Because of its shape, you can rest the shield on your left shoulder and the weight is distributed across your entire arm. You thrust your left arm through the central grip or porpax and grasp the handle or antilabe, located near the rim, with your left hand. The typical hoplite shield is about a metre across and hollow, with a pronounced rim. I also point to the appearance of a new feature on the inside of the ‘hoplite’ (or Argive) shield. I believe the shift from mass tactics to massed tactics can be traced archaeologically by the appearance of a number of different things, including trumpets, open-faced helmets, and a new type of sword. The passage deals with the date of the introduction of what we can refer to simply – if again somewhat anachronistically – as ‘phalanx’ tactics. Recently, someone asked for clarification on something that I wrote on page 109. It’s been selling well and I occasionally get sent emails with questions regarding aspects of the book. It’ll be two years this November since Henchmen of Ares was published. Of course, when I wrote that I could write a book on the subject, I was being a little facetious, as I in fact did write a book on warfare in Greece from the Mycenaean era down to the Persian Wars. The Greeks were, in fact, hopelessly inexact as far as terminology was concerned: any shield, regardless of type, could be referred to as an aspis. John Lazenby and David Whitehead dealt with this issue exhaustively in their article ‘The myth of the hoplite’s hoplon’, published in Classical Quarterly 46 (1996), pp. But hoplon is the general term to denote equipment: the Spartan poet Tyrtaeus refers to heavily-armed men as panoploi (‘all equipped’), and the word was actually seldom used to denote a shield specifically. All too often, I see people refer to the ‘hoplite’ shield as a hoplon. Indeed, Herodotus even suggested that most characteristically ‘Greek’ elements of the ‘hoplite’ panoply were invented by Carians! And there are pictures of similar people from Phrygia that date to the ninth century BC and therefore predate the earliest Greek depictions of hoplites.Īnother issue that doesn’t seem to want to go away is the Greek term used to denote the shield. They might indeed be Greek mercenaries, but they may just as well be local troops equipped in a similar manner. But the bowl itself is Phoenician in origin and was found on Cyprus. One can look at the Amathus Bowl in the British Museum and conclude that those guys with round shields, helmets, and spears are ‘hoplites’. Then there’s the assumption that ‘hoplites’ are always ‘Greek’. Then there’s loads of modern authors who define the term as ‘citizen-soldier’, which opens up an entirely different can of worms, not least of which etymologically (since a soldier is technically someone who fights for pay). It isn’t used before the fifth century BC, so referring to pictures of heavily-armed warriors on Greek vases as ‘hoplites’ is actually anachronistic. The term ‘hoplite’ itself is problematic: it refers to a heavily-armed warrior with shield and spear, but that’s about it. I could write an entire book on the subject. An action so significant that a Greek general would mention it in his writings suggests a uniqueness to the motion and the phalanx it self, and contributed to the phalanx emerging as a battle formation unlike anything the world had ever seen before.Ah, the Greek hoplite shield. The fact that Thucydides mentions the rightward motion of the phalanx due to the hoplon cannot be ignored. Thucydides states that all Greek armies are alike in there tendency to step right when engaging in battle, as hoplites would out of fear move to cover their unprotected sides with the left half of the hoplite next to them (see Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 7.71). Thucydides mentions the right step motion in his account of the Battle of Manitea in 418 B.C. Allowing a hoplite to utilize the extra portion of his fellow combatant’s shield would also imply that the hoplite phalanx would have a tendency to move right when advancing in combat (see “Formations and Tactics”). The double grip method of holding the shield offers protection on the center and left side of the body, but leaves the right side of the body exposed, unless the hoplite utilizes the extra, redundant portion of the shield owned by the hoplite to the right of him. Two Greek hoplites engaged in battle utilizing the hoplite shield.Primarily, the shield serves as protection for the hoplite that holds it, as well as the hoplite to his immediate left.
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