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

Want to hear what a conference on Alexander the Great was like in the before times? Check it out here www.bookandsword.com/2018/06/23/monarchy-and-... #histodons #classics #antiquidons #alexanderTheGreat

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

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

Intermission: Battle Pulses This week we’re going to take a brief break from our series on hoplites (I, II, IIIa, IIIb) to address a broader question in how we understand the mechanics of warfare with contact weapons, which is the mechanics of the concept of a ‘battle pulse.’ This notion, that front lines in contact might occasionally withdraw to catch their breath, replace wounded men at the front or simply to relieve the psychological pressure of the fighting keeps coming up in the comments and is worth addressing on its own. Because while it is an important question for understanding _any kind_ of contact warfare (because ‘pulse’ proponents insist on the pulse as being a _general_ feature of contact warfare, not restricted to any particular culture), it is both very relevant to understanding hoplites, but also _emerged_ as an extension of the argument about _othismos_ that extended _into Roman warfare_. There is something of an irony that we are briefly disengaging from our discussion of hoplites to discuss if hoplites briefly disnegaged from battle. So our question here is, “**was the fighting at the point of contact between two formations of heavy infantry a continuous run of fighting or did it proceed in pulses and bursts and if the latter, of what nature might they have been**?” I should note that the normal expression here is to describe the sparring at the line of contact as a ‘series of duels’ but anyone who has watched or participated in experiments in contact-line fighting will immediately recognize they are not ever a ‘series of duels’ as any given combatant on the front moving into measure is entering measure of several enemies and so may attack or be attacked by any of them (and indeed, striking the fellow to the left or right of the fellow in front of you, catching them unawares, is often useful). So the line of contact is not a series of 1-on-1s but rather a rolling series of ‘several-on-severals’ with each man having his own set of ‘several,’ depending on the length of the weapons used. Now before we rush in, I want to make a clarification of two terms I am going to use here that might otherwise be confusing. I am going to make a distinction here between ‘**measure** ‘ and ‘**contact**.’ This is not some well-established distinction, so I am bending these terms a bit to make clear a different that I think matters. When I say _measure_ here, I mean the reach of the contact weapons the men have, how far they can actually deliver a strike. That’s going to vary a bit based on the weapons they have, but it’s going to be around 1-2 meters.1 When I say _contact_ what I mean is a bit looser: two formations standing a few yards apart might be out of measure, but they are certainly _in contact_ in that neither can maneuver freely and the men in the front of both must be focused on their enemies directly forward because anyone could dash into measure to strike at any time. For these units to move out of contact, I’d argue they need to back up a fair bit more, perhaps out to something like ‘javelin reach’ which with the heaviest of javelins might be around 20-25 meters. As we’re going to see, there’s a big difference between being _just outside measure_ at perhaps 2 or 3 meters away and being at ‘javelin range’ at say, 15 meters away. **But to be clear:_measure_ here is the closer proximity, _contact_ is the looser, more distant proximity**. But first, 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! ## Whence the Pulse We ought to begin with a brief history of the concept of the ‘battle pulse’ in ancient warfare and fortunately this can be quite brief. As you will recall from our historiography on hoplites and Michael Taylor’s guest post on the book, John Keegan’s _The Face of Battle_ (1976) had quite an impact. It inspired Victor Davis Hanson to essentially replicate the approach in writing _Western Way of War_ , kicking off the modern period of hoplite debates, but it _also_ had imitators in the study of the Roman army, most notably Adrian Goldsworthy. Now I think it is worth noting that is something of an important _delay_ here: when Adrian Goldsworthy goes to write _The Roman Army at War_ , _100 BC – AD 200_ (1997), _WWoW_ (1989) has been out for nearly a decade and while the full-throated heterodox vision of _Myths and Realities_ hadn’t arrived yet, it was clearly _coming_. By this point, in particular, Peter Krentz, writing article after article, had punched some pretty significant holes in elements of orthodoxy, including the shoving-_othismos_. So when Goldsworthy (and Philip Saban, working at the same time) go to apply a Keegan-style _Face of Battle_ approach to the Romans, they are doing so downstream of the hoplite debate. **And so in a sense you want to understand Goldsworthy and Sabin (and Zhmodikov, to whom we will come shortly) as essentially the extension of hoplite heterodoxy into the Roman sphere** ; you can see this, I think, quite clearly in their writing (and in turn they are relied upon and cited by more recent hoplite heterodox writers). Except, of course, the scholarship on _Roman_ warfare never had anything remotely as rigid or implausible as the ‘strong’ orthodox hoplite model, so the modifications to our understanding of Roman battle that these fellows offer are more modest.2 The starting point of this burst (dare we say ‘pulse?’) of Roman-legion-heterodoxy is P. Sabin, “The Mechanics of Battle in the Second Punic War” _BICS_ 67 (1996), followed very rapidly be the aforementioned A. Goldsworthy _The Roman Army at War_ , _100 BC – AD 200_ (1997) and then clarified and restated with Sabin, “The Face of Roman Battle” _JRS_ 90 (2000). Essentially Sabin raises the question first, noting that our sources often describe Roman battles in the Middle and Late Republic as lasting several hours (typically one to three) and noting that neither the number of casualties described nor the limits of human endurance would be consistent with a continuous exchange of sword blows for three hours. Hence, Sabin figures, the Romans must have moved in and out of contact, which in turn also helps him make sense of how battles in the Second Punic War seemed so often involve a formation getting ‘pushed’ backwards (not literally, of course) significant distances to create pockets or holes without collapsing. I should note that Sabin doesn’t really get into _how far out of contact_ these movements might be. Goldsworthy then brings to this problem the work of S.L.A. Marshall in _Men against Fire_ (1947).3 Marshall had argued that only a small portion of soldiers in WWII had actually used their weapons, an extension of Ardant du Picq’s should-be-more-famous maxim, “Man does not enter battle to fight, but for victory. He does everything that he can to avoid the first and obtain the second.”4 Goldsworthy sought to apply this insight to Roman combat and argued that likewise in the front line of a Roman legion, many men, indeed “the majority of soldiers” even in the front rank must have done essentially no meaningful fighting, mostly staying safe behind their shields.5 It seems worth noting that this insight is being applied by analogy – no one ever had a chance to study contact warfare in this way – and so while I think there is an insight here going back to Ardant du Picq, it is not clear to me that the straight-forward application of very modern evidence of combat participation with guns can be applied to combat with contact weapons without considerable hazards. Goldsworthy also imagines Roman maniples – the basic maneuver unit of the legion in battle – more as ‘clouds’ of men fighting (a kind of presaging of van Wees’ skirmishing hoplites) rather than a coherent mass with men having a specific, assigned place in the formation. Instead, braver individuals might hype up the whole group to make a big push into contact, bringing the ‘cloud’ of soldiers forward, but men were equally able to hang back in the ‘cloud’ because there isn’t much sense of an assigned place. **But how to keep that up for a few hours?** **The solution was the ‘battle pulse.’** Sabin imagines Roman battle as a “natural stand-off punctuated by period and localized charges into contact.”6 In this vision entire Roman maniples might functionally withdraw to javelin range for extended periods to catch their breath, exchange some missiles and recover. This is, in theory, a separate process from the Roman triple _acies_ having the second (principes) and third (triarii) ranks move forward to take over the fight.7 So to be clear, what is being described here when we talk about ‘battle pulses’ is an action on the front line that consists of **pulses** and **lulls** , where in the **lulls** , **the two lines withdraw out of measure** (_well_ out of measure, by implication) **to momentarily rest and reconstitute** , before the ‘pulse’ when one side rushes back _into contact_ , precipitating another round of fighting. This vision of battle then acquired key support with A. Zhmodikov, “Roman Republican Heavy Infantrymen in Battle (IV-II Centuries B.C.)” _Historia_ 49.1 (2000). Prior to Zhmodikov, the general model for Roman infantry combat was ‘volley-and-charge:’ the _hastati_ and _principes_ advanced and hurled their _pila_ at the outset of an engagement before closing in for a decisive action with swords. Zhmodikov instead pulls together all of the evidence for javelin use and argues that _pila_ remained in use over the whole battle. This was in the moment pretty important because it solved a problem that Goldsworthy and Sabin faced which **is that our ancient sources on battles almost never describe anything resembling** **the extended pause between pulses** : we get _pushes_ in the sources but not very often do we hear ‘lulls’ described (in stark contrast to their frequency in sources for gunpowder warfare, I might note). When a force is described as moving backward, it is generally because they are routing or _being pushed_ , not because they are mutually disengaging. **Zhmodikov’s article thus promised to provide an evidentiary basis that the Goldsworthy-Sabin ‘pulse’ model otherwise lacked** , albeit quite indirectly so (‘these guys throw lots of javelins, so there must be pauses’ is not the same as ‘the sources tell us there are pauses.’) But note that Goldsworthy and Sabin are seeking to explain _Roman_ combat evidence and to do that they have resorted to _general_ arguments about human endurance and psychology because **they _do not have_ much direct source evidence** **for the lulls** in their pulse model (by contrast, I’d argue, the pulse itself – the ‘push’ – is attested). Consequently, this is a theory developed to explain _Roman warfare_ , which was **because of the _lack_ of direct testimony in the sources is instead posited as a _general rule_ of combat** (since the only argument available is one from human endurance and psychological capability),**from where it then gets applied to hoplites and dismounted knights and _Landsknechte_ and so on**. So we have to discuss it in this Roman context, but with a key warning: **Greeks are not Romans** and **the Roman tactical and broader institutional military systems _were not very much like Greek ones_**. Or, as Ardant du Picq quips: > The Gaul, a fool in war, used barbarian tactics. After the first surprise, he was always beaten by the Greeks and Romans. > The Greek, a warrior, but also a politician, had tactics far superior to those of the Gauls and the Asiatics. > The Roman, a politician above all, with whom war was only a means, wanted perfect means. He had no illusions. He took into account human weakness and he discovered the legion. > But this is merely affirming what should be demonstrated. (It is not, in fact, clear to me that ‘The Greek’ had superior tactics to ‘the Asiatics’ by which Ardant du Picq means the Persians. The Macedonians certainly did, but that’s a separate question). ## What Pulse So given that scholarship, why aren’t my discussions of hoplite tactics or, indeed, Roman tactics, full of discussions of pulses? Because I don’t think they were _full_ of pulses, or more correctly, I don’t think they were full of what I am going to call **macro-pulses** , but they did include lots of what I am going to call **micro-pulses** , because I think it is important to distinguish between the two. In a **micro-pulse** , what we’re really describing is ‘withdrawing to measure’ – the combatants separate not a huge amount, but just a few steps outside of the reach of their weapons (striking distance here is termed ‘measure’ so moving ‘into measure’ means moving into an opponent’s striking range (to strike yourself) and so too ‘out of measure.’) **I don’t think two opposing lines locked shields against each other and stayed _in measure_ for minutes or hours on end**. That doesn’t seem physically or psychologically possible. It would produce the casualty problem Sabin identifies and psychologically, as Ardant du Picq points to, men are going to want to pull out of reach of their opponents weapons and that psychological force is going to become swiftly overpowering. Anyone who watches combat sports or HEMA sparring, as an aside, can see this tendency for fighters to pull out of measure but remain ‘in contact’ (close enough to move back into measure at any moment) for themselves. **So I have no problem with the ‘micro-pulse,’ and indeed, I think they must have been continually happening down the line, with men or groups of men stepping forward into measure to deliver one or two strikes (and likely take a few in return) before backing out**. And of course that pattern might also serve to conserve the men’s stamina, because the periods of really intense physical action – the throwing of blows or blocks – might be interspersed with longer periods of watching and smaller probing strikes. **I admit, it would be really interesting to see how long a set of reasonable fit reenactors could keep up this kind of pulsing fight** , never withdrawing much more than a few steps beyond measure. The key would be running the experiment as near to exhaustion as possible, because we ought to expect _battle_ to push men to the very limits of endurance as they struggle to survive.8 The broader question then is the **macro-pulse** , where we imagine the lines truly _break contact_ to the point where they are far enough apart that men cannot dash forward back into measure quickly. Now Goldsworthy-Sabin-Zhmodikov don’t, to my reading, draw a distinction between these two sorts of pulses, so it is hard to tell which they mean, but when they talk about extended javelin exchanges late in battles or lulls long enough to switch out wounded or fatigued men I read that as a _**macro**_ -pulse (or more correctly a ‘**macro-lull** ‘). To the degree that these authors actually intend what I’ve defined above as a _micro-pulse_ , then I don’t think I have any disagreement with them on this point. **But instead what they seem to imagine is a battle that consists _primarily_ of macro-lulls, punctuated by micro-pulses, where formations spend a lot of time at ‘javelin reach’ of each other** (so separated by perhaps 10 or 20 yards instead of 10 or 20 feet). Critically, such a large disengagement requires the _whole formation_ to move. A **micro-pulse** can work by having the front ranks simply accordion into the back ranks, closing the ‘vertical’ distance between them, but a **macro-pulse** requires the rear ranks to _really back up_ and critically for men to keep backing up after contact is broken and thus there is no immediate pressure from the enemy (because the macro-pulse also requires the enemy not to advance back to the edge of measure). Indeed, Sabin seems to imagine it is in the context of these macro-pulses that the Roman changing out of battle lines occurs, so we are _really backing up quite a bit_. **Fundamentally, the macro-pulse exists in tension then**(via Zhmodikov) **with a volley-and-charge model** (which has no trouble incorporating the ‘micro-pulse’ – no one has ever suggested Roman soldiers did anything like a shoving-_othismos_). The **macro-pulse model** **also generally asserts more flexible physical formation** , approaching ‘clouds’ or ‘mobs’ of soldiers, rather than a single formation with assigned places and it isn’t hard to see how that makes sense if this formation is supposed to pulse forward and backwards; by contrast the older vision of volley-and-charge **assumes a regular, somewhat rigid formation** , not _infinitely rigid_ as we’ll see, but there is at least the notion of a _block_ of men who are intended for the most part to maintain relative position. In essence, this macro-pulse model assumes that these fellows are doing something closer to what we might call ‘dense skirmishing’ in ‘clouds’ rather than formations spending most of their time _well_ out of measure for contact weapons. You can see how this works as a continuation of the hoplite-as-skirmisher ‘strong’ heterodox vision. To put it bluntly, **I think micro-pulses happen and are in evidence in the sources** , however **I think macro-pulses –** situations where the two lines _truly disengage_ for a period without either routing**– seem very fairly rare and the source evidence for them as frequent occurrences is** **actually quite thin**. ## The Lull In the Pulse And it seems like from some quarters when I express this view there is a degree of incredulity that I would ‘go against the scholarship’ on an issue that is treated as ‘solved.’ Which is odd to me because it seems clear that significant parts of the Goldsworthy-Sabin-Zhmodikov thesis have been softened or even overturned. An effort to find Goldsworthy’s pulses-and-lulls in the sources was mounted by Sam Koon, _Infantry Combat in Livy’s Battle Narratives_ (2010).9 Koon set out to find the lulls though it is striking that the clearest example of a lull is also obviously exceptional: the two-part battle at Zama (202), where the ‘lull’ is very openly and visibly created by the recall of the _hastati_ behind the next line and the re-ordering of the formation, rather than by a pulse-and-lull model; we’ll come back to this. And there is certainly _some_ openness to this model. I am stuck, for instance by two chapters in _The Oxford Handbook of Warfare in the Classical World_ (2013), eds. B. Campbell and Lawrence Tritle: Michael Sage’s chapter (“The Rise of Rome”) which accepts the Goldsworthy-Sabin-Zhmodikov model and Brian Campbell’s chapter (“Arming Romans”) which implicitly rejects it, asserting a volley-and-charge purpose for the _pilum_. But problems with the macro-pulse model emerged. **For one, some of the spacing and interval problems that Sabin brushed off as unsolveable (and thus avoids having to account for even flexible-but-real intervals and formations) have been revisited** by MT. Taylor, “Roman Infantry Tactics in the Mid-Republic: A Reassessment” _Historia_ 63 (2014) **and to a significant degree resolved** : there is a regular formation, it has both close-order and modestly-open-order standard intervals and we can also gauge to a significant degree the intervals _between_ maniples. The units of the army (and the army itself) were accordions, not clouds of soldiers and men could – and in the sources _do_ – close up to receive missiles or space out to fight in close combat (typically, we’ll get to this, they do the one and then the other). Most notably, the intervals between maniples are almost certainly – at points explicitly (Sall. _Jug._ 49.6) – where the _**light infantry**_(like the _velites_ , but also any slingers or archers) are, which in turn exposes a real weakness in Zhmodikov, which is a near-total failure to distinguish between heavy infantry throwing their _pila_ and the light infantry _velites_ throwing their lighter javelins (_hasta velitaris_). The heavy infantry have just two pila, but the _velites_ carry many javelins, which as you might imagine has implications for extended missile exchanges and intended function. But crucially, Taylor’s approach fatally undermines the notion of the maniple as a ‘cloud’ of soldiers: these men have assigned spaces and semi-standard spacing with clear intervals between them. Polybius – who we must stress _describes standard spacing in this army which he was an eyewitness to_(18.30.6-8) – is not making it up. Instead, Taylor’s formation is not a cloud but an ‘accordion’ – the men have assigned spaces in which they are free to move around. Each man thus has _some_ flexibility of position, but not infinitely so. That accordion nature can accommodate ‘micro-pulses’ but for a macro-pulse you have the problem above: it requires the rear ranks to back up quite a bit. **That point about distinguishing _who is throwing the javelins_** in turn becomes the cornerstone of J.F. Slavik, “ _Pilum_ and _Telum_ : The Roman Infantryman’s Style of Combat in the Middle Republic” _CJ_ 113 (2018) which argues that the _velites_ use showers of their light javelins -to enable the changing out of _hastati_ to _principes_ or _triarii_. Zhmodikov fails to distinguish the activity of the _velites_ and so as a result his battles of “long exchange of throwing weapons”10 functionally collapses into the action not of Roman heavy infantry, but of Rome’s dedicated light infantry skirmishers, operating in those intervals noted above. I don’t know that Slavik’s philological argument – that we can distinguish what is being thrown and thus who is throwing it by the words used – is airtight, but in the cases where we are told _explicitly_ what kind of soldiers are doing what, his argument holds much better: heavy infantry seem to volley-and-charge, while the _velites_ and other lights may be skirmishing on a more extended basis in the intervals and covering the line-changes. That said, whereas the heterodox/orthodox line on hoplites has tended to be a hard division into two camps, **thinking on the Roman army, has tended much more towards synthesis** , in part because the individual questions (role of the _pilum_ , the extent of skirmishing, the presence of ‘pulses,’ the rigidity of the formation) **are not treated as forming a coherent orthodox/heterodox, but rather ‘sliding’ values capable of moving independently**. You can see this in general treatments, e.g. K.H. Milne, _Inside the Roman Legions_(2024), which clearly asserts a volley-and-charge model of _pilum_ usage (163) and a clear sense of a “static front line” implying a regular formation (159, 162) with assigned places (166) but frequent micro-pulses (164, 167), but no macro-pulses except for the changing out of lines (167), with most fighting done with swords, not _pila_ and supporting missiles to cover these movements by _velites_ , not heavy infantry (168). It’s a blended position. At some point it is hard to say if that is either a very softened version of volley-and-charge or a softened version of Goldsworthy-Sabin-Zhmodikov, because we’ve more or less met in the middle. ## So What of Battle Pulses? **So I do not think the scholarship at present _requires_ me to adopt the complete Goldsworthy-Sabin-Zhmodikov model**. And, as it is clear, I _don’t_ entirely adopt that model, though I don’t think _everything_ about it is wrong either. In particular, **I do not think macro-pulses, as I’ve defined them, were common** , **as distinct from the ‘micro-pulse,’ which I think must have been continuously happening,** where the lines remain loosely ‘in contact’ (within maybe a few yards of measure) or the ‘line change’ (from _hastati_ to _principes_ to _triarii_), probably covered not by _pila_ but by _velites_ throwing their _hastae velitares_. Now I am not going to reproduce Koon’s book going in the other direction in a blog post – and in any case, one of the authors above is _already_ working on a monograph on Roman tactics which I shall not spoil here – but I want to give a few data-points as to why I lean this way. The first is the soldier’s oath Livy reports before Cannae (Livy 22.38.4), “that they would not go away nor drop back **from their posts** [_ex ordine_] neither for flight or fear, unless to pick up or fetch a weapon, or to strike an enemy or to save a citizen.”11 The word _ordo_ in that sentence (_ex ordine_) means a row, a line, a series, a rank, an arrangement of things, but it is not a unit and it is certainly not a ‘cloud.’ It is an _assigned place_ that the soldier is bound to. The oath, which Livy represents as customary and regular, makes no sense unless these soldiers _**have an assigned place**_ in their unit to which they can swear not to leave nor even to shrink back from (_non…recessuros_ , “not to withdraw from, shrink back from, fall back from, give ground”). **Meanwhile, we have a lot of evidence, I’d argue, as to the volley-and-charge nature of _pilum_ use**. We get lines like, “When he [the Roman commander] was leading the men-formed-up from the camp, scarcely before they cleared the rampart, the Romans threw their _pila._ The Spaniards ducked down against the javelins thrown by the enemies, then rose themselves to throw [their own] which when the Romans, clustered together as they are accustomed, had received with shields densely packed, then, with foot against foot and swords drawn, the matter was begun” (Livy 28.2.5-6), which is just a very clear statement of a volley-and-charge action, the throwing of _pila_ by the Romans in the perfect (coniecerunt, ‘perfect’ meaning ‘completed’) tense: it happened (once) and then stopped.12 Further examples of volley-and-charge in Livy are not hard to come by.13 Heck, Tacitus has a Roman general _lay out the sequence_ in an order to his men: “with _pila_ having been thrown then with shields and swords continue the butchery and slaughter” (Tac. _Ann_. 14.37).14 **Most striking are the incidents where the Romans don’t throw their _pila_ at all**. Livy, for instance, has one general, the dictator Aullus Cornelius Cossus, tell his men to drop their _pila_ and then note that the enemy (the Volsci who will have fought in the same manner as the Romans), “when they shall have thrown their missiles in vain” will have to come to close quarters where he expects the Roman line will triumph (Livy 6.12.8-9). Conversely, Q. Pubilius Philo’s troops are so eager on the attack that they drop their _pila_ to engage directly with swords (Livy 9.13.2, cf. also 7.16.5-6, this happens more than once). Likewise, Julius Caesar reports in one battle that, “Thus our men, the signal having been given sharply made an attack on the enemies and they charged the enemies so suddenly and rapidly that a space for throwing _pila_ at the enemy was not given. So throwing away their _pila_ , at close-quarters they fought with _gladii_ ” (Caes. _BGall_. 1.52.3-4). It happens in Sallust too (Sall. _Cat._ 61.2). **If these guys think they are regularly going to _back off_ out of close-combat to throw javelins for a bit, _why do they drop their javelins_** (_pila_) **_the moment they come to close quarters?_** Surely, if having a ‘macro-lull’ was normal, they would want to save these weapons – at least in the back ranks – to be available in that event. Instead, the expectation is clearly not that the unit will back off after it has engaged nor that men in the rear ranks are throwing _pila_ over the heads of the men in front of them (the danger of which is noted in some ancient sources, e.g. Onasander 17). Now for the man in the _front_ the answer is pretty obvious that _pila_ are quite heavy and you can’t sword-fight while carrying them _and_ a shield and so they have to go if youa re coming to close contact. But note that these lines don’t say “and then the front rank dropped their _pila_ ” but rather clearly _whole units do_. **Which really only makes sense if these fellows imagine that once they are going into contact, they are not going to _break contact_ for more missile-throwing or just to sit outside of contact**. We might also consider what we know about Pydna. Now this relies a fair bit on Plutarch and Plutarch is often not the best source on battles, but on Pydna he is working from some known sources (Scipio Nasica Corculum’s writings and likely the account of Polybius) and his vignettes are instructive. By the time the general, Lucius Aemilius Paullus is on the field – this was, you will recall, an unplanned engagement – the armies are already to close combat (Plut. _Aem_. 18.4) and we’re given a really physical description that the _sarisae_ of the Macedonians were fixed in the shields of the Romans (19.1) so we know he intends us to understand these units are very much _in contact_ (though we’d say that while the Macedonians are in measure, the Romans are not). Certainly no one has backed out of contact. Then we get two interesting passages which I think we might say are something like micro-pulses: a Paelignian chucks his unit’s standard into the enemy to compel them to make a push (20.1-5) and after taking heavy losses, they’re pushed back but evidently still to some degree in contact (perhaps pursued) because – as Michael Taylor notes in his reconstruction of the battle – they continue to hold up the Macedonian _agema_ which would otherwise flank the legion. Meanwhile we also get Marcus Cato (son of Cato the Elder), who loses his sword and has to gather up his friends to push forward to retrieve it (21.1-5). In both cases these are units that we have to understand are in contact, not back at javelin reach, where an individual is rallying men to _push forward_ in an effort to force the enemy back: Marcus Cato’s effort succeeds, whereas the Paelignians are thrown back (but buy essential time for the main Roman force). Both of these events have to involve units that are outside of _measure_ , but which do not seem – note the above line about pikes _touching Roman shields_ – to be fully out of _contact_. The battle is won, as Livy (44.41.6-9) and Plutarch (20.7-10) both note, by having the Roman maniples engage separately, exploiting disruptions in the phalanx as it advanced. What I find striking here is that our sources – both relying on the (lost) Polybian account of the battle – evidently **think that this ‘engage at discretion’ order _needed to be given as an order_** (Plut. _Aem_. 20.7-9); dropping well back out of contact was evidently not a thing units normally were not supposed to do _on their own_. If engaging at discretion like this was the standard way of fighting, there would be no point in Plutarch having Aemilius order it, or Livy noting the unusual nature of many separate engagements. **We can contrast what we’re told about the Battle of Zama, which gives us a very clear macro-scale battle lull** , albeit an unusual one (Polyb. 15.13-14). Both armies are drawn up (after Roman fashion) in multiple battle lines; the first lines of the two armies, the Carthaginian mercenaries and the Roman _hastati_ engage in a fierce close-combat fight, but separation doesn’t occur as a result of a macro-battle-pulse, it occurs because _the mercenary line collapses_ after the failure of the Carthaginian second line to move up to support it (Polyb. 15.13.3-4; the impression is psychological collapse, as Polybius is noting the cheering and encouragement of the so-far entirely unengaged Roman second line as decisive). The mercenaries collapse into the main Carthaginian line, which does not admit them, leading to a mercenary-on-Carthaginian engagement in which the fleeing mercenaries are slaughtered by their employers (Polyb. 13.5-6), which in turn now leaves the field of gore and wreckage between the Romans and their enemies (Polyb. 14.1-2). Scipio doesn’t want to advance over that so – and this is the thing – “recalling those still pursuing of the hastati _**by trumpet**_ ” [emphasis mine] Scipio reforms his ranks (Polyb. 14.4). What is significant to me here is that the disengagement of the _hastati_ is not voluntary or automatic or natural, but in fact requires a trumpet signal: Scipio has to _order_ an _army-wide_ ‘pause’ in order to reorganize his units (really, he is ordering the ‘change out’ of the _hastati_ as a way to halt their pursuit), which he can do in part because the peculiar situation where Hannibal (himself seemingly mimicking Roman tactics he has by this point so much experience with) has not yet committed his main line of infantry. This thus isn’t an organic ‘macro-lull’ so much as it is both armies attempting to the classic Roman _hastati_ to _principes_ line change, with the Romans doing it more successfully because their fussy tactical system creates lanes, whereas Hannibal needs his mercenaries to run _all the way around_ his second (unbroken) line to get off of the field. **I think this episode should also give us some meaningful pause when trying to apply Roman tactical thinking outside of Roman contexts.** The Roman system of maintaining multiple complete lines of heavy infantry, one in contact initially and two out of contact is, if not unique, certainly unusual. Likewise, a formation with wide, relatively regular intervals to enable the front battle line to be ‘changed out’ in a regular fashion is again, if not unique, highly unusual. Efforts to mimic that flexibility without the same complex and unusual tactical system often went badly, as with Hannibal’s mercenaries at Zama or, famously, the French dispositions at Agincourt, where an advanced cavalry force disrupted the two main lines of infantry attack15 as they advanced and then those lines, with no way to interchange, stacked up on each other to their ruin. **But it is also indicative of how unusual a ‘macro-lull’ was** : this one only happens because Scipio Africanus gives an order to recall his front line as the enemy’s front ranks were breaking. Once again, the reason the armies end up separated after a ‘pulse’ of violence is not because that was the normal way these armies fought but because one general had specifically and somewhat unusually ordered it. The other example of a large-scale macro-lull is equally instructive: Appian _BC_ 3.68. Appian is describing an engagement between two veteran Roman legions at the Forum Gallorum (43 BC). **Reading the passage, I think it is obvious we should not take the engagement as anything like typical** : they fight in silence, no battle cries but also cries or shouts even as men were wounded and killed. Each man who falls is instantly replaced, every blow was supposedly on target. And in this context of a literary description of inhuman mechanical precision in battle, we’re told “when they were overcome by fatigue they drew apart from each other for a brief space to take breath, as in gymnastic games, and then rushed again to the encounter.” Immediately after that, we’re told the other soldiers present were taken by amazement at the sight and sound of it. It is a description that is clearly heavily embroidered, about a battle where Appian is writing nearly two centuries after the fact, about an army that is supposed to seem superhuman in its actions through the motif of presenting the soldiers as treating the battle like gymnastic games. I do not think we can draw secure conclusions about actual battlefield practice from such a passage alone. After this, I should note, we swiftly begin running out of examples of clear ‘macro-lulls’ in Roman battles. Plenty of units being ‘pushed’ (discussed below) or collapsing under pressure or armies being flanked experiencing crowd collapse under continuous pressure (e.g. Cannae), but almost no examples of units engaging and then backing off and then moving back to re-engage. ## The Roman Face of Battle And Implications for Hoplites Summing all of this up, what do I think a Roman maniple engaging in pitched battle combat against heavy infantry looks like, given the evidence? **The attack begins with the volley of _pila_ and it sure seems like usually any _pila_ not thrown at this point are discarded, given how often we hear of _pila_ being dropped without being thrown**.16 We’ve already discussed the weapon and its performance and so need not belabor the point here. **The _hastati_ follow this with a charge to contact with swords. **A few things could happen at this point. **One side could collapse, leading to rout and slaughter, of course**. Alternately, both sides might stand firm: the Romans are heavily armored and have big shields and many of their opponents have big shields (if generally lighter armor) too, so a lot of strikes are going to not connect, or merely graze targets. Our ancient sources assume quite a lot of non-lethal, non-disabling wounding happening in these battles and we ought to believe them, given shields, armor, and movement.**If both sides stay firm then after a few blows we might expect them to ‘accordion’ out to measure as men refuse to stay inside of the ‘killing zone’ a few feet wide running along the line, a ‘micro-lull’ in which the units are still in contact, but much of their front lines are not in measure.** **On either side, the soldiers now need to move up to advance into measure in order to strike** , **but in this model they can do so with just a step or two**. Because this is a formation with a regular order, the men in the front cannot simply drop back for fear – recall, they have sworn not to do so – and the eyes of their buddies are upon them, which is one of those things that can get men to fight when they might otherwise not, though one imagines many of the blows are very tentative and a high proportion of the total time here is spent watching and waiting. Sabin is right about that: it basically _must be_ given the relatively low casualties in these periods and the fact that they might stretch on for many minutes even to an hour or more in some cases. The men in the front are being cheered on by their fellows behind them and at least in the case of the Romans also urged forward by their centurions and it is this context where you get the **micro-pulses** : individuals or more likely groups of men push forward into measure for a concerted ‘push’ on the enemy line. They’re not literally shoving, of course, but simply moving aggressively into measure to attack – in the case of the Romans they have to move _well_ into measure because they have swords and not spears, so they are relying on their heavy armor and big shield to absorb a strike from the enemy before they can reply. On the other hand, once they get through that range, they are _significantly_ more lethal, better able to strike over or under an enemy’s shield and pierce armor. **It’s a ‘high risk, high lethality’ tactical package that the Roman soldier carries, balanced with his heavier-than-typical armor and shield.** Now the enemy can do two things: **they can hold firm against this ‘push’** or – seeing friends fall and feeling the danger –**they can push back out of measure on their side, backing up to get space**. This isn’t a rout yet, cohesion is not broken, they’re just going to back up into the empty space between them and the next man behind them and that man will then back up too to preserve space as the formation accordions in from the front, then accordions out again on the back. This probably isn’t a huge movement – it doesn’t need to be. A quick shuffle of a yard or two is enough to clear well out of measure. At which point the Romans can press _again_ or stop at measure to stabilize. **Now what often happened, what Hannibal is _counting on_ at Cannae, is that this process is going to repeat over and over again, steadily _pushing_ a line backwards without breaking it**. The Roman, after all, has the shorter range weapon – he must, on some level, advance or he has to endure ‘potshots’ from longer spears forever. And he can advance, trusting his large shield and heavy armor to absorb a blow or two from his enemy while he pushes into his own, shorter but more lethal measure. So when the enemy backs up, the Romans quickly – perhaps immediately – push right back into measure. A few more foes fall, the enemy backs up again. After all, his enemy lacks that heavy armor and big shield to be so confident in very close quarters and so will want to move away from the Roman with his deadly sword, back to spear’s reach. So long as cohesion holds, each localized ‘push’ is perhaps only gaining a few meters and neither side is breaking contact, but the line is bending and moving. Roman maniples can adapt well to that shifting line; the _sarisa_ -phalanx cannot (thus Pydna). In this sort of back and forth, I think we need to assume that wounded men (or utterly exhausted ones) can drop back through the ranks, but there’s clearly some shame in so doing, at least for the Romans (remember that oath). But there’s plenty of space with a Roman file width of c. 135cm. Heck, even at a conjectured hoplite phalanx’s 90cm, a hurt man could squeeze back – or be pulled back – by his comrades so long as the formation is hovering at the edge of measure rather than right up on the enemy. Cycling the front rank seems to have never been systematized, however, so I suspect the expectation is that many men in the front ranks will remain there through the whole fight if they’re not wounded.17 Because the line’s movement forward and back is driven mostly by **psychology** , it is a _visible_ indicator of the more confident side – the side with confidence is pushing into measure, their opponents backing out. For many armies using contact weapons, there’s not much a general can do at this stage even if they see that their line is getting the worst of it, but Roman armies are unusually complex and so the Roman general has an option here if things don’t seem to be going well: he can sound that trumpet to recall the _hastati_. What I suspect happens here is that the men at the front are going to – still facing the enemy with shields up – quickly shuffle backwards (getting out of measure and moving to exit contact) while the _velites_ (present in the gaps of the formation) shower javelins to give their opponents pause and then everyone breaks for the rear, passing through the intervals of the next line. The enemy cannot charge after them or they’ll run pell-mell into the well-ordered maniples of the _principes_ and be butchered. Surely this must have entailed the loss of some of the _hastati_ , but not many, I’d imagine, with the _velites_ covering (and the _velites_ , very lightly equipped, can easily flee an enemy’s heavy battle line). The centurions rally the _hastati_ in the safety of the space behind the _principes_ , who now advance and the cycle repeats. So **micro-pulses** but not **macro-pulses** : the lines once in contact don’t break that ‘loose’ contact except to flee, **but they do ‘push’** and **while there is no _general_ pause in fighting, _individually_ soldiers are not always swinging or being swung at**. **What might that mean for a Greek hoplite phalanx?** Well quite a few of these elements must substantially drop away. While the Greeks certainly have light infantry, as we’ve discussed they do not have _integrated_ light infantry, nor the retreat lanes or tactical flexibility to use them in the way the Romans do; **Greeks are not Romans**. Equally, while the phalanx has a bunch of _organizational_ units, it does not have a lot of _maneuver_ units: the whole formation is supposed to move together. So the ability to maintain cohesion moving in and out of contact is going to be significantly less. And there is no way to change out entire battle lines, both because the phalanx is not built to do so and also because there is no second battle line waiting to rotate in any case. But the other elements, I think, largely remain. No volley of _pila_ (at least, not after the Archaic, but we must assume that earlier Archaic throwing spear fills a similar role to a _pilum_ , a pre-charge volley weapon), but the hoplites charge to contact (as noted last time, either to measure or to impact). But they don’t start shoving, instead accordioning back out and then, as above, the **micro-pulses** : localized ‘pushes’ in sections of the line. In some cases, you might get the ‘pushing’ effect we see the Romans achieve although it is notable to me that it seems like hoplite armies achieve this effect less (though certainly not never!) and I suspect this is because everyone is working with a spear’s reach and thus a spear’s measure, so no one side is compelled (as the Romans are) to advance impetuously _through_ an opponent’s measure, nor is one side (as Macedonians might) able to relentlessly push an enemy back from _beyond_ their measure. But I don’t think the lines frequently _disengaged_ in the Classical period, because we’re not told that they do so in any source I can think of and because the phalanx would be even less capable of doing a ‘**macro-lull** ‘ than a Roman legion and it seems like the Roman legions almost never did them either. The consequence of this model – micro-pulses but no macro-lulls – is to a degree to restore the role of heavy infantry as ‘shock’ based contact troops. These men – and I think this is true of hoplites as well – fight in formation, with assigned positions (or something very close to it) that they are expected to maintain for as long as they are able. **Once they advance into contact, they do not expect to break contact until one side has _won_ or _lost_ the fight in that part of the line**. But they do not stay permanently in measure swinging potentially lethal blows for an hour straight. Instead we might imagine an open space, roughly the width of measure (so a couple of meters), with men lunging or advancing forward to strike and then backing out. Every so often a concerted group of men will push into measure collectively. And sometimes their aggression causes the enemy to back up, leading to the ‘pushing’ effect we’re told about – which happens with no shoving. But **what they are not doing is _backing out_ to go back to skirmishing**. The reason so many javelin-wielding line infantry (archaic hoplites, Roman heavy infantry, Iberian and Celtiberian infantry) carry just _one_ or _two_ javelins is that they expect to hurl these immediately before contact to intensify the force of their onset and then _not do any more throwing_. If these units break contact, it is because they are routing or – in the Roman case only – because they have been recalled to reform behind the next line of heavy infantry. But heavy contact infantry are not skirmishers and so we should not try to extrapolate their behavior entirely from watching the fighting of Dani skirmishers in Papua New Guinea. Our sources _resound_ with assertions and descriptions that heavy infantry worked differently on the battlefield than light infantry and that the two types were not interchangeable. Hopefully that all clarifies my views on ‘pulses’ and ‘lulls.’ **Micro-pulses? Yes.** Macro-lulls? Only very rarely, in unusual circumstances. Now as I write this, I am getting ready to fly out to attend the 2025 _Prancing Pony Podcast Moot_ to deliver a keynote on the historical grounding of Tolkien’s view of war. Next week is also the week of Christmas. So there will be no post _next week_ (the 26th), so we’ll be wrapping up our look at hoplites in the New Year. ### Share this: * Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * 1. Remember to keep in mind not just the length of the fellow’s weapon, but also his arm and also the amount of his weapon, especially for spears, behind his hand as a counter-balance. 2. Also, credit where credit is due, Goldsworthy and Sabin are both fully aware of their debt through Keegan to Ardant du Picq. As a result, this debate, though much smaller than its hoplite equivalent, is actually somewhat more aware of its theoretical basis. 3. As mentioned previously, it is a broadly known fact among military historians but perhaps not among readers that, “S.L.A. Marshall‘s work is shoddy where it isn’t outright fabrication, but he happens to be right,” though the shoddiness and fabrication was not as well known in the 1990s. 4. Again, an _openly admitted_ extension; Philip Sabin knows his Ardant du Picq. 5. Goldsworthy _op. cit._ , 222. 6. “The Face of Roman Battle,” 16. 7. As an aside, the idea that men to the rear are put under less psychological pressure, which Sabin and Goldsworthy argue for, works a lot better for the Romans, where those ‘men to the rear’ are in entirely seperate formations some distance behind, than it does when applied to hoplites (e.g. Konijnendijk (2018), 136) where the ‘men to the rear’ are just the back ranks of the same formation. Indeed, Ardant du Picq, from whom Sabin and Goldsworthy are borrowing this idea, is explicit that it is the great virtue _of the Roman way of fighting_ that it removes its reserves from the psychological pressure, whereas other forms (e.g. hoplites) _do not_. Another good reason to **read _Battle Studies_**. 8. As an aside, I will note that the assertions of the physical impossibility of carrying on this kind of fight without substantial lulls**is always made without evidence in the writings here cited**. Now I don’t have an experimental data either, but I’ll note that some sport activities demand quite a lot of endurance. The longest boxing match ever was _seven hours_ long, marathons can take upwards of two hours to run for well trained athletes, and so on. **I am not saying Sabin _et al_. is _wrong_ about the impossibility of maintaining contact for more than thirty-or-so minutes**, because I don’t have any evidence either **and they may very well be right**. But it is not clear to me that this argument is _so obviously true_ that I must accept it without evidence. I would like to see it proved in an experimental context. 9. Note also his chapter, “Phalanx and Legion: the “Face” of Punic War Battle” in _A Companion to the Punic Wars_ , ed. D. Hoyos (2011). 10. Zhmodikov, _op. cit._ , 70 11. _fugae atque fomidinis ergo non abituros neque ex ordine recessuros nisi teli sumendi aut petendi aut hostis feriendi aut civis servandi causa_. 12. Latin has a way to say the Romans ‘were throwing [continuously]’ rather than ‘they threw’ and Livy is not using it here. 13. Livy 7.23, 9.35, 23.29, 32.17, 38.22 14. Again, Latin being Latin, there is a clarity to the tenses here. _pilis emissis_ is a perfect passive participle in an ablative absolute, “with _pila_ having been thrown” that is quite clear this action is _completed_ , _finished, done_ as the precondition for the following clause. The _pila_ are not still being thrown, they get thrown, once, in the past and it is _done_ when the next action happens. Can you tell I’ve been teaching Latin this semester? 15. There was also a rear-guard and one wonders if the intent here was to recreate a Roman-style _triplex acies_ ; if so it was not a success. 16. Sabin notes the evidence for _pila_ being used after a charge but it is pretty thin: a specific response to a remarkably deep pike formation (Plut. _Sulla_ 19.6), two instances of spent javelins being picked up (Livy 10.29.6 by reserves coming into contact, not men moving out of it and Sall. _BJ_ 58, the latter a camp defense throwing back enemy missiles, hardly a strong example) and the purported _pilum_ of Marius (Plut. _Mar_. 25) which we’ve already discussed does not seem to have actually existed. Compared to the _far more numerous, frequent and clear_ evidence of _pila_ being discarded without being used in swift charges, this is pretty thin gruel. 17. Otherwise the placement of the officers of the Macedonian _sarisa_ -phalanx in the front rank makes very little sense. And we _know_ that the Macedonian phalanx has fixed positions in it: _lochogoi_ at the front, _ouragoi_ at the back. ### Like this: Like Loading...

Bret Devereaux now has a whole post about theories of how ancient battles could last for hours when elite athletes need a break after a few minutes of boxing. Recommended acoup.blog/2025/12/18/intermission-... #histodons #militaryHistory #antiquidons #romanArmy

I think warfare in 18th- and 19th-century Europe is a very bad model for understanding the psychology of ancient or medieval warfare, and categories from that culture like "shock" are also damaging. Fortunately we now have a wealth of world history and ethnography to draw on. #histodons #antiquidons

Publications by Non-Tenure-Track Historians Since we began publishing in 2019, _Contingent_ has published end-of-year lists of books and articles by **non-tenure-track historians** released in the past calendar year. To submit something for inclusion on this year’s lists, fill out the form below. Books, journal articles, and chapters are all welcome. Check out all of our previous lists here. Please give _complete_ citation info and a link to the publisher’s webpage for the book or the stable URL for the article. If you wish to submit multiple publications, each one should be its own submission. The due date for submissions is Saturday, November 29. **Anything with a clear 2025 publication date is acceptable, even if it hasn’t come out yet.** Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form. Name * First Last Citation * URL stable list Link to publisher's webpage or stable URL * If you're submitting a journal article, is it open access? * Yes * No * I'm not sure Check this box if you're submitting for the philosophy list * Philosophy Twitter/Bluesky/Instagram handle Not required, but it can help interested readers contact you easily without making your email public. Make it clear what social media platform you're talking about so we can link to it. Submit

"Contingent" magazine in the USA is collecting a list of (academic?) publications by non-tenure-track historians with release dates in 2025 https://contingentmagazine.org/yearly-pub-lists/ #histodons #antiquidons #glam

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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