phalanx

伊坂幸太郎氏の小説 "Remote Control" を読んでいます。前回引用した個所の直後の文から引用します。

He was prepared for a phalanx of policemen silhouetted in the door, but it was just Iwasaki who jumped in with him. The worried look on his face made it clear that something had happened.

"phalanx" はエジプトのPharaohを連想させるような古い言葉の様な気がしますが、辞書で意味を調べます。

・Oxford English Dictionary: a group of people or things standing very close together; The protesters ran into a solid phalanx of riot police.
・Collins Dictionary: A phalanx is a group of soldiers or police who are standing or marching close together ready to fight.: the police formed a phalanx to protect the embassy
・Cambridge English Dictionary: a large group of people standing very close to each other, usually for the purposes of defence or attack: Bodyguards formed a solid phalanx around the singer so that photographers couldn't get close.
・Vocabulary.com: A phalanx is a tightly knit group of people or things, like an army troop or a bunch of fans of the same band.
Phalanx refers to any tightly formed group of soldiers or officers, and historically defines a body of Macedonian infantry whose shields overlapped. From that sense, it came to mean any close-knit group. Another definition of phalanx — any bone in a finger or toe — also came out of the military sense: these bones work together closely, just like a military phalanx. The plural for these bones is phalanges, while the plural for the other senses is phalanxes.
ギリシャ時代からの単語ですね。