handles, a central armband (porpax), and a lateral handgrip (antilabe).
According to the most recent scholarship, the elements of the panoply appeared in Greece from the middle of the eighth century onward and spread piecemeal during the following decades. They appear in considerable quantities as offerings in sanctuaries and figure prominently in the iconography of the period.8 The impact of foreign influences in Greek military technology of this period remains debated, but whatever this impact may have been, by the beginning of the sixth century the panoply seems to have been widespread and became the standard equipment of Greek heavy infantry forces during the Classical period.9
The characteristics of the different items of the panoply have generated little controversy, except for the weight of the Argive shield and the accumulated weight of the panoply: in the past, both shield and panoply were regarded as heavy and cumbersome, but recent estimates reduce their weight by half, with important consequences for the general interpretation of the capabilities of the Greek hoplite.10
Discussion has focused on the panoply in action.11 It all starts with the Argive shield: its double grip and its width provide better handling and greater protection, respectively; these qualities are improved by its concave shape, which allows the inner side of the rim to rest on the shoulder and deflect blows. These very same qualities, however, together with its considerable weight, make the hoplite slow and heavy, while the double grip means that the shield protects only one side of the fighter. This shield thus exposes him to attacks from the unprotected side or the rear. The bronze cuirass offers protection at the cost of more weight, and the helmet makes it hard to see and hear. Although a heavily equipped and highly protected fighter, the hoplite is also slow, clumsy, and easily disoriented target.
Given these drawbacks, the hoplite needed to be part of a closed formation, the phalanx. In isolation, he was well-nigh useless.12 This conclusion led to another: phalanx equipment must be standardized, to make it easier for hoplites to serve together at close quarters.
This scholarly discussion depended on technological determinism: the peculiarities of the weapons determine the need for a particular method of fighting, and that method only. Archaeological evidence for use of the equipment thus implies certain military realities.13 Conversely, written evidence for the existence of the phalanx implies the presence of hoplites. Determinism comes full circle.
Recently, scholars have questioned this sequential reasoning. It has been argued, for example, that the panoply was rarely complete (something attested by the iconography) and that the different items could be used in endless combinations, even including controversial types such as the Boeotian shield; as a result, military equipment was not standardized, but could depend to some extent on particular tastes and local traditions.14 If there was no such thing as a standard panoply, conclusions about the role of hoplites in the phalanx are questionable, as are larger claims about hoplite warfare, to which we now turn.
Hoplite Warfare and Hoplite Ideology
Notions of “hoplite warfare” date back to the 1850s.15 The English Classical scholar (and Classical Liberal) George Grote then posited that the kind of warfare practiced during the historical period in Greece differed from the heroic warfare of the epics because of introduction of the phalanx. Individual prowess became secondary to the discipline of the group.16 In the following decades, a group of German scholars, some of them Prussian officers, built on Grote’s ideas and established the principle that Greek war centered on pitched battles.17 According to these writers, Greek wars were decided by short clashes of two closed formations of heavy infantry arranged in neat ranks, with little room for tactics, maneuvers, or inventiveness; battles were planned in advance, and troops other than heavy infantry were regarded as auxiliary. It has been argued recently that the Prussians elaborated this model of combat in order to produce a contrast between the Archaic and Classical periods, on the one hand, and, on the other, fourth-century developments that interested them thanks to the emergence of great generals such as Alexander the Great, envisioned as models for Germany’s own military.18 Whatever their motives, they were authoritative; for example, the dictum that the standard depth of the phalanx was eight ranks derives from them, not from the ancient sources.19
In the early twentieth century, Anglo-American scholars adopted the German model without reservations.20 An orthodoxy had emerged: the simple battles of phalanxes, the exclusive presence of hoplites, the deterministic correlation between hoplite and phalanx, and the homogeneity of equipment. English-language writers made several contributions, first, formulating an important paradox of Greek warfare, this being the prevalence of the heavy, rigid phalanx in the rugged landscape of Greece; second, explaining the common practice of devastating enemy fields and orchards as a bait to lure the enemy to give battle; and third, focusing on hand-to-hand combat in closed formation (giving rise to the debate on the othismos, or “push,” and the analogy of the rugby scrum).21 These ideas have shaped the study of Greek warfare up to the present.
The elaboration of the ideological framework of hoplite combat came during the 1960s and 1970s. Since Grote, the hoplite soldier had been an anti-aristocratic, if not democratic, figure, but now, thanks to a group of French scholars, equality and ritualism became aspects of a new ideology.22 The conditions of the panoply and the phalanx (homogenous equipment, fixed positions in the formation, restricted movements, and rigidity) were said to enforce strict solidarity and equality on fighters, and aristocratic individualism thus yielded to collective values (keeping formation, cohesion, rejection of individualistic behavior, and sacrifice).23 The hoplite was now expected to collaborate in the mass of fighters for the common good, as in the fragments of Tyrtaeus; the egalitarian principle of the polis resulted from transferring these military values to the political and social spheres. Egalitarianism, in turn, reinforced protocols of the phalanx and hoplite combat, encouraging solidarity, anonymity, and simplicity.
The German scholars of the nineteenth century had already described hoplite warfare as simple and unimaginative because of the limitations of the phalanx.24 From the 1960s onward, however, this simplicity was reinterpreted as a choice made by the hoplites so as to materialize their ideas, principles, and interests (and thus solve a problem noted by Grundy and Gomme, which was that phalanx fighting was not feasible unless armies were thoroughly and profoundly unified).25 A strict code of unwritten norms and protocols, one that emanated from the material conditions and ideological principles of the “hoplite class,” would supply this degree of unity. The “simple battle” described by the Prussians thus became a “ritualized battle.”
Ritualism drew on studies of Greek athletic competitions to conceive battle as a regulated contest or agon: a setting (the battlefield), a board of judges (the gods), two participants (the rival armies), and a prize (military victory). The rules for the competition were distilled by Ober in a list of 12 norms that included a formal declaration of war, sparing of “civilians,” and the ransom of prisoners.26 Ritualism seemed to fit the hoplite agenda of economy of effort, the social background of yeomen soldiers, uniform reliance on a heavy and cumbersome panoply, and the tidy reduction of war to quickly resolved battles. By the 1990s, it had become the prevailing view on the mechanics of Greek warfare.
The expanding construct of “hoplite warfare” met with criticism from revisionists writing after the 1960s.27 They addressed the problems posed by the fractious evidence for hoplite combat and also embarked on a reconsideration of Greek warfare that has led to the gradual articulation of an alternative view of the Archaic period and of the origins of the polis. In the first place, Snodgrass questioned the notion of a uniform panoply, which he termed a “motley assemblage” of weapons and armor.28 It spread “piecemeal” through Greece.29 Snodgrass suggested that the adoption of the equipment and the introduction of the phalanx were not successive steps but instead were separated by a sizable lapse of time. He presented middle-class farmers as “reluctant hoplites,”30 undermining the notion of a hoplite mindset. Snodgrass accepted other popular ideas, such as the military superiority of the hoplite and the phalanx, and hoplite military service