsemen. People just like to assume that Alexander's tactics probably went back to his dad's. It is possible, but only because (as I said) these tactics were pretty much standard practice in Classical Greece.
Now, this:
I believe that the lecturer said that the cavalry would come from the right (enemy's left) because it was harder for the enemy to defend.
This is the opposite of true. The left-hand side was the shield side, which meant that it was easier to defend. The Greeks typically tried to get at their enemies' right-hand side, where they were less well protected. The right-hand side is even referred to in the sources as the "naked side". Encountering enemy forces "on high ground on the right" was a tactical emergency serious enough to prompt the Spartans to develop specific formation evolutions to counter it.
However, the very fact that the right-hand side was vulnerable caused a strange feature of Greek infantry combat known as the rightward drift. Each man tried as hard as he could to turn his left toward the enemy as he advanced into battle, and to stay as close as possible to the man on his right, who could support him in combat. As a result, advancing hoplite formations always edged to the right. This meant that when the lines met, both right wings would find no one opposite them, while both left wings found themselves badly outflanked. In this sense the left wing was vulnerable in battle, but only if the army drifted in this way. We hear nothing about the rightward drift affecting Persian armies, so it's hard to know whether any of this was relevant during Alexander's campaigns against Persia.
There is a Biblical reference to a Kanaanite unit made up entirely of southpaws, but to my knowledge that's the only time anyone ever tried to organise such a force (and I can't find the thread now where this came up recently).