Reinstating the Hoplite: Arms, Armour and Phalanx Fighting in Archaic and Classical Greece (review)

Ancient Greek warfare has enjoyed something of a renaissance in the past decade. Scholars like Peter Krentz, Hans van Wees, Louis Rawlings, John Lendon and Adrian Goldsworthy are all leading a new generation of thinking about ancient Greek fighting systems and reforging the ways we think about war in the Greek world. Before them, like him or not, Victor Davis Hanson set in motion many of the current great debates about the mechanics of hoplite warfare and its relationship to Greek society. Now Adam Schwartz draws fuel and argument from these and others and sets out to establish a new understanding of the hoplite and hoplite warfare.

The title of Schwartz's book suggests that the hoplite needs some kind of reinstatement. On one level this is misleading. Despite the fact that much work has now been done on promoting the importance of the non-hoplite warriors on Greek battlefields, the lighter troops and cavalry, and on assessing the nature and significance of hoplites themselves in Greek warfare, especially with regard to their abilities to fight independently of the phalanx or to charge at speed specifically in the later classical period, most scholars would agree that the hoplite always remained the paradigm of military status within all Greek poleis. The title actually has meaning. Schwartz wants to reinstate the hoplite as the warrior that he really was. To Schwartz, hoplites fought battles in ways that remained traditional and unchanging from as early as the eighth until the late fourth century BC. From the outset Schwartz stresses that hoplite warfare remained fundamentally the same for about four centuries. The changes in hoplite warfare, most notably in the arms and armour carried by individual hoplites, were minor compared to the basic continuity of fighting practices. The book, therefore, stresses that the phalanx remained heavily armed and ponderous, that individual hoplites were unable to function independently of the group and that the phalanx remained effectively defensive. As a result, hoplites were inflexible with poor manoeuvrability. Finally, hoplite battles were simple affairs throughout the archaic and classical era between lines of infantrymen slogging it out. In conclusion and in the face of much recent scholarship, Schwartz supports the idea of the othismos or the mass shove that completed a victory.

The book uses both literary and iconographic sources and usefully includes an appendix of forty-one major battles of the classical era commencing with Marathon in 490 BC as a resource for assessing the evidence and other markers of hoplite fighting in pitched battle. Schwartz sees the Iliad as a starting point. He agrees with Latacz that phalanx fighting appears in the Iliad, despite an emphasis on individual and heroic warfare. After a discussion of method and sources he begins with an analysis of hoplite equipment (Section Two: 25-104), and then moves to the development and nature of the phalanx (Section Three: 102-200).

Schwartz sees the hoplite shield, the aspis, as crucial to hoplite fighting styles. This wooden round and concave shield carried on the left arm with a unique double grip, that included an armband (porpax) and handgrip (antilabe) was central to the hoplite and phalanx fighting. There is of course nothing controversial in this. The ancient sources and modern commentators all agree that the shield was a central aspect of the hoplite, hoplite warfare and hoplite ideology. Schwartz goes further in arguing that the shield determined and defined the hoplite's fighting style. Criticising recent analysts (like van Wees and Rawlings), Schwartz claims that the shield was cumbersome and hard to manoeuvre.¹ He dismisses arguments about hoplites dancing the Pyrrhiche in arms and running armed races (hoplitodromos) as evidence that the shield could easily be wielded and easily carried on the run. The shield as a constant feature of hoplite battles determined they were slow, steady and defensive affairs. Moving on from the shield he then analyses the rest...