In one of many such passages in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari describe the assemblage as the imbrication of the social and the somatic, this time using an example from ancient Greek warfare: Assemblages [agencements] are passional, they are compositions of desire. Desire has nothing to do with a natural or spontaneous determination; there is no desire but assembling, assembled, desire [il n'y a de désir qu'agencant, agencé, machiné]. The rationality, the efficiency, of an assemblage does not exist without the passions the assemblage brings into play, without the desires that constitute it as much as it constitutes them. Detienne has shown that the Greek phalanx was inseparable from a whole reversal of values, and from a passional mutation that drastically changed the relations between desire and the war machine. It is a case of a man dismounting from the horse, and of the man-animal relation being replaced by a relation between men in an infantry assemblage that paves the way for the advent of the peasant-soldier, the citizen-soldier: the entire Eros of war changes, a group homosexual Eros tends to replace the zoosexual Eros of the horseman…. Passions are effectuations of desire that differ according to the assemblage…. Affect is the active discharge of emotion, the counterattack [la riposte], whereas feeling [le sentiment] is an always displaced, retarded, resisting emotion (497- 498 / 399-400) We are going to use this passage as a jumping-off point to examine some of the geo-bio-technoaffective assemblages at work in ancient Greek and Near Eastern warfare. We will look at the phalanx, but for greater contrast, we will not focus on the "zoosexual" horsemen, but on the berserker "runners" and their putative involvement in the 1200 BCE collapse of the Bronze Age kingdoms, of which Mycenae and Troy are the most famous examples. To describe these imbrications of the social and the somatic, I will use the term "body politic" (Protevi 2001; 2009)...