This week (and next) we\u2019re looking at hoplites<\/strong>, the heavy infantry of the ancient Greek poleis<\/em> in the (early? mid? late?) Archaic and Classical periods, into the Hellenistic. In particular, I want to outline the major debate,<\/strong> which I have alluded to quite a few times here, that swirls around hoplite warfare and the phalanx<\/strong>. While this is often represented as simply a debate on tactics \u2013 the othismos <\/em>over othismos<\/em> \u2013 as we\u2019re going to see the debate has implications that stretch well beyond battle tactics into questions of the political and social structure of the polis<\/em> and the place of hoplites in it. Indeed the implications for the nature and development of the polis<\/em> are almost certainly more<\/em> important than the implications for hoplite tactics<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n I had wanted to roll this out in a single post covering the two \u2018schools\u2019 of thought (generally known as \u2018orthodox\u2019 and \u2018heterodox\u2019) on hoplites, offer a historiography (an account of the debate) and then give my own view on the question, but that has proven rather long and unwieldy, so I\u2019ve opted to break this up. In this part, we\u2019ll lay out the groundwork of how the debate has developed and where it currently stands and then next week we\u2019ll look at the broader implications<\/em> \u2013 which are in many cases, as interesting if not more interesting than the narrow tactical or chronological questions \u2013 and my own view of what a profitable synthesis might look like.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>; I don\u2019t promise not to use the money to buy a full hoplite panoply, but I also don\u2019t not<\/em> 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 <\/a>and Bluesky <\/a>and (less frequently) Mastodon (@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis<\/em> presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.<\/p>\n Before we dive in, we need to clarify some terms<\/strong> and outline periodization<\/strong> or nothing that follows is going to make very much sense.<\/p>\n First we can begin with the very basic question of what is a hoplite?<\/strong> <\/p>\n The term \u2018hoplite\u2019 (Greek hoplites<\/em> (\u1f41\u03c0\u03bb\u03af\u03c4\u03b7\u03c2), plural hoplitai<\/em> (\u1f41\u03c0\u03bb\u1fd6\u03c4\u03b1\u03b9)) means \u2018equipped [man]\u2019 or \u2018armored [man],\u2019 from hoplon<\/em> (\u1f45\u03c0\u03bb\u03bf\u03bd), \u201cequipment, tool, weapon.\u201d You will still sometimes hear that hoplon<\/em> was the name for the hoplite\u2019s shield, but this is not quite right: the shield was an aspis<\/em>, whereas hopla<\/em> (the plural of hoplon<\/em>) is used to describe a hoplite\u2019s full kit. Diodorus offers the etymology of hoplite, \u201cthese were earlier called hoplites from the aspides<\/em>, and then took a new name, peltasts from the pelte<\/em> [a lighter shield]\u201d which at no point insists that the aspis<\/em> was called a hoplon<\/em> (Diod. Sic. 15.44.3). So while many Greek troops are named for their shields \u2013 chalkaspides<\/em>, argyraspides<\/em>, peltastai<\/em>, thureophoroi<\/em>, etc. (notice all of those \u2013aspides<\/em>!) \u2013 especially in the Hellenistic period when Diodorus is writing (which may be why he makes this guess), hoplites were not one of them: they were not named for their shields but for their whole panoply<\/strong>.<\/p>\n We might thus define a hoplite as a \u201cfully equipped man,\u201d where the equipment in question was generally at a minimum the aspis<\/em> (a large round double-strap grip shield), a doru<\/em> (a fairly standard one-handed thrusting spear<\/a> whose only unusual characteristic is that its spear-butt is unusually developed) and a metal helmet; one certainly gets the sense from the sources that some sort of body armor was also an expectation here (e.g. Hdt. 9.63.2, but it is not clear how often that was realized in practice (frequently, it must be said \u2013 but perhaps not always). These men also generally carried swords as backup weapons.<\/p>\n By the time we can see them clearly<\/em> (in the 400s) these fellows generally<\/em> fight in a formation the Greeks call a phalanx<\/em> (\u03c6\u03ac\u03bb\u03b1\u03b3\u03be), but we need to issue an immediate caution that \u03c6\u03ac\u03bb\u03b1\u03b3\u03be is not a technical term in Greek but rather the equivalent to Latin\u2019s acies<\/em> in that it just means \u201cbattle line.\u201d Consequently Greek authors can and will use it to refer to any<\/em> clear battle line and it gets used of hoplites, but also pike-wielding sarissa<\/em> infantry and also Roman legions and also barbarians and also chariots<\/em> and also elephants<\/strong><\/em> at points<\/a>. The word is actually even more general<\/em> than this and seems to have at its core the idea of a beam or trunk \u2013 it can mean the main mass of something (as opposed to its edges), like the trunk of a tree or a beam of wood, it can mean the finger-bone but also is used for rows of eyelashes. And you can kind of get how, metaphorically, you get from finger-bones in a row or eyelashes in a row or beams or planks (in a row at regular distances) or even just the central mass of a tree to either men lined up neatly or the central mass of an army<\/em>.<\/p>\n We\u2019re going to get into the particulars of exactly how we might imagine hoplites fought and how exactly a phalanx of them (keeping in mind you can have a phalanx of other things<\/em>) might fight as we go along. But those are our key terms: a hoplite is a soldier with a specific \u2018full\u2019 or \u2018heavy\u2019 equipment set (aspis<\/em>, spear, sword, helmet, cuirass) and hoplites sometimes fight in a close-order shield-wall infantry formation<\/a> called a phalanx. I don\u2019t want to go much further than this because what we\u2019re going to see in part two is that some of the fights about hoplites and especially about the phalanx are definitional<\/em> and I don\u2019t want to load those dice here before we\u2019ve even introduced the debate \u2013 better to come at it with relatively few assumptions.<\/p>\n On to periodization<\/strong>. We generally break down this period of Greek antiquity into the following periods:<\/p>\n Obviously we\u2019ll be mostly focused on the Archaic and the Classical, the dividing line between which are the Persian Wars (492-490, 480-479) which are also some of the first relatively<\/em> clear descriptions of Greek warfare in a high degree of detail and which are generally<\/em> (some hoplite-heterodox scholars contest this) taken to be our earliest solid descriptions of hoplite warfare. But there\u2019s a challenge here because our main source for the Persian Wars (Herodotus) is writing not in 479 but in the 430s<\/em>. Meanwhile our understanding of the mechanics<\/em> of hoplite warfare emerges out of Thucydides\u2019 history of the Peloponnesian War (431-404; he\u2019s probably writing c. 400) well into the Classical period. So the sources where hoplite warfare becomes explicit<\/em> (we\u2019ll talk poetry a bit later) are writing about 480 in 430 or about 430 in 400, but a lot of our questions about hoplites relate to how they fought in the Archaic (800-480).<\/p>\n That means \u2013 and this is quite important for what follows \u2013 hoplite arms and armor emerge in our archaeological record during the Archaic well before<\/em> we have literary sources offering solid, detailed descriptions of how men using that equipment fought. Much of the hoplite debate thus lives in the Archaic when our evidence is quite thin and often frustratingly ambiguous.<\/p>\n With that out the way, we can get to the debate<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Fundamentally the debate about hoplites function as a debate between two \u2018schools\u2019 of thought, generally termed the \u2018orthodox\u2019 and \u2018heterodox\u2019 schools on hoplites. Hoplite \u2018orthodoxy\u2019 is associated most of all with Victor Davis Hansen, but has other defenders (e.g. Adam Schwartz, Gregory Viggiano), while the \u2018heterodox\u2019 school is most associated with Hans van Wees and Peter Krentz, but includes many other current scholars (Fernando Echeverria, Roel Konijnendijk, etc.). But I often think the way we talk about this debate is really hard<\/em> for non-specialists to get a handle on<\/strong> and it often remains at this level of \u2018these folks and those folks.\u2019<\/p>\n But here we want to explain what is actually being disputed<\/em><\/strong>, which can be quite hard to get clearly answered in a lot of the flurry of writing on this topic because since the mid-2000s at least, everyone either mostly assumes<\/em> their (scholarly) readers know the grounds of dispute or that their (public, popular) readers do not need<\/em> to know and need only be told \u2018how it is\u2019 (according to them). Consequently, a lot of modern works present a historiography<\/em> of the debate (which we\u2019ll do in a simple form in a moment) without actually running down the exact positions<\/em> of the two camps, which can make it hard for a new reader to get a sense of what we\u2019re even arguing about.<\/p>\n Both the \u2018orthodox\u2019 and \u2018heterodox\u2019 schools on hoplites consist of a series of connected answers to key questions about hoplites<\/strong>: questions about hoplite equipment, tactics, organization, place in society and both when and how hoplite warfare (as we see it, particularly in Thucydides) developed. These answers are connected<\/em>, by which I mean that if you answer a given way for, say, questions, A, B, and C, it starts to logically \u2018lock in\u2019 answers to later questions. But I would suggest that in fact some of these propositions are only weakly<\/em> connected<\/strong> \u2013 they might suggest<\/strong><\/em> paired answers but do not require them<\/em><\/strong> and the evidence might well suggest (indeed, I\u2019d argue it does) that on some points, we ought to be \u2018mixing and matching\u2019 or \u2018splitting the difference\u2019 Indeed, this is, in my view, some of the most fertile ground for productive synthesis: these \u2018schools\u2019 do not need to remain \u2018pure.\u2019<\/p>\n I think the best way to tackle that complexity is to first, outline in brief<\/em> the opposing schools of thought<\/strong>, then give a brief historiography<\/strong> (the \u2018history of the history\u2019) of how these schools came to be, then take their key contentions apart and see if we can assemble something of that synthesis<\/strong>.<\/p>\n So for our brief outline:<\/p>\n We can state the orthodox<\/strong> position on hoplites, in its simple form with the following propositions:<\/p>\n As you might imagine, the heretodox school<\/strong> rejects, or at least substantially revises basically all of these points: In the heterodox school<\/strong>:<\/p>\n As you can see, both schools weld together chronological assumptions<\/strong><\/em> (\u2018when did the phalanx emerge, how completely and how long did it remain in a position of unique dominance?\u2019), social assumptions<\/strong><\/em> (\u2018who was a hoplite, how rich were they, what were their political roles and political tendencies?\u2019) tactical assumptions<\/em> <\/strong>(\u2018how did the phalanx function, how was it shaped by its equipment, what were the role of non-hoplites?\u2019) and strategic assumptions<\/strong><\/em> (\u2018what was the purpose of war among poleis<\/em>, what did they fight over and what was their overall theory of victory?\u2019).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acoup.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Hoplite_fight_from_Athens_Museum.jpg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1\")
What is a Hoplite?<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acoup.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/hoplite_kmkg.jpg?resize=800%2C546&ssl=1\")
\n
Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acoup.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Detail_from_the_Chigi-vase.jpg?resize=1024%2C625&ssl=1\")