Collections: Hoplite Wars, Part II: Hoplite Equipment, Hoplight or Hopheavy?

Collections, Weapon Studies 45 Minutes

This is the second part of what looks like it’ll be end up as a four part series discussing the debates surrounding ancient Greek hoplites, the heavy infantry of the Archaic (800-480) and Classical (480-323) periods. Last week, we outlined the contours of the debate: the major points of contention and the history of the debate and how it has come to its current – and I would argue, unsatisfactory – point.

This week, I want to stay laying out my own sense of the arguments and what I see as a viable synthesis. I’ve opted to split this into three parts because I don’t just want to present my ‘answers’ but also really use this as an opportunity to contrast the two opposing camps (hoplite orthodoxy and hoplite heterodoxy) in the process of laying out where I think the firmest ground is, which as we’ll see is something of a blend of both. That is a larger project so I’ve opted to split it up. This post will cover the question of equipment, both the date of its emergence and its use and function (which have implications for chronolgy and tactics). Then the next post will cover the question of tactics, both in terms of how the phalanx might have functioned on an Archaic battlefield where light infantry and cavalry remained common and important and how it may have functioned in a late-Archaic or Classical battlefield when they were less central (but still at least sometimes present). Then, at long last, the final post will cover what I think are some of the social and political implications (some of which falls out of the first ideas), which is actually where I think some of the most explosive conclusions really are.

However before I launch into all of that, I want to be clear about the perspective I am coming from. On the one hand, I am an ancient historian, I do read ancient Greek, I can engage with the main bodies of evidence (literary, archaeological, representational) directly, as an expert. On the other hand, I am not a scholar of hoplites: this is my field, but not my sub-field. Consequently, I am assessing the arguments of folks who have spent a lot more time on hoplites than me and have thus read these sources more closely and more widely than I have. I can check their work, I can assess their arguments, but while I am going to suggest solutions to some of these quandaries, I want to be clear I am coming at this from a pose of intellectual humility in terms of raw command of the evidence.

(Although I should note this post, which is on equipment basically is square in my wheelhouse, so if I sound a bit more strident this week it is because while I am modestly familiar with hoplites, I am very familiar with hoplite (and other pre-gunpowder) equipment.)

On the other hand, I think I do come at the problem with two advantages, the value of which the reader may determine for themselves. The first of these is simply that I am not a scholar of hoplites and so I am not ‘in’ one of these ‘camps;’ an ‘outsiders’ perspective – from someone who can still engage directly with the evidence – can be handy. The second of these is frankly that I have very broad training as a military historian which gives me a somewhat wider base of comparative evidence to draw on than I think has been brought to bear on these questions before. And that is going to be relevant, particularly this week, because part of my core argument here is that one mistake that has been repeated here is treating the hoplite phalanx as something special and unique, rather than as an interesting species of a common phenomenon: the shield wall, which has shared characteristics that occur in many cultures at many times.

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The Emergence of the Hoplite Panoply

We need to start with three entwined questions, the nature of hoplite equipment, the dates at which it appears and the implications for the emergence of the ‘true’ phalanx (and its nature). As I noted in the first part, while the two ‘camps’ on hoplites consist of a set of linked answers to key questions, the strength of those linkages vary: in some cases, answer A necessitates answer B and in some cases it does not. In this case, the hoplite orthodox argument is that hoplite equipment was too cumbersome to fight much outside of the phalanx, which in turn (they argue) necessitates that the emergence of the full panoply means the phalanx must come with it. Consequently, hoplite orthodoxy assumes something like a ‘hoplite revolution’ (a phrase they use), where hoplites (and their equipment) and the phalanx emerge at more of less the same time, rapidly remaking the politics of the polis and polis warfare.

By contrast, hoplite heterodoxy unlinks these issues, by arguing that hoplite equipment is not that cumbersome and so need not necessitate the phalanx, while at the same time noting that such equipment emerged gradually and the fully panoply appeared rather later than hoplite orthodoxy might suggest. But this plays into a larger argument that hoplites developed outside of close-order formations and could function just as well in skirmish or open-order environments.

As an aside, I want to clarify terminology here: we are not dealing, this week, with the question of ‘the phalanx.’ That term’s use is heavily subject to definition and we need to have that definitional fight out before we use it. So instead, we are going to talk about ‘close order‘ formations (close intervals (combat width sub-150cm or so), fixed positioning) as compared to ‘open order‘ (wide intervals (combat width 150cm+), somewhat flexible positioning) and skirmishing (arbitrary intervals, infinitely flexible positioning). And in particular, we’re interested in a big ‘family’ of close-order formations I am going to call shield walls, which is any formation where combatants stand close enough together to mutually support with shields (which is often not shoulder-to-shoulder, but often more like 1m combat widths). We will untangle how a phalanx fits into these categories later.

We can start, I think, with the easy part: when does hoplite equipment show up in the evidence-record. This is the easier question because it can be answered with some decision by archaeology: when you have dated examples of the gear or representations of it in artwork, it exists; if you do not, it probably doesn’t yet. We should be clear here that we’re working with a terminus post quem (‘limit before which’), which is to say our evidence will give us the latest possible date of something: if we find that the earliest, say, Archaic bell-cuirass we have is c. 720, then c. 721 is the last possible date that this armor might not yet have existed. But of course there could have been still earlier armors which do not survive: so new discoveries can shift dates back but not forward in time. That said, our evidence – archaeology of arms buttressed by artwork of soldiers – is fairly decent and it would be a major surprise if any of these dates shifted by more than a decade or two.

(An aside before I go further: I am focused here mostly on the when of hoplite equipment. There is also a really interesting question of the where of early hoplite equipment. Older hoplite orthodox scholars assumed hoplite equipment emerged in Greece ex nihilo and was peculiar to the Greeks, but this vision has been challenged and I think is rightly challenged (by, e.g. J. Brouwers, Henchmen of Ares (2013), reviewed favorably by Sean Manning here). In particular, the fact that a lot of our evidence comes from either Southern Italy or Anatolia is not always well appreciated in these debates. We don’t have the space to untangle those arguments (and I am not versed enough on the eastern side) but it is well worth remembering that Archaic Greece was not culturally isolated and that influences eastern and western are easy to demonstrate.)

And what our evidence suggests is that Anthony Snodgrass was right:2 hoplite equipment emerges peicemeal and gradually (and were adopted even slower), not all at once and did so well before we have evidence by any other metric for fighting in the phalanx (which comes towards the end of the equipment’s developmental timeline).

The earliest piece of distinctively hoplite equipment that we see in artwork is the circular aspis, which starts showing up around c. 750, but takes a long time to displace other, lighter shield forms, only pushing out these other types in artwork (Diplyon shields with ‘carve outs’ on either side giving them a figure-8 design, squarish shields, center-grip shields) in the back half of the 600s. Metal helmets begin appearing first in the late 8th century (a couple of decades behind the earliest aspides), with the oldest type being the open-faced Kegelhelm, which evolved into the also open-faced ‘Illyrian‘ helmet (please ignore the ethnic signifiers used on these helmet names, they are usually not historically grounded). By the early seventh century – so just a few decades later – we start to get our first close-faced helmets, the early Corinthian helmet types, which is going to be the most popular – but by no means only – helmet for hoplites for the rest of the Archaic and early Classical.

Via Wikipedia, a black-figure amphora (c. 560) showing a battle scene. The warriors on the left hold aspides and wear Corinthian helmets, while the ones on the right carry diplyon shields (which look to have the two-points-of-contact grip the aspis does). I useful reminder that non-hoplite equipment was not immediately or even necessarily very rapidly displaced by what became the hoplite standard.

Coming fairly quickly after the appearance of metal helmets is metal body armor, with the earliest dated example (to my knowledge) still being the the Argos cuirass (c. 720), which is the first of the ‘bell cuirass’ type, which will evolve into the later muscle cuirass you are likely familiar with, which appears at the tail end of the Archaic as an artistic elaboration of the design.3 Not everyone dons this armor right away to go by its appearance in artwork or prevalence in the archaeological record – adoption was slow, almost certainly (given the expense of a bronze cuirass) from the upper-classes downward.

Via Wikipedia, a picture of the Argos bell cuirass with its Kegelhelm-type helmet dated to c. 720. Apologies for the side-on picture, I couldn’t find a straight-on image that had a clean CC license.

This element of armor is eventually joined by quite a few ‘add-ons’ protecting the arms, legs, feet and groin, which also phase in (and in some cases phase out) over time. The first to show up are greaves (which are also the only armor ‘add on’ to really stick around) which begin to appear perhaps as early as c. 750 but only really securely (there are dating troubles with some examples) by c. 700. Small semi-circular metal plates designed to hang from the base of the cuirass to protect the belly and goin, ‘belly guards,’ start showing up around c. 675 or so (so around four decades after the cuirasses themselves), while other add-ins fill in later – ankle-guards in the mid-600s, foot-guards and arm guards (quite rare) in the late 600s. All of these but the greaves basically phase out by the end of the 500s.

Via Wikipedia, a late classical (c. 340-330) cuirass and helmet showing how some of this equipment will develop over time. The cuirass here is a muscle cuirass, a direct development from the earlier bell cuirass above. The helmet is a Chalcidian-type, which seems to have developed out of the Corinthian helmet as a lighter, less restrictive option in the fifth century.

Pteruges, those distinctive leather strips hanging down from the cuirass (they are part of the textile or leather liner worn underneath it) start showing up in the sixth century (so the 500s), about two centuries after the cuirasses themselves. There is also some reason to suppose that textile armor is in use as a cheaper substitute for the bronze cuirass as early as the seventh century, but it is only in the mid-sixth century that we get clear and unambiguous effort for the classic stiff tube-and-yoke cuirass which by c. 500 becomes the most common hoplite armor, displacing the bronze cuirass (almost certainly because it was cheaper, not because it was lighter, which it probably wasn’t).

Via Wikipedia, from the Alexander Mosaic, a later Roman copy of an early Hellenistic mosaic (so quite a bit after our period), Alexander the Great shown wearing a tube-and-yoke cuirass (probably linen, clearly with some metal reinforcement), with visible pteruges around his lower waist (the straps there).
Note that there is a second quieter debate about the construction of the tube-and-yoke cuirass which we’re just going to leave aside for now.

Weapons are less useful for our chronology, so we can give them just a few words. Thrusting spears were, of course, a bronze age technology not lost to our Dark Age Greeks, but they persist alongside throwing spears, often with visible throwing loops, well into the 600s, even for heavily armored hoplite-style troops. As for swords, the Greek hoplites will have two types, a straight-edged cut-and-thrust sword of modest length (the xiphos) and a single-edged foward curving chopper of a sword (the kopis), though older Naue II types – a continuation of bronze age designs – continues all the way into the 500s. The origin of the kopis is quite contested and meaningfully uncertain (whereas the xiphos seems a straight line extrapolation from previous designs), but need not detain us here.

So in summary, we do not see a sudden ‘revolution’ in terms of the adoption of hoplite arms, but rather a fairly gradual process stretched out over a century where equip emerges, often vies with ‘non-hoplite’ equipment for prominence and slowly becomes more popular (almost certainly faster in some places and slower in others, though our evidence rarely lets us see this clearly). The aspis first starts showing up c. 750, the helmets a decade or two after that, the breastplates a decade or two after that, the greaves a decade or two after that, the other ‘add-ons’ a few decades after that (by which point we’re closing in on 650 and we have visual evidence of hoplites in close-order, albeit with caveats). Meanwhile adoption is also gradual: hoplite-equipped men co-exist in artwork alongside men with different equipment for quite a while, with artwork showing unbroken lines of uniformly equipped hoplites with the full panoply beginning in the mid-to-late 7th century, about a century to a century and a half after we started. It is after this, in the sixth century, that we see both pteruges – which will become the standard goin and upper-thigh protection – and the tube-and-yoke cuirass, a cheaper armor probably indicating poorer-but-still-well-to-do men entering the phalanx.

Via Wikipedia, the Chigi Vase (c. 650). Its hoplite scene is (arguably) the oldest clear scene we have of hoplites depicted fighting in close-order with overlapping shields, although the difficulty of depth (how closely is that second rank behind the first?) remains.

Consequently, the Archaic hoplite must have shared his battlefield with non-hoplites and indeed – and this is one of van Wees’ strongest points – when we look at Archaic artwork, we see that a lot. Just all over the place. Hoplites with cavalry, hoplites with light infantry, hoplites with archers (and, of course, hoplites with hoplites).

Of course that raises key questions about how hoplites function on two kinds of battlefield: an early battlefield where they have to function within an army that is probably still predominately lighter infantry (with some cavalry) and a later battlefield in which the hoplite is the center-piece of the army. But before we get to how hoplites fight together, we need to think a bit about what hoplite equipment means for how they fight individually.

Hoplight or Hopheavy?4

If the basic outlines of the gradualist argument about the development of hoplite equipment is one where the heterodox camp has more or less simply won, the argument about the impact of that equipment is one in which the orthodox camp is determined to hold its ground.

To summarize the arguments: hoplite orthodoxy argues, in effect, that hoplite equipment was so heavy and cumbersome that it necessitated fighting in the phalanx. As a result orthodox scholars tend to emphasize the significant weight of hoplite equipment. Consequently, this becomes an argument against any vision of a more fluid battlefield, as orthodox scholars will argue hoplites were simply too encumbered to function in such a battlefield. This argument appears in WWoW, along with a call for more archaeology to support it, a call which was answered by the sometimes frustrating E. Jarva, Archaiologia on Archaic Greek Body Armour (1995) but it remains current. The latest attempt I am aware of to renew this argument is part of A. Schwartz, Reinstating the Hoplite (2013), 25-101.

By contrast, the heterodox camp argues that hoplite equipment was not that heavy or cumbersome and could be used outside of the phalanx (and indeed, was so used), but this argument often proceeds beyond this point to argue that hoplite equipment emerged in a fluid, skirmish-like battlefield and was, in a sense, at home in such a battlefield, as part of a larger argument about the phalanx being quite a lot less rigid and organized than the orthodox camp imagines it. Put another way at the extremes the heterodox camp argues there is nothing about hoplite equipment which would suggest it was designed or intended for a close-order, relatively rigid infantry formation. There’s a dovetailing here where this argument also gets drawn into arguments about ‘technological determinism’ – a rejection of the idea that any given form of ancient warfare, especially hoplite warfare, represented a technologically superior way of fighting or set of equipment – which also gets overstated to the point of suggesting weapon design doesn’t particularly matter at all.5

This is one of those areas where I will make few friends because I think both arguments are actually quite bad, a product of scholars who are extremely well versed in the ancient sources but who have relatively less training in military history more broadly and especially in pre-modern military history and especially especially pre-modern arms and armor.

So let me set some ‘ground rules’ about how, generally speaking, pre-modern arms and armor emerge. When it comes to personal combat equipment, (almost) no one in these periods has a military research and development department and equipment is rarely designed from scratch. Instead, arms and armor are evolving out of a fairly organic process, iterating on previous patterns or (more rarely) experimenting with entirely new patterns. This process is driven by need, which is to say arms and armor respond to the current threat environment, not a projection of a (far) future threat environment. As a result, arms and armor tend to engage in a kind of ‘antagonistic co-evolution,’ with designs evolving and responding to present threats and challenges. Within that space, imitation and adornment also play key roles: cultures imitate the weapons of armies they see as more successful and elites often use arms and armor to display status.

The way entire panoplies – that is full sets of equipment intended to be used together – tend to emerge is part of this process: panoplies tend to be pretty clearly planned or designed for a specific threat environment, which is to say they are intended for a specific role. Now, I want to be clear about these words ‘planned,’ ‘designed,’ or ‘intended’ – we are being quite metaphorical here. There is often no single person drafting design documents, rather we’re describing the outcome of the evolutionary process above: many individual combatants making individual choices about equipment (because few pre-modern armies have standardized kit) thinking about the kind of battle they expect to be in tend very strongly to produce panoplies that are clearly biased towards a specific intended kind of battle.

Which absolutely does not mean they are never used for any other kind of battle. The ‘kit’ of an 18th century line infantryman in Europe was designed, very clearly for linear engagements between large units on relatively open battlefields. But if what you had was that kit and an enemy who was in a forest or a town or an orchard or behind a fence, well that was the kit you had and you made the best of it you could.6 Likewise, if what you have is a hoplite army but you need to engage in terrain or a situation which does not permit a phalanx, you do not suffer a 404-TACTICS-NOT-FOUND error, you engage with the equipment you have. That said, being very good at one sort of fighting means making compromises (weight, mobility, protection, lethality) for other kinds of fighting, so two equipment sets might be situationally superior to each other (panoply A is better at combat situation Y, while panoply B is better at situation Z, though they may both be able to do either and roughly equally bad at situation X).

Via Wikimedia Commons, a black figure amphora (c. 510) showing a mythological scene (Achilles and Ajax) with warriors represented as hoplites, but carrying two spears (so they can throw one of them).

Naturally, in a non-standardized army, the individual combatants making individual choices about equipment are going to be considering the primary kind of battle they expect but also the likelihood that they are going to end up having to fight in other ways and so nearly all real-world panoplies (and nearly all of the weapons and armor they use) are not ultra-specialized hot-house flowers, but rather compromise designs. Which doesn’t mean they don’t have a primary kind of battle in mind! Just that some affordance has been made for other modalities of warfare.

If we apply that model to hoplite equipment, I think it resolves a lot of our quandaries reasonably well towards the following conclusion: hoplite equipment was a heavy infantry kit which was reasonably flexible but seems very clearly to have been intended, first and foremost, to function in close order infantry formations, rather than in fully individual combats or skirmishing.

Now let’s look at the equipment and talk about why I think that, starting with:

Overall Weight.

I am by no means the first person to note that absurdly heavy estimates dating back more than a century for the hoplite’s ‘combat load’ (that is, what would be carried into battle, not on campaign) are absurdly high; you will still hear figures of 33-40kg (72-90lbs) bandied about. These estimates predated a lot of modern archaeology and were consistently too high. Likewise, the first systematic effort to figure out, archaeologically, how heavy this equipment was by Eero Jarva, skewed the results high in a consistent pattern.7 Equally, I think there is some risk coming in a bit low, but frankly low-errors have been consistently less egregious than high-errors.8 Conveniently, I have looked at a lot of this material in order to get a sense of military gear in the later Hellenistic period, so I can quickly summarize and estimate from the archaeology.

Early Corinthian helmets can come in close to 2kg in weight, though later Greek helmets tend much lighter, between 1-1.5kg; we’re interested in the Archaic so the heavier number bears some weight. Greek bronze cuirasses as recovered invariably mass under 4.5kg (not the 4-8kg Jarva imagines), so we might imagine in original condition an upper limit around c. 5.5kg with most closer to 3.5-4.5kg, with probably 1-2kg for liner and pteruges; a tube-and-yoke cuirass in linen or leather (the former was probably more common) would have been only modestly lighter, perhaps 3.5-4kg (a small proportion of these had metal reinforcements, but these were very modest outside of Etruria).9 So for a typical load, we might imagine anywhere from 3.5kg to 6.5kg of armor, but 5kg is probably a healthy median value. We actually have a lot of greaves: individual pieces (greaves are worn in pairs) range from ~450 to 1,100g, with the cluster around 700-800, suggesting a pair around 1.4-1.6kg; we can say around 1.5kg.

For weapons, the dory (the one-handed thrusting spear), tips range from c. 150 to c. 400g, spear butts (the sauroter) around c. 150g, plus a haft that probably comes in around 1kg, for a c. 1.5kg spear. Greek infantry swords are a tiny bit smaller and lighter than what we see to their West, with a straight-edged xiphos probably having around 500g (plus a hundred grams or so of organic fittings to the hilt) of metal and a kopis a bit heavier at c. 700g. Adding suspension and such, we probably get to around 1.25kg or so.10

That leaves the aspis, which is tricky for two reasons. First, aspides, while a clear and visible type, clearly varied a bit in size: they are roughly 90cm in diameter, but with a fair bit of wiggle room and likewise the depth of the dish matters for weight. Second, what we recover for aspides are generally the metal (bronze) shield covers, not the wooden cores; these shields were never all-metal like you see in games or movies, they were mostly wood with a very thin sheet of bronze (c. 0.25-0.5mm) over the top. So you can shift the weight a lot by what wood you use and how thick the core is made (it is worth noting that while you might expect a preference for strong woods, the ancient preference explicitly is for light woods in shields).11 You can get a reconstruction really quite light (as light as 3.5kg or so), but my sense is most come in around 6-7kg, with some as heavy as 9kg.12 A bigger fellow might carry a bigger, heavier shield, but let’s say 6kg on the high side and call it a day.

How encumbered is our hoplite? Well, if we skew heavy on everything and add a second spear (for reasons we’ll get to next time), we come out to about 23kg – our ‘hopheavy.’ If we skew light on everything, our ‘hoplight’ could come to as little as c. 13kg while still having the full kit; to be frank I don’t think they were ever this light, but we’ll leave this as a minimum marker. For the Archaic period (when helmets tend to be heavier), I think we might imagine something like a typical single-spear, bronze-cuirass-wearing hoplite combat load coming in something closer to 18kg or so.13

And now we need to ask a second important question (which is frustratingly rarely asked in these debates – not never, but rarely): is that a lot? What we should not do is compare this to modern, post-gunpowder combat loads which assume very different kinds of combat that require very different sorts of mobility. What we should do is compare this to ancient and medieval combat loads to get a sense of how heavy different classes of infantry were. And it just so happens I am wrapping up a book project that involves computing that, many times for quite a few different panoplies. So here are some brief topline figures, along with the assigned combat role (light infantry, medium infantry, heavy infantry):

  • A fully plate-armored late 14th/early 15th century dismounted knight: 24-27kg (Heavy Infantry).14
  • Hop-heavy, c. 23kg
  • Roman Hastatus/Princeps of the Middle Republic: c. 20-24kg (Heavy Infantry)
  • Macedonian Phalangite: c. 20kg (Heavy Infantry)
  • Typical Hoplite, c. 18kg
  • Hellenistic Peltastai: c. 17-18kg (Heavy Infantry, modestly lighter than above)
  • Gallic Warrior: c. 14kg (Medium infantry, assumes metal helmet, textile armor so on the heavy side for the Gauls)
  • Hop-light, c. 13kg.
  • Iberian Warrior: c. 13kg (Medium infantry)
  • Celtiberian Warrior: c. 11.5kg (Medium Infantry)
  • Hellenistic thureophoroi: c. 10.5kg (Medium Infantry)
  • Roman veles: c. 8kg (Light infantry).15

Some observations emerge from this exercise immediately. First combat role – which I’ve derived from how these troops are used and positioned in ancient armies, not on how much their kit weighs – clearly connects to equipment weight. There is a visible ‘heavy infantry range’ that starts around 15kg and runs upward, a clear ‘medium’ range of lightly-armored line-but-also-skirmish infantry from around 14kg to about 10kg and then everything below that are ‘lights’ that aren’t expected to hold part of the main infantry line.16

But I’d argue simply putting these weights together exposes some real problems in both the extreme orthodox and extreme heterodox views. On the one hand, the idea that hoplite equipment was so heavy that it could only function in the phalanx is clearly nonsense: the typical hoplite was lighter than the typical Roman heavy infantryman who fought in a looser, more flexible formation! Dismounted knights generally fought as close-order heavy infantrymen, but certainly could fight alone or in small groups and maneuver on the battlefield or over rough terrain and they are heavier still. So the idea that hoplites were so heavily equipped that they must fight in the extremely tight orthodox phalanx (we’ll come to spacing later, but they want these fellows crowded in) is silly.

On the other hand hoplites are very clearly typically heavy infantry. They are not mediums and they are certainly not lights. Can you ask heavy infantrymen to skirmish like lights or ask light infantrymen to hold positions like heavies? Well, you can and they may try; the results are generally awful (which is why the flexible ‘mediums’ exist in so many Hellenistic-period armies: they can do both things not-great-but-not-terribly).17 So do I think soldiers wearing this equipment generally intended to fight in skirmish actions or in truly open-order (note that Roman combat spacing, while loose by Greek standards, is still counting as ‘close order’ here)? Oh my no; across the Mediterranean, we see that the troops who intend to fight like that even a little are markedly lighter and those who specialize in it are much lighter, for the obvious reason that running around in 18kg is a lot more tiring than running around in 8kg or less.

So the typical hoplite was a heavy infantryman but not the heaviest of heavy infantry. If anything, he was on the low(ish) end of heavy infantry, probably roughly alongside Hellenistic peltastai (who were intended as lighter, more mobile phalangites)18 but still very clearly in the ‘heavy’ category. Heavier infantry existed, both in antiquity and in the middle ages and did not suffer from the lack of mobility often asserted by the orthodox crowd for hoplites.

But of course equipment is more than just weight, so let’s talk about the implications of some of this kit, most notably the aspis.

The Aspis

Once again, to summarize the opposing camps, the orthodox argument is that hoplite equipment – particularly the aspis (with its weight and limited range of motion) and the Corinthian helmet (with its limited peripheral vision and hearing) – make hoplites ineffective, almost useless, outside of the rigid confines of the phalanx, and in particular outside of the ‘massed shove othismos‘ phalanx (as opposed to looser phalanxes we’ll get into next time).

The moderate heterodox argument can be summed up as, “nuh uh.” It argues that the Corinthian helmet is not so restricting, the aspis not so cumbersome and thus it is possible to dodge, to leap around, to block and throw the shield around and generally to fight in a more fluid way. The ‘strong’ heterodox argument, linking back to development, is to argue that the hoplite’s panoply actually emerged in a more fluid, skirmish environment and the phalanx – here basically any close-order, semi-rigid formation fighting style – emerged only later, implying that the hoplite’s equipment must be robustly multi-purpose. And to be clear that I am not jousting with a straw man, van Wees claims, “the hoplite shield did not presuppose or dictate a dense formation but could be used to equally good effect [emphasis mine] in open-order fighting.”19

The short version of my view is that the moderate heterodox answer is correct and very clearly so, with both the orthodox and ‘strong’ heterodox arguments having serious defects.

But first, I want to introduce a new concept building off of the way we’ve already talked about how equipment develops, which I am going to call appositeness which we can define as something like ‘situational effectiveness.’ The extreme orthodox and heterodox arguments here often seem to dwell – especially by the time they make it to public-accessible books – in a binary can/cannot space: the hoplite can or cannot move quickly, can or cannot skirmish, can or cannot fight with agility and so on.

But as noted above real equipment is not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but ‘situationally effective’ or not and I want to introduce another layer of complexity in that this situational effectiveness – this appositeness – is a spectrum, not a binary. Weapons and armor are almost invariably deeply compromised designs, forced to make hard trade-offs between protection, reach, weight and so on, and those tradeoffs are real, meaning that they involve real deterioration of the ability to do a given combat activity. But ‘less’ does not mean ‘none.’ So the question is not can/cannot, but rather how apposite is this equipment for a given function – how well adapted is it for this specific situation.

You can do almost any kind of fighting hoplite armor, but it is very obviously adapted for one kind of fighting and was very obviously adapted for that kind of fighting when it emerged: fighting in a shield wall. And that has downstream implications of course: if the aspis is adapted for a shield wall, that implies that a shield wall already existed when it emerged (in the mid-to-late 8th century). Now we may, for the moment, leave aside if we ought to call that early shield wall a phalanx. First, we ought to talk about why I think the hoplite’s kit is designed for a shield wall but also why it could function (less effectively) outside of it.

So lets talk about the form of the aspis. The aspis is a large round shield with a lightly dished (so convex) shape, albeit in this period with a flat rim-section that runs around the edge. The whole thing is typically about 90cm in diameter (sometimes more, sometimes less) and it is held with two points of contact: the arm is passed through the porpax which sits at the center of mass of the shield and will sit against the inside of the elbow of the wear, and then holds the antelabe, a strap near the edge of the shield (so the wearer’s elbow sits just to the left of the shield’s center of mass and his hand just to the left of the shield’s edge). That explains the size: the shield pretty much has to have a radius of one forearm (conveniently a standard ancient unit called a ‘cubit’) and thus a diameter of two forearms, plus a bit for the rim, which comes to about 90cm.

Via Wikimedia Commons, a Corinthian black-figure alabastron (c. 590-570) showing hoplites in rows, which really demonstrates just how big the aspis can be. A 90cm shield is a really big shield although the artist here has certainly chosen to emphasize the size.

In construction, the aspis has, as mentioned, a wooden core made of a wood that offers the best strength at low weight (e.g. willow, poplar, not oak or ash) covered (at least for the better off hoplites) with a very thin (c. 0.25-0.5mm) bronze facing, which actually does substantially strengthen the shield. The result is, it must be noted, a somewhat heavy but very stout shield. The dished shape lets the user put a bit of their body into the hollow of the shield and creates a ledge around the rim which sits handily at about shoulder height, allowing the shield to be rested against the shoulder in a ‘ready’ position in situations where you don’t want to put the shield down but want to reduce the fatigue of holding it.

And here is where I come at this question a bit differently from my peers: that description to me demands comparison but the aspis is almost never compared to other similar shields. Two things, however, should immediately stand out in such a comparison. First, the aspis is an unusually, remarkably wide shield; many oblong shields are taller, but I can think of no shield-type that is on average wider than 90cm. The early medieval round shield, perhaps the closest comparison for coverage, averages around 75-85cm wide (with fairly wide variation, mind you), while the caetra, a contemporary ancient round shield from Spain, averages around 50-70cm. The famously large Roman scutum of the Middle Republic is generally only around 60cm or so wide (though it is far taller). So this is a very wide shield.

Via Wikimedia Commons, an Attic black-figure Kylix (c. 560) which gives us a good look at the two-point grip of the aspis (though note this aspis is something of a diplyon-hybrid with two small cutouts!).

Second, the two-points-of-contact strap-grip structure is a somewhat uncommon design decision (center-grip shields are, globally speaking, more common) with significant trade-offs. As an aside, it seems generally assumed – mistakenly – that ‘strap-grip’ shields dominated European medieval shields, but this isn’t quite right: the period saw a fair amount of center-grip shields, two-point-of-contact shields (what is generally meant by ‘strap grip’) and off-center single-point of contact shields, with a substantial portion of the latter two supported by a guige or shield sling, perhaps similar to how we generally reconstruct later Hellenistic version of the aspis supported by a strap over the shoulder. So the pure two-point-of-contact porpax-antelabe grip of the aspis is actually fairly unusual but not entirely unique.

But those tradeoffs can help give us a sense of what this shield was for. On the one hand, two points of contact give the user a strong connection to the shield and make it very hard for an opponent to push it out of position (and almost impossible to rotate it): that shield is going to be where its wearer wants it, no matter how hard you are hitting it. It also puts the top of the dish at shoulder level, which probably helps keeping the shield at ‘ready,’ especially because you can’t rest the thing on the ground without taking your arm out of it or kneeling.

On the other hand the two-point grip substantially reduces the shield’s range of motion and its potential to be used offensively. Now this is where the heterodox scholars will point to references in the ancient sources to war dances intended to mimic combat where participants jumped about or descriptions of combatants swinging their shield around and dodging and so on,20 and then on the other hand to the ample supply of videos showing modern reenactors in hoplite kit doing this.21 To which I first say: granted. Conceded. You can move the aspis with agility, you can hit someone with it, you can jump and dodge in hoplite kit. And that is basically enough to be fatal to the orthodox argument here.

But remember our question is appositeness: is this the ideal or even a particularly good piece of equipment to do that with? In short, the question is not ‘can you use an aspis offensively’ (at all) but is it better than other plausible designs at it. Likewise, we ask not ‘can you move the aspis around quickly’ but is it better at that than other plausible designs. And recall above, when the aspis emerged, it had competition: we see other shield designs in early Archaic artwork. There were alternatives, but the aspis ‘won out’ for the heavy infantryman and that can tell us something about what was desired in a shield.

In terms of offensive potential, we’re really interested in the range of strikes you can perform with a shield and the reach you can have with them. For the aspis, the wearer is limited to variations on a shove (pushing the shield out) and a ‘door swing’ (swinging the edge at someone) and both have really limited range. The body of the shield can never be more than one upper-arm-length away from the shoulder (c. 30cm or so)22 so the ‘shove’ can’t shove all that far and the rim of the shield can’t ever be more than a few centimeters in advance of the wearer’s fist. By contrast a center-grip shield can have its body shoved outward to the full extension of the arm (almost double the distance) and its rim can extend half the shield’s length in any direction from the hand (so striking with the lower rim of a scutum you can get the lower rim c. 60cm from your hand which is c. 60cm from your body, while a center-grip round shield of c. 80cm in diameter – smaller than the aspis – can project out 40cm from the hand which is 60cm from the body).

So that two-point grip that gives the shield such stability is dropping its offensive reach from something like 60 or 100cm (shove or strike) to just about 30 or 65cm or so (shove or strike).23 That is a meaningful difference (and you can see it represented visually in the diagram below). Again, this is not to say you cannot use the aspis offensively, just that this design prioritizes its defensive value over its offensive value with its grip and structure.

And then there is the question of coverage. Can you swing an aspis around, left to right, blocking and warding blows? Absolutely. Is it good at that? No. It is not and I am always surprised to see folks challenge this position because have you seen how a center-grip round shield is used? And to be clear, we know the Greeks could have used center-grip shields because center-grip dipylon shields show up in Archaic Greek artwork (though many diplyon shields have the same two-point grip-system as aspides as well): they had the other option and chose not to use it.24 With a two-point porpax-antelabe grip, the aspis‘ center of mass can never be more than an upper-arm’s length (again, c. 30cm) away, which really matters given that the average male might be c. 45cm wide. In practice, of course, it is hard to get an elbow much further than the center of one’s chest and that is basically the limit for how far to the right the center of the aspis can be. Likewise, there’s a real limit to how far you can cock your elbow backwards.

By contrast, the center-point of a center-grip shield can be wherever you fist can be, which is a lot wider of a set of places: you can get a center-grip shield all the way to the far side of your body, you can pull it all the way in to your chest or push your entire arm’s length into the enemy’s space. Moreover, with just a single point of contact, these shields can rotate around your hand. You can see the difference in coverage arcs below which honestly also understates how much easier it is to move a center-group shield into some of these extreme positions because it isn’t strapped to your arm.

Note: We’re going to return to the ‘side on’ vs. ‘straight on’ question in a future post, but I’ve provided both for now. The heterodox school (van Wees, op. cit., 168-9) supposes a side-on stance but in practice hoplites must have been transitioning frequently between side-on and straight-on simply to use their weapons (you bring your back leg forward when striking to get your whole body into the blow) or to march (these guys did not run sideways into battle, even if they might turn sideways as they reached the enemy). However I will note that you can see very clearly that it is only in the ‘straight on’ (or nearly so) position that Thucydides’ statement about the tendency of hoplites to drift right-ward to seek to protect their unprotected right side makes any sense (Thuc. 5.71.1), something Thucydides says “all armies do so” (ἅπαντα τοῦτο) and so must have been a general feature of the warfare he knew.
Note also: the semi-circles are the exact same diameter, to give you a sense of just how far further a center-grip shield can project. And in our best reconstructions of shielded combat, you do often want to be pushing the shield into your enemy’s space to block them off, to get contact with their shield (to push it out of position) or to strike with the shield. As you can see, the aspis can barely get beyond the c. 60cm circle, while the center-grip shield can be pushed much further out – it’s center can be as far out as the edge of the aspis.

So the aspis‘ design has significantly compromised offensive potential, mobility, maneuverability and the range of coverage on the sides. What it gains is a stout design, a very stable grip and an unusually high amount of width and we know they chose these trade-offs because the aspis replaced other shield designs that were present in the Archaic, at least for this kind of combatant (the emerging hoplite). The question then is why and here certainty is impossible because the Greeks do not tell us, but we can approach a plausible answer to the question in two ways: we can ask in what situation would those positive qualities – stoutness, stability and width – be more valuable or we could look at how similar shields (large round shields) are used in other cultures.

A very wide shield that covers a lot of space in which the combatant is not (because it is much wider than the combatant is) is not particularly useful in skirmishing or open-order fighting (cultures that do that kind of fighting tend to drift towards either large oblong shields or small buckler-style shields that don’t waste weight covering area the combatant doesn’t occupy). But that extra width is really handy if the goal is to create an unbroken horizontal line of protection without having to crowd so tightly with your buddies that you can’t move effectively. A hoplite can ‘join shields’ with his mates even with a file width of 90cm, which is certainly closed-order, but not absurdly tight – a Roman with a scutum has to pull in to about 60-65cm of file width to do the same. Where might you value stoutness over mobility or range of motion? Well, under conditions where you expect most strikes to come from a single direction (in front of you), you are more concerned about your ability to meet those strikes effectively than your ability to cover angles of attack that aren’t supposed to be threatened in the first place – such as, for instance, a situation where that space is occupied by a buddy who also has a big shield. In particular, you might want this if you are more worried about having your shield shifted out of position by an enemy – a thing that was clearly a concern25 – than you are about its offensive potential or rapid mobility (or its utility for a shoving match). By contrast, in open order or skirmishing, you need to be very concerned about an attack towards your flanks and a shield which can rapidly shift into those positions is really useful.

What is the environment where those tradeoffs make sense? A shield wall.

Alternately, we could just ask, “what contexts in other societies or other periods do we tend to see large, solid and relatively robust round shields” and the answer is in shield walls. Or we might ask, “where do we see infantry using two-point grip shields (like some kite shields, for instance)” and find the answer is in shield walls. Shields that are like the aspis: robust, either wide, two-point gripped or both and used by infantry (rather than cavalry) tend in my experience to be pretty strongly connected to societies with shield wall tactics.

I thus find myself feeling very confident that the aspis was designed for a shield wall context. Which, given how weapons develop (see above) would suggest that context already existed to some degree when the aspis emerged in the mid-to-late 8th century, although we will leave to next time working out what that might have looked like.

A Brief Digression on the Corinthian Helmet

We can think about the Corinthian helmet in similar terms. Victor Davis Hansen, who can only compare Corinthian helmets to modern combat helmets – because again a huge problem in this debate is that both sides lack sufficient pre-modern military comparanda – suggested that hoplites wearing the helmet could “scarcely see or hear” which essentially forced hoplites into a dense formation. “Dueling, skirmishing and hit-and-run tactics were out of the question with such headgear.”26 The heterodox response is to dispute the degree of those trade-offs, arguing that the helmets don’t inhibit peripheral vision or hearing and are not as heavy as the orthodox camp supposes.27 That dispute matters quite a lot because again, as we’ll get to, the ‘strong’ heterodox position is that hoplite equipment didn’t develop for or in a shield-wall formation, but for skirmishing, so if the Corinthian helmet is a bad helmet for skirmishing, that would make its emergence rather strange; we’ll come back to the question of early Archaic warfare later. Strikingly, there is a lot of effort in these treatments to reason from first principles or from other later ancient Greek helmets but the only non-Greek comparandum that is regularly brought up is the open-faced Roman montefortino-helmet – other closed-face helmets are rarely mentioned.

Via Wikimedia Commons, a relatively early design (c. 630) Corinthian helmet, showing the minimal nose protection (albeit there was some more here before it was broken off) and very wide gap over the face. The punch-holes are presumably to enable the attachment of a liner.
Via Wikimedia Commons, a sixth century Corinthian helmet (so the ‘middle’ stage of development) – the face gap is not yet fully closed, but we have the fully developed nose guard and more curved overall shape.

So does the Corinthian helmet limit vision? It depends on the particular design but a general answer is ‘perhaps a bit, but not an enormous amount.’ The eye-slits in original Corinthian helmets (as opposed to sometimes poorly made modern replicas) are fairly wide and the aperture is right up against the face, so you might lose some peripheral vision, but not a very large amount; the Corinthian helmet design actually does a really good job of limiting the peripheral vision tradeoff (but it is accepting a small tradeoff). The impact to hearing is relatively more significant, but what I’ve heard from reenactors more than once is that it only gets bad if you make noise (which then is transmitted through the helmet), but that can include heavy breathing.28 Of course the best evidence that the impact to hearing was non-trivial (even if the wearer is still able to hear somewhat) is that later versions of the helmet feature cutouts for the ears. Breathing itself is a factor here: the width of the mouth-slit varies over time (it tends to close up as we move from the Archaic towards the Classical), but basically any obstruction of the front of the face with a helmet is going to be felt by the wearer when they are engaged in heavy exertion: if you are running or fighting your body is going to feel just about anything that restricts its ability to suck in maximum air.

Via Wikipedia, a 13th century German great helm, showing the narrowness of the vision-slits and the breaths (breathing holes).

But those drawbacks simply do not get us to the idea that this was a helmet which could only be used in a tight, huddled formation for the obvious reason that other, far more enclosed helmets have existed at other points in history and been used for a wider range of fighting. 13th century great helms also have no ear cutouts, feature even narrower vision-slits and use a system of ‘breaths’ (small circular holes, typically in patterns) to enable breathing, which restrict breathing more than at least early Corinthian helmets (and probably about the same amount as the more closed-front late types). Visored bascinets, like the iconic hounskull bascinet design likewise lack ear-cut outs, have breaths for air and notably move the eye aperture forward away from the eyes on the visor, reducing the area of vision significantly as compared to a Corinthian helmet. And yet we see these helmets used by both heavy infantry (dismounted knights and men-at-arms) and cavalry in a variety of situations including dueling.29

Via Wikipedia, a hounskull visored bascinet. The visor was attached via hinges so that it could be swung open (some designs have them swing upwards, others have two points of contact and swing horizontally). The large bulge beneath the eyes served in part to make breathing easier, creating a larger air pocket and more space for the breaths.

Which puts us in a similar place as with the aspis: the Corinthian helmet is a design that has made some trade-offs and compromises. It is capable of a lot – the idea that men wearing these were forced to huddle up because couldn’t see or hear each other is excessive (and honestly absurdly so) – but the choice has clearly been made to sacrifice a bit of lightness, some vision, a fair bit of hearing and some breathing in order to squeeze out significantly more face and neck protection (those cheek pieces generally descend well below the chin, to help guard the neck that Greek body armor struggled to protect adequately). That is not a set of compromises that would make sense for a skirmisher who needs to be able to see and hear with maximum clarity and who expects to be running back and forth on the battlefield for an extended period – and indeed, skirmishing troops often forgo helmets entirely. When they wear them, they are to my knowledge invariably open-faced.

Via Wikimedia Commons, an early classical (and thus ‘late’) Corinthian helmet design (c. 475). The face has almost totally closed off and the eye-gaps have narrowed, although there is still a decently wide cutout to avoid harming peripheral vision.

Instead, when we see partially- or fully-closed-face helmets, we tend to see them in basically two environments: heavy cavalry and shield walls.30 Some of this is doubtless socioeconomic: the cavalryman has the money for expensive, fully-enclosed helmets while the poorer infantrymen must make do with less. Whereas I think the aspis was clearly developed to function in a shield wall (even though it can be used to do other things) I am less confident on the Corinthian helmet; I could probably be persuaded of the idea this began as a cavalryman’s heavy helmet, only to be adopted by the infantry because its emphasis on face-protection was so useful in the context of a shield wall clashing with another shield wall. What it is very obviously not is a skirmishers helmet.31

Conclusions

As you have probably picked up when it comes to equipment, I find the ‘orthodox’ position unacceptable on almost every point, but equally I find the ‘strong’ heterodox position unpersuasive on every point except the ‘soft’ gradualism in development (the Snodgrass position) which I think has decisively triumphed (some moderate heterodox objections to orthodoxy survive quite well, however). Of the entire debate, this is often the part that I find most frustrating because of the failure of the scholars involved to really engage meaningfully with the broader field of arms-and-armor study and to think more comparatively about how arms and armor develop, are selected and are used.

On the one hand, the idea that the hoplite, in full or nearly-full kit, could function as a skirmisher, “even in full armour, a hoplite was quite capable of moving back and forth across the battlefield in the Homeric manner” or that the kit could be “used to equally good effect in open-order fighting” is just not plausible and mistakes capability for appositeness.32 Hoplite equipment placed the typical hoplite very clearly into the weight-range of ‘heavy infantry,’ by no means the heaviest of heavy infantry (which fatally undermines the ‘encumbered hoplite’ of the orthodox vision) but also by no means light infantry or even really medium infantry except if substantial parts of the panoply were abandoned. Again, I could be sold on the idea that the earliest hoplites were, perhaps, ‘mediums’ – versatile infantry that could skirmish (but not well) and fight in close order (but not well) – but by the early 600s when the whole panoply is coming together it seems clear that the fellows with the full set are in the weight range for ‘heavies.’ We’ll talk about how we might imagine that combat evolving next time.

Moreover, key elements of hoplite equipment show a clear effort to prioritize protection over other factors: shield mobility, offensive potential, a small degree of vision, a larger but still modest degree of hearing, a smaller but still significant degree of breathing, which contributes to a larger tradeoff in endurance (another strike against the ‘skirmishing hoplite’). The environment where those tradeoffs all make sense is the shield wall. Which in turn means that while the ultra-rigid orthodox vision where these soldiers cannot function outside of the phalanx has to be abandoned – they’re more versatile than that – the vision, propounded by van Wees, that the hoplite worked just as well in open-order is also not persuasive.

Instead, it seems most plausible by far to me that this equipment emerged to meet the demands of men who were already beginning to fight in shield walls, which is to say relatively33 close-order formations with mutually supporting34 shields probably already existed when the hoplite panoply began to emerge in the mid- and late-8th century.

And that’s where we’ll go next time: to look at tactics both in the Archaic and Classical periods.

Did they shove?

(No, they did not shove)

  1. To be fair, I would probably by a full set of mid-republic legionary kit first.
  2. A not-unusual-occurrence. Arms and Armour of the Greeks (1967) holds up almost absurdly well on a lot of points, given how old it is and how much archaeology has happened since. There are newer and more up-to-date things to read (T. Everson, Warfare in Ancient Greece (2004) for instance), but it has been striking how often I will see a mistake, later disproved by more recent archaeology and go back and find that Snodgrass was already on the right side of it, decades earlier.
  3. Some folks in the comments are asking why I am starting here and not with the earlier Dendra Panoply (late 15th cent.). And the answer is that there is a pretty clear discontinuity over the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the heavy armor forms of the late bronze age are pretty clearly extinct in the intervening time. The Argos cuirass is thus not an evolution on the Dendra panoply, but reflects an entirely new armor tradition, probably influences somewhat by contemporary eastern armor traditions, but basically wholly unconnected with earlier Greek armoring traditions.
  4. I stole this joke from Jonah Goldberg, but it was too good not to use. I apologize for nothing.
  5. E.g. F. Echeverría, “Weapons, Technological Determinism and Ancient Warfare,” in New Perspectives on Ancient Warfare, edited by G. G. Fagan and M Trundle (2010). I find this argument very frustrating: weapon design does matter, some weapons are better than others in both technological and non-technological ways (e.g. a weapon can be better but also better suited to a given situation).
  6. On this specifically, there are two fantastic recent books, A.S. Burns, Infantry in Battle: 1733-1783 (2025) and M.H. Spring, With Zeal and With Bayonets Only: The British Army on Campaign in North America, 1775-1783 (2008).
  7. That is, again E. Jarva, Archaiologia on Archaic Greek Body Armour (1995), which I may now stop bashing. It is not, on the whole, a terrible book, but the bias towards over-heavy estimates of weight is pervasive, an effect of Jarva trying to get where the WWoW thesis requires him to be.
  8. In particular, Krentz’ figures “A Cup by Douris and the Battle of Marathon” in New Perspective of Ancient Warfare (2010), which you can find listed in summary in the link above, are on the one hand well within the range of reasonable but on the other hand they are consistently towards the low end of that range in a way that suggests a light but perceptible thumb on the scale (though some of that is justified by the choice to look at later hoplites).
  9. The Etruscans pick up the tube-and-yoke armor and, for whatever reason decide, “this would be even more awesome if it were entirely covered with metal scales. It fits the broader trend towards heavier armor in Italy than in mainland Greece.
  10. A point where I actually run marginally lighter than Krentz, who reasons from larger Roman swords, but that was hardly unreasonable: coming up with correct masses for Greek swords was a major challenge for my dissertation/book project. The information would not have been easily available for him in 2010 and my figure ends up well within his range, so no harm, no foul.
  11. Pliny HN 16.209, confirmed by wood fragments in the ‘Vatican’ (Bomarzo) and Basel Shields, poplar and willow respectively. See Blyth, H.  “The Structure of a Hoplite Shield in the Museo Gregoriano Etrusco.”  Bolletino dei monumenti, musei e gallerie pontificie 3 (1982): 5-21, Cahn, D.  Waffen und Zamzeug (1989), 15-6 and Schwartz, op. cit., 28.
  12. See K.R. de Groote, ‘”Twas When my Shield Turned Traitor!’ Establishing the Combat Effectiveness of the Greek Hoplite Shield” OJA 35.2 (2016) for a rundown.
  13. Cf. Krentz op. cit., who gives a range of 13-21kg and Schwartz, op. cit., who gives a range of 15-30kg. Schwartz’ ‘high’ is much too high, borrowing too many old over-estimates, but I also suspect Krentz’ low – though I’ve adopted it here for the sake of argument – is substantially too low, particularly the 3kg aspis. If you forced me to tighten the range, I’d say 15-25kg.
  14. Obviously there’s a lot more variation than just this one fellow’s accurate kit, but his equipment is quite reasonable for a ‘complete’ set of late medieval plate armor and is instructive with how it compares to the rest below.
  15. We’re not well informed about the kit of most light infantry except for the Roman velites, but as far as I can tell, the velites are probably the heaviest ‘lights’ in terms of gear, since they carry javelins (heavier than arrows or sling bullets), a sword and perhaps sometimes a helmet, along with a small shield.
  16. Unless you are Antiochus III at Magnesia, in which case they are and it goes terribly, an immediate reminder of why you don’t do that.
  17. Just for the love of Sweet, Sweet Athena do not ask them to go toe-to-toe with the uber-heavy (for the period) Roman heavy infantry in a shock engagement unless you have a very good tactical plan to get them out of that fight quickly.
  18. Note: these are not the peltastai of the Classical period, who were true ‘lights.’ Also it is worth saying that of my list, the Hellenistic peltastai are the most speculative of the bunch, because it is unclear how much armor they really wore.
  19. van Wees, Greek Warfare (2004), 169.
  20. See van Wees, Greek Warfare (2004), 189, fn. 27-28 for the standard references; there are a fair number.
  21. Hat tip to reader Ynneadwraith for commenting with a link to a set of these so I didn’t have to go and hunt down the ones I’ve seen (of which there are quite a few).
  22. Probably a touch high for most men in antiquity, but 30 is a nice round number and not entirely out of range.
  23. Because the aspis‘ rim projects a bit beyond the hand, we need to add some centimeters, which is why it is ’65cm or so.’
  24. E.g. Everson, op. cit., fig 26 for a very clear example: the shields clearly held by a single point of contact in the fist at the center of mass.
  25. see van Wees, op. cit., 168, fn 10. and Tyrtaeus F. 11.31 and 19.14-15 (West)
  26. WWoW, 71-2. This argument is renewed in an only modestly softer form by Schwartz, op. cit., 61-66. This is picked up, I think overly credulously so, by Everson, op. cit., 80
  27. Of particular note, J.P. Franz, Krieger, Bauern, Bürger (2002), 134-8
  28. I’ve heard this a couple of times informally, but if you are not prepared to take my word for it, Lloyd (Lindybeige) made exactly this point about his replica helmet a decade ago.
  29. Cf. also some earlier medieval closed-face helmets, like the Sutton Hoo helmet and some partially closed (around the eyes and nose, but not closed around the mouth) Scandinavian ‘nasal’ helmets
  30. Cf. also face protection for the Japanese samurai class, called a men-yoroi or mengu. Of course the bushi, while they might fight on foot had armored, mounted warfare as their primary combat role.
  31. We’ll come back to this, but just to head off immediate objections: just because a warrior carries a javelin does not make him a skirmisher. Roman heavy infantry carried javelins too and they were not skirmishers (indeed, they had dedicated skirmishing troops because they were very much not skirmishers).
  32. van Wees (2004), 169, 171.
  33. Important word, we’ll get to spacing later.
  34. Which may or may not mean overlapping.

Published by Bret Devereaux

Published

230 thoughts on “Collections: Hoplite Wars, Part II: Hoplite Equipment, Hoplight or Hopheavy?”

  2. I love how last week this began “This week (and next)” and now it’s probably four weeks. I do always appreciate that you take more time to go over stuff if you feel it’s worthwhile, rather than truncating stuff in a way that causes misunderstandings.

    Reply

    1. “This is part VII b of our two part series on x” is an ACOUP running joke at this point.

      Reply

      1. In this case it looks like Dr Devereaux is really doing the thing he is complaining about no one else doing in academia. As a layperson I was totally unaware of the debate, but after having read the forst two parts I hope it gets picked up by the academic debate.

        It’s really a tragedy that the huge ampunt of work put into this blog gets him basically no professional recognition. Research is broken (in the US, also in my country, and AFAICT also in every other country in the world).

        Reply

      2. Reminds me of Douglas Adams’ “book five in the increasingly inaccurately-named Hitchhiker’s Trilogy” joke.

        Reply

  3. This is the second part of what looks like it’ll be end up as a four part series

    That’s the spirit!

    Not that we’re complaining – it’s a good dive into what exactly the historiographical debate is about, and you’ve always shone when connecting militaria and kit with the broader social history.

    Reply

  4. I seem to remember we have mentions of european knights doing at least simply acrobatics in full armour as training? Which I think would be in line with the idea that you *can* move around fairly freely in heavy kit but you’re probably not doing that *in battle*.

    That said, I wonder how much of this is just bunch of people not having quite the same defintions of close vs. open order, skirmish, etc? If someone has a vision where close-order means shoulder-to-shoulder they might call a formation using your 90 cm spacing “open order”, f.ex.

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    1. A significant detail here is weight distribution. Part of the cool thing about the late medieval full plate set is that the bits of metal protecting my hips are more or less mounted at my hips (I’m not a plate armor aficionado, being more of an early medieval fanboy), which makes the cumulative effect of wearing all that steel less tiring than if it were all hanging straight down from my shoulders. I thus suspect that, pound for pound, late medieval armor “felt” lighter to wear than a bronze age cuirass, with associated mobility.

      However, as I commented last week, and as the good professor pointed out this week, the whole “that armor would be too heavy to move around in” thing suggests a bunch of people who neither looked for illustrative examples from better-documented periods AND never thought about easy ways to sanity-check this intuition of theirs. Like, how much extra weight in equipment does a modern American infantryman carry, and are they ever called upon to move briskly? Or as I commented last week, all these guys teach at colleges, right? Pay some soccer players $10 to do jumping jacks in weight vests you borrowed from the athletic department. Go to a gym and watch (admittedly very strong) people do weighted pullups and think about whether it makes sense to claim that 20kg of kit means you can’t do anything except turtle up next to your buddies.

      Since this is going to be a multi-part extension now, reupping the other part of my questions about the “orthodox” position might be better suited to a future week, but just in case:

      So what does VDH – or his followers, or his antecedents – have to say about the wars against Persian invasion? Did the Greeks fight those battles in a highly ritualized manner against a compliant Persian army, or did they have to change tactics to meet a foe with different preconceptions, and if THAT’s the case, wouldn’t that have affected Greek warfare afterward?

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      1. To answer the last: that did affect Greek warfare, and (as mentioned in part 1) the orthodox do claim that it affected warfare. One must note the two effects are not entirely coincident.

        What it did most clearly affect is the diplomatic context of warfare. Beforehand, you had temporary alliances of poleis, which was not reliably capable of achieving extensive strategic goals, so statesmen largely didn’t have such goals in mind. Afterward, you had the Delian and Peloponnesian Leagues (Athenian and Spartan empires) — capable of projecting violence in greater quantity, for a longer duration, with higher reliability. Statesmen also had consultants write a management case study learned about the structure of the Achaemenid empire, and what strategic ends one could pursue with this new hammer. For example, as a matter of military economics, besieging a polis fortified from its own resources with a field army equipped from the resources of a handful of poleis was never going to work, so after winning the battle you negotiate a peace with limited gains, mostly backed up with a threat of agricultural devastation. But if you besiege the same target with a field army equipped from several dozen poleis, on papyrus the odds look rather better. (Mostly the Greek managed to be rubbish at sieges, though.) Which puts more extensive wargoals on the negotiating table.

        The orthodox claim that the Persian and Peloponnesian wars broke their citizen-soldier hoplites, adulterating them with all kinds of filth from light infantry to mercenaries. (When the more plausible explanation is that we simply get so much more surviving literature that finally someone mentions cavalry and skirmishers. Mercenaries are probably real and empire-related.) They also remark on wars being longer, there being more sieges and less limited wargoals, but attribute these to the system of ritual warfare breaking down.

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        1. “so after winning the battle you negotiate a peace with limited gains, mostly backed up with a threat of agricultural devastation.”

          I can’t really agree with the limited aims argument as a thing. Sparta aims were not exactly limited as it expanded. Ask the residents of Arisba how limited the aims of the Methymnaeans were? Nor were the aims of Aegina’s all that limited at Cydonia nor the aims of Paros when they showed up to settle Thasos. In some world scale aims might see small but I find those are often forced comparisons same with…

          ” (Mostly the Greek managed to be rubbish at sieges, though.)”

          I find this perplexing really. What makes you say that and compared to whom? If you net out vast lopsided resource cases and the ability to freely spend the lives of your soldiers and actually doing so I am not sure I see the Greeks as really all that bad or anyone else somehow all around better.

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      2. To his credit, VDH tried some things out with his students in the 1980s. They sound like very rough-and-ready tests, and amateurs making ancient kit always make it 50-100% too heavy the first time. He never seems to have followed up or dug deeper into the archaeology, probably because he was becoming more and more interested in first California and then national politics and public affairs.

        Those were the days when about three or four people in North America were making reasonably good copies of medieval armour and almost no precise information was available on ancient Greek kit. Today the number is about the same but the rest of us have our harness made in Eastern Europe.

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        1. I had an early classical hoplite panoply made for me by an armorer in the US in 1998 after years of futile inquiries near and far. The results are … adequate. But not entirely satisfactory and the bronze he used was entirely too thick and heavy compared to historical examples. So this is a fine display set but awkward to wear. I’m not sure if much has changed since those days. So much reenactor kit comes from Asia and is of dubious authenticity or construction, and so many reputable European suppliers are overbooked, very expensive, and have limited catalogs.

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          1. If you’re brave and have a modicum of hand-eye co-ordination, you could solve the thickness issue with a sanding disc on an angle grinder (from the inside, I’d recommend).

            Be sure to wear a dust mask. If the bronze is more brass than bronze you could end up inhaling more zinc than you’d prefer. It’s not going to cause lasting damage, but does make you feel pretty rough for a day or two (zinc poisoning, ‘welders flu’, usually from welding galvanised steel without grinding it off first). Ask me how I know.

        2. I think many of the people making armor were interested in using it for e.g. SCA fighting.
          Which is a sport, not a fight, and has many rules regarding legal equipment. Intended in large part to let a large number of people, not all of which are experts, participate without too many injuries. Accurate re-enactment is secondary.

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      3. “A significant detail here is weight distribution. … I thus suspect that, pound for pound, late medieval armor “felt” lighter to wear than a bronze age cuirass, with associated mobility.”

        And a shield would be even worse for weight distribution. I imagine this explains why the c.1400 knight is wearing more weight than anyone else. Note that there are Youtube videos of people running or doing cartwheels in such armour, although I imagine they could do that more easily and for longer without the armour. As OGH observed, “harder” does not mean “impossible”, any more than it means “easy”.

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        1. And there are period anecdotes of knights e.g. climbing ladders with just their arms, doing somersaults, etc. So basically not too different from the stuff athletic moderns are doing.

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      4. Greek reenactor here, and I can confirm, weight-distribution is a major factor. A properly-fitted cuirass should basically rest on the top of your hips at the natural waist, the way modern hiking backpacks are designed to do. We actually even have a contemporary source in one of the Socratic dialogues wherein Socrates is questioning the best armorer in the city as to what makes his wares worth the added price, who answers describing how a cheaper poor-fitting cuirass will weigh down on your shoulders, but his proper-fitting ones will fit like a second skin and so you will not feel the weight at all.

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    2. On the precise meaning of close order, open order, etc yeah it’s a real problem. The better authors, such as Prof Devereaux in this very post, define what they mean. Others don’t: e.g. supporters of Philip Sabin often insist on using “skirmisher” in a manner which, IMNSHO, is confusing and counter-productive to their argument.

      I’ve seen variations on close, loose, tight all used in wargame rules to describe infantry within the 150cm spacing. Open order is in my experience referring to skirmishers with additional spacing – but I’m sure there are exceptions. Shoulder to shoulder and within arms reach both seem to imply different kit and battlefield role than the more open skirmishing formations.

      If you look at re-enactors, or for that matter protest crowds, the two most common densities are shoulder-to-shoulder and within arms reach. Commentators in previous posts about phalanxes and Roman lines have pointed out that these are easy to establish and maintain with minimum training. And psychologically I for one feel a difference when I’m more than arms length away from others in the group.

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      1. I think one confusing thing is that “skirmisher” and “skirmish” mean two very different things: Eg. heavy infatnry regularly fight in skirmishes. (IE: Small scale engagements, whether or it be when they’re out foraging, or something else) but they’re not *skirmishers*.

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      2. Not just psychologically; coordination is *much* harder as separation increases. One can train for that, of course, but by the same token, one *needs* to train for it, or performance will be sub-par.

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        1. This is part of why modern infantry has to train so much harder than any close-order heavy infantry (and note that skirmish infantry generally manage no more co-ordination than all falling back at once behind the close-order heavies; concentrating fire on a particular target was largely beyond the capabilities of that era)

          Fireteams advancing by fire and movement requires far more training than any close-order drill.

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    3. Among the differences that tend to reconcile “a strong man can do acrobatics in full armor in training” and “people who wear heavy armor in combat don’t expect to be bouncing and running around in it” is that if you’re doing something as an athletic training exercise, then when you get tired enough, you stop. You take a drink of whatever vinegar-based Gatorade equivalent your ancient culture has, you catch a breather and stretch a bit. In battle, you cannot do this, so anything that significantly burdens your movements will start to add up because you don’t control the pace of your own activities nearly so much.

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      1. The other difference is that a commander, like any manager, has to be guided by what the average man can do, not what the best man can do. Dave Goggins’ videos, for example, are not good guides for what the average American soldier (maybe not even the average SEAL) can do.

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      2. Also the reenactor is presumably well fed and well rested. In campaign conditions one may have been marching for days or weeks, sleeping the gods know where, with scarce rations and possibly ill. The enemy may have cut off your water supply as well. And then you have to fight for hours in the summer heat. In these conditions the weight of the armor would be felt much heavier.

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    4. You can be fairly acrobatic in armour (if you have the fitness to do so), but you *will* notice a significant drop in *how long* you can do those acrobatics; the endurance penalty of heavy armour is quite substantial.

      Then again, *fighting* in full armour is intensely athletic / aerobic. Arguably, over the course of a full battle, pure physical endurance is going to be at least as decisive, if not more so, than strength, dexterity or even skill at arms.
      Though, there is a floor to the latter – superior endurance means nothing if you get killed two minutes in.

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      1. That’s the real limiter that heavy kit puts on you. Sure you *can* do all kinds of fancy acrobatics in full plate or a hoplite panoply, but you’ll exhaust yourself relatively quickly, and in battle you cannot afford to take on unnecessary fatigue.

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      2. Another reason why the older troops in Roman legions ended up at the back.

        As you get older, your endurance goes down even with the best training.

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      3. Really a different type of endurance is sometimes even more important: how tired are you and how sick are you when you actually have to fight, having previously done all the walking and camping and cohabitating to arrive at the battle? If the battle is right next door, maybe you’re at roughly baseline condition. If it’s further off, your immune system and metabolism start to count more.

        I believe this blog has previously quoted greek authors prizing the ability to endure hardship in a soldier, gesturing at the above.

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    5. “European knights” covers a lot of ground, everything from 11th century (mostly mail) to 17th (white plate) and also includes jousting armor (much much heavier than anything you’d wear in a battle because you could take it off or sit down between jousts).

      But yes. Armor that heavily restricts your movement is for when you don’t really expect to move. E.g. jousting armor.

      A modern example is the suits bomb disposal experts wear. They won’t be able to outrun the blast, so it has maximum protection (consistent with actually being able to work) so they have at least some chance of survival.

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      1. Jousting armour also purposely restricts some movement, e. g., at least the later iterations entirely remove neck movement. This is a safety feature for something that has, by that time, become a combat sport – if the neck cannot move, falling off your horse becomes *much* safer.
        The price is that you can only see forward, but in the combat sport of jousting, that doesn’t matter.

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    6. I’m in pretty good physical condition, so I could probably do some feats of strength, agility or speed while wearing heavy armor, especially if the ergonomics were good. However, if I tried to skirmish while wearing heavy armor, some guy who was also very fit would be faster and less tired than me and could potentially put a pilum into me for my hubris.

      I think discussion of tradeoffs in equipment needs some grounding in the understanding of battles as contests. Doing something better or worse compared to counterfactual with different equipment may practically mean doing it significantly better or worse than your factual opponent. That neglect might have been another part of the reason for earlier extremist positions, as well as a more general lack of broader context of similar equipment in other places and other times.

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  5. “All of these but the greaves basically phase out by the end of the 500s.”

    “Moreover, key elements of hoplite equipment show a clear effort to prioritize protection over other factors”

    What do you think the reasoning is for the failure for the wider choice of accessories not sticking, given they seem to be looking for more protection?

    Does it seem like they were just too expensive, or did they add just too much weight for protecting areas that were already covered in a shield wall, or too much weight for people who might still fight outside of a shield wall, or some other reason?

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    1. To me, it seems like you have two moving parts: a demand for protection over all other concerns which rises from 750 to perhaps 600 and then recedes somewhat with a greater demand for lightness and wearability in the 500s and 400s, combined with a widening of the range of folks who fought as hoplites and thus demand for more cost-effective equipment (thus the tube-and-yoke cuirass, but also lighter helmet styles and dropping expensive vanity pieces in armor). But we can’t really know with certainty, no source tells us.

      I doubt a lot of the add-ons beyond greaves were ever very common.

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      1. To me it makes perfect sense that greaves stuck around when nothing else did because every other novelty armour component you mentioned covers a part of the body that should be behind the shield most of the time.

        Every man wants to protect the family jewels, for instance, but hanging an even modestly heavy piece of metal there is going to get old real fast.

        Greaves – while absolutely infuriating piece to fit to your legs properly – cover a part of your body that is almost never protected by the shield, because lowering the shield to defend your legs opens up your face, neck and shoulders to attack. So greaves are worth the trouble but none of the other stuff is.

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    2. One of the main current *theories* is that Greek combat changed profoundly on contact with Persian archery, and the big clue is in the change in Greek spears. Archaic Greek spears are depicted as generally shorter, single-ended spears with little loops on them to assist with throwing. Classical Greek spears are a bit longer, asymmetrically double-ended, and thus rear weighted, giving them a longer stabbing range but making them almost impossible to throw farther than arm’s reach. There are a lot of clashing interpretations of the Chigi Olpe, but what is inarguable is that it shows *a shield wall of archaic hoplites wielding spears that are in some capacity designed for throwing*. And having all those extra accessories helps give much greater protection from projectiles, at the cost of some mobility and added weight. Likewise we see helmets gradually getting more and more closed-face, peaking around the style of the Hermione corinthian, which would help protect from projectiles.

      And then we get contact in Anatolia between Ionian Greek hoplites, and Persian archers. We see some immediate innovations to the hoplite kit which we can only assume were relatively ineffective due to their shortlived-ness, such as the shield aprons we briefly see appear in art at the time. None of it stuck because at a large scale, even with shield aprons and foot-armor and thigh guards, spear-throwing still just loses to mass-volleyed archery, period. The one thing the Greeks find that does seem most effective is charging as quickly as possible through effective arrow-range to engage the enemy in close order where they cannot use their bows. It’s at this time that we see most of those extra pieces being dropped. No more arm guards or thigh guards, the helmets start moving back towards more open-faced helmets like the Chalcidian and Attic helmets, and the spear becomes the classical Doru with sauroter.

      It’s somewhat counter-intuitive, but that up-close shock fighting in the shield wall actually requires less armor than two shield walls chucking spears at each other. Incoming projectiles raining from different angles can hit you basically anywhere. Spear-fighting at spear-distance, behind a massive shield that covers you knee to neck, the enemy is only really going to be targeting thrusts from one or two main angles at your head and your lower legs.

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      1. Roll and I suggested this in The Face of Battleat Plataiai. And Krentz had earlier linked the charge at Marathon to a need to run through Persian archery.

        I have a chapter coming out in a book titled “Plataea: Politics, Memory, Landscape. That directly addresses the failure of the Archaic Greek shield-wall when confronted by the Achaemenid shield-wall.

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  6. Sounds like there’s a broken footnote [/efn_note]See K.R. de Groote, ‘”Twas When my Shield Turned Traitor!’ Establishing the Combat Effectiveness of the Greek Hoplite Shield” OJA 35.2 (2016) for a rundown.[/efn_note]

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  8. Regarding note 4, and as an engineer who dealt with multiple-choice issues, I feel the debate lacks some reminding of Pareto choice theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency). I see too often nowadays a corollary of “nothing is better, it all depends on context”. The fact is that there are solutions that dominate all others and they tend to displace prior solutions. A lot of the humanities debate seems to be too focused on relativism vs absolutism for a certain side to recognize this part.

    However, a trade off (better en A, worse in B) does not constitute a formal domination in mathematical multiple choice. Those produce what marketing theory calls iso-indiference curves (and it has similar curves in other aspects, as efficiency frontiers of multiple variable systems in which the cost of each variable is potentially variable). That’s the reason for which we have multiple surviving production methods for the same final goods or multiple consumer product ranges.

    Unfortunately, the complexity of this makes that many people on the opposite site doesn’t grasp it quite well. Sometimes the variable cost variation happens in long temporal scale, so the difference is complex to see. E.g. In my profession, I’ve had to deal with labour vs material costs. A certain solution may involve more labour but less wasted concrete/metal whilst other does the opposite. In a low labour cost environment, one solution seems to dominate despite being a trade off. The change in the indiference curve may need generations to be visible, provided that there is not a shock like the Black Death (or, in my case, moving the the antipodes).

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    1. I look at footnote four and think about what a biologist would say – that is, while you can measure the fitness of organisms, it isn’t actually valid to say one organism is more fit than another, you have to qualify it with the environment it’s more fit in.

      And the same goes for weapons – weapon panoplies undergo an evolutionary process very similar to that of biological evolution, and what determines which panoply will be used more is the environment, ie which one is more fit to that environment.

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      1. Regarding biology: many random mutations are absolute negative and just cause illness. Other are slightly negative in some environment but have other consequences positive in other. Many are neutral and actually a lot of the evolutionary effect happenes by statistical drift without increasing or decreasing fitness (which is a quite obsolete definition in biology). Some are net positive: for example increased reproduction speed facilitate the spread of a microbial strain.

        Again, for my explanation: there is an overuse of concepts like environmental fittnes that confuse people. When a mutation makes a pregnancy end on abortion or a baby dying soon, it is usually not a an environmental fittnes issue. Surviving phenotypes is the efficiency frontier equivalent to that indifference curve I mentioned in economy: you are seeing a specific set of variation in a narrow range and or with tradeoffs. If a mutation brings just evolutionary advantages or disadvantages it tended to displace/be displaced

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      2. I feel this comparison to evolution is very apt, not just because of the similarity of the processes, but also the same trouble in communicating its nature to the public. When looking at the process afterwards, the changes can look teleological, that is, pre-ordained and designed, even though they were in truth highly contingent and random.
        Not to mention that in both cases, the niche that the process supposedly evolved towards was actually only created due to the random mutations making it viable. That is, what allows changes in behaviour and equipment/body to create a positive feedback loop towards specialisation is that the environment around it also becomes part of the loop, being changed as its participants change.

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        1. Technological change (including in military technology) is not random: it is designed by humans seeking a specific goal. Now it is of course possible for those humans to try an experiment that doesn’t work, but that is different from biological mutations, which are purposeless in their inception.

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          1. “We tried and it didn’t work” is not too different from “This mutation arose randomly and the carrier died before having offspring”

          2. The two are equivalent only if you assume that an intention to produce something useful is no more predictive of result than random chance.

      3. As a biologist, what we see in nature is called a phenotype, the result of both genetic information inherited from the past and all of the inputs from the environment, from in the womb to adulthood. I am constantly applying this to the study of hoplites.

        The shift we see between Archaic and later hoplites is a story of reaction to external forces, the challenge of Persia, and specialization of the shield-wall. As with species, we see over specialization can lead to great short term success and also leave them vulnerable to catastrophic loss if the environment changes. This happened to Persia and to Greece in turn.

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  9. “Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social)”

    That doesn’t work for me on Mastodon. Looking closer the server is @historians.social@a.gup.pe

    Unfortunately everything on the gup.pe domain is dead and gone, because someone stole the domain because the provider is a rat bastige that lets people buy other peoples’ unexpired domains.

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    1. There is ‘”Online Rent-a-Sage” Bret Devereaux
      @bretdevereaux@bird.makeup’ but I believe that bird.makeup just echoes your posts from Twitter and/or Bluesky on Mastodon.

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    2. Historians.social announced at the end of August that they were closing at the end of October, so there is also that.

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  10. I can’t remember if you’ve done posts on how different types of infantry fight, which may be useful to link here. There’s also the post on the priority of armour which might prove useful in talking about why some parts of the panoply were selected over others.

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  11. I have to say, the biggest point in my (uninformed) mind against the orthodox position is the idea that you can fight when some asshole is shoving you from behind. I kinda get where they’re coming from but if you stop and think about it… it doesn’t make much sense.

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      1. I never read VDH but I did suffer through Pressfield’s “Gates of Fire” and, uh, the way he describes the pushing (and the “tree fucking” training exercise, and the apparently constant fear-induced pooping) really makes it sound like a sex thing. When then Defense Secretary Bill Cohen praised the book at length in a speech, my respect for him plummeted:

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        1. I’m cheered to think that I’m not the only reader who thought Pressfield’s book was a lot of faux woo-woo, pseudo-macho b.s. When I read and reviewed “Gates of Fire,” all I could think of was old school Marine Corps basic training sadism, prison yard bullying, and an overlay of pretentious, half-baked Nietzschean yearnings. Bah.

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          1. On USMC basic training sadism: it’s telling that the best-known example of this is fictional, from Full Metal Jacket – and was cranked up to be worse than real 1960s training for the film (the book has the drill instructor be a more paternal figure to the recruits). I think Lee Emery himself said that drill instructors never choked or hit recruits, only yelled at them to train harder. And of course the climax scene at the end of the training half of the film is completely fictional.

            And this matters historiographically, because you should assume that what sources tell you about how things were in their past is similarly mediated through literary or cultural expectations.

          2. Alon: and, also, it is from a film made almost forty years ago about a war happening almost sixty years ago!

            It is notable that cinema critics at the time who had (unlike Kubrick) served in the military were *extremely* scathing about the training depicted – I’ve read comments like “I don’t know if this is an accurate depiction of USMC training in the 60s, but if it is, no wonder they lost the war”.

        2. I think the thing about shoving (which I don’t think came up last week) is that, if two shield wars are shoving against each other, then their shields are basically locked in place, because they’re shoving against each other. And if I’m in the second rank, and this othismos is happening between my front rank and the enemy front rank, I am going to use my spear to poke forward over the shoulder of my front rank guy, over the shield of the enemy front rank guy, and into his pretty much immobile face or neck, and he won’t be able to raise his shield to stop me. If he tries, he’s going to have to take the pressure off his shield first, and then he’s going to immediately get pushed over backwards by my front-rank guy. His second rank guy isn’t going to be able to protect him unless he’s able somehow to parry my spear with his spear, which is not easy because he won’t be able to get much strength into a sideways blow.

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          1. It’s worth noting that the swords we tend to see depicted in the classical era tend to be very short (borderline dagger-length) with large guards, which is a design which would be ideal for the front-rank guys in such a hypothetical lock-up to try to stab each other over the shields and also parry incoming attacks over them.

  12. How does someone get used to wearing this armor, however heavy it may be? I seem to recall (from the Sparta series?) that training was not a thing the ancient Greeks did. Farming is hard work, to be sure, but it isn’t the same type of hard work as wearing/carrying 18 kg of stuff then trying to stab each other. Or maybe it is, I have no experience with the latter.

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    1. Hoplite armor really doesn’t cover any of the joints, so there isn’t too much learning to be done with it – it isn’t like articulated plate armor where you have to get used to the way it moves. The Greeks at this point haven’t mastered any way to really articulate the armor (and for whatever reason largely do not adopt scaled armor, though they are aware of it), so I’m not sure there would be too much adaptation.

      In terms of just strength and endurance, physical training – as opposed to drill or weapons training – was something the Greeks valued.

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      1. I am not the only one who believes that people in earlier times were simply stronger and tougher than we moderns. Their lives demanded it and if you were an ordinary fellow working for a living you became fit in the course of your activities. Or you broke down. We are so soft by comparison!

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          1. I’m less certain that the folks well off enough to afford a full bronze hoplite panoply were chronically undernourished.

        2. Yes. If you wanted to go anywhere for most people it was walking.

          Even if you had a horse, riding one is much more work than driving a car.

          Being fat enough to have difficulty walking was limited to those rich and/or powerful enough for a litter. And generally resulted in an early death due to bedsores.

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        3. Given that even as late as the 1940s you got armies worrying that people were too underfed and thus weakened to serve, I don’t think that’s so clear-cut.

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        4. “if you were an ordinary fellow working for a living you became fit in the course of your activities. Or you broke down.”

          This is an “and” not an “or” – constant hard physical work is bad for the body! You get chronic injuries! It is not the same as going to the gym three times a week! Have you ever met a non-mechanised farmer, especially one in later life? These are not spry, nimble pictures of health!

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        5. My guess is that the kind and duration of physical labour I did in the 1970s was near enough optimal. I might have been unloading lorries by hand for (net) six or seven hours in a day, or digging holes in the ground. More than that, which is the kind of thing badly opressed people and foolish would-be athletes can manage, will cause injury, which I didn’t get. That suggests there might have been an optimum for Greek or Roman farmers, which would be the ‘not the poorest’, and which made them the most effective or most enduring soldiers. Rich people, then and now, have to mimic the kinds of training which was just an ordinary part of my life, and which would be ordinary for those ‘not the poorest’ farmers.

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      2. I remember reading about olympic hoplite races (hoplitodromos) in Horrible Histories, but apparently that was only introduced in the 65th Olympics (520 BCE). So there was some interest in physical training in armour even if apparently the cuirass wasn’t part of the event, just helmet, greaves and aspis

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  13. I’m interested in where the central Italian use of hoplite panoply fits into this. The Etruscans – at least the wealthier classes – clearly used a version of the Hoplite panoply, albeit possibly with javelins as well. Surely this has some bearing on how we interpret the interaction between the panoply and mode of warfare.

    Even more interestingly, the Samnites also appear to have used a version of the Hoplite panoply (or at least some Samnite warriors did). We have good archaeological and pictorial evidence for this. Yet the Samnites were a mountain people who we are pretty certain didn’t fight in phalanx and were sufficiently competent to give early Rome a real challenge. What does this tell us about the way in which the Hoplite panoply was used?

    Given that our author is an expert on early Italian warfare and military equipment, I think he does himself a disservice when he claims humility here. If I were looking for someone to move this debate forward I would have thought an early Italian military expert would be exactly the right person…

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    1. He has already done as the Sabin women, and has run out between the battle-lines with own baby in hand. The thesis that pre-hoplite Archaic Greeks already fought in shield-walls frequently enough to motivate the development/adoption of the hoplite kit is new (or at least if someone has proposed it before, it has not become adopted by either of the two main camps). (I guess the direction to elaborate this is: if we assume the post-LBAC (i.e. post-chariot) military system was open-order or even skirmishing-based, the pre-hoplites would have been equipped as medium infantry. This would have allowed for the gradual rise of close-order fighting. It is not entirely clear whether further explanation is needed — meeleeing down the opponent is dominant over throwing javelins at them — but another cause may be the tendency for army headcounts to grow over time, driven by phylai/komai/demoi putting their houses together into poleis.)

      On the other hand: what is thought, how did the Samnites fight?

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    2. I have suggested that the shift from Archaic shield-wall to classical phalanx (still just a shield-wall of a different flavor) was sparked by the inability of Greeks to stand in a missile phase with Persian archers and the specialized shield-wall they used to protect them. Because the Italian Greeks and other hoplite fielding cultures never faced massed archers, they retained the archaic missile throwing hoplite. The rise of the Roman manipular system would then be a means of using the shield-wall to maximize the element of lighter troops sallying forth from the wall to skirmish. We see the fossil of this in the retention of the Triarii and the Rorarii and Accensi behind them because the Archaic shield-wall requires light troops in the rear to support it with missiles. Some of this I developed from chats with Michael Taylor and I know he has published elements of this, but I do not recall where.

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  14. “There is also a really interesting question of the where of early hoplite equipment. Older hoplite orthodox scholars assumed hoplite equipment emerged in Greece ex nihilo and was peculiar to the Greeks, but this vision has been challenged and I think is rightly challenged (by, e.g. J. Brouwers, Henchmen of Ares (2013), reviewed favorably by Sean Manning here. In particular, the fact that a lot of our evidence comes from either Southern Italy or Anatolia is not always well appreciated in these debates. We don’t have the space to untangle those arguments (and I am not versed enough on the eastern side) but it is well worth remembering that Archaic Greece was not culturally isolated and that influences eastern and western are easy to demonstrate.)”

    What do you mean as “Anatolia”?
    Lydia?
    Caria?
    Phrygia? 8th century was time of King Midas and Gordium.
    Central Anatolia?
    As far east as Cilicia?
    Further east, 8th century BC was a time of major social developments. The Assyrian Empire. How were the common soldiers and officers of Assyrian army armed? Any change between early 9th and late 8th centuries BC?
    About that body armour like Argos panoply… It had existed centuries before
    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Mycenaean_armour_from_chamber_tomb_12_of_Dendra_1.JPG
    But note how Dendra panoply seems to have relatively less ear protection of helmet than the Argos panoply. Tutanchamon might have been able to afford bronze armour… but he did not. He wore leather armour.

    So the hoplite equipment was designed for a shield wall.
    Does it mean that shield walls consisting of non-hoplites predated hoplites?
    What equipment did the pre-hoplite shield wall soldiers have?
    After hoplites appeared but when they were few in numbers, did shield walls normally have mostly non-hoplite shields with a few hoplites among the non-hoplites?

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    1. Tutankhamen certainly wore bronze armour. We have many depictions of Egyptian bronze scale armour from the New Kingdom and many pictorial representations. The fact that he also had a leather tunic buried with him – which may have been worn for practice – certainly doesn’t mean that the pharaoh would turn up on the battlefield under equipped compared to every other chariot warrior.

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    2. “Does it mean that shield walls consisting of non-hoplites predated hoplites?”
      Yes.
      “What equipment did the pre-hoplite shield wall soldiers have?”
      Medium infantry. More literally, the post includes a list: “Diplyon shields, squarish shields, center-grip shields […] Kegelhelm […] Illyrian helmets“. And either no armor, or an early form of the linothorax tube-and-yoke cuirass (if that predated the bronze breastplates, rather than evolving out of them as a cheaper substitute).
      “After hoplites appeared but when they were few in numbers, did shield walls normally have mostly non-hoplite shields with a few hoplites among the non-hoplites?”
      Yes, that is how this works.

      Common soldiers of the Assyrian army were — described in this post — armed with one-handed spears and very large (probably wicker? would be excessively heavy if solid wood) shields; in some contexts they had archers interspersed with them, possibly 1:1.

      During the Greek Dark Age, the previous (Bronze Age) social organization almost completely falls apart, individual villages and clans become independent polities. Warfare would mostly be raiding, but the occasional field battle may well feature fewer than a hundred men per side. This being the case, the fighting in these battles would have to be skirmishing.

      Through the Archaic, whether kings reemerge or the villages (komai (demoi?)) and/or clans (phylai) put the houses together into fiercely antimonarchical poleis, or indeed both happen in sequence — either way, average polity size grows, until a typical army has over a thousand men in it. Frontage becomes a concern, thus the fighting order gradually densifies (and the armies stack up in multiple ranks, anywhere from 2-3 to as many as 8). As the character of fighting changes, the equipment changes to match: light infantry, geared for skirmishing, are pushed out of the center of the fighting by medium infantry, which in turn eventually develop into heavy infantry (our hoplites).

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      1. And nothing breeds imitation like success. If a few archaic Greek cities started to win pitched battles through new tactics and armaments, you can bet their adversaries noticed and followed suit. Within a generation or two, hoplite formations would have been the norm and remain so as long as Greek warfare remained largely a Hellenic affair.

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        1. “And nothing breeds imitation like success. If a few archaic Greek cities started to win pitched battles through new tactics and armaments, you can bet their adversaries noticed and followed suit. Within a generation or two, hoplite formations would have been the norm and remain so as long as Greek warfare remained largely a Hellenic affair.”

          Except it didn´t?
          A major development of Archaic Greece was Greek colonization. Thrace, Sicily, South Italy.
          Were the Greek colonies founded thanks to the colonists arming themselves as hoplites, catching the natives in a pitched battle and defeating them?
          Did the natives of Sicily and Thrace follow suit in equipping as hoplites and building cities?
          In Asia Minor, Greek colonization had happened back in Dark Ages, but the Lydian kingdom developed in Archaic Age. Gyges of his Ring invented tyranny and his attacks on Ionian cities in 670s were significant.
          How were the Lydian soldiers of Gyges armed, compared to the Ionians?

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          1. Colonization: much more intricate than that!

            Elsewhere in history, there were waves of settler-colonization driven by agricultural advantage, that the colonists brought a subsistence system that allowed/produced a higher population density than that of the previous residents. In those cases, if the colonists could find a toehold, they could make a sustained push and bulldoze the previous population. However, the Phoenician and Greek colonizations probably weren’t like this. The population density before and after would have been similar.

            Instead, as explained in the post on colonization:
            “That leads to a fairly common assumption that Greek colonization in particular must have been the product of a superior military system, namely the hoplite phalanx, but [phalanx dating debate!]. […] Instead, looking at the pattern of colonial settlements, it seems fairly clear both that military force was a major factor […] but that the key innovation might actually be the state rather than a specific form of fighting. […] The areas where Greek and Phoenician colonization are most successful are regions where the local populace was not (yet) organized into large states, but remained grouped into smaller tribes or clans. […] And one indicator that this may in fact be what is happening is to look where Greek colonization failed. […] The presence of a stronger, centralized state made prohibiting further colonial settlement possible.”

            Which is to say, the areas where colonization was successful would have been organized into independent polities of clan/tribe/village scale. Again, probably fewer than a hundred military-age males per polity to marshal. If the Greek have already formed poleis, with a militia size over a thousand, they are (just barely?) capable of sending out a colonial expedition of more than a hundred armed men. When they arrive on shore to find a diplomatic landscape of feuding hamlets, where the colonists are able to overpower any single one, then — if they have any diplomatic acumen at all — they can kick off a rapid diplomatic rearrangement, allying with some clans against others, and crucially acting as unquestioned coalition leader. Assuming the pro-colonist alliance wins the ensuing battle (highly probable based on numbers even if the colonists were skirmishers, though they are probably at least pre-hoplite medium infantry), the members of the anti-colonist alliance all die, flee, or get enslaved (andrapodized), much of their movable property (including themselves as slaves) becomes the bounty of the pro-colonist clans, while their land becomes the land of the new Greek polis, which is also now a hegemon sort-of ruling over their allied clans. (After they properly establish themselves, they probably start altering the deal fairly soon.)

            The emphasis is on the allied local clans. If the Greeks just rocked up, even as hoplites, and started blindly fighting everyone — not even as “one pitched battle against all of them together”, which they would just lose (even as hoplites vs. skirmishers), merely fighting one clan after another — they would suffer unsustainable casualties even if they won the battles. Which, yes, would soon turn into a “containment war” they would just lose.

            Whereas if the existing polities in the area were small city-states with a thousand militia, they can’t reliably do the above. In particular, even if they succeed at making a mess of the balance of power and winning the resulting battle, they would be a junior party to the alliance with some local city-state. They could only establish a new polis at the sufferance of their senior ally, and if they tried outgrowing them, they would be slapped down.

          2. This suggest that the early Greek colonies were not particularly likely place to develop hoplites. Because if all the Greeks faced were lightly armed native skirmishers then they could face them equally armed by superiority of numbers alone, or as medium infantry skirmishers, or as medium infantry shieldwall.
            How much was the development of shieldwall, as in developing heavier shields and armour for the shieldwall, prompted by facing concentrated, well-armed attacks against lighter shieldwalls?

      2. ““What equipment did the pre-hoplite shield wall soldiers have?”
        Medium infantry. More literally, the post includes a list: “Diplyon shields, squarish shields, center-grip shields […] Kegelhelm […] Illyrian helmets“. And either no armor, or an early form of the linothorax tube-and-yoke cuirass (if that predated the bronze breastplates, rather than evolving out of them as a cheaper substitute).”

        Nope.
        We are told that aspis appeared about 750 BC (where? Greece?) and metal helmets like Kegelhelm and Illyrian helmets only later (but Argos panoply by 720 BC included a metal helmet already). Therefore the users of the first aspis in 750 BC had no metal helmet at all, and people fighting in a shield wall in 760 or 770 before they invented the aspis had no metal helmet either.

        “Common soldiers of the Assyrian army were — described in this post — armed with one-handed spears and very large (probably wicker? would be excessively heavy if solid wood) shields;”

        Note how this is a similar compromise! Mobility for protection.
        A shield held in hand is mobile but holding it in outstretched hand limits the weight it can have and protection it can offer. So looking for extra point of support to support a stronger and more stable shield at the sacrifice of mobility.
        Aspis picks elbow for the other point of support. But aspis left legs unprotected, which tended to require greaves and slow down the legs.
        The option the Assyrians are using is resting the bottom of the shield on ground. Which also allows a heavier and more stable shield at the sacrifice of mobility.

        Supporting the shield on elbow vs. ground are similar but different compromises. Did Greeks experiment with grounded shields as well?

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    3. The Dendra Panoply predates the Late Bronze Age Collapse, the Argos Panoply is one of the earliest prices from the Archaic period, as civilization recovered in Greece. This in part explains the significant stylistic differences in construction between the Dendra and Argos Panoplies.

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  16. Do we know how the shield wood was shaped and joined? Straight boards across trimmed to fit? Curved pieces nested together? Radial wedges? All one piece from a really big tree?

    Were they nailed or sewn, or did the metal rim and covering hold them in place?

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    1. It doesn’t seem to have been an easy job, and there are YouTube videos showing modern armorers crafting ancient Greek hoplite shields (and other items). And they are using modern tools and materials. The ancients must have simplified and standardized the processes, or those armies couldn’t have fielded and equipped so many warriors.

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    2. The aspis was constructed in three different ways based on finds. The best surviving examples we have a formed of thin planks, as little as 5mm in surviving cores, butted and glue horizontally. Once the general shape was formed, they finished the shield on a lathe. The profile of the shield is a unique, thinnest on the face of the shield, then doubling in thickness at the section that turns back to make a bowl and joins with an offset rim. This turned-back section and the rim account of much of the mass of the core, so they do not exist to allow the shield to be supported because it is heavy- it is heavy because of the bowl section.

      The second way is glued strips just like a scutum. Lastly there were planks that were supported by an internal stringer shaped like an X. This type reminds me of boat hull construction.

      Oddly, we only have one surviving fragment that contained leather or rawhide on the rim on the front side. You would imagine a rawhide facing, but no direct evidence. Instead we have bronze rims and whole bronze facings, very thin 0.05mm. We also have linen facings, 2 ply and glued (this is in fact the only defensive part of the panoply for which we have glued linen in evidence, none for the infamous “linothorax”.)

      We do see leather, probably kidskin on the inside of the bowl of the aspis. We also see on at least one aspis oval bronze sheets nailed into adjacent boards to hold them together and the wooden core could be made of joined planks rather than single whole planks.

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  18. “The ‘kit’ of an 18th century line infantryman in Europe was designed, very clearly for linear engagements between large units on relatively open battlefields.”

    Frankly that’s not true at all. The ‘kit’ of an 18th century line infantryman is fundamentally a light skirmisher kit supplemented by training and tactics that let them perform ‘okay’ in pitched battles. Compared to 100 years earlier, even their muskets are lighter, have less range and power, and are closer to what would be categorized as “calivers” rather than proper muskets.

    The fact that the universal arming of even the “heavy infantry” became light muskets and bayonets (rather than, say, pikes and pistols, which would certainly make them far more effective in a charge) should be read as an indication of just how important “small war” skirmishes, firepower, and flexibility had become for early modern armies.

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    1. I’d half-agree. Clearly something about the nature of 17th century warfare led, logically, to a more lightly-armed infantryman as a more ideal way of fighting in an environment still dominated (in pitched battle at least) by linear warfare, but I do think it is telling that the transition to skirmishing as the primary method of even pitched battles was one that took place entirely within the age of the flintlock musket, culminating during, rather than after, the Napoleonic period. I suppose it depends what you consider the ‘prime mover’.

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    2. In the 15th C an 18th C musketeer would have been regarded as a time traveller from a more technologically advanced culture; in classical era Greece he would have been regarded as a magician. So what?

      If you really must nitpick 18th CE gunpowder weaponry in a post about classical era Greek hoplites, warfare changed dramatically at the end of the 18th C. The French introduced mass conscription to greatly increase the size of armies AND changed the political goal of warfare from extracting concessions to overthrowing existing governments and imposing new political structures. Other nations had to follow or be overwhelmed.
      The infantry gear did NOT change, because the armies in question were already used to fighting linear engagements. If 18th C muskets had not been intended for linear warfare, everybody would have changed in face of this new existential threat.

      18th C muskets are lighter because metalworking is more precise and more consistent, so is the manufacture of gunpowder. They may have less theoretical maximum range, but effective range, where aimed shots are actually likely to hit something, is unchanged or possibly better. They are using less gunpowder to throw a smaller bullet, but it’s still lethal.

      Bayonets replaced pikes because they doubled the effective number of shooters AND stabbers without actually needing more men: every musketeer could now stand off cavalry without needing pikemen. And in a charge bayonets had just as much morale effect as pikes in persuading enemy infantry to run away.

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      1. it doesn’t change the fact that their ‘kit’ is derived from light infantry kit in pretty much the most literal ways possible. In the 17th century, up until it became clear pikes had finally disappeared for good, *all* shot were called “light infantry” and military theorists inspired by antiquity often made the explicit comparison calling them the modern version of “velites.” Along with the connotations that came with it, saying that shot were best suited for fighting in woods, ditches, hedges, towns or other places of broken ground.

        Bayonets already existed in the 17th century. The problem is that they were never taken seriously as an anti-cavalry weapon in an era where it was still widely believed you needed at least 4 or 5 overlapping ranks of pikepoints to resist a cavalry charge on open ground (and in practice even that sometimes proved insufficient), nevermind the prospect of an unarmored man with a bayonet trying to resist a man charging at him with a 15 foot pike. It was only with the decline of heavy cavalry and the decline of pikes to either support or oppose musketeers that people finally started to go “well, maybe we can try giving this bayonet thing a shot.”

        The why didn’t they use pikes against bayonets thing isn’t just my observation. It’s a repeated sentiment that keeps getting brought up every now and then up through the American revolution, the peninsular campaign, and even the American civil war with occasional thinkers and military men going “hey, if bayonet charges are so important, why don’t we arm troops with pikes or half-pikes, since those are way better than bayonets?” But that idea obviously never took off for various reasons.

        First off frankly it is very useful to have lots of troops who can partake in skirmishing, foraging, raiding, and fighting in woods, ditches, hedges, and all these other places, and even if you have a very large army it’s useful to have even more troops who can do so. History likes to focus on big, flashy battles, as do most period military treatises and manuals, however that should not be interpreted as being the primary mode of warfare, and is in fact partly because pitched battles were fairly uncommon so it was sought for generals and soldiers to learn how to fight them ahead of time, rather than try to learn through hands on experience. Skirmishing, by contrast, was a skill that could be learned “on the job” as it were, and if a few skirmishes were lost in the process it was no big deal.

        Secondly, and this part might actually be relevant to the discussion about hoplites, is that culturally there tends to be changing ideas about what a “soldier” ought to look like, which can include specific decorations, dress, ways of moving, as well as how they should be armed. This can be influenced by changing technological and tactical considerations but it isn’t necessarily a one-way street. In 1672 Sir James Turner wrote that he often heard gentlemen in england and the low countries say that they scorned the idea of being a sergeant, and preferred to serve as a pikeman even at only 1/3rd the pay, because the sergeant had to carry a halberd, which they considered less honorable than the pike. By the 18th and 19th centuries this attitude seems to have disappeared, and if you did try to arm a battalion with pikes during this period for dedicated shock actions the troops would have felt greatly demoralized and disdained the fact that they felt useless armed with just “sharp sticks” because their idea of a soldier by that point is supposed to be a man in a uniform with a musket and bayonet. This was definitely the experience expressed by confederate troops armed with pikes during the ACW.

        Back in 16th century England you also see a similar process with the longbow slowly coming to be viewed as an “soldierly” weapon.

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        1. Didn’t some theorists in the 19th century also advocate bringing back the longbow? That idea didn’t take off either.

          I think there is an essay out there about how Alexander the Great could have beaten Wellington at Waterloo with his Macedonian army of the time. But I wouldn’t have laid odds on it.

          This is all so much bar talk.

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          1. I think there is an essay out there about how Alexander the Great could have beaten Wellington at Waterloo with his Macedonian army of the time. But I wouldn’t have laid odds on it.

            Anyone saying that hasn’t reckoned with the absolutely absurd firepower revolution called the field artillery cannon. And I’m sure you can build a shield that can bounce a musket bullet, but you probably can’t charge with it.

            I’ve even seen some people comment that the only people who weren’t shocked by the casualty rates in Napoleonic era battles seem to have been the Prussians, who presumably had a similar battle style to Napoleon even before the wars.

    3. The 18th Century is the 1700s.

      Since the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792 – 1815) were primarily fought with rectangles of men lining up to shoot at the opposing rectangle, and Old Fritz (Frederick II, king 1740 – 1780) was working with variations on the original Linear Tactics (Gustav Adolphus, king 1610 – 1630) I think we can safely say that linear tactics were still firmly in place during C.18.

      The Napoleonic Wars steadily increased the value of skirmishers, until by the end loose riflemen were seen as the way of the future, but that marks the end of the linear system… In the 19th century.

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    4. > Compared to 100 years earlier, even their muskets are lighter, have less range and power, and are closer to what would be categorized as “calivers” rather than proper muskets.

      I feel this is a bit of a distraction – the broad demise of armour on the field at the time has removed the _need_ for the full power musket. When it comes to blasting at other unarmoured infantry or largely unarmoured cavalry, a musket twice as powerful doesn’t kill them any deader.

      > The fact that the universal arming of even the “heavy infantry” became light muskets and bayonets (rather than, say, pikes and pistols, which would certainly make them far more effective in a charge) should be read as an indication of just how important “small war” skirmishes, firepower, and flexibility had become for early modern armies.

      Alternatively, that firearms and the doctrine around them had become sufficiently robust by this point that maximising firepower was more important than maximising close combat potential. If your pike and pistol column gets shot to pieces on the approach and loses cohesion it’s not much good at charging.

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      1. > When it comes to blasting at other unarmoured infantry or largely unarmoured cavalry, a musket twice as powerful doesn’t kill them any deader.

        Believe it or not, there were people who argued exactly that. In 1598, in response to an argument by a Sir John Smythe that muskets and calivers should be replaced with arquebuses that would be much lighter, less cumbersome, and easier for skirmishers to retreat with, former soldier Barnabe Rich sarcastically retorted:
        “Then I perceiue the errour of our Low-country captaines is, because they would arme their people in such sort as they might be able to put the enemie to a retrait, but your great captaines cleane contrary would haue them
        description so appointed as they might be light and nimble to runne a∣way themselues: and he that should bring his men but furnished with paltry harquebuz to incounter the musket and caliuer were fitter indeede to runne away from an ennemie that would offer to assaile him, than be able to tarry by him in the field.”

        In 1590, in comparing the musket and caliver in his “Breife Discourse of Warre”, Roger Williams writes:
        “100. Muskets are to be valued vnto 200. Caliuers or more: the Caliuers may say they will discharge two shot for one, but cannot denie; but one Musket shot doth more hurt than two Caliuers shot, farre or nere and better cheape”

        And there probably is some truth to it. A heavier bullet carries enough momentum to wound or kill unarmored men and horses at much farther distances than lighter ones. Barnabe Rich, goes on a lengthy rant about “those that do no better valew of the musket, but to giue their volies at tenne, twenty, or thirtie paces” saying that “it should seeme they knew of no other seruice in the field” and “sheweth their little vnderstanding”
        “in truth one of the most especiall causes that muskets are so much regarded, is because they may be brought 24. and 30. scores off to beate vpon squadrons either of horsmen or footmen, to breake and dismember them: and in like maner to beate passages or groundes of aduantage taken by the enemy, or for many other seruices”

        At shorter ranges, even against unarmored men, a more powerful bullet has the potential to pierce more bodies, though this may have become less important and formations grew thinner. The heavier musket could also be loaded with a larger quantity of shot when occasions required. Again from Barnabe Rich:
        “And yet for those seruices when occasion shall require, what weapon more terrible than the musket, that within twentie, thirtie, fortie, or a hundred paces, will deliuer foure or fiue caliuer shot at one discharge, to the wonderful spoile of such as wil approch them”

        Around the start of the 17th century, the ‘musket enthusiast’ crowd does seem to have won out. Despite the usage of armor already in a state of rapid decline at this point you start to see military reforms in the netherlands and elsewhere pushing for shot on foot to be armed entirely with the heavy musket and forked rest, and trying to exclude the lighter weapons from service except among the cavalry. In England this is where we see a terminology shift occur, whereas in the 16th century the generic term for any group of footsoldiers with firearms tends to be “arquebusiers” or “calivermen”, in the 17th century it becomes more common to refer to only “musketeers” whether the soldiers referred to are armed with proper muskets or not.
        It’s then that we have a gradual process over the next hundred years where the average “musket” becomes smaller and lighter until eventually the forked rest is done away with.

        This is likely in part because the use of armor among infantry and cavalry continued to decline. As formations became smaller and much thinner they likely became much harder to hit at 600 paces away than the gigantic squadrons of pikes and cavalry common in the 16th century, making the “far shooting” Barnabe Rich talks about less useful. They also seem to have discovered the same thing that later 18th and 19th century armies did when dealing with riflemen, that the far shooters are easily occupied by loose skirmishers of your own to screen against them. But overall it is still is a process that was seeing the overall firepower of each musketeer being sacrificed somewhat in favor of agility and endurance.

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        1. “As formations became smaller and much thinner they likely became much harder to hit at 600 paces away than the gigantic squadrons of pikes and cavalry common in the 16th century, making the “far shooting” Barnabe Rich talks about less useful.”

          And the advantage of a heavy, powerful musket, as well as penetration through armour, is range. If you aren’t going to be engaging at 600m, you don’t need a weapon that can kill at 600m, and so you can get away with a lighter, smaller, cheaper, more rapid-firing weapon. True for the shift from battle rifles to assault rifles in the 20th century as well!

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    5. Didn’t the Scots do a version of your ‘pikes and pistols’ proposal with pistols, big swords and small shields? and they got shot to pieces by English line infantry

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      1. At Culloden. But the Highlanders won at Prestonpans, so I would not bet too much on technological determinism.

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        1. But Prestonpans saw the Jacobite Scots making a “sneak attack” basically, coming at unwary government troops from an unexpected direction and not facing any artillery fire or concentrated musketry. That was an outlier battle. Similar in a way to Isandhlwana, when spear-wielding Zulus overran a British position too thinly held for its size and caught the leadership napping.

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          1. I would be careful about this kind of argument. If you have (as the Jacobites had) an army that is lightly armed and equipped, and which is best suited to sudden surprise attacks followed by close-range disorganised action, then you will try to fight that kind of battle.
            And if you have an army that does best when it’s able to engage its enemy with massed musketry and artillery at range, then that is the sort of battle that you will try to fight.
            I’m not sure it is useful to dismiss examples of either as “outliers”. Yes, if Cope had been able to fight the kind of battle his army was best at fighting, he would have won at Prestonpans. He didn’t because he was a bad general!

  19. I really appreciate (and am looking forward to continuing) this deep dive! I’ve seen historians mention that this debate exists before, but never run across a really good, extended but accessible discussion of the positions and evidence of the two camps.

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    1. I may be getting ahead of Dr. Devereaux, since tactics are coming up next week, but the driver behind heavier armour seems really obvious to me.

      Basically, if army sizes are small and battlefields are sparsely populated, it’s (nearly) always better to be mobile. Heavy armour isn’t worth the trouble because your mobility does a better job of keeping you safe; you can simply keep your distance from anyone too heavily armoured to fight directly, for example.

      But this starts to change as army sizes get bigger and battlefields get more crowded. Now there are going to be people in the middle of the field whose mobility is sharply restricted by the number of men around them. They can’t move quickly because there’s nowhere to go.

      For these people, heavier armour starts to make sense because they have no choice but to go through the enemy, or force the enemy to break upon them.

      So if ancient Greek polities increased the size of their armies over time as their economies grew (or whatever), it’s natural that they would also start wearing more armour as combatants in those larger armies increasingly needed to confront their opponents head on.

      Naturally the richest men can afford the most armour, but there’s also a very empowering feeling to be the armoured core of the army. You and your wealthy, heavily armoured peers would be literally shielding your less-wealthy, less-armoured comrades from the enemy and acting as the immovable anchor that keeps the army together.

      It’s really not surprising that so many pre-modern upper classes let this sort of thing go to their heads, when you think about it.

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      2. I did my conscription in the Finnish Army when shrapnel-proof vests were being introduced. The first 11 months, I trained with just a combat webbing and a steel helmet. The combat weight with full ammo and a day’s solid food would be around 12-15 kg, and when you had adjusted the webbing properly, it was actually quite comfortable, especially as in peace time, you never carry the full ammo load.

        For the final maneuvers of the service term, we were issued brand-new flak vests and kevlar helmets. The helmet was great, but the flak vest, with its weight of some 5 kg and mediocre fit meant that you felt completely different. You felt protected, which was great, and the warm vest allowed you to sleep in warm weather without any other protection, but you didn’t really feel like wanting to do anything particularly rapid. But the feeling of being armoured was awesome about the way you describe.

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      3. “Basically, if army sizes are small and battlefields are sparsely populated, it’s (nearly) always better to be mobile. Heavy armour isn’t worth the trouble because your mobility does a better job of keeping you safe; you can simply keep your distance from anyone too heavily armoured to fight directly, for example.

        But this starts to change as army sizes get bigger and battlefields get more crowded. Now there are going to be people in the middle of the field whose mobility is sharply restricted by the number of men around them. They can’t move quickly because there’s nowhere to go.”

        I think the counter to this is that pre-modern battlefields are not fixed sites, and are, to an extent, chosen by mutual agreement. I am not going to choose to offer battle on a field that is so small I can’t deploy my big army fully, nor on a site that is so large that my little army can be easily outflanked. If Henry V had had 200,000 men (and the French the same) he would have fought somewhere else.

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        1. This is true, but only to some extent. The historical record shows that there are places which have been battlefields often, even for millenia. Typically, they are places which are key points on some strategic routes, and which are of suitable size for 5,000-20,000 man armies to meet. After all, the upper size of an army is limited by its logistics, so a European premodern army cannot be any bigger in most places. Thus, you end up fighting in the same fields time and again, even if every time, the commanders have free will.

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          2. “This is true, but only to some extent. The historical record shows that there are places which have been battlefields often, even for millennia.”

            At what degree of precision is this true, though? Is it literally true that there are multiple battles being fought on exactly the same four square kilometres of ground? Or is it more like “controlling this valley is important because it’s the obvious route through the mountains, so there have been lots of battles in and around the valley”?

            To take one example: Stirling is a very important site in mediaeval Scotland because it’s the lowest possible crossing site for the River Forth, and also it’s the only crossing for some way because there are (or were) large marshes upstream of it, and also it’s at the narrow waist of the country connecting the Lowlands with the Highlands. Hence why there’s a large castle there and there have indeed been several battles about who controls Stirling. But I don’t think any of the battles have happened on exactly the same ground as any of the others.

            To take another – the two battles of Thermopylae…

  20. The Roman shields from Dura-Europos might be only 90 cm wide (I lost my copy of Simon James’ book in the catastrophes of 2020) but I think some shields on the Great Plains before the gun were a bit bigger. They were not used for hand to hand fighting though, but defense against arrows and thrown spears. The two sides would set up a line of shields and start shooting and throwing from behind them, pushing the line forward if they felt lucky and hauling it back to regroup. David Thompson of the North West Company describes the day when that tactic died, “they formed their long usual line by placing their shields on the ground to touch each other, the shield having a breadth of full three feet or more.” https://bowvsmusket.com/2017/04/30/saukamappee-plains-indians-use-guns-in-battle-for-the-first-time/

    Looking forward to the rest of the series.

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  21. Fascinating essay again. And I myself DO have a replica hoplite panoply from the period c. 500 BC. So I certainly relate!

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    1. Ah, perfect. So, genuine question, that muscle cuirass in the Wikipedia image looks like it would restrict arm movement towards the centre of the body significantly. Unarmoured, you can get your elbow about as far as your sternum, but from the way that front plate looks, that wouldn’t be possible in this sort of armour.

      Is that an accurate assessment?

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  22. Do you have any interest in playing the new nightreign expansion?

    Ive always wanted to play a fromsoft game with you

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  23. Maybe someone else has raised this point before, above, but I wonder from the Professor’s introductory remarks about hoplites and phalanxes, and from my recent rereading (in translation) of the Anabasis, if we should re-evaluate hoplites as an equivalent to “men at arms” in the medieval context? Soldiers in heavy armor who typically fought in close formations — the “phalanx” — but might also be deployed in looser order and fight in a more independent or skirmish fashion (but not as capably, perhaps, as peltasts or other lighter-armored types). As time goes on, and our literary sources multiply, we seem to see hoplite warfare evolve from dense shield-wall phalanxes to something more flexible and less massive.

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  24. “Via Wikipedia, the Chigi Vase (c. 650). Its hoplite scene is (arguably) the oldest clear scene we have of hoplites depicted fighting in close-order with overlapping shields, although the difficulty of depth (how closely is that second rank behind the first?) remains.”

    I know you put “arguably” in here for good reason, but the problem of interpretation is always going to be that art styles very often show “overlapping” shields when they intend to show a line of men with shields who shields aren’t overlapping. See, for instance, f.024v from the Leiden I Maccabees where the infantry on top of the wall have overlapping shields and the cavalry attacking are in a “reverse shield wall”: https://manuscriptminiatures.com/4887/14190. There are plenty of others (eg: St. Gallen Cod. Sang. 22 Golden Psalter f.141; The Life of Saint Aubin f.7r; even the Bayeux Tapestry, once your realise those shields would only be 60cm wide).

    Artists certainly could show separate ranks, even within the same work as overlapping shields (f.016r of the Leiden Maccabees and f.7v of The Life of Saint Aubin, for instance), but the fact that they often didn’t should be a pretty big check on interpreting art as depicting that particular form of the shield wall. This is especially important when the Macmillan aryballos is thought to be by the Chigi painter, as one part of the vase shows two shield walls facing and mingling with each other, the shield of the front right warrior of one side overlapping with the shield of the front left warrior of the other side. Even if they have different artists, it’s an important look into the style of the time. Compare them to the roughly contemporary Berlin 3773, for instance, which takes pains to depict space between each individual warrior on one side has “overlapping” shields. Is this a clash of two shield wall styles, or is it an artist playing with conventional art styles in an attempt to portray the reality on the ground, so to speak?

    I know it doesn’t much too much to your argument one way or the other, it’s just a pet peeve of mine.

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    1. I am sympathetic to your pet peeve. The Chigi olpe and in fact no vase I can think of at the moment shows unambiguously overlapped aspides. In the case of the Chigi you can see spear shafts between the shields. Where we see overlapped aspides is usually on depictions of Geryon! The one image i can think of off the top of my head is the Frescoe at Paestum (320BCE) that may be of the battle at the Caudine Forks.

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  25. This is a fascinating attempt to explain and address the old positions and a a likely more accrate third position. Thank you so much for attempting it! Looking forwards to the additional parts!

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  26. Question. Where abouts are these different bits of hoplite kit appearing in the Greek world? Are they all appearing across the Greek world uniformly or do they appear in one part (Italy/Greece/Asia minor) and then spread from there outwards?

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  27. So, in the sixteenth century a footsoldier was considered “light armored” if he wore mail sleeves instead of plate vambraces. Guillaume du Bellay considered this manner of arming sufficient for the “extraordinary” pikemen and halberdiers, so-called because they fought “out of order” among loose skirmishers.
    A “Light Horseman” was likewise defined as a man with a heavy lance and in full plate armor except for no greaves or sabatons.
    the extra light horsemen were armed in the same manner but with mail sleeves.

    This is from a partly idealized account, but it’s the kind of thing that makes me dubious about using weight alone to determine how certain soldiers fought. Obviously there are different contexts and back in ancient Greece hoplites would likely be called heavy infantry in at least the literal sense due to wearing heavier armor that other sorts infantry at the time. But here we have an example where even more heavily armed infantry are expected to be able to fight in loose order and keep up with arquebusiers wearing little or no armor to back them against incursions by melee troops. So why should we expect hoplites to be unable to do the same?

    Different people have different levels of strength and stamina and have different amounts of weight they may be willing to endure in combat (Allegedly this can be improved by frequent exercise as well). Presumably, if you can tolerate the weight, armor would be quite useful in many types of loose skirmish where you are liable to be struck from unexpected angles. It seems quite feasible to me for a skirmish to involve combatants in a variety of different levels of armor, rather than strictly being “lighter armor=better”

    As for the aspis, it does seem out of place when center grip shields went on to dominate most of europe for the next 1500 years, but if you go far enough eventually the center grip does seem to fall out of favor again and by the late middle ages you see a variety of double-grip shields become very popular in both duels and skirmishes. Especially in 15th century italy it’s becomes very common to see soldiers using fairly large double-grip shields with either spears or partisans, sometimes in armor, sometimes in just a helmet and greaves.

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    1. Which shields worn on the arm do you mean? There are the large oval shields with three or four pairs of bosses in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, the “wing shields” in Hungary, the square-ish jousting targes, and the sixteenth-century round target or rotella. But centregrip bucklers, targes, and targets remained very popular as sidearms into the sixteenth century.

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      1. The shield he mentions it’s called “targone” or “imbracciatura”; it’s virtually identical in dimensions and shape to the Roman Republican scutum, except it has no boss and it’s strapped to the arm, not gripped; its use in a duel is described by Pietro Monte, Achille Marozzo and Francesco Altoni.
        As an aside, the rotella was already very popular in Italy in the XVth century.

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        1. The rotella could also sometimes get quite large, for instance as seen with the italian footsolders in the upper right and bottom left of this illustration of Fornovo.
          https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Battle_of_Fornovo.jpg

          But yeah. If having a shield strapped to the arm is such a significant downside in terms of less mobility than a center grip, it would seem that many fighters did see that as an acceptable trade off in exchange for the greater stability provided by having at least two points of contact. And i’m not convinced the rationale behind preferring one or the other is as straightforward as “am i planning to fight in a shield wall or not.”

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          1. Personally I’ve always found strapped shields to be far superior to the gripped ones, without any downside in terms of mobility; this is one of the few instances where I actually disagree with dr. Devereaux.

            As for the image linked, in both instances the shields depicted are not rotelle, but targoni/imbracciature. There isn’t a fixed width for the rotella, it depends by who’s using it; Francesco Altoni (1540 ca.) states it should be as wide as the distance from the neck to the groin, while according to Marco Docciolini (1601) from the shoulder to the fingertips.

          2. Cool shield fact: the round shields with two short straps which you can grip in your fist or thrust your arm through, which were popular from Iberia to India in recent times, show up on the Altıkulaç sarcophagus from the 4th century BCE.

            Strapped shields can’t protect your strong side while you give a backhand cut although that is more a trick for single combat than fighting in a line.

          3. That grip system is very similar to the grip system on many heater shields, as I understand it, to enable the shield to be used as a strap-grip on horseback or effectively center-grip on foot. One imagines emerging in a similar context where cavalry was important and so common shield designs had to work both on foot and on horseback.

          4. Thracian peltai sometimes seem to have a hybrid system with two crossed straps in the middle and an antilabe strap near the edge, allowing them to be worn on the arm for stability and support or gripped in the fist for mobility and maximum reach. Jan Kohlmorgen’s book is probably the best view for all the weird and wonderful strapping arrangements on surviving heater shields, whose users also seem to have wanted to be able to hold or wear the shield in different ways. Strapping systems are one of the many topics where a thoughtful reenactor could help out by staring at sculptures and vase paintings and writing a short article which documents where he or she looked.

      1. In a lot of these cases, the contexts of these Roman reliefs are often either 1) culturally Greek parts of the empire or 2) Greek artists working in Latin contexts and in both cases it seems clear that what is usually happening is that Greek artistic conventions are rendering ‘heroic’ Romans as hoplites rather than with actual Roman equipment (and in some of your examples, it is non-Romans who carry the porpax-antelabe shields).

        In any case, by the Middle Republic if not earlier, all standard Roman shields were single-center-grip shields and would remain so through the fall of the Empire in the West.

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  28. “part of my core argument here is that one mistake that has been repeated here is treating the hoplite phalanx as something special and unique, rather than as an interesting species of a common phenomenon”

    Well hurrah for that, and if you worry (later on) that you won’t be making many friends with your arguments, don’t worry. A number of people (including yours truly) have been making precisely this point for a few years now. In arguing against the ‘orthodoxy’ you are in the slightly awkward position (as you know, and as are we all) of arguing against a fundamentally blinkered and silly position that nobody has argued for in print for at least 10 years or more (for all that popular support for it is still strong, sadly). But if I were to offer a criticism it is that you are operating in a rather narrow world (you quote Manning with approval, he quotes you, you both quote Brouwers – maybe you need to get out more?).

    “In particular, the fact that a lot of our evidence comes from either Southern Italy or Anatolia is not always well appreciated in these debates.”

    Indeed – and it was Herodotus’ view that the Greeks adopted their equipment from the Carians or even the Egyptians (and Xenophon too believes that Egyptians were ‘heavy infantry who push’ (but not shove! I expect you will come to that)).

    “To summarize the arguments: hoplite orthodoxy argues, in effect, that hoplite equipment was so heavy and cumbersome that it necessitated fighting in the phalanx.”

    Which, given that so far as we know, hoplites had always spent at least some of their time on board ships, fighting from ships, and fighting between ships, is just a bizarre thing to believe (unless hoplites, like Egyptians, had a special set of kit for ship fighting, but there’s no evidence for that and plenty to the contrary).

    “Now we may, for the moment, leave aside if we ought to call that early shield wall a phalanx.”

    I expect a definition of ‘phalanx’ will come next week; I hope you will keep in mind what you said at the top about the mistake of treating the hoplite phalanx as something special and unique. ‘Phalanx’ in Greek does not mean ‘a particular type of heavy infantry formation with a certain file spacing and style of fighting’. Just as ‘othismos’ does not mean ‘a mass shove’. These are Greek words which have been adopted into English usage with a specific meaning that they did not have for the Greeks.

    “perhaps similar to how we generally reconstruct later Hellenistic version of the aspis supported by a strap over the shoulder.”

    Perhaps, but you are certainly wrong about the Macedonian shield strap – there is no evidence for it at all (it might have existed! Lots of things might. But there is no evidence for it).

    “However I will note that you can see very clearly that it is only in the ‘straight on’ (or nearly so) position that Thucydides’ statement about the tendency of hoplites to drift right-ward to seek to protect their unprotected right side makes any sense (Thuc. 5.71.1)”

    You are wrong about that too, I fear. They are seeking to protect their right side (their unshielded side). They are not seeking to place the right half of their front behind their neighbour’s shield.

    “I thus find myself feeling very confident that the aspis was designed for a shield wall context.”

    I have problems with the idea of “designed for” since as you say earlier, the Argive aspis wasn’t designed (so far as we know), it evolved. Everybody adopted it, which suggests it wasn’t rubbish for its main use (of course), but there are all sorts of reasons why people might all want to adopt the same type of shield.

    “the ‘strong’ heterodox position is that hoplite equipment didn’t develop for or in a shield-wall formation, but for skirmishing”

    You are going to have to spend some time, presumably next week, defining what you mean by ‘skirmishing’, as until then it’s not totally clear what you are arguing against. If it’s an extreme version of van Wees, that hoplites were in very open order and fought individual duels against single opponents picked out of the enemy force, in a space largely unconstrained by their neighbours (as in the admittedly rather horriible analogy of New Guinean fighting), then I expect you are right. But “skirmishing” is too vague a term as it stands to really know what you mean. I hope you don’t get too hung up on precise file intervals, which so many people waste so much time defining with quote ludicrous precision (96cm, anyone?). Until next week!

    “The environment where those tradeoffs all make sense is the shield wall.”

    But then as you recognise, and perhaps for other reasons, the time at which we know for certain that the shield wall (‘phalanx’) was in use in a fairly rigid and formal form (i.e. the Classical) is also the time at which equipment (except the shield) is clearly getting lighter. There just deosn’t seem to be close causal relationship between equipment and formation (which is not to say that they are not related at all).

    “Did they shove?
    (No, they did not shove)”

    Well hurrah for that too! But don’t forget to address the cases where they (or somebody – not just hoplites) did, or seem to have, pushed.

    Reply

    1. It seems to me skirmishing means anything that involves really fluid warfare where you are not fundamentally counting on your overall line of battle and weight of your massed formation (both actual and moral) to win that is a heavy infantry shield wall.. Hoplite armor may have gotten lighter in that some of the extraneous bits of metal armor fell by the wayside but nothing say it was sufficient to make them skirmishers in any meaningful way or specialists in dueling. Moreover the preponderance of evidence from well described battles says that hoplite when asked to try and skirmish against anything other than other hoplites in the same sub optimal role had a very bad day (even very good hoplites). There is as far as I can tell no expectation you would leave home with a 1000 hoplites by themselves and they would just say fall into loose order skirmish as an equal task to fighting in shield wall.

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      1. Skirmishing is a method of battle in which the goals of the damage you inflict are first to persuade the enemy commander to organize a retreat out of contact and second to persuade the enemy (under or against command) to advance into (assumed-unfavorable) more thorough contact. This clearly distinguishes it from line battle, where breaking enemy morale is the primary goal and having the enemy retreat under orders is essentially a failure.

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    2. Maybe people are confusing “shoving” against the ENEMY front rank (or any individual duel) with “shoving” against YOUR OWN MEN in the rank ahead of you? Because in the latter case, it’s obviously (to me at least) a foolish notion. Your phalanx would fall apart with men tripping or being knocked over behind.

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    3. Thucydides says very explicitly that armies drift right because “each man [does] his best to shelter his unarmed side with the shield of the man next to him on the right.”

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      1. ‘Shelter his unarmed side with the shield of the man next to him’ does not necessarily mean ‘physically tried to get his shoulder underneath their shield’.

        Considering that attacks across columns of men are really rather effective (e.g. trying to spear the guy one across from the guy in front of you), you could adequately protect your vulnerable right side from that sort of attack just by getting close enough to your neighbour’s shield to close the opening for attack. It doesn’t even need to be complete protection driving it. If the risk is getting stabbed in the side, any increase in protection against that is to be valued.

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        1. IDK, Thucydides says that the men want to protect their naked side by placing themselves side by side (paratetagmenou) with the shield to the right and they think that the closest closure (ten puknoteta tes sugkleseos) is the best protection (euskepastotaton). To me, it seems that if you are protecting your naked side by closing up as tightly as possible (superlative) with the man to the right, your shields are touching and your right side is now behind his shield.

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          1. Shouldn’t we understand this as a possible (perhaps indeed common) failure mode of shieldwalls in general? Different shieldwall, with presumably more symmetrically covering shields — I can easily imagine that this phenomenon with aspis-bearing troops would present itself as a rightward drift. In this case, we might read Thucydides as rebuking this error, because the best defence is not in fact the closest closure, but — say it with me — a good offence.

          2. Well, we are talking about Greek hoplite phalanxes, not other historical shieldwalls. I’m sure Thucydides would have been interested in formations that avoided the problem he described, but based on his lived experience, he says that ALL armies (stratopeda men kai hapanta) do it.

            This was originally a response to Richard Taylor. He says that the men are seeking to protect their right side, but not by placing it behind their neighbor’s shield. I don’t understand what movement or what goal he is envisioning, or how it can be reconciled with Thucydides’ reference to the closest (ta puknoteta) possible closure.

          3. (Replying to ey81)

            “This was originally a response to Richard Taylor. He says that the men are seeking to protect their right side, but not by placing it behind their neighbor’s shield. I don’t understand what movement or what goal he is envisioning, or how it can be reconciled with Thucydides’ reference to the closest (ta puknoteta) possible closure.”

            I’ll try to help. It is very likely that when Thucydides talks about a hoplite’s ‘naked side’, he means the same thing that this expression means the other (large number) of times it is used, that is, the man’s right side, not his front. So the objective is to reduce the chance that someone can attack you on your right side. This can be achieved, not just by standing literally behind your right-hand neighbour’s shield, but also by standing close enough that your neighbour can prevent anyone attacking you from the right. How close that is is open to debate (and indeed has been debated by Krentz, van Wees etc in the relevant literature).

            Then what does Thucydides mean by “the closest (ta puknoteta) possible closure”? Well, the closest possible would be literally shoulder to shoulder, with shields heavily overlapping, but we can be reasonably sure that hoplites didn’t habitually close up this close, because the Macedonian phalanx, which did, is distinguished from the Greek phalanx for precisely this feature. So “the closest possible” must mean something like “the closest practicable” and that is undefined, but shields needn’t overlap, and needn’t even touch, provided the men are close enough to achieve the objective (which is providing protection for the naked side).

            Personally I think they probably did close up (or tried to close up) until shields touched edge-to-edge, providing a continuous wall of shields (a shield wall, you might say). But my original aim (in this thread of comments) was not to define what the precise spacing miight have been (fundamentally, we don’t and can’t ever know), it was to object to OGH’s statement that “you can see very clearly that it is only in the ‘straight on’ (or nearly so) position that Thucydides’ statement about the tendency of hoplites to drift right-ward to seek to protect their unprotected right side makes any sense”. This is incorrect as Thucydides’ statement makes perfect sense even if you do not posit a straight on stance (or a straight on stance with the shield held off to the left). So OGH is wrong here (even though hoplites might in fact have stood in a straight on stance! We don’t know – Thucydides doesn’t help).

    4. ““However I will note that you can see very clearly that it is only in the ‘straight on’ (or nearly so) position that Thucydides’ statement about the tendency of hoplites to drift right-ward to seek to protect their unprotected right side makes any sense (Thuc. 5.71.1)”

      You are wrong about that too, I fear. They are seeking to protect their right side (their unshielded side). They are not seeking to place the right half of their front behind their neighbour’s shield.”

      I think this criticism rather misses the mark (especially as elaborated in later replies). Devereaux’s point is not a proposition about line spacing; it stands whether the hoplite’s goal is to put his body behind his neighbor’s shield or not. The question is not “how close does a hoplite need to be from his neighbor for that neighbor to effectively protect him?” but rather, “why does he consistently seek the protection of his neighbor to the right, and not his neighbor to the left?” After all, moving closer to one is necessarily moving further from the other.

      In a front-on formation, the answer is obvious. The Aspis is attached to the left arm, with its center at the left elbow, so it will naturally extend quite a ways past their body on the left but very little if at all past the right side. The hoplite will therefore be careful to keep his rightward neighbor close (for whatever definition of “close” offers him the best protection). If his rightward neighbor is drawn farther away for whatever reason, he has far more incentive to follow that man to the right than that man has to return leftward to him. As he moves rightward, his neighbor to the left must follow suit or be exposed, and so on down the line until the whole formation has moved to the right. In contrast, if our hoplite’s leftward neighbor is drawn farther away, it is the leftward neighbor who will most assiduously seek to return to him for protection, so the formation does not move leftward. You don’t need every hoplite to believe “closer is better” to get this drift, the struggle to maintain the original spacing in the face of external shocks is enough.

      However, the situation is different in a side-on formation. With the hoplite’s left shoulder towards the enemy and the upper arm extending naturally in the same direction, the soldier’s elbow is basically in the center of his body (from the perspective of the enemy). By extension, the shield centered on his elbow is also centered on his body, providing fairly symmetric protection. If anything, the soldier is more vulnerable on the left than the right, as his “left” in this position is actually his back, where his vision is obstructed, and he actually has more freedom of motion in his shoulder to move the shield rightward (forward, from his perspective) than leftward (back). As a result, a soldier’s desire to stay close to his neighbors (again, for whatever definition of “close” you think is most accurate) is as likely to pull him to the left as to the right, so there is no systematic drift in either direction.

      Perhaps more importantly, if the hoplite operates exclusively in the side-on stance, it does not make sense for Thucydides to comment on the “unprotected right side,” drift or no drift. The right side is not unprotected in the side-on stance. That is, in fact, the whole reason hoplite heterodoxy supposes a side-on stance. They need hoplites that can operate independently in a loose order/skirmishing role, not dependent on a neighbor in close order (however close you define it) to defend their unprotected side. And that is precisely what Thucydides tells them they cannot have.

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      1. “Straight on” and “side on” are not binary options – the much more common default throughout basically all of history is a middle position with the torso at around 45 degrees.

        This, unsurprisingly, gives you a compromise outcome. Your lead shoulder and elbow are somewhat off to your left* side. If you’re holding the shield totally square your left hand will then bring the front edge back roughly across to your right shoulder or a little further, but that’s a surprisingly annoying angle to hold in practice. Even in that position, you are well covered from straight on and from your left side, but there is an open angle from your right past the edge of your shield towards your sword shoulder etc which it is very useful to have your buddy helping protect.

        Instead more natural tendency is to let your right hand drift forward a bit – this gives you a lot more space to work with your weapon and only marginally reduces how much you are covered by your shield. You remain pretty well covered from directly in front and are if anything even _better_ covered from your left (this is a nasty dead angle to have to try and defend with your weapon), but there is now a bigger open angle from your front right.

        In either of these, the tendency to hug up a bit towards your mate on the right is pretty clear. And for the guy on the right edge of the formation, that big ‘tail’ of shield hanging out past his opponent’s left elbow also encourages shifting a bit to the right to try and get round it – if you can achieve that it’s a really nasty dead angle that’s hard to defend against. So he moves right, everyone else shuffles up a bit to stay covered, and you have the Thucydides result.

        This position works pretty much just as well in looser order “skirmish” fighting, by the way. Defending your left beyond the shield is really hard to do with your weapon, since your own shield and arm are getting in the way. So if you’re going to have somewhat asymmetric protection from your shield, better to use it to close out your left side well and use your spear (and the shield rim as necessary) to the right.

        *Presuming a right hander. Reverse all lefts and rights in the subsequent text for a left hander.

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    5. ““However I will note that you can see very clearly that it is only in the ‘straight on’ (or nearly so) position that Thucydides’ statement about the tendency of hoplites to drift right-ward to seek to protect their unprotected right side makes any sense (Thuc. 5.71.1)”

      You are wrong about that too, I fear. They are seeking to protect their right side (their unshielded side). They are not seeking to place the right half of their front behind their neighbour’s shield.”

      This critique seems to rather miss the point. Deveroux’s proposition is not about line spacing; it stands whether or not the hoplite aims to put his body behind their neighbor’s shield.

      In the front-on position, with the aspis’ center at the hoplite’s left elbow and its right edge just passed the hoplite’s left hand, the shield can quite handily protect the user’s left side even from fairly oblique angles but leaves him relatively vulnerable to attacks from his right side. Thus, as Thucydides remarks, the hoplite in the rightmost file will seek to keep his foe to his better-protected left side by moving to the right. The next file to his left, now exposed because he has exceeded the initial, optimal spacing (whether that was shield-to-shield or not), moves right to follow. And so on down the line until the whole formation has drifted right. You will also get this kind of drift in response to external shocks to file spacing, such as broken terrain, enemy action, or poor discipline. If any portion of the line moves to the right, those to the left of that break (seeking to regain the right’s protection as quickly as possible) will rapidly move to close that gap by following it rightwards. If some portion of the line moves to the left, however, self preservation will spur that portion to close the gap by returning to position more quickly than the right side is moved to follow leftwards. As a result, the line drifts.

      The situation is very different in a side-on stance. With the hoplite’s left shoulder advanced towards the enemy, and the upper part of their left arm naturally extended towards the enemy, the left elbow is more or less centered on the hoplite’s body (from the enemy’s prospective). By extension, the shield centered on that elbow is also centered on the hoplite’s body, offering fairly symmetric protection to the left and right. If anything, the hoplite is better protected on the right, as his range of motion in the shoulder allows him to move the shield farther right (forward, from his perspective) than to the left (backwards), and on the left side (which, again, is his back) his vision is obscured by his shoulder and he cannot bring his right arm to bear.

      Right off the bat, then, it does not make sense for Thucydides to talk of an unprotected right side, drift or no drift. The right side is not unprotected in a side-on stance. Incidentally, that is precisely why the heterodoxy favors a side-on stance–they need a hoplite who can operate independently, without a buddy close by on his right to imply a close-order formation/phalanx. Furthermore, with symmetric protection, there would be no reason to systematically drift rightward. For a hoplite in the rightmost file, moving rightward would expose his left more than it would cover his right, while the hoplite in the leftmost file is just as concerned about being outflanked.

      Reply

  29. Re: Corinthian helmets starting as calvary helmets. That immediately strikes me as likely because the crested helmets–so common in vase paintings & re-enactments, so rare in collections–visually echo the shape of a horse’s arched neck with bristling mane. It looks very “horsey” to me, like the kind of exaggerated helmet you get with calvary, up out of the fray and away from where a random spear or sword might catch on it.

    Also speaking of vase paintings: in many of the hoplite paintings, e.g. the first one in the post, the combatants are wearing no groin protection at all, but are letting it all hang out to a degree that makes even me, who does not possess that equipment, want to curl up like a snail. Could this possibly reflect reality?!? or is it strictly an artistic convention?

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    1. The exposed private parts of hoplites in Archaic art is something I’m quite curious about too. It also appears on the Vix Crater

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      1. It’s an interesting question because in any visual arts culture certain things will develop meanings that communicate something beyond the literal image, even in art that aims for realism. I am not supposing a full ‘language-of-flowers’ style of understanding penises in Ancient Greek art, but we do know that that art culture did arrive at the view that dick depictions told viewers something important about the character/nature of the person depicted.
        In the above vase painting, the most prominent phallus is on the front-most warrior using the more out-dated shield, and this would be read by Classical-era Greek artists as an important detail. He is perhaps not so large as to be fundamentally unserious, but he is definitely the least-reasonable and ugliest of the figures.

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    1. Also Thomas O. Rover, “The Combat Archaeology of the Fifth-Century BC
      Kopis,” IJHM 2020. It was not published in an established Ancient World Studies journal and in a forthcoming article I cite his kopis as an example of a replica that is at least 50% overweight. But he has actually read the archaeological literature in German.

      I have not yet read Matthew A. Sears, Understanding Greek Warfare (2019).

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      1. Sears is something of an orthodoxist. Hmm, perhaps reports of the death of orthodoxy have been exaggerated, after all?

        Though Sears’ orthodoxy lies chiefly in opposing gradualism i.e. he holds that there was not much change between Archaic and Classical phalanxes. It is possible to reject gradualism while also rejecting the tactical aspects of orthodoxy (which I guess is where OGH is heading). That is the trouble with the two camps approach, these are not (or should not be) manifestos which must be accepted or rejected as a whole.

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        1. The framing of Greek Warfare, Myths and Realities as “everything in WWoW is wrong” helped it reach a wider audience, but also limited it because it let the California School set the terms of the debate. That is why I think the next major step was a more archaeological, comparative, experimental, and Mediterranean approach rather than trying to parse the epic and lyric poets better than van Wees or the late Kurt Raaflaub.

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  32. Glad to see this topic is going to be expanded, it’s very interesting all around.

    Now, one thing that did strike me as weird is the implication that the academics have not tried to resort to experimental archaeology to more or less get an idea of how the hoplite kit could work as a whole, both for the individual and for the group. It seems like a glaring mistake considering that, while the exact physics of archaic/classical combat might be lost to us, the physics of the human body remain a constant.

    Someone previously mentioned the Dendra panoply, and that armour in particular was also tested by soldiers of the Hellenic army to see if it was useable for battle, which it was. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/soldiers-put-an-ancient-greek-suit-of-armor-to-the-test-and-it-passed-180984411/), I do not see why the hoplite kit, from which we have even bigger evidence, cannot be tested in such a similar manner.

    Granted, I’m someone from the Hema community so maybe that colours my perspective and I can acknowledge that there’s likely a reticence to attempt such a thing because of the impression such groups might have on historians (with unfortunate justification, as the article of the Public medievalist on knight fight [https://publicmedievalist.com/knight-fight/] alludes to), but I think there’s a missed chance of getting a sense of the practicality or, as you said, appositness of the equipment for battle once we hit the limit of information given by the sources.

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    1. I’m a hoplite reenactor who has participated in several experimental archaeology tests, and I can tell you that we the experimental archaeologists have basically already done a lot of the “synthesis” of the two doxies that Bret is calling for. But most academics just straight up ignore us, or listen just long enough to find out that we didn’t prove their theories completely correct and then dismiss us for not knowing what we are doing.

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  33. I remember reading a paper about Cretan warfare (“The Cretan way of war” by David Lewis) that brought up some points relating to both the origin of the hoplite and the Freman Mirage.

    The paper suggested that the phalanx was developed in part due to the typical Greek being less exposed to warfare than during the Greek Dark Ages. After the Bronze Age Collapse but before the establishment of the Greek polises, the average man would take part in a numerous small scale raids and skirmishes. During the Archaic Period battles become larger but less common, so the average Greek during this time would have had less experience in battle than their Dark Age ancestors. The higher population also meant there were fewer skilled hunters than before, and since these were societies that saw relatively little training in weapon use, there would have been fewer and fewer able skirmishers. Bunching up the green farmers together would helped keep them from bolting at the first sign of danger and help to make up for their individual lacking prowess.

    In Crete the older forms of social organization and regular low scale warfare persisted, which is why their archers became so sought after as mercenaries. The Cretans can in some ways be seen as the “Fremen” to the Classical Greeks. Of course, this didn’t mean they were supermen who overtook their “weak” or “decedent” cousins. Phalanx warfare was effective in its context and served as the foundation for the Hellenistic system that conquered Persia. Instead the Cretans were able to fill a specialist role that Greek generals recognized as important but whose own societies were no longer able to fulfill.

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  34. “However I will note that you can see very clearly that it is only in the ‘straight on’ (or nearly so) position that Thucydides’ statement about the tendency of hoplites to drift right-ward to seek to protect their unprotected right side makes any sense (Thuc. 5.71.1), something Thucydides says “all armies do so” (ἅπαντα τοῦτο) and so must have been a general feature of the warfare he knew.”

    I’m not sure about this, if you watch any boxing you’ll see right-handed fighters, mostly _very_ bladed, tend to drift right to move towards their opponents’ back while staying away from the power hand much like Thucydides seems to say in the next bit “The man primarily responsible for this is the first upon the right wing, who is always striving to withdraw from the enemy his unarmed side; and the same apprehension makes the rest follow him.” I havn’t done any spear fighting but you can see a similar dynamic in e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8CBc1e3Ofg.

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    1. re: Spelling, VDH spells his last name ‘Hanson’, not Hansen, who also iirc works in ancient history [confusingly]

      IIRC van wees points out that our earliest descriptions of combat contemporary with early hoplite armor are in the Iliad, in which the heavily armored magnates ride chariots into battle, hopping in and out of the car with the ebb and flow of the battle, which would mitigate the impediment of the panoply weight. We see heavily armored chariot riders throughout ancient battlefields, so to me it seems plausible that heavy defensive equipment emerges as protection for the chariot-riding elite

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      2. I’m not a historian, but my understanding is that said description of chariot usage is another hotly debated topic among historians. One side basically says “the Iliad says this is how chariots were used”. If comparisons even come up, they also mention GJC in Britain.

        The other side says “the Iliad was written down, or even its oral form ‘standardized’, centuries after chariots fell out of use, thus it’s way too likely some poet during that time made a convincing-souding mistake — and look at Egyptian artwork, the pharaohs shoot bows from the chariots”. They also go on saying that e.g. the Dendra panoply looks as though it would have constrained the thighs’ range of motion, supporting the idea that its wearer wouldn’t dismount to fight, but act more akin to an armored turret on the chariot. (Its general form, especially the high “collar”, is sometimes compared to the types of armor common in static missile-exchange fighting styles.) You may perform the stereotypical missile-cavalry caracole with chariots. Furthermore, it is sometimes mooted that light/medium infantry learning to counter the caracole (run out at just the right time to entangle them into melee) may have been an agent of the LBAC.

        Either the second group, or a third side, may also point out that post-LBAC battlefields would have had such tiny headcounts that the infantry would have consisted of skirmishers or at most very shallow (2-3 ranks deep) open-order light or medium infantry. Which can with good chances simply be ridden down with a chariot.

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        1. Chariots seem to have remained in use throughout the archaic period; we have Late Geometric Art depicting processions of chariots, and they show up in the musters of late archaic / early classical Greek cities, so you’d have to have substantial innovation very late in order for the Iliad to be disconnected from recent chariot tactics.

          On a certain level the Dendra panoply is neither here nor there, since that equipment tradition was broken in the bronze age collapse, but there is decent pictorial evidence of the Mycenaean chariot being primarily a spearman’s platform [I believe Josho Brouwers has collated it], rather than for archery, and reconstructions of the Dendra panoply have generally found it decent enough at foot combat. I’ll also point out that high collars also evolved on the late medieval battlefield, apparently to counter lance thrusts made more deadly by the cuirass-rest and lance-rest. Overall, I don’t think it offers good grounds to rebut the notion of a heavily armored chariot-dismount in light of Homer’s extensive depiction.

          I also don’t think the size of archaic battles is very meaningful, since by that same token there would also be very few chariots involved, perhaps as few as one per fifty infantry, which seem not to have been specialized war vehicles in Homer’s description, and relied on obviously expensive horses that their owners would not want to needlessly risk. At the same time, rushing a mounted charioteer during the turn of the caracole would also be a risky proposition for the enemy infantry if we picture the friendly foot being e.g. a stone’s throw from the throng of the enemy, ready to counterattack to rescue their chieftain.

          Furthermore, it’s worth remembering that e.g. greaves and cuirasses [indeed, even helmets] were not indispensable for hoplites; afaik we have far more archaic helmets than cuirasses. A magnate might wear them [and potentially even more] and rely on his chariot for agility, and then maybe their foot followers and the ‘gentry’ adopt bits and pieces of the panoply like e.g. lighter dipylon shields, helmets, javelins, and swords, dispensing with cuirasses and/or greaves to stay nimble in fluid dismounted skirmishing while still providing some stiffness for a loose line mostly made up of unarmored slingers and archers.

          Overall, i think it’d decently plausible that the early forms of this panoply were imported from the east by an Archaic elite that rode chariots, bits filtered down into the wealthier foot who still fought intermingled with / at the head of a swarm of light-armed tenant farmers, and then the agricultural expansion of the early Classical period finally produced enough ‘respectable farmer’ hoplites to form a solid phalanx, pushing the light troops out to screen the front and flanks.

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          1. Xenophon actually says that the Greeks of Cyrene still fight from chariots like the warriors at Troy, and texts a bit earlier from Babylonia mention chariot estates and three-man chariot teams. We also have the Archaic Greek names for two-man teams: one to ride the horse close to the enemy and hop off, the other to turn the horse and get it out of danger. Early Greek warfare was diverse and dynamic.

  35. Glad to be of service!

    One thing I did notice about the aspis vs non-aspis bouts in the links I posted was that the aspis-wielders seemed to need to expend a lot less effort than the pelte-wielders to keep themselves protected, with the aspis-wielder thus seeming to have finer control of their spear (I assumed simply due to greater available concentration on what your weapon-hand is doing).

    Though I’m not convinced that’s enough to sway the balance far enough to ‘the hoplite panoply evolved in response to skirmish warfare’. If only because the mobility advantage of the lighter shield especially is pretty stark (which would pay dividends not just in the actual close combat tussle, but in everything around that as well).

    Though I do have to be careful of drawing conclusions from limited data. I’ve only watched a handful of these videos, and not participated in it myself.

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    1. Hah, I was actually the camera-man in a couple of those videos, the ones on the LeonidasSparta channel! And having partaken in it, I generally concur. One of the big assumptions that a lot people make talking about what the shields can and cannot do is that the aspis cannot be moved around as easily as a smaller hand-grip shield, which is to some extent true, but the real answer is: it doesn’t need to move all that much. It can be moved around somewhat, if you want, but it is so massive that it mostly doesn’t need to be moved. I find it far more energy-efficient to just keep the aspis in place, let it do what it does and cover the vast majority of my body, and then simply use the spear to parry attacks to the few uncovered areas. But that also depends on knowing how to use a one-handed spear effectively, which certain youtubers (glaring at you Lindybeige) do not.

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      1. Oh cool! Sounds like a fun gig.

        Interestingly, I’ve just linked to another set of videos with folks in Mycenaean gear (not sure if it’s the same bunch!), but this one popped into my mind when you said ‘I…just keep the aspis in place [and] let it…cover the vast majority of my body’.

        https://www.instagram.com/p/C4SgMfgMWoK/?img_index=2

        It’s a staged drill rather than sparring, but if the big Mycenaean figure-8 shields functioned in anywhere near this sort of manner, it seems like the Greeks already had a tradition of ‘big shield that you don’t really move much’. Provided it wasn’t entirely lost during the LBAC.

        Also, funny you mention Lindybeige as one of my first thoughts watching those sparring videos was ‘huh, so you can competently use a one handed spear and shield’, having mainly seen Lindy’s video beforehand.

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  36. Bret seems to be restoring the pre-Hansonian orthodoxy rather than any sort of heterodoxy. He says that hoplite armor is designed primarily for phalanx warfare and that both the armor and the phalanx developed during by 650, i.e., the first century of the archaic period. This chronology meshes well with literary sources, i.e., we can connect hoplite methods with Tyrtaeus’s poetry, and historical sources, i.e., the development of a style of warfare that involved a large number of men with relatively cheap equipment (compared to chariots and horses) led to the empowering of a larger and poorer portion of the demos, who overthrew the traditional aristocracy, initially under the leadership of populist tyrants like Cypselus and Pisistratus, whose reigns occur during the period from 650 to 500. (Later, some regimes became democratic.) Since hoplite methods had been in place by about 650, they seemed ageless to Thucydides and his contemporaries. (Recall Wellington’s remark that Waterloo was fought “in the old style”: hoplite warfare was almost as old in Thucydides’ day as black powder warfare was in Wellington’s.) All of this seems totally orthodox.

    The major place where Bret seems to differ from VDH is in the nature of the othismos. VDH’s focus on this topic was part of the post-Face of Battle development in military history. Prior to Keegan, very few historians, including the various 19th century scholars Bret cites, focused on the granular details of the average soldier’s mechanical and sensory experience of combat. I will be interested to see what Bret offers in lieu of Hanson’s reconstruction of the “face of hoplite battle.”

    (Hanson also introduced a change to the orthodox interpretation when he claimed that, given the nature of Greek agriculture, invaders could not actually do much damage to crops pre-harvest. The conclusion is that Greek defenders were motivated more by honor (“get off my land”) than by fear (“I’ll starve”). Hanson based his claim on an exposition, as a farmer, of the nature of wheat, vineyards and olive trees. I’m not sure what Bret’s counterargument is. Maybe we need to gather a bunch of men, give them iron swords and knives (no steel), and see how much damage they can do to an olive grove.)

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    1. I’m not sure ‘re-establishing the orthodoxy’ is a genuine read of what Brett seems to be doing (though my grip of the historiography of it isn’t good enough to discern quite what you mean by ‘pre-Hansonian’, which might explain my confusion).

      I also understood that his argument was that the method of close order shield wall combat (within which ‘phalanx’ warfare is situated) pre-dates 650 in order for the hoplite panoply to be designed in response to it, rather than appearing simultaneously.

      The concept that there was no ‘hoplite revolution’ where the panoply emerged fully formed and transformed warfare, but that there was a (likely extended) period where close order hoplite warfare intermingled with both close order non-hoplite warfare and looser order non-hoplite warfare seems decidedly more heterodox than orthodox (though doesn’t quite fit clearly into either).

      That’s to say nothing of the ‘shoving match’ ritualised warfare element, or the ‘hoplite equipment was too heavy to do anything other than phalanx’ farce.

      We shall have to wait a while to see about the implications on social structure, of course.

      Oh, and if I were to attempt to devastate an olive grove with early iron age equipment I wouldn’t be hacking at it with a sword. I’d burn it. Pile up brush in a Mediterranean summer (which I understand is towards the latter half of the ancient Greek campaigning season) and light it with whatever campfire-lighting equipment I had.

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      1. Does that work? Olive wood is very hard, and the trees have a large circumference, so I don’t know if you can kill a living olive tree with a brushfire. Maybe some experiments are in order.

        If you or Bret is claiming that the “hoplite revolution” was like the industrial revolution, and worked itself out over a century, first supplanting other fighting methods and then transforming society, okay. That’s how most historical revolutions work. I don’t see that as particularly heterodox, unless you were one of those people who believed that Lycurgus, or Solon, or whoever, in one fell swoop designed the societies and polities we find in classical times.

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        1. The problem is that olive trees take a very long time to grow: by today’s standards they must grow for at least 20 years before they produce enough olives to be commercially profitable. Olive trees are such a long-term investment, and since they’re going to be vulnerable for quite a few years no farmer is going to plant them unless they’re reasonably sure that no one is going to cut or burn them down.

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        2. It’s not likely to work, and I can’t think of any examples of anyone trying. Live trees are surprisingly hard to burn down; photogenic wildfire works by boiling out the moisture inside the tree and then using the dried trunk to fuel heating the adjacent trees above boiling and etc. Intentionally planted trees are rarely close enough for that and orchard trees always have any dry branches cut and removed from the area. If your invading army happened to capture an industrial stockpile of firewood you could stack a big-enough bonfire around a few trees just to be cruel, much like you’d have to capture a salt mine before sowing a field with salt.

          The actual way you spite-kill a tree is by ringbarking, and people would have known this. Invading armies did destroy things for fun all the time, they didn’t have TV, but permanently ending an orchard is a weird thing to do when just eating this year’s fruit yourself has the same power to persuade the farmer to surrender.

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          1. “It’s not likely to work, and I can’t think of any examples of anyone trying. Live trees are surprisingly hard to burn down; photogenic wildfire works by boiling out the moisture inside the tree and then using the dried trunk to fuel heating the adjacent trees above boiling and etc. Intentionally planted trees are rarely close enough for that and orchard trees always have any dry branches cut and removed from the area.”

            If you google “greece wildfires olive trees” you will see literally hundreds of news reports of orchards of olive trees being destroyed by fires across Greece in 2023. For variety you could google “turkey wildfires olive trees” or “italy wildfires olive trees” and find very similar reports from 2021. If you want examples of deliberate burning of olive trees you could google “palestine burning olive trees”.

            Here’s a quote from one of those thousands of stories:
            “Vincenzo Cossari, whose family runs a large olive farm in Badolato, says the fires have been happening every summer for a long time and always started by someone’s carelessness. He described the olive trees as: “Like a natural bomb – full of oil”. In high winds, they can burn very quickly.”

            So, yes, you absolutely can destroy a live olive tree with fire and it happens all the time. “Fires can’t burn live olive groves” belongs with “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams”.

        3. You might not have to kill the tree — it could be enough to burn the leaves and budding fruit and blight a harvest. The Spartans returned every year for a while in the early Peloponnesian War — if they keep ruining the harvest for enough farmers, that would suffice, I should think. If some trees also die along the way, good enough. Or weaken through prolonged stress, they will be less productive over time and perhaps also succumb early to disease or insects.

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      2. Less re-establishing and more fixing, maybe?
        ‘The equipment appeared all at once, fully formed, was too heavy to be anything but extremely specialised fighting, and thus enabled a new way of fighting.’ Nonsense.
        ‘The equipment appeared over a relatively short amount of time (about a century), was much lighter than claimed but still neatly fitting into the ‘Heavy’ category, and supported a way of fighting well attested to over numerous cultures, that must already have been established for the new equipment to be advantageous over the alternatives’.
        Fixed version.

        Of interest would be how special the ‘New Way’ of fighting really was at the time – we know of shield walls in lots of contexts, but how did the Greeks’ neighbours fight at the time? How did, say, the Hallstatt culture fight?

        I do recall a post in the distant past suggesting that the mass mobilisation and shield walls of La Tene were a response to the appearance of first Greek/Phoenician and later Roman armies, and that they used to fight with much less mobilisation, in a more aristocratic fashion. If this holds true, the establishment of the Phalanx/shield wall in the Greek context would’ve been new (in the west; the Anatolian and Mesopotamian states are a different matter, but the Assyrian use of light cavalry in particular also suggests something rather more complex than just shield walls), and something that spread from them to neighbouring cultures.

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          1. It’s also rather different from the orthodoxy as understood now as well.

            Personally, I think engaging in a debate about whether Brett’s ‘something in the middle’ approach is a repaired orthodoxy or a repaired heterodoxy is simply a continuation of the semi-tribal bickering that seems to have dogged this debate and prevented any real advancement for decades.

            I.e. not worth very much at all, beyond people who are already bought into one or the other camps wanting to be able to claim ‘Hah! We were right all along!’.

      3. One thing that struck me in Greece in an old growth olive tree orchard is that the trees are Pollarded. This selective pruning leaves them with a huge central trunk and numerous, but thin sub-trunks rising from that central piece. My guess is that the invaders chopped the sub-trunks easily with their swords or axes and left the huge central stump. I have a comical image in mind of Spartiates, who wives may have known more about agriculture than they did, looking on with satisfaction at the “ruined” orchards of Athens, while they may have enhanced next years fruit set.

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    2. You’re attacking a strawman with that last aside. As Bret has laid out several times, the safety and capital of a peasant farmer is in *grain*, not olives. And fields of ripe wheat burn very readily. Not to mention that the mere act of foraging a community can already inflict irreparable harm on families as the grain they would have needed to sow their fields again is carried off by the soldiers.
      Also: An army needs firewood, so you can bet than even if it’s not part of the battlefield kit, at least some soldiers are carrying axes. And even if they don’t bother trying to chop down the entire olive tree, they can remove the branches and kill the tree that way.

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      1. Or cut the bark in a circle around the trunk. The tree remains standing, but withers and dies. I understand this (and after it dried out, setting it on fire) was the common method of clearing inconvenient trees before the iron age gave people axes with which they could readily chop such trees down. (Even felling large trees for timber would often use small fires in preference to cutting with a solid tool. Compare how nowadays when someone needs to cut through steel plate, they probably use an oxyacetylene torch.)

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      2. That may be true about the ripe grain burning readily, but VDH points out reasonably that armies don’t invade when the grain is ripe, because they need to be at home harvesting their own grain, they invade when the grain is green, and (he claims) the grain doesn’t burn easily at that time. For myself, I have no strong view. As I have mentioned, on this point VDH was revising the earlier orthodoxy which I had learned.

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    3. “Maybe we need to gather a bunch of men, give them iron swords and knives (no steel), and see how much damage they can do to an olive grove.”

      Please don’t do that! So much easier to just read the ancient sources and take note of a) the occasions where trees are said to have been the targets of agricultural devastation b) other crops were also targetted, including sown wheat c) cattle, horses and sheep were taken d) slaves (the agricultural workforce) and civilians (women and children, the families of the farmers) were taken e) houses and other agricultural buildings were destroyed (the Athenians, Thucydides tells us, removed their furniture and the wooden parts of their houses to prevent the Spartans destroying them).

      Sometimes ancient history is simpler than people try to make it seem.

      As for “get off my land” v. “don’t starve me”, it’s a false dichotomy. There are always going to be elements of both.

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  37. Going by equipment alone then, on the presumption that it dictates the primary, but not exclusively, mode of combat the person carries it engages in we have close-order heavy infantry in Assyria and the Levant in the same time as the Greek hoplite emerges. There’s Assyrian and Phoenician art to back such a statement. We also know from Assyrian and Greek sources both that Greeks served in the Assyrian imperial armies. The Greek hoplite also emerges in the late Orientalising period where Greece absorbs, and reshapes, massive amounts of Eastern Mediterranean cultural influence, often with Phoenicians as the middle-men (those fellows who according to Herodotus wore identical (Corinthian!?) helmets as the Greeks.

    Has anyone done a systematic study on the Assyrian Connection when it comes to the rise of the Greek hoplite?

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    1. Mostly individual chapters and articles eg. Nino Luraghi, “Traders, Pirates, Warriors: The Proto-History of Greek Mercenary Soldiers in the Eastern Mediterranean,” Phoenix, Vol. 60, No. 1/2 (Spring – Summer 2006), pp. 21-47 and Kurt Raaflaub’s chapter in Men of Bronze. Raaflaub points out that some of the Assyrian round shields were light enough to carry under the arm, but not that “the men are the city” goes back to the Old Babylonian recension of the Gilgamesh epic so the Greek poet who says that “men are the city’s bul(wark” was probably not describing a revolutionary new insight driven by changes in warfare.

      The Assyrian use of paired spear-and-shield men and bowmen in sieges looks very much like what the Iliad and Tyrtaeus describe (and the Hellenistic tactical manuals mention in passing that you can place light-armed men next to the files of your phalanx rather than stationing them in front, behind, or to the side).

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  38. Quick question on the Alexander mosaic:

    If the primary driver for wearing the tube-and-yoke is because it’s cheaper than bronze, why is Alexander depicted wearing one? Surely the literal king can afford a metal chestplate?

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    1. The tube-and-yoke armour, if reinforced with metal, might offer as good as protection as a full bronze cuirass. I would guess that it is more flexible, both in leather/linen being able to bend a little and in having larger arm holes, or more easily adjusted to give more arm movement. Flexibility would be especially important for a cavalryman who is more likely to end up in a melee and needs to bend and twist to face opponents on either side as well as in front.

      “Might” offer as good as protection because apparently there is little or no actual evidence as to how these tube-and-yoke armours were made, which leads to wildly varying guesstimates on how effective they are. This site talks about some of the possibilities:
      https://www.thegreekphalanx.org/thorax

      Reply

      1. I can see how it would be MUCH preferable on horseback — as Alex usually fought — to have a more flexible cuirass.

        Reply

      2. I have doubts about your propositions for the following reasons.

        A. If textiles reinforced with metal offered similar protection to metal armor, no one would wear metal armor. As bronze greaves were used contemporaneously with the linothorax, I think we can assume that an actual plate of bronze does in fact offer better protection than reinforced textiles; otherwise, we should see greaves being phased out in favor of very thick leggings.

        B. Heavy cavalry very readily adopted plate armor when it was invented in the Late Middle Ages. If flexibility was such an important factor, we ought to see at least some continuing to wear mail as their primary defense, but that did not happen.

        Reply

        1. I was careful to say the tube-and-yoke MIGHT offer as good protection.

          A. Different kinds of armour are better or worse suited to different threats and different parts of the body. Thin metal over textile, or just thick textile, works well on a larger area such as the body where it can distribute the force of the blow over an area. And indeed the Hellenes did largely replace metal body armour with the linothorax. Doesn’t have to provide equal protection, just be good enough.

          This won’t work for a narrow shin, so yes greaves continue to be made of metal because a rigid greave is better protection and less encumbering than a mass of padding around your legs.

          B. The Hellenistic cuirass is basically two half cylinders strapped around the body and is very rigid. Medieval plate armour has both front and back in at least two pieces each, with a hinge or sliding joint in the middle. The shoulders and lower waist have more articulated pieces. Medieval plate is much more flexible and comfortable, no comparison to the bell cuirass.

          Reply

          1. We also have to remember that Alexander, while taking part in the charge, probably was not litterally in the first line. He probably was behind at least a couple of lines of body guards.
            A textile armor might just have offered “enough” protection, for the king, while being a lot more confortable to wear.

    2. By the Hellenistic period, tube-and-yoke armors were very common and pretty clearly worn by some elite or high status combatants simply out of preference. We also have one example of a metal cuirass (from Vergina-Aigai) made to *look* like a textile tube-and-yoke cuirass, but little way to know how common that was.

      Reply

      1. I would suggest that far from lower status or cheaper, T-Y’s were, at least at the time of their introduction, eastern and exotic as early as Alcaeus. A snippet from an article I wrote for Ancient Warfare on the “Linorthorax”:

        Alcaeus, born to an aristocratic family from Mytilene on Lesbos around 620 BC. In a poem of the early 6th c, he describes arms and armor, probably hanging in a temple. There are obvious hoplite accoutrements, such as bronze greaves and hollow shields, but among these he writes of “White corslets of new linen” (fr. V 140). He and his older brother Antimenidas served as mercenaries for the Egyptians and Babylonians respectively. Hoplite mercenaries serving abroad may have brought home new types of armor, or ideas for making armor from new materials.

        You might like this article, in my humble opinion it is by far the most balanced thing written on the topic.

        https://hollow-lakedaimon.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-linothorax.html

        Reply

  39. Counter-pedantry:
    “I am assessing the arguments of folks who have spent a lot more time on hoplites than me”
    This should be “than I [have].” Otherwise, it means they have studied *you* less than they have hoplites.
    I do know you care, because it’s correct elsewhere.
    Kapwiiiing!

    Reply

  40. I have seen an old essay or two comparing the Spartan agoge with the Zulu regimental system as installed by Shaka in the 19th century. Something that strikes me as a parallel might be the evolution of the phalanx and hoplite warfare. Shaka takes the existing way of waging war in that area of southern Africa, fairly ritualized, fairly static for centuries, and completely overturns it. he introduces new weapons (broad-bladed stabbing spear, large shield) and new tactics (disciplined mass rush into close combat, no desultory skirmishing or displays of individual showmanship) and new organization of armies and instills a completely new mindset — and with that revolution, the Zulus become an invincible battlefield force and establish a kingdom that crushes enemies and neighbors at will. It took facing European forces with modern firearms to break the Zulu military. Imagine something similar occurring in Greece with some leader or leaders in the archaic age whose names are lost to history. A revolution in warfare once something breaks the mold and overturns the old established norms. And everyone adapts fast — or suffers the consequences.

    Reply

    1. “Shaka takes the existing way of waging war in that area of southern Africa, fairly ritualized, fairly static for centuries”

      What do you mean by “ritualized”, exactly. To me it suggests that there is no real mechanism to link an action with its intended goal. I’d take a lot of persuading that was true of most wars, especially in places where there were a lot of wars.

      Reply

      1. By “ritualized” people generally mean that cultural norms of the type that have been discussed, which dictate things like the treatment of prisoners, the degree of respect accorded treaties, the types of concessions that victors can demand, evolve to a point where the types of combat that a society engages in are sustainable. Otherwise social breakdown puts an end to the organized conflict we call “war.” And once such an equilibrium has evolved, it often continues for a long time, until upset by outside forces, technological changes, or new ideologies.

        Reply

      2. Then you misunderstand what a ritual is. A ritual is simply a set of established forms by which you do something in a set or precise manner. A Japanese tea ceremony or a liturgical wedding, for example, is a ritual.

        So, for example, extremely ritualized warfare might go something like this: Group X is feeling frisky, so they steal Group Y’s cattle. Group Y steals the cattle back, plus some more. This escalates, until eventually the leaders of X and Y decide they need to have it out while also not risking everything, because if they weaken each other badly enough groups V, W, and Z will swoop in and wipe out what’s left. So they meet, decide on a place for their forces to come together and do battle, they do so in a way that will end up showing that one side is stronger and the other is weaker while getting relatively few people are killed, the dispute is settled accordingly, and everyone goes home.

        Reply

        1. I don’t think anyone claims that hoplite warfare was ritualized in that sense, like a football game, arranged for a specified time and place by mutual agreement among leaders. When people say it was ritualized, they mean that there was a fairly strong cultural consensus about the sorts of things I have mentioned combined with relatively universal methods and tactics which made results fairly predictable.

          Reply

          1. Basically the idea is that in a “ritual” war, both sides agree on the conventional way of how the war should be fought. An arranged battle or an arranged prisoner exchange can be both “ritual”, in a sense.

          2. There’s a reason I threw in “extremely” at the beginning of that second paragraph.

            I was more pushing against the idea that having things be “ritualized” somehow implies “there is no real mechanism to link an action with its intended goal.”

      3. “Ritualized” also doesn’t mean that there is no connection between action and goal. Courtroom trials are highly ritualized. To take an example at random, the ritual of rising when the judge enters the courtroom is meant to increase the participants’ respect for the judge (and maybe even for the law). The mechanisms by which this works are (i) humans are physical beings, so our bodily postures affect our emotions, and (ii) humans are social animals, so seeing everyone else display respect for the judge is calculated to increase our respect. Obviously, those mechanisms are not so direct as to guarantee the desired result, but they are calculated and somewhat effective. I could go on through many other courtroom rituals, but I think the point is clear.

        Reply

    2. Having read above a number of conceptually wildly different definitions of “ritualized warfare”, I have to say that I don’t have a clue which, if any, of these the OP meant by the term, as applied to either the Zulus or the ancient Greeks, and really feel that people who use the term would be well advised to avoid it if they wish to make their meaning plain.

      Reply

  41. Having watched the video link for the 24 to 27 kg combat load for the medieval knight, it only covers armor, not weapons, which is different than the hoplite numbers here and (I presume?) the other ancient numbers.

    If you add weapons and suspension to make it more apples-to-apples with the ancient numbers, I guess you are not adding tons but definitely a few kilograms, depending on whether you’re talking about e.g. a light hammer with a dagger sidearm, a heavy halberd with a sword, etc.

    Reply

    1. Yes, but you have to remeber that late medival/early modern soldiers were among the heaviest armored troops period. Nobody else before or after went to battle enclosed in iron plate from head to toe.

      Reply

      1. Oh, indeed, a dismounted knight in full harness is pretty heavy as heavy infantry goes. I’m not saying this to argue with our host – if anything, correcting this minor oversight and adding a few kg to the number for the knight’s combat load strengthens the argument against the traditional orthodoxy, as that would mean combat loads even further above the hopheavy weight still didn’t make knights helpless outside close order formation.

        Reply

  42. “the aspis has, as mentioned, a wooden core made of a wood that offers the best strength at low weight (e.g. willow, poplar, not oak or ash) covered (at least for the better off hoplites) with a very thin (c. 0.25-0.5mm) bronze facing, which actually does substantially strengthen the shield.”

    How? That’s like between 10-20 sheets of (heavy duty) aluminum foil. Bronze shear strength is (can be) higher, but it’s hard to imagine that the contribution is more than marginal. Is there something that happens to the whole system when layered like this?

    Reply

    1. It’s metal. So it’s harder for edged weapons to bite into it’s surface and create damage. The same way early protected ironclads used metal/wood composite armor.

      Reply

      1. This is exactly what I’m asking: ironclad composite armor had iron plates on the order of inches thick (~4-10cm) so several orders of magnitude more. Of course, this was to defeat cannonballs with considerably more energy (and a different profile) than a spear, so maybe the whole comparison breaks down. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t seem obvious to me how much of the spear’s energy a sub-millimeter layer could absorb.
        I mean, you can try the experiment: cover a cutting board with (layers of) reynold’s wrap and stab it with a knife. The blade will be stopped by the wood. More so than the bare wood? Hard to say, but the foil most definitely fails.
        My brief research suggests that the foil layer might protect the wood in a more long-term sense, say, from weathering, maybe more like lacquer or paint than as a structural component. Thoughts?

        Reply

        1. Yes the comparison with ironclade armor is not perfect, since the metal there was to break the impact of the shot, and not to make an edge glide of.
          So multiple layers of foil will be weaker than a single layer of the same thickness. And the aluminium the tin foil is made from is not as strong as bronze. And a modern steel blade will be a lot harder then the tin foil, making it easier for it to bite into the material. But a early iron wasn’t that much harder then hammered bronze. And even then, stab at a 90° angle might still penetrate. But stabs at other angles and almost every cut will find it a lot harder to get purchase and cut the material.

          Reply

          1. The research I found does point to “active defense” as crucial to shield performance. So you’re suggesting (like these researchers,) that the angle of the shield plus the smooth metal face are what makes the difference.

            That makes sense, although, as I found and made note of someplace below, useful thicknesses of metal facing were found to be 2-3x what is cited above.
            “…at 0.3mm, the Coles replica was, approximately two to three times
            thinner than a typical Yetholm type shield, and four to five times thinner than most Athenry-
            Eynsham and Nipperwiese shields. While extremely thin Bronze shields may not have been
            functional in combat, the thicker ones were well suited to this end.” (Molloy 2009 referring to John Coles, 1962)

      2. Sorry, double reply.

        The other avenue I’ve considered is whether it might help the overall integrity of the wooden shield, that is, against splitting or splintering. This effect might otherwise be obtained through cross-grain wood laminations (e.g. plywood,) but maybe the foil layer gave some of these advantages at lower overall weight? Hide seems to be used in other contexts in this way.
        Metal doesn’t have grain on the scale that wood does, and I don’t feel like a covering so thin could be applied in such a way as to add compressive stress to the system (I could be wrong about this second point,) so I’m skeptical about this one as well.
        Here’s Homer:
        “It struck the sevenfold shield in its outermost layer–the eighth, which was of bronze–and went through six of the layers but in the seventh hide it stayed.” (Iliad VII)
        Doesn’t prove anything one way or the other except that the bronze layer is toast. Plus the scientific value of the statement is diminished by things like, “Aeneas’s spear did not pierce the shield, for the layer of gold, gift of the god, stayed the point. It went through two layers, but the god had made the shield in five, two of bronze, the two innermost ones of tin, and one of gold; it was in this that the spear was stayed.” (Iliad XX)

        Reply

        1. DeGroote has already shown through puncture testing that the thin bronze face does in fact aid in resisting strikes. I was surprised because I thought it was purely structural, like metal packing straps. It is surely structural as well.

          Reply

          1. Who is DeGroote? Web searches are polluted by other things than academic research (searching “DeGroote bronze shield” produces as the first result… this comment, and items of little relevance thereafter)

          2. I found a 2009 paper by Barry Molloy, which is further cited in other papers but without advancing the particular research. Interestingly, his results somewhat validate my initial skepticism: thin bronze covering did not help appreciably. However, he did discover that ~0.9mm bronze faced shields *did* outperform their hide counterparts, and that this thickness “reflect[s] the majority of shields from Europe.”

  43. “The first to show up are greaves (which are also the only armor ‘add on’ to really stick around) which begin to appear perhaps as early as c. 750 but only really securely (there are dating troubles with some examples) by c. 700.”

    This surprises me not at all. Had a shield-brother who fought with a round shield in the SCA. The rest of us fought with heaters. The difference is that the heater extends significantly lower on the body than the round shield–so our legs were better defended despite our shields being overall smaller. The result was that the guy fighting with a round shield tended to get hit in the legs a lot, and we got really good at closing that hole in the line. (While criticisms of SCA heavy combat are warranted, and it imitates Medieval not Greek combat, the mechanics are the same so it’s still a valid demonstration of the effect of round shields on leg wounds.)

    A shield is really good at protecting the body, and humans instinctively protect the head; it is, after all, where our sensory organs (which inform us defense is required) are located. We’re not so good at defending our legs. And the way all the artworks I’ve seen from the Greek hayday have depicted shield use leaves the legs rather wildly exposed. Hit enough guys in the legs, though, and you can disrupt the formation. Happened to us a few times, despite our experience in dealing with the issue. A staggered shield wall is basically not a shield wall anymore; a wall in good order hitting one that’s ragged has a decidedly one-sided outcome.

    Armor is a static defense, meaning that you put it on and then it does its job without you thinking about it (shields are active defense–you can use them to actively prevent attacks, or to create openings, or whatnot). Makes absolute sense to me that a passive defense in an area that’s highly likely to take damage, and highly likely to be targeted to at least some extent, and which is hard to defend, would stick around!

    The issue with the rest is that anything covered by a shield doesn’t need additional protection. You can reduce the protection there because, frankly, if the shield doesn’t block the attack the armor isn’t going to do much good. It’s better to have the flexibility and the endurance than to have heavy armor. This is particularly true in a society that values things like wrestling and gymnastics, as it would permit you to dodge instead of tanking the hit (and yes, you can dodge to some extent in close order; footwork still matters).

    Reply

    1. I don’t know anything about these matters, but I’ve noticed a lot of greaves (and, especially, detail concerning their attachment,) in The Iliad. Now, I suppose we’ve learned that that shield was probably not the “aspis,” but it does seem to have been a current concern.

      Reply

    2. Note that while the ancient men were, in general, roughly as strong as modern men, the ancient men were NOT as strong and fast as each other in their contemporary society.

      A society would have included men who, outside wartime, had to work harvesting and ploughing – jobs that did take physical endurance, but not sprint speed, and do that on limited/cheap diet. And besides these men, there would have been men who COULD afford to spend their leisure time exercising, on good food.

      Roman “skirmishers”, the velites, were young and light infantry who could be faster because they were wearing lighter armour.
      But when you have men who are stronger ad faster than most because they can afford to train while rank and file cannot, cannot they instead train to achieve equal speed while wearing heavier armour than rank and file? At least on the sprint basis?

      I have the impression that this is what being a true hero is all about. Wearing heavier and fancier armour than rank and file (consider the big deal made about Achilles´ armours and shields, whether worn by himself, Patroclus or Hector), and being able to use it to sprint out in front of shieldwall. And then retreat back to the protection of shieldwall when tired of the sprint, confronted by an enemy hero or an excessively big bunch of enemy rank and file.

      When a hero plans on running back to the protection of his own phalanx, or on confronting several enemy rank and file closing in on him from several sides, would it be important to have the armour cover Achilles´ heel and other spots not covered by the shield and, for a hero, not by the comrades either?

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  44. So, this is an extremely belated post. It’s mostly prompted by a much more recent post and response in your bluesky, but I don’t have bluesky and so I guess this is going here.

    So, my ‘experience’ related to this comes from four or so years spent training and ‘fighting’ across three differetn reenactment groups, SCA heavy, SCA light, and most recently HEMA. It must be ackowledged that none of these function the way real combat would, that there are people much more expereinced and better at these than I am, and that things like this are still heavily argued about by participants in all of the above.

    That said:

    The intial nitpick that has sort of ‘goaded’ me into making this post is Chrononaut’s statement that ‘maybe 40% of [the aspis’s] width that don’t protect the shield bearer’ – this being the shield space projecting to the left of the fighter. I would say with a fairly strong degree of certainty that this statement isn’t really right.. One of the ways to offensively bypass a shield is to essentially place your wrist to one side of the shield-edge and turn your wrist in such a manner that your weapon angles behind the shield. In SCA heavy this was called a ‘wrap’ and done at an extreme could allow the wielder to cut around the shield and into the back of their oppents head with a high level of force. I believe that one of the german hema methodologies has a specific name for a less extreme version of this technique that I can’t recall, and the overarm spear grip is particularly good at generating these angles.

    The side that is the most vulnerable to these types of attacks is your left flank (assuming you are right handed) because that’s where their weapon is and yours isn’t. Similarly, if you are fighting in a line any oppents in line to your left will have tese kinds of angles automatically unless shields are overlapping, and you again are more vulnerable on this flank because your weapon (an additional proactive layer of defense) is on your other side. Extending the shield to your left helps cut off these kinds of angles.

    The second nitpick is regarding footwork, as you mentioned both here and on bluesky that your understanding is at some point in combat you would have to bring your back foot (your right foot) forwards in order to ‘power’ a shot.

    In terms of footwork, you will typically either be left foot forwards, right foot forwards, or in a moment of transition between the two. At no point in any version of a historical combat sport I have participated in have I been tought to stand with both feet in-line with neother one behind the other whilst you are actively engaged. It’s bad for stability, force generation (if that’s something you are prioritising) and footwork speed. Even the ‘passing step’ of bringing your back foot to fore or your fore foot to back is taught in a specific way to avoid you doing what you would normally do instinctually and lose your balance and structure mid-movement.

    Your torso on the other hand doesn’t have to line up with this exactly. The default stance I’ve been taught in HEMA for example is half sword and has your torso twisted so that neither shoulder is ahead of the other. Other stances will place your shoulders foot-forwards – if your right-foot and shoulder forwards you’re prioritising reach while the buckler protects your hand and blocks the angles of attack towards your uppermost body, if you’re left foot and shoulder forwards you’re prioritising defence by projecting the buckler forwards. If your either foot forwards but have your shoulders level balanced your balancing your offensive/defensive capabilities, but I have only ever been taught to do this in sward and buckler hema. If your one foot forwards and the opposite shoulder back you’re typically asking to get knocked on your arse. In terms of the statement ‘no one fights entirely side on outside of foil fencing’, the default stances I have been taught time and time again *are* side on, whether its weapons side or shield side forwards, with a ‘level’ oreintation being a brief transitional period from one to the other with the aim of maneuvering (which becomes a lot less feasible in dense formations). Simillarly every single sword system I’ve been taught places your weapon side forwards because it is now your only defense and bringing your back foot forwards only happens if you are using that particular step to maneuver around them, or if you are using your off hand in some way and unless you have control of their weapon with said off hand it is not a stance you want to stay in.

    Of the stuff I’ve done, the only one that really cares about generating ‘power’ is SCA heavy, where you’re using a minimum of knee, elbow and kidney protection, padding and ahistorically heavy helmets against rattan ‘blades’ and the hit still has to be felt hard enough through all of that for the hit to count. The exact threshold for this tends to vary from group to group, but power generation was a massive portion of what I was taught at SCA heavy and even through the other stuff doesn’t focus on that I still found what I learnt in terms of body mechanics to be incredibly useful in terms of moving efficiently in other variants. The point is that although you *can* step forwards in the process of using your torso to generate that level of force, you don’t *need* to. You can generate the necessary force perfectly well with a relativly slight movment of the torso towards ‘level’ position. If you are making passing steps it’s much less likely to be about force generation and much more likely to be about changing the angles and distancting which you’re attacking through or being attacked from. In HEMA, which typically aims to simulate unarmoured combat by default, this is even more extreme, and there are cuts that you’re taught to make using movement just from the wrist.

    There is/has been a whole argument about ‘precision in targeting unarmoured bits of the enemy’ and ‘force generation to do damage through armour’ especially in relation to HEMA vs SCA debates that I don’t think will ever be properly answered fully without actually risking getting people killed.

    In terms of line fights (here’s where reenactment comes in, other than how much being knocked about by plut metal weapons with minimal protection tends to make you a lot more appreciative of how dangerous their sharp equivalents would me), you don’t tend to go weapons shoulder forwards by default if you have a shield because then your shield isn’t protecting your right flank at all. You *might* try and make a passing step to your right leg if the lines were just out of measure and you were try to snipe somebody and transition back before anybody could react, or if you were trying to just gain distance to ‘charge’ and get up close and personal either on your own (bad idea) or as part of a push. Doing it while in measure means that you’re stepping out of the shield line and blocking of your shield from your right flank while your weapon is committed to an attack and leaving you entirely open on your left. Even if you did your goal would be to transition back as quickly as possible, so I would expect a shield to be optimised for the ‘default’ position.

    Reply
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  47. I have a few things to say about your reasoning in the segment on shield positions and the associated geometry of shield position and avenues of attack. If I had to choose one, it’s that the aspis is as you say, a very broad shield. This means that when held at a 45 degree angle forward, the leading edge smothers quite a lot of the available attack vectors coming towards the shield bearer’s right side, and with some minor movement of the shield and footwork the lead edge can intercept very effectively with very little movement being needed. On the left side, the geometry is even better, since a wide shield with the edge tilted backwards at 45 degrees effectively closes off most angles of attack. And the fact that the aspis is wide helps with this because it is also as wide vertically, i.e. it is taller than you’d think. This gets hard to explain in text, but the circular form means the “bottom” point and its arcs up towards the horizontal middle line is well suited to block attacks to the lower parts of the body, again with relatively small movement of the shield.

    To use your own term, there is appositeness at work here – the center grip shield is more agile, and has better reach, but this is partially because it _has_ to be since it is not as sturdy. It offers different techniques because of its agility, but that agility is also a function of its lightness, which then ties into combat role – most troops using these shields are arguably “medium”.

    What I’m trying to say is that the lack of range of motion in the aspis is not a detriment to its ability to flexibly intercept attacks from different angles.

    Additionally, you state that you have to move your back leg forward when thrusting to add your body weight to the blow. My apologies, but you are simply factually incorrect about this. There are many ways to generate power when fighting with bladed (and concussive) hand held weapons, but stepping forward with the back leg and thus come to a squared up frontal stance simply isn’t necessary nor feasible for this purpose. I say this as someone who has trained seriously both in traditional Eastern weapon arts and done decades of experimentation with Western arms and armour as well. Your statement is not true, and worse, it posits a way of moving which will get you killed in armed hand to hand combat.

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