Quintus Antistius Adventus Postumius Aquilinus - Livius

An article in the Roman praetor Quintus Antistius Adventus Postumius Aquilinus www.livius.org/articles/person/antistiu... #romanEmpire #histodons #antiquidons #ancMedToot

In the last winter of the Before Times, I told a cheerful winter story about a hundred years of scholars repeating what a German professor told them not what any ancient sources actually says www.bookandsword.com/2019/12/21/herodotus-mey... #histodons #antiquidons #ancMedToot

Parenthically to the above, it is just possible that Socrates was present at the first siege where Greeks used rams and tortoises like civilized people in 441/540 BCE www.bookandsword.com/2020/01/11/how-the-greek... #ancMedToot #histodons #philosophy #militaryHistory

A quick note on "two battles in three years" www.bookandsword.com/2026/01/18/a-quick-note-... #histodons #researchHistory #ancMedToot #antiquidons #militaryHistory

What if we take Bret Devereaux's argument about the Roman Republic engineering Italy and run with it? There was no typical polis in ancient Greece www.bookandsword.com/2026/01/11/there-was-no-... #histodons #antiquidons #ancMedToot

Collections: Hoplite Wars: Part IVa, The Status of Hoplites This is the last part of our four-part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, Intermission) on the debates surrounding ancient Greek hoplites and the phalanx formation in which they fought. We’ve spent the last two entries in this series looking at warfare quite narrowly through the lens of tactics: hoplite spacing, depth, fighting style, and so on. I’ve argued for what I regard as a ‘blended’ model that sits somewhere between orthodoxy and heterodoxy: no ‘shoving’ _othismos_ , but the hoplite phalanx is a shield wall, a formation with mostly regular spacing that is intended for shock and functions as a shock-focused shield wall formation likely from a relatively early date. This week, we’re going to now ‘zoom out’ a bit and ask **what implications the hoplite debate has for our broader understanding of Greek society** , particularly _polis_ Greek society. Hoplites, as warriors, were generally found in the Greek _poleis_ but of course not all Greeks lived in _poleis_ and areas of Greece without _poleis_ largely lacked hoplites as well. In particular, **our understanding of the place that hoplites have in _polis_ society has a bunch of downstream implications in terms of social structure, the prevalence of slavery and even the question of how many Greeks there are in the first place**. I ended up having to split this into two parts for time, so this week we’re going to focus on **the social status of hoplites** , as well as some of the broader implications, particularly demographic ones, of a change in our understanding of how rich hoplites were. Then next week we’re going to close the series out by looking at hoplite ‘discipline,’ training and experience. As always, if you like what you are reading, please share it as I rely on word-of-mouth to find readers! And if you really like it, you can support this project over at Patreon; I don’t promise not to use the money to buy a full hoplite panoply, but I also don’t _not_ promise to do that. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on Twitter and Bluesky for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some _de minimis_ presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter. ## Email Address Subscribe! Via Wikimedia Commons, an arming scene showing hoplites and a young man being armed as a hoplite (c. 530-510 BC). ## Orthodox Yeoman Hoplites The key question we are asking here is fundamentally “how broad is the hoplite class?” That is, of course, a _very important_ question, but as we’ll see, also a fiendishly tricky one. It is also a question where it can be unclear sometimes where scholars actually _are_ which can render the debates confusing: **heterodox scholars write articles and chapters against something called the ‘myth of the middle-class hoplite** ‘1 **but it isn’t always clear exactly what the bounds of the model they’re arguing against is, in part because orthodox scholars are not generally proposing hard numbers for the size of the hoplite class**. By way of example, I want to take Victor Davis Hansen out to the woodshed on this point – because his half of this specific disconnect was brought up in the comments early in this series – in terms of **the difference between how he sometimes imagines _in words_ the size and social composition of the hoplite class and then how it looks when he uses numbers**. In _The Other Greeks_ , VDH’s preference for describing the hoplite _polis_ of the late Archaic is ‘broad-based’ a term he uses for it about three dozen times, including on when he talks about the “broad base of hoplite yeomanry” and how “when middling farmers were in control of a Greek _polis_ government it was broad-based: it was representative of the economic interest of most of the citizenry” and when he references “the yeomanry […] who had built the _polis_ and created broad-based agrarian governments.”2 These references are, in my digital copy, all within 3 pages of each other. They certainly give the impression of a middling, yeoman-hoplite class that dominated the typical _polis_. And indeed, in his more pop-focused works, like the deeply flawed _Carnage and Culture_ (2001) he posits Greece as the origin point for a western tradition that includes “equality among the middling classes” tied to the hoplite tradition, which certainly seems to suggest that **Hanson thinks we should understand the hoplite class as broad, covering even relatively poor farmers, and with a great degree of internal equality**. But then flash forward _three whole pages_ and we’re calculating the size of that ‘broad-based’ class and we get a line like, “the full-citizen hoplites […] composed about twenty percent of the total _adult_ resident population of Boeotia.”3 And pulling out _just that second quote_ , someone might express confusion when I say that the heterodox argue that the hoplite class is small and exclusive, a rejection of the ‘middle class’ yeoman-hoplite of the orthodox school, because look there is VDH himself saying they’re only 20%! But equally, one may question the fairness of describing such a rate of enfranchisement as ‘broad-based!’ Now on the one hand VDH’s argument in this passage is about the relative inclusivity of ‘moderate’ oligarchies (the ‘broad-based’ ones) as compared to radical Greek democracies and so the question of the relative breadth of the hoplite class itself is not _particularly_ his concern. But I think he’s also hiding the ball here in key ways: Boeotia is a tricky test case – unusual and famous for both its significant cavalry (drawn from an unusually wealthy aristocracy) and light infantry manpower (drawn from an unusually impoverished peasantry). VDH notes the low property qualifications for citizenship in Boeotia but does not stop to consider if that might be connected not to the hoplites, but to the unusually large numbers of Boeotian _light infantry_. Moreover, there is a lack of clarity when presenting these percentages as to exactly what is being included. VDH’s 20% figure is 20% of the total _“adult_ resident population,” rather than – as we might expect – a percentage of the adult _male_ population or frequently the _free_ adult _male_ population. So he is actually asserting **something like almost 45%** (really probably 43 or 44%) **of free households serve as hoplites** (once we adjust for women and the elderly), which, as we’ll see, I think is pretty doubtful.4 For the sake of keeping comparisons here ‘clean,’ I am going to try to be really clear on what is a percentage of what, because as we’ll see **there _is_ in fact, a real difference between the orthodox assumption of a hoplite class of 40-50% _of free households_ and the heterodox assumption that is closer to 25% _of free households_.** So when I say **that heterodox scholars generally argue for a _smaller_ , economically elite hoplite class while orthodox scholars generally _assume_ a _larger_ ‘yeoman’ hoplite class**, it can be tricky to pin down what that means, particularly on the orthodox side. We need apples-to-apples number comparisons to get a sense of where these folks differ. **And I think the place to actually start with this isKarl Julius Beloch (1854-1929)**; stick with me, I promise this will make sense in a second. Beloch’s _Die Bevölkerung der griechisch-römischen Welt_ (1886, “The Population of the Greco-Roman World”) is the starting point for all of the debates of Greek and Roman demography, the first really significant, systematic effort to estimate the population of the entire classical world in a rigorous way. Now if you recall your historiography from our first part, you will quickly realize that as a German writing in the 1880s, Beloch was bound to have drawn his assumptions about Greek society and the social role of the hoplite class from those early Prussian and German scholars who serve as the foundation for the orthodox school. They were, after all, writing at the same time and in the same language as he was. Equally useful (for us) Beloch’s basic range of estimates for Greece remain more-or-less the accepted starting point for the problem, which is to say that a **lot of _current_ historians of ancient Greece when they think about the population of the Greek _poleis_ are still ‘thinking with Beloch’** (typically mediated by Corvisier and Suder, _La population de l’Antitiquité classique_ (2000)). So analyzing Beloch’s approach – and because he is estimating population, he is forced to _use numbers_ – can give us a sense of the society that the ‘orthodox’ vision of hoplites imagined at its inception and which it largely still imagines when it thinks in terms of raw population numbers. And that can help us lock down what we’re actually _arguing about_. In _very_ brief, Beloch had a problem to solve in estimating the population of Greece. Whereas in Roman Italy, he had census data to interpret, we have no equivalent in Greece (ancient reports of population in Greece are rare and almost invariably unreliable).**So instead he adopts the method of estimating** **from maximum military deployments** , the one number we reliably get from ancient sources. Doing so, of course, requires squaring away some key questions: what percentage of adult males might be called up for these armies? Our sources often give us _only_ figures for hoplites, so this question really becomes, ‘what percentage of adult males served as hoplites?’ And then following on that, what percentage of people were female, children, elderly or non-free? Beloch answers those questions as follows: **he assumes that _roughly half_ of all free households are in the hoplite class**, so he can compute the free adult male population by multiplying hoplite deployments by two, **that he can compute the free population by multiplying the adult male population by three** , and **that the non-free population is around 25% of the total** (significantly concentrated in Sparta and Athens), including both slaves and serfs. You can see the logic in these assumptions but as I am going to argue _all of these assumptions are wrong_ , some more wrong than others. We’ll come back to this, but I think Beloch’s key stumbling block (apart from just badly underestimating the number of _children_ in a pre-modern population – he should be multiplying his adult males by _four_ , not _three_) is that he largely assumes that the Greek _poleis_ look more or less like the Roman Republic except that the Romans recruit a bit further down their socio-economic ladder. And that’s…not right, though you could see how someone working in the 1880s might jump to that expedient when the differences in Greek and Roman social structure were less clear. **Greeks are not Romans and the Greek _polis_ is not the Roman Republic**.5 Nevertheless those assumptions suggest a vision, a _mental model_ of the social structure of the typical Greek _polis_ : wealthy citizens of the hoplite class make up roughly half of the free households (he explicitly defends a 47/53% breakdown between hoplite and sub-hoplite), while the landless citizen poor make up the other half. Beloch assumes an enslaved population of c. 1m (against a free population of c. 3m), so a society that is roughly 25% enslaved, so we might properly say he imagines a society that is roughly 37.5% hoplite class (or richer), 37.5% poorer households and 25% enslaved households. And returning to a moment to VDH’s _The Other Greeks_(1995), that’s his model too: if 20% of _adults_ (not just adult males) were citizen-hoplites in Boeotia, then something like 43% of (free) _households_ were hoplite _households_ (remember to adjust not just for women, but also for the elderly),6 which is roughly Beloch’s figure. It is a touch lower, but remember that VDH is computing for Boeotia, a part of Greece where we expect a modestly larger lower class. **What does it mean for a society if the hoplite class represents approximately 40% of households** (including non-free households)? Well, this suggests first that the hoplite class is perhaps the largest or second-largest demographic group, behind only free poor citizens. **It also assumes that nearly all of the _propertied_ households** – that is, the farmers who own their own farms – **both served as hoplites and were members of the hoplite class**.7 **In particular, this imagines the ‘typical’ member of the hoplite _class_** (this distinction between hoplites and the hoplite class will matter in a moment) **as a middling farmer whose farm was likely small enough that he had to work it himself**(not having enough land to live off rents or enslaved labor), **essentially a modest peasant**. Moreover the assumption here is that this broad hoplite ‘middle class’ dominates the demography of the _polis_ , with very few leisured elites above them and a similar number of free poor (rather than a much larger number) below them. And I want to note here again there is an implicit – only rarely explicit (Beloch makes the comparison directly) – effort to reason from the social model we see in the Roman Republic, where the _assidui_ (the class liable for taxes and military service) as a group basically did include nearly all farmers with any kind of property and ‘farmers with any kind of property’ really does seem to have included the overwhelming majority of the population. There’s an effort to see Greek ‘civic militarism’ through the same frame, with the _polis_ a community made up of small freeholding farmers banding together.8 **I think scholarship has not always grappled clearly enough with the ways in which Rome is _not_ like an overgrown _polis_ , but in fact quite different**. One of those differences is that the _assidui_ is a _much larger class of people_ than _anything_ in a _polis_ , encompassing something like 70% of all adult males (free and non-free) and perhaps as much as 90% of all free households. That is an _enormous difference_ jumping even from 37.5% to _70%_. What that figure suggests is both that **Roman military participation reached _much more robustly_ into the lower classes **but also that (and we’ll come back to this in a moment) **land ownership was probably more widespread among the Roman peasantry than their Greek equivalents**. In short part of what makes the Roman Republic different is not just where they draw the census lines, but the _underlying structure of the countryside_ is meaningfully different and that has _very significant_ impacts on the structure of Roman society.9 **Taken on its own evidence, it sure looks like the organization of _land_ in the Greek countryside was meaningfully less equal**10 **and included meaningfully _more slaves_ than the Italian countryside**, with significant implications for how we understand the social position of hoplites. And that brings us to the heterodox objections and thus… ## Divisions Among Hoplites The response to the ‘yeoman hoplite’ model of hoplite orthodoxy has been Hans van Wees’ assault on the ‘myth of the middle-class hoplite.’11 **What van Wees does is look specifically at Athens, because unlike anywhere else in the Greek world, we have the complete ‘schedule’ of wealth classes in Athens, denominated in agricultural production**. He’s able to reason from that to likely estate size for each of the classes and from there, given the size of Attica (the territory of Athens) and the supposed citizen population (estimates from 40,000 to 60,000) the total size of each wealth class in terms of households and land ownership, in order to very roughly sketch the outlines of what wealth and social class in Attica might have looked like. Our sources offer little sense that they thought Athenian class structure was ever unusual or remarkable beyond the fact that Athens was _very big_ (in contrast to Sparta, which is treated as _quite strange_), so the idea here is that insights in Athenian class divisions help us understand class divisions in other _poleis_ as well. What he is working with are the wealth classes defined by the reforms of Solon, which we haven’t really discussed in depth but these are reported by Plutarch (_Solon_ 16) and seem to have been the genuine property classifications for Athenian citizens, which I’ve laid out in the chart below. Wealth was defined by the amount of grain (measured in _medimnoi_ , a dry measure unit of 51.84 liters), but for non-farmers (craftsmen and such) you qualified to the class equal to your income (so if you got paid the equivalent of 250 _medimnoi_ of grain to be a blacksmith, you were of the _zeugitai_ , though one imagines fairly few non-landowners qualify for reasons swiftly to become clear). **Name**| **Wealth Requirement**| **Notional Military role**| Percentage of Population Following van Wees (2001) ---|---|---|--- Pentakosiomedimnoi (“500 Bushel Men”)| 500 medimnoi or more| Leaders, Officers, Generals| 1.7-2.5% Hippeis (‘horsemen’)| 400 medimnoi| Cavalry| 1.7-2.5% Zeugitai (‘yoked ones’) | 200 medimnoi (possibly reduced later to 150 medimnoi)| Hoplites| 5.6-25% Thetes (‘serfs’)| Less than 200 medimnoi| Too poor to serve (later rowers in the navy)| 90-70% Now traditionally, the _zeugitai_ were regarded as the ‘hoplite class’ and that is sometimes supposed to be the source of their name (they were ‘yoked together’ standing in position in the phalanx), but**what van Wees is working out is that although the _zeugitai_ are supposed to be the core of the citizen polity (the _thetes_ have limited political participation) there simply cannot be that many of them** because the _minimum_ farm necessary to produce 200 _medimnoi_ of grain is going to be around 7.5 ha12 or roughly 18 acres which is – by peasant standards – an _enormous farm_ , well into ‘rich peasant’ territory. It is, in fact, roughly enough farm for the owner to **not do much or any farming** but instead subsist entirely off of either rents or the labor of enslaved workers.13 In short, the _zeugitai_ aren’t ‘working class’ ‘yeoman farmers’ at all, **but leisure-class _elites_** – _mostly landlords, not farmers_ – albeit poorer than the _hippeis_ and _pentakosiomedimnoi_ even further above them. And that actually makes a great deal of sense: one of the ideas that pops up in Greek political philosophy – albeit in tension with another we’ll get to in a moment – is the idea that the ideal hoplite is a leisured elite and that the ideal _polis_ would be governed exclusively by the leisured hoplites.14 Indeed, when a bunch of Greek-speakers (mostly Macedonians) find themselves suddenly in possession of vast kingdoms, this is _exactly the model_ they try to build their military on (before getting utterly rolled by the Romans because this is actually a bad way to build a society). And of course Sparta’s citizen body, the spartiates, replicate this model as well. Often when we see elements in a Greek _polis_ try to create an oligarchy, what they are intending to do is reduce political participation back to roughly this class – the few thousand richest households – which is not _all the hoplites_ , but merely the richest ones. Of course with such large farms there can’t be all that many _zeugitai_ and indeed there don’t seem to have been. **In van Wees’ model, the _zeugitai_ -and-up classes never supply even half of the number of hoplites _we see Athens deploy_** ; they only _barely_ crawl over half if we assume the property qualification was (as it probably was) reduced at some point to just 150 _medimnoi_. Instead, under most conditions **the majority of hoplites are _thetes_** , pulled from the wealthiest stratum of that class (van Wees figures these fellows probably have farms in the range of ~3 ha or so, so c. 7.5 acres). Those _thetes_ make up the majority of hoplites on the field **but do not enjoy the political privileges of the ‘hoplite class.’** And pushing against the ‘ _polis_ -of-rentier-elites’ model, we often also find Greek sources remarking that these fellows, “wiry and sunburnt” (Plato _Republic_ 556cd, trans. van Wees), make the best soldiers because they’re more physically fit and more inured to hardship – because unlike the wealthy hoplites _they actually have to work_. What the transition to the Athenian democracy meant was the full enfranchisement of _this large class of thetes_ , both the fellows who could afford to fight as hoplites (but previously didn’t have the rights of them) and the poorer citizen _thetes_. And of course this isn’t _only Athens_. The only other _polis_ whose complete social system we can see with any clarity, of course, is Sparta and when we look there, what do we find? **A system where political participation is limited to the rentier-elite class (the Spartiates), where there is _another class of poorer hoplites_ – the perioikoi, _who fight as hoplites_ – who are entirely blocked from political participation**. It appears to be the same kind of dividing line, with the difference being that the spartiates had become so dominant as to deny the perioikoi even citizenship in the polity and to physically segregate themselves (the perioikoi lived in their own communities, mostly on the marginal land). It is suggestive that this sort of **divide between the wealthy ‘hoplite class’** that enjoyed distinct political privileges **and other ‘working-class’ hoplites** who did not (and yet _even far more_ poor farmers who could not afford to fight as hoplites) **was common in the _polis_** _._ **That leaves the notion of a truly ‘broad-based’ hoplite-class that runs a ‘broad-based’ agrarian _polis_ government that consisted of ‘middle-class’ ‘yeoman’ hoplites largely in tatters**. Instead, what you may normally have is a legally defined ‘hoplite class’ that is just the richest 10-20% of the free citizen population, a distinct ‘poor hoplite’ class that might be around 20% **and then a free citizen underclass of 60-70% that cannot fight as hoplites and also have very limited political participation, even though many of them do own some small amount of land**. Once again, if you’ll forgive me, **that looks _nothing like_ the Middle Roman Republic**, where the _capite censi_ (aka the _proletarii_) – men too poor to serve – probably amounted to only around 10% of the population and the light infantry contingent of a Roman army (where the poorest men who could serve would go) was just 25%.15 So whereas the free ‘Roman’ underclass of landless or very poor is at most perhaps 35% _of (free) households_ ,16 the equivalent class at Athens at least (and perhaps in Greece more broadly) _is 60%_ of (free) households. Accounting for the enslaved population makes this gap _wider_ , because it certainly seems like **the percentage of the enslaved population in Greece was somewhat higher than Roman Italy**. It is suddenly less of a marvel that Rome could produce military mobilizations that staggered the Greek world. **Greeks are not Romans**. **This is a set of conclusions that naturally has significant implications for how we understand the _polis_ , particularly non-democratic _poleis_**. Older scholarship often assumes that a ‘broad’ Greek oligarchy meant rule by the landholding class, but if you look at the number of enfranchised citizens, **it is clear that ‘broad’ oligarchies were _much narrower than this_ : not ‘farmer’s republics’ **(as VDH supposes)**but rather ‘ _landlord_ ‘s republics.’**17 That is quite a different sort of state! And understanding broad oligarchies in this way suddenly restores the explanatory power of what _demokratia_ was in Greek thought: it isn’t just about enfranchising the urban poor (a class that must have been vanishingly small in outside of very large cities like Athens) but about enfranchising the _small farmer_ , a class that would have been quite large in any _polis_ for reasons we’ve discussed with peasants. Via Wikimedia Commons, a Greek funerary statute from Eleusis (c. 350-325) showing a hoplite being armed by his enslaved porter. One of the indicators that slavery may have been more prevalent in Greece and that the hoplite class was wealther than their Roman equivalents is that Greek writers often seem to assume that the typical hoplite has an enslaved servant with them on campaign to carry their equipment and handle their logistics, whereas famously in the Roman army, the individual infantrymen were responsible for this. I think there’s also a less directly important but even more _profound_ implication here: ## Wait, How Many Greeks Are There? The attentive reader may be thinking, “wait, but Beloch’s population estimates assume that the hoplite contingent of any Greek _polis_ represent _half_ of its military aged (20-60) free adult males, but _you’re_ saying that number might be _much lower_ , perhaps just 30 or 40%?” I actually haven’t seen any scholars directly draw this connection, so I am going to do so here. Hell, I’ve already seen this blog cited quite a few times in peer-reviewed scholarship so why not. If it isn’t already clear, **I think when it comes to the size of the hoplite class, van Wees is correct** and that thought interlocks with another thought that has slowly crept into my mind and at last become lodged as my working assumption: we have significantly under-counted the number of Greeks. Or, more correctly, **everyone except Mogens Herman Hansen has significantly under-counted the number of Greeks**. So good job to Mogens Herman Hansen, everyone else, see me after class. Now these days the standard demographic reference for the population of Greece is not Beloch (1886), it is Corvisier and Suder, _La population de l’Antitiquité classique_ (2000). Unlike Beloch, they do not reason from military deployments, instead they reason from estimated population density. Now I want to be clear, they are reasoning from estimated _rural_ population density, which is not the same as reasoning from _built-up urban area_ 18 The thing is, we can’t independently confirm rural population density from archaeology (unlike urban area estimates) so this method is _entirely_ hostage to its assumptions. **So the fact that Corvisier and Suder’s estimates fall neatly almost exactly on Beloch’s estimate** (a free population of c. 3m in mainland Greece) **might suggest they tweaked their assumptions to get that result**. And on some level, it is a circular process, because Beloch _checks_ his own military-based estimates _with population density calculations_ in order to try to show that he is producing reasonable numbers. So if you accept Beloch’s density estimates at the beginning, you are going to end up back-computing Beloch’s military estimates at the end, moving through the same process in reverse order. But you can see how we have begun to trouble the foundations of Beloch’s numbers in a few ways. **First off, we’ve already noted that his multiplier to get from military aged males to total population (multiply by three) is too low (it needs to be four)**. Beloch didn’t have the advantage of modern model life tables or the ability to see so clearly that mortality in his own day was changing rapidly and had been doing so for a while. Adjusting for that alone has to bring the free population up to support the military numbers, to around 4m instead of 3m (so we have effectively already broken Corvisier and Suder (2000)). **Then there is the question of the prevalence of the enslaved** ; Beloch figures 25% (1m total), but estimates certainly run higher. Bresson, _L’économie de la Grèce des cités_ (2007/8) figures perhaps 40-50% and 30% is also a common estimate, though we are here, in practice, largely guessing. Even keeping the 25% figure Beloch uses, which we now have to acknowledge may be on the low side, we have to raise the number of enslaved to reflect the larger free population: 1.33m instead of 1m, for a new total of 5.33m instead of Beloch’s original 4m. But then if the number of men who fight as hoplites is not, as Beloch supposes, roughly half of _polis_ society, but closer to 40% or even less, then we would need to expand the population even further. If it is, say, 40% instead of 50%, suddenly instead of Beloch’s computation (very roughly) of 500,000 hoplites giving us 1,000,000 free adult men giving us 3,000,000 free persons, resulting in a total population of 4,000,000 including the enslaved, we have 500,000 hoplites implying 1,250,000 free adult men implying _5,000,000_ free persons, to which we have to add something like 1,500,000 enslaved persons19 implying a total human population not of 3 or 4m but of c. 6,500,000. And there’s a reason to think that _might be right_. The one truly novel effort at estimating the population of Greece in the last few decades (and/or century or so) was by Mogens Herman Hansen. Having spent quite some time on a large, multi-scholar project to document _every known polis_ (resulting in M.H. Hansen and T.H. Nielsen, _An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis_ (2004)), M.H. Hansen decided to use that count as a basis to estimate population, assigning a rough estimate to the size of small, medium and large _poleis_ – using the built-up urban area of _poleis_ we knew relatively well – and then simply multiplying by all of the known _poleis_ to exist at one point in time. The result, documented in M.H. Hansen, _The shogtun method: the demography and ancient Greek city-state culture_(2006), produced an estimate of 4-6m for mainland Greece and I think, to be frank, Hansen pulled his punch here. His method really produced the _top_ figure in that range, a significantly higher figure that generally postulated for Greece.20 My strong suspicion – which the evidence is insufficient to confirm definitively –**is that van Wees is right about the relative size of the slice of men who fight as hoplites (distinct from the ‘hoplite class’) and that M.H. Hansen is correct about the population and that these two conclusions interlock with each other to imply a rather different Greece in terms of equality and social structure than we had thought**. Looping back around to what is my repeated complaint this week: we were often conditions to think about Greek agriculture, the Greek peasantry, the Greek countryside through the lens of the _much better documented_ Roman Italian agriculture, peasantry and countryside. After all, it is for Italy, not Greece, that we have real census data, it is the Roman period, not the classical period, that gives us sustained production of agricultural treatises. We simply have a much better picture of Roman social structures and so it was natural for scholars trying to get to grips with a quite frankly _alien economic system_ to work from the nearest system they knew. And that was fine when we were starting from nothing but I think it is a set of assumptions that have outlived their usefulness. This isn’t the place for this argument in full (that’s in my book), but briefly, **the structure of the Roman countryside** – as we come to see it in the late third/early second century BC – **did not form naturally**. **It was instead the product of policy** , by that point, **of a century’s worth of colonial settlements intentionally altering, terraforming, landholding patterns to maximize the amount of heavy infantry** the land could support. **It was also the product of a tax-and-soldier-pay regime** (_tributum_ and _stipendium_) that on the net **channeled resources _downward_** to enable poorer men to serve in that heavy infantry.21 Those mechanisms are not grinding away in mainland Greece (we can leave Greek colonial settlement aside for now, as it is happening outside of mainland Greece), so we have no reason to expect the structure of the countryside to look the same either. In short the Romans are taking steps to ‘flatten out’ their infantry class (but not their aristocracy, of course), to a degree, which we do not see in Greece. Instead, where we get an ideology of economically equal citizenry, it is an ideology of equality _within the leisured elite_ , an ‘equality of landlords’ not an equality of farmers. **We should thus not expect wealth and land distribution to be as ‘flat’ in Greece as in Italy** – and to be clear, wealth distribution in Italy was not _very flat_ by any reasonable standard, there was _enormous_ disparity between the _prima classis_ (‘first class’) of infantry and the poorest Roman _assidui_. But it was probably _flatter_ than in Greece _within the infantry class_ (again, the Roman aristocracy is a separate question), something that seems confirmed given that the militarily active class in Roman Italy is so much larger and more heavily concentrated into the heavy infantry.22 Consequently, we ought not assume that we can casually estimate the total population of Greece from hoplite deployments, supposing that the Greeks _like the Romans_ , expected nearly all free men to serve. Instead, the suggestion of our evidence was that in Greece, as in many pre-modern societies, military service (and thus political power) was often the preserve of an exclusive affluent class. ## Implications **But returning to Greece** , I would argue that accepting the heterodox position on the social status of hoplites has some substantial implications. First, it suggests that there was, in fact, a very real and substantial social division _within_ the body of hoplites, between wealth hoplites who were of the ‘hoplite class’ as politically understood and poor hoplites who fought in the same way but only enjoyed a portion of the social status implied. That division suddenly makes sense of the emergence of _demokratia_ in _poleis_ that were more rural than Athens (which is all of them). **The typical _polis_ was thus not a ‘farmer’s republic’ but a _landlord’s_ republic**. At the same time, this also substantially alters the assumptions about ‘yeoman hoplites’ who have to rush home to pull in their harvests and who are, in effect, ‘blue-collar warriors.’ Instead, the core of the hoplite army was a body – not a majority, but a significant minority – of leisured elites who had slaves or tenants doing most of their farming for them. What kept hoplite armies from campaigning year-round was as much poor logistics as yeoman economics (something clear in the fact that spartiates – by definition leisured elites – didn’t campaign year-round either). Finally, if we extend this thinking into our demographic analysis, we have to accept a _much larger_ population in Greece, with _all_ of the expansion happening below the men who fought as hoplites (both the hoplite class and our poorer working-class hoplites). It suggests a remarkably _less equal_ social structure in Greece – indeed, perhaps less equal than the structure in Roman Italy – which in turn significantly caveats the way we often understand the Greek _polis_ as a citizen community relatively more egalitarian and free than the absolute monarchies which pervaded Egypt and the Near East. And of course, for one last return to my pet complaint in this post, it should reinforce our sense that __**Greek are not Romans** and that we cannot casually supply the habits, economics or social structures of one society to the other to fill in gaps in our evidence. In particular, the assumption that the Greeks and Romans essentially _share_ a civic and military tradition is a thing that would need to be _proved_ , not assumed.23 ### Share this: * Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * 1. e.g. ch4 of van Wees, _Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities_ (2004) is, “Men of Bronze: the myth of the middle-class militia” and his 2001 chapter, “The Myth of the Middle-Class Army” in T. Bekker-Nielsen/L. Hannestad (eds.), _War as a Cultural and Social Force: Essays on Warfare in Antiquity_ (2001). 2. VDH, _The Other Greeks_ (1995), 205-7. I have a digital copy of this (it’s a kindle version) which gives page numbers, but I do not know if these match the page numbers in the print version. 3. _op. cit._ , 210. 4. Quickly on the math: if 20% of the _adult_ population are hoplites, then shifting our statistic to the adult **_male_ **population is going to basically double that figure to 40%. Factoring in the small but meaningful number of men over 60 who no longer serve is going to inch it up further, close to 45%. So the suggestion here is that **nearly half of all households can furnish a hoplite** , which we’re going to see in a second is exactly what I think VDH and other orthodox scholars _mean_. But notice how tricky that statistic is: we could say that under VDH’s model, 45% of _households_ serve as hoplites in Boeotia, but flip that around and we could equally say _with the same model_ that **less than ten percent** of free Boeotians at any given time were eligible to serve as hoplites, accounting for the fact that half of this society will be female and nearly 55% of it will be underage, so ‘adult males’ only make up around 22.5% of the population, so 45% of 22.5% ends up being almost exactly 10%. 5. While we’re beating up on VDH, at the start of his chapter on the ideology of the _polis_ , he quotes Pliny, _Natural History_ 18.4 (18.4.18), “Anyone for whom seven acres are not enough is a dangerous citizen,” which just about broke me because of course first _Greeks are not Romans_ and this is Pliny the Elder (d. 79 _**AD**_) quoting Manius Curius (d. 270 BCE _at Rome_) and also because it is a mistranslation: it is not seven _acres_ but seven _iugera_ , which is 4.36 acres (he’s also somewhat mangled the relative clause of characteristic here). Needless to say, Pliny the Elder cannot be an authority for the ideology of the Archaic Greek _polis_ but also the fact that the ‘ideal’ Roman farm suggested here is _significantly smaller_ than the figures we’re going to see in a moment for the Greeks is also a tell that the Romans maybe do not have the same assumptions about the wealth of their heavy infantry. 6. Which I may note VDH fails to do, but men above _fighting age_ (sixty for a Greek _polis_ , generally) would make up about 2.5 of the population (and women of that age another 3.5%) even under the dismal estimated mortality figures in antiquity. 7. I am struck by Hanson’s use of ‘yeoman’ here because he may be thinking of that social class in Colonial North America, unaware that in Britain there was in fact a significant class of freeholding farmers poorer than the yeomanry, called the ‘husbandry.’ 8. Again, Hanson makes this badly flawed ‘Greece and Rome are basically the same’ sort of argument more or less explicitly in his later works, like _Carnage and Culture_ (2001). His grasp on the Roman Republic is, frankly, quite poor. 9. The most obvious is the enormous role of patronage in Roman social structures; parallel social customs in Greece are much less common and weaker. 10. In particular, to clarify this point, the upper-end of the Roman aristocracy were probably meaningfully wealthier even before massive Roman expansion, than their Greek peers, so inequality at the _top_ of the distribution was greater in Italy. Certainly the ability of those aristocrats to mobilize _hundreds of clients_ is something we do not see often in Greek _poleis_ and suggestive of the greater power Roman aristocrats wielded. But underneath those ‘big men,’ I think our evidence suggests that Italy had more middling and small farmers and fewer ‘very rich peasants’ than Greece, in part because the very action of Roman conquest and land distribution seems to have purposefully produced that effect to maximize the number of households liable for conscription. 11. As noted above, this is “Men of Bronze: the myth of the middle-class militia” in his monograph, _Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities_ (2004) and his 2001 chapter, “The Myth of the Middle-Class Army” in T. Bekker-Nielsen/L. Hannestad (eds.), _War as a Cultural and Social Force: Essays on Warfare in Antiquity_ (2001). The latter is more detailed to the point and mostly what I am covering here. 12. van Wees does his calculations in hectares. 13. That is, 200 _medimnoi_ of grain is enough to feed the necessary enslaved work force _and then_ still maintain the owner’s household in relative comfort. You’ll recall we did our peasant math in _modii_ (8.73 liters) and our households needed around 200-400 _modii_ of grain to survive and 400-800 to life in maximum comfort. The _medimnos_ is a bigger unit (51.84 liters) so 200 _medimnoi_ is **1,187 _modii_** , more than enough to maintain one complete peasant household (of slaves) at subsistence and then another _complete household_ (of leisured elites) in comfort. 14. This idea is discussed in Pritchard, D.M. “Thetes, Hoplites, and the Athenian Imaginary,” in _Ancient History in a Modern University_ , eds. T.W. Hillard, R.A. Kearsley, C.E.V. Nixon and A.M. Nobbs (1998) and also van Wees (2004), 55-7. 15. On this point, see N. Rosenstein, _Rome at War: Farms, Families and Death in the Middle Republic _(2004) which has an appendix directly addressing the size of the _capite censi_. 16. Keep in mind that a good number of the men serving as _velites_ at any given time were doing so not because they were too poor to be _hastati_ , but because they were _too young_ : both the very young and the very poor get put out in front as skirmishers. 17. This point is made quite effectively in M. Simonton, _Classical Greek Oligarchy: A Political History_ (2017). 18. As some works on the demography of Roman Italy have been able to do, e.g. de Ligt _Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers_ (2012). 19. 1,666,666 to be precise in keeping the 25% ratio, but I want to keep my numbers here clean in part to be clear what wild estimates they are 20. MHH revisited these calculations and largely stood by the upper-end estimates (which I think is also indicative of how the upper-end estimate is the ‘real’ estimate) in M.H. Hanson, “An Update on the Shotgun Method” _GRBS_ 48 (2008). 21. Because the _tributum_ was collected as a tax proportional to wealth, but wages (_stipendium_) were paid out on a flat basis with all infantry receiving the same wage, so poorer infantrymen paid lower taxes when they weren’t serving but received the same wage back as their richer compatriots who paid heavier taxes. Thus poorer _assidui_ end up as net recipients of tax money while rich _assidui_ end up as net contributors. This argument on _tributum_ relies very heavily on the excellent scholarship of James Tan on the nature and function of _tributum_. 22. Interestingly, the _prima classis_ of Roman infantry, at around a quarter to a third of the total number of the _pedites_ (very roughly estimated) approximates the slice of men in Greece serving as hoplites, which makes sense since our sources seem to think – there is some dispute as to if they think rightly – that the _prima classis_ began as the part of Roman society that fought as hoplites. What is different is that the next set of fellows down the social ladder (the next four classes of _pedites_) in Roman Italy _also_ fight mostly as armored heavy infantry (albeit with worse armor), whereas in Greece the ‘subhoplites’ fight as _psiloi_ , ‘lights’ – skirmishers with very cheap equipment. That is, it turns out a _big difference_. if I am right above, mainland Greece actually had somewhat more total population than Roman Italy c. 212, but if you bolted all the _poleis_ together you would still never match the Roman deployment of 185,000 men in that year (the largest combined _polis_ army is at Plataea in 479, was probably around 80,000 men, with perhaps another 20,000 Greeks (or somewhat more) on the other side). It turns out spending a century terraforming Italy into an infantry-generation-machine generates _a lot of infantry_. 23. Once again, the idea that Rome was a simple extension of the Greek civic and military tradition is a foundational assumption (read: mistake) of VDH’s _Carnage and Culture_ (2001), which uses this slight of hand to conjure a continuous ‘western’ military tradition (which somehow goes on holiday for most of the Middle Ages) for societies that have functionally no connection at all to the ancient Greek military tradition. ### Like this: Like Loading...

Bret Devreeaux has another excellent post in his hoplite series acoup.blog/2026/01/09/collections-h... #histodons #ancMedToot #hopliteWars #militaryHistory #politicalEconomy

Body-armour of glued linen? - The origin of the idea of glued linen armour Many people believe that the ancient Greeks used, among other things, armour that was made of layers of linen cloth glued together. But there is no ancient text linking linen armour and glue. No other culture made armour this way. So where does this idea come from?

In 2021 I wrote a magazine article on how a translated French summary of a medieval Roman chronicle gave English-speaking classicists misconceptions about linen armour www.ancientworldmagazine.com/articles/glued-linen-arm... #materialCulture #antiquidons #ancMedToot #byzantine

Who writes the history books?

Classic post: history is written by losers, because they have time to write www.bookandsword.com/2013/09/29/who-writes-th... #histodons #historiography #ancMedToot

Collections: Hoplite Wars, Part II: Hoplite Equipment, Hoplight or Hopheavy? 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. As always, if you like what you are reading, please share it as I rely on word-of-mouth to find readers! And if you really like it, you can support this project over at Patreon; I don’t promise not to use the money to buy a full hoplite panoply, but I also don’t _not_ promise to do that.1 And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on Twitter and Bluesky for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some _de minimis_ presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter. ## Email Address Subscribe! ## 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. 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?3 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.4 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.5 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.6 Equally, I think there is some risk coming in a bit _low_ , but frankly low-errors have been consistently less egregious than high-errors.7 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).8 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.9 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).10 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.11 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.12 **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).13 * **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).14 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.15 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).16 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)17 **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.”18 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,19 and then on the other hand to the ample supply of videos showing modern reenactors in hoplite kit doing this.20 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)21 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).22 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_.23 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 concern24 – 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.”25 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.26 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.27 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.28 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.29 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**.30 ## 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.31 **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 relatively32 close-order formations with mutually supporting33 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) ### Share this: * Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * 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. I stole this joke from Jonah Goldberg, but it was too good not to use. I apologize for nothing. 4. 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). 5. 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). 6. 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. 7. 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). 8. 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. 9. 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. 10. 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. 11. 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. 12. 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. 13. 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. 14. 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. 15. 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_. 16. 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_. 17. 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. 18. van Wees, _Greek Warfare_ (2004), 169. 19. See van Wees, _Greek Warfare_ (2004), 189, fn. 27-28 for the standard references; there are a fair number. 20. 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). 21. Probably a touch high for most men in antiquity, but 30 is a nice round number and not entirely out of range. 22. Because the _aspis_ ‘ rim projects a bit beyond the hand, we need to add some centimeters, which is why it is ’65cm or so.’ 23. 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. 24. see van Wees, _op. cit._ , 168, fn 10. and Tyrtaeus F. 11.31 and 19.14-15 (West) 25. _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 26. Of particular note, J.P. Franz, _Krieger, Bauern, Bürger_ (2002), 134-8 27. 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. 28. 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 29. 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. 30. 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). 31. van Wees (2004), 169, 171. 32. Important word, we’ll get to spacing later. 33. Which may or may not mean overlapping. ### Like this: Like Loading...

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