Posted by Bret Devereaux

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This week (and next) we’re looking at hoplites, the heavy infantry of the ancient Greek poleis in the (early? mid? late?) Archaic and Classical periods, into the Hellenistic. In particular, I want to outline the major debate, which I have alluded to quite a few times here, that swirls around hoplite warfare and the phalanx. While this is often represented as simply a debate on tactics – the othismos over othismos – as we’re going to see the debate has implications that stretch well beyond battle tactics into questions of the political and social structure of the polis and the place of hoplites in it. Indeed the implications for the nature and development of the polis are almost certainly more important than the implications for hoplite tactics.

I had wanted to roll this out in a single post covering the two ‘schools’ of thought (generally known as ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’) 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’ve opted to break this up. In this part, we’ll lay out the groundwork of how the debate has developed and where it currently stands and then next week we’ll look at the broader implications – which are in many cases, as interesting if not more interesting than the narrow tactical or chronological questions – and my own view of what a profitable synthesis might look like.

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What is a Hoplite?

Before we dive in, we need to clarify some terms and outline periodization or nothing that follows is going to make very much sense.

First we can begin with the very basic question of what is a hoplite?

The term ‘hoplite’ (Greek hoplites (ὁπλίτης), plural hoplitai (ὁπλῖται)) means ‘equipped [man]’ or ‘armored [man],’ from hoplon (ὅπλον), “equipment, tool, weapon.” You will still sometimes hear that hoplon was the name for the hoplite’s shield, but this is not quite right: the shield was an aspis, whereas hopla (the plural of hoplon) is used to describe a hoplite’s full kit. Diodorus offers the etymology of hoplite, “these were earlier called hoplites from the aspides, and then took a new name, peltasts from the pelte [a lighter shield]” which at no point insists that the aspis was called a hoplon (Diod. Sic. 15.44.3).² So while many Greek troops are named for their shields – chalkaspides, argyraspides, peltastai, thureophoroi, etc. (notice all of those –aspides!) – 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.

We might thus define a hoplite as a “fully equipped man,” where the equipment in question was generally at a minimum the aspis (a large round double-strap grip shield), a doru (a fairly standard one-handed thrusting spear 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 – but perhaps not always). These men also generally carried swords as backup weapons.

By the time we can see them clearly (in the 400s) these fellows generally fight in a formation the Greeks call a phalanx (φάλαγξ), but we need to issue an immediate caution that φάλαγξ is not a technical term in Greek but rather the equivalent to Latin’s acies in that it just means “battle line.” Consequently Greek authors can and will use it to refer to any clear battle line and it gets used of hoplites, but also pike-wielding sarissa infantry and also Roman legions and also barbarians and also chariots and also elephants at points. The word is actually even more general than this and seems to have at its core the idea of a beam or trunk – 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.³

We’re 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) might fight as we go along. But those are our key terms: a hoplite is a soldier with a specific ‘full’ or ‘heavy’ equipment set (aspis, spear, sword, helmet, cuirass) and hoplites sometimes fight in a close-order shield-wall infantry formation called a phalanx. I don’t want to go much further than this because what we’re going to see in part two is that some of the fights about hoplites and especially about the phalanx are definitional and I don’t want to load those dice here before we’ve even introduced the debate – better to come at it with relatively few assumptions.

On to periodization. We generally break down this period of Greek antiquity into the following periods:

• The Greek ‘Dark Ages‘ (c. 1100-c. 800) during which we have no written evidence (the writing of the earlier Bronze Age having been lost and the ancient Greek script we know not having been invented) and thus it is very hard for us to talk with much confidence about how warfare worked (except that it wasn’t phalanxes).
• The Greek Archaic Period (c. 800-480). Writing returns at the beginning of this, but the Greeks won’t start writing their own history until the Classical period, so our sources mostly view the Archaic as the distant past. This is the period where the polis and hoplites are emerging, though as we’ll see the ‘when’ and ‘how’ of that are core to the debate.
• The Greek Classical Period (480-323). This is the period where the independent Greek poleis are at their height and where ‘hoplite warfare’ is the predominant (but not only) method of warfare. It is also much better documented than the others. It ends with Greek independence being shattered and hoplite armies largely replaced by Macedonian armies (which operate under a different, but related, system of close-order heavy infantry).
• The Hellenistic Period (323-31). There are still some hoplite-armed troops around in this period, but they are increasingly less relevant compared to Hellenistic armies, which we’ve already discussed at length. This period ends when the Romans steamroll everyone and set up a Mediterranean-wide empire.

Obviously we’ll 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 clear descriptions of Greek warfare in a high degree of detail and which are generally (some hoplite-heterodox scholars contest this) taken to be our earliest solid descriptions of hoplite warfare. But there’s a challenge here because our main source for the Persian Wars (Herodotus) is writing not in 479 but in the 430s. Meanwhile our understanding of the mechanics of hoplite warfare emerges out of Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War (431-404; he’s probably writing c. 400) well into the Classical period. So the sources where hoplite warfare becomes explicit (we’ll 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).

That means – and this is quite important for what follows – hoplite arms and armor emerge in our archaeological record during the Archaic well before 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.

With that out the way, we can get to the debate.

Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy

Fundamentally the debate about hoplites function as a debate between two ‘schools’ of thought, generally termed the ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ schools on hoplites. Hoplite ‘orthodoxy’ is associated most of all with Victor Davis Hansen, but has other defenders (e.g. Adam Schwartz, Gregory Viggiano), while the ‘heterodox’ 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 for non-specialists to get a handle on and it often remains at this level of ‘these folks and those folks.’

But here we want to explain what is actually being disputed, 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 their (scholarly) readers know the grounds of dispute or that their (public, popular) readers do not need to know and need only be told ‘how it is’ (according to them). Consequently, a lot of modern works present a historiography of the debate (which we’ll do in a simple form in a moment) without actually running down the exact positions of the two camps, which can make it hard for a new reader to get a sense of what we’re even arguing about.

Both the ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ schools on hoplites consist of a series of connected answers to key questions about hoplites: 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, by which I mean that if you answer a given way for, say, questions, A, B, and C, it starts to logically ‘lock in’ answers to later questions. But I would suggest that in fact some of these propositions are only weakly connected – they might suggest paired answers but do not require them and the evidence might well suggest (indeed, I’d argue it does) that on some points, we ought to be ‘mixing and matching’ or ‘splitting the difference’ Indeed, this is, in my view, some of the most fertile ground for productive synthesis: these ‘schools’ do not need to remain ‘pure.’

I think the best way to tackle that complexity is to first, outline in brief the opposing schools of thought, then give a brief historiography (the ‘history of the history’) of how these schools came to be, then take their key contentions apart and see if we can assemble something of that synthesis.

So for our brief outline:

We can state the orthodox position on hoplites, in its simple form with the following propositions:

• The hoplite phalanx emerged early, in the eighth century, at the same time as we see the earliest evidence for the heavy armor that will typify the most wealthy hoplites.
• It rapidly reached a ‘pure’ form, with light troops excluded from the phalanx and combat proceeding as close infantry shock actions (discussed below), such that this form dominated Greek warfare through the Archaic period (c. 750-490BC) and was thus deeply entrenched by the Persian Wars (492-479).
• We can know this in part because hoplite equipment is largely too cumbersome and awkward to be effectively used for other forms of fighting, and thus in particular the strap-gripped dished round shield (the aspis) can only be effectively used for this kind of fighting.
• Hoplites were drawn from a broad ‘yeoman farmer’ middle-class (like Rome’s heavy infantry in the Middle Republic) and thus the bulk of citizens were required to serve as hoplites.
  • (There’s a corollary here that I’ve noted before: that the population of Greek poleis may thus be estimated from the number of hoplites they field.)
• In battle these hoplites fought in an othismos (ὠθισμός, ‘pushing’ ‘jostling’ – we might translate to the English ‘press’⁴ – this is an important word, so mark it), which they understand to be pushing match, where men in the rear ranks use their shields to push the front ranks forward and the two formations shove against each other, with spears and swords confined to auxiliary use in something a lot like a rugby scrum.
• This odd form of combat is in a sense, fundamentally ritual, intended or at least developed out of a need to limit the duration of wars to sharp bursts of violence that fit within the agricultural calendar.
  • In this vision wars are decided by pitched battle (raiding, sieges and such are lesser, secondary or absent), with armies lining up on open plains for a ‘fair fight’ with limited or no effort at ambush, pursuit or trickery, at least until the Peloponnesian War (431-404) if not until the Anabasis of the Ten Thousand (401-399).
  • Thus there is an expectation that victory in a pitched battle entitled the winner to dictate a limited peace to the loser, but that ‘absolute’ war goals were avoided and instead communities might expect to replay the same basic battle multiple times over decades while never seeking to entirely destroy each other.
  • Victor Davis Hanson, of course, has an entire second theory about how this is the foundation of a ‘western way of war’ which is quite poorly constructed, which we won’t cover here.
• That limited, ritualistic style of warfare persisted through the Archaic, but breaks down during the Peloponnesian War (431-404), where we start to see longer wars, more sieges, more mercenaries, more light troops and so on. Thus there is a long, rural ideal form of warfare (the Archaic hoplite phalanx) which is ruptured by the the emergence of more complex, urban polis societies with their greater economic complexity and ability to escalate to more extreme forms of warfare. A sort of ‘fall of man’ but it is the ‘fall of hoplites’ – complete with an Edenic distant past and a worse present.

As you might imagine, the heretodox school rejects, or at least substantially revises basically all of these points: In the heterodox school:

• While we start to see hoplite equipment in the eighth century, the hoplite phalanx – the tactical formation which excludes light infantry and cavalry – emerges very late, perhaps as late as the 550s or even the 490s or even – in some extreme arguments – only in the mid-400s.
• There is thus no long period of ‘ideal’ Archaic hoplite warfare, where the system functioned in an ideal form over many generations, but instead hoplite warfare emerges ‘fully formed’ perhaps only moments before we see it in our texts; it is thus ‘new’ in 490 (or perhaps 431!).
• This is in part because hoplite equipment emerged gradually and piecemeal over a long period, with the fully panoply only present around c. 650 and hoplite equipment could be and was used for kinds of warfare other than the hoplite phalanx.
  • Let me pause for a moment to note that in both of these arguments the definition of ‘hoplite phalanx’ is very rigid: a fixed formation composed entirely of hoplites with no light troops intermingled, in close-order with fixed positions for the men. You may note this is a much more rigid definition than just a shield wall and indeed far more rigid than how the Greeks use the word phalanx (φάλαγξ), which they can use to describe almost any close-order heavy infantry formation using shields.
• The hoplite class was much smaller than the orthodox suppose, consisting in the main of ‘rich peasants’ and rentier-elites, rather than ‘yeoman farmers,’ and as such made up a much smaller proportion of the citizen population, perhaps around a quarter or a third of all adult citizen males in the Classical period, rather than nearly all (and even fewer in the Archaic period).
  • Here is some ‘linkage:’ the orthodox position often sees hoplites arising earlier at the same time as the first wave of tyrants in Greece, seen as the product of revolt by the demos (‘the people’) against narrow oligarchies, whereas the heterodox points out the chronology does not work and also hoplites were themselves oligarchic in nature, drawn from well-off farmers, not typical ones.
• The pressing of the othismos was metaphorical: hoplites did not smash together nor did they shove on each other in a rugby scrum, but rather fought at spear’s reach (eis doru), in a series of one-on-one fights, with combatants moving forward to strike or backwards to avoid being struck in a somewhat more fluid (but still organized and fairly rigid) formation. The ‘pressure’ was thus morale pressure, not physical pressure.
  • The heterodox phalanx is thus a looser formation, which is not built for ‘shoving‘ and is meaningfully more flexible on the battlefield.
• Because of the development timeline there was no long period of ‘ritual limited warfare,’ but rather a set of assumptions about ‘proper war’ honored mostly in the breach. Raiding, sieges, pursuit never went away and the troops to perform them – cavalry, light infantry – remained important in Greek polis armies throughout.
  • Consequently, whereas the orthodox view regards wars as fundamentally limited with a tacit agreement that the winner of a pitched battle will be able to dictate a limited peace, the heterodox school sees hoplite warfare as much less limited, especially in the Archaic, with more absolute war goals and a wider set of theories of victory to achieve them.
• Consequently, Thucydides and Xenophon are not so much representing the sudden rupture of an ancient set of military assumptions, but rather perhaps simply the high-water-mark of hoplite dominance and the consequent complaints as the waters recede.

As you can see, both schools weld together chronological assumptions (‘when did the phalanx emerge, how completely and how long did it remain in a position of unique dominance?’), social assumptions (‘who was a hoplite, how rich were they, what were their political roles and political tendencies?’) tactical assumptions (‘how did the phalanx function, how was it shaped by its equipment, what were the role of non-hoplites?’) and strategic assumptions (‘what was the purpose of war among poleis, what did they fight over and what was their overall theory of victory?’).

So if those are the positions, how did we get here and why does the debate seem ‘stalled out?’

Greeks, Germans and an Englishman

This summary I am going to present, I should note, is not by any means original to me but instead draws heavily on the historiographies presented by Roel Konijnendijk (a major hoplite-heterodox scholar) at the opening of his Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History (2018) alongside Donald Kagan and Gregory Viggiano’s (who sit on the hoplite-orthodox side) “The Hoplite Debate” chapter in their Men of Bronze (2013).⁵ This is a much simplified summary, but hopefully useful to see how we got here proceeding in five (perhaps six) phases. This is a historiography; Historiography is the ‘history of the history’ as it were, the history of a historical debate and so the topic of interest if we want to understand why these two schools formed the way they did.

The first phase, ably detailed by Konijnendijk is the phase we might call Prussian Foundations: a number of significant German-language scholars laid out the groundwork on the hoplite phalanx from the mid-to-late 1800s to the first decade of the 1900s, beginning with the work of Wilhelm Rüstow and Hermann Köchly and culminating in the work of Hans Delbrück.⁶ As Konijnendijk notes, these were nearly all military men and that influence permeates their vision of Greek warfare.In particular, they operated from an assumption, perhaps only tenable before the First World War, that the principles of war hadn’t really changed since antiquity and so the basic maxims, organizations and patterns of thinking they used would be readily applicable to polis armies composed primarily of hoplites. This is one of the frequent flaws of pre-1940-or-so scholarship: a failure to recognize the gulf of experience between the past and the present, in part because the gulf wasn’t quite so wide yet so military aristocrats of the 1890s or 1900s could imagine they were no so different from military aristocrats of the 490s or 390s (when in fact they were).

In short these late-18th, early-19th century German thinkers operated by analogy from the warfare they knew in their own past and a result developed a model of hoplite warfare predicted on the patterns of early gunpowder warfare.

The model they had, of course, was late-early-modern gunpowder warfare: rigid, performed in tight ranks with lots of control by command, where the actions of elite light forces and cavalry – high status units – would be rigorously recorded. That model was breaking down in their own day but still informed their sense of what warfare in the past might be like. And their model of hoplite warfare follows on this: tactically rigid, conducted with very tight ranks in pitched battles. Light infantry and cavalry, if not mentioned, must be unmentioned because they were absent, not because they might be politically or socially marginal.

And indeed, we too often jump to imagining close-order heavy infantry as literally ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ in this way, even though that was not how early modern pike squares or medieval shield walls or Roman legions or even hoplites fought. But it was how infantry was taught to fight (even if they didn’t always fight that way) with muskets during the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. And one feels in the Prussians some of that same assumption of tight, almost suffocating rigidity seeping in: they assume a standard depth, highly standard equipment, standard units (which they happily call ‘battalions’ and such) and they assume formation drill, because it was utterly standard in their warfare – even when it appears to be entirely absent from their subjects and when a more comparative frame would have told them such drilling was also absent from many other military traditions.

Note that what these historians are producing is a model, a sort of blended, formalized picture of an ideal hoplite battle in the sources – for these scholars had an incredible grasp of the source material – which risks then becoming the straight-jacket into which the sources are then fed. That rigid vision in turn forms the foundation for hoplite orthodoxy.

The next phase is the step into the Anglophone scholarship, which is where the debate will live for the next century; we might term this phase one of English Orthodoxy. The key initial figure here is G.B. Grundy, writing in the 1910s. Grundy takes the phalanx of the German scholarship and if anything interprets it even more rigidly, taking a general mental model and turning it into a ritualistic practice of war, arguing this was grounded in agricultural practice and the need to keep warfare limited for that purpose.⁷ He is also responsible for developing the ‘rugby scrum’ vision of what two phalanxes coming together might look like.

Grundy is also in no small part responsible both for the ‘fall of Man’ vision of hoplite change and for the orthodox interpretation of the othismos as well as developing a social vision for the place of the hoplite. As Konijnendijk notes – and indeed as Victor Davis Hansen has noted⁸ – Grundy doesn’t appear in citations nearly as much as his influence would imply; one is left to assume it is in part because he was a giant racist and no one is quite comfortable admitting that they are still using the historical model he constructed for his racism as the foundation for their assumptions. In particular, Grundy believed that the Greeks were racially predisposed to hoplite warfare and thus that the decline of its rigid customs was ‘racial decay,’ thus introducing this strain of the decline of hoplite warfare as a kind of ‘fall of man’ analogy.⁹

This phase then continues past the 1910s as scholars work out – or at least codify, as many of these conclusions had already occurred in some form among those first German scholars – implications about the connection between hoplites and the emergence of the polis, its structure, the rise of tyranny and such, as well as the supposed close connection between hoplite warfare and hoplite equipment (supposed at this point to have emerged at the same time and relatively quickly together).¹⁰

The othismos over othismos

The next phase we might call the Cracks in the Armor of hoplite orthodoxy because the response to this really begins with Anthony Snodgrass’ work on Greek arms and armor (notably Arms and Armor of the Greeks (1967)), though he was not wholly alone. By the 1950s, the archaeological and representational evidence for the development of Greek arms and armor in the Archaic period had gotten a fair bit better and Snodgrass is the first fellow to pull it all together in a book that is still a valuable reference text for discussing arms and armor. Snodgrass’ greater amount of material (and his frankly far greater mastery of the material) allowed him to demonstrate among other things that hoplite equipment did not appear all at once in the 700s, but rather emerged gradually and piecemeal, with the fully panoply not available until the 650s and even then incompletely adopted. There must then have been lone warriors using this equipment outside of the phalanx before a full formation was developed to accommodate it and so it must be able to be used outside of the rigid phalanx. That observation alone shakes many of the evidentiary pillars of orthodoxy mightily in terms of both chronology and tactics. It also shakes the political and social assumptions, because if hoplite equipment was introduced slowly and in piecemeal fashion, then the traditional aristocrats – the only fellows who could afford it – could have remained an elite warrior class and so the connection between hoplites and the emergence of a broad yeoman political class was weakened.

That movement then set the stage for the Restatement of the Orthodoxy, led by Victor Davis Hansen and his Western Way of War (1989, henceforth WWoW). This book has become so influential that students – and even scholars – often go no further back than it and so one often gets the impression that WWoW was a remarkably original or groundbreaking statement on hoplites, which to a considerable degree it isn’t. What WWoW does is take the method of probing battlefield experience advanced by John Keegan in The Face of Battle (1976) and apply it to a quite doctrinaire hoplite-orthodoxy model. Indeed, VDH notes (xvii) that he is doing this in part to refute the “idea of widespread fluidity in the phalanx,” which is to say Snodgrass and co., though he does not name them.¹¹ In particular, VDH reiterates – without much in the way of new evidence – that hoplite equipment was simply too cumbersome to use in other ways, thus trying to restore the connective tissue between hoplite equipment showing up in the archaeological evidence and the emergence of the phalanx as a fighting formation. In the first edition of WWoW, he essentially called for a new archaeological study to supply that evidence and Eero Jarva answered with Archaiologia on Archaic Greek Body Armour (1995), a book that assembles a lot of useful evidence only to – straight-jacketed by WWoW assumptions – sometimes interpret it quite strangely.¹²

To the degree that WWoW is making a new argument, it is an argument not about tactics or the emergence of the phalanx but about agriculture. Whereas previous scholars had argued that what would cause a defender to be willing to meet an attacker in a devastating clash of phalanxes was the threat of agricultural devastation, VDH argues that this threat was very limited: it simply wasn’t possible for these armies to do much devastating. Consequently, hoplites marshaled out not so much to protect fields as for civic pride and ideals, to oppose the insulting notion that an enemy might march uncontested through their lands. For what it is worth, I find Hanson’s view of the impact of agricultural disruption, focused on the impact of burned crops or cut down trees, a bit too capital focused – the viewpoint of a farmer who might always have had recourse to a grocery store and a checking account should a harvest fail. But as we’ve seen, that is not how ancient farmers lived so an army need not destroy farmland to pose a threat, they merely needed to disrupt agricultural activities (and forage off of the locals doing it) to pose a significant economic threat.

Equally important for VDH’s own model of thinking here (and his subsequent politics) is his stress on something we might call (he does not) the “yeoman hoplite.” What I mean by that is an assumption that the great strength of numbers of a hoplite army is drawn from a broad freeholding farmer class, composed mostly of men who work on their own quite small farms with fairly limited means. These households, it is assumed, would have made up most of the population (we’ll come back to the implications of this assumption) and so apart from large cities that had an urban poor class (like Athens) or under-developed hinterlands (like Achaea or Aitolia), the hoplites would represent not an elite or a gentry but a sort of ‘middle class’ in the American sense – the big bulk of households with property. This is not an immediately insane assumption – this does seem to be how the Roman army of the Middle Republic was structured – but it is a big assumption which we’ll see challenged in a minute. That said it fits broadly with VDH’s view that the ideal society is something like an ethnically homogeneous agrarian state of citizen-farmer-soldiers (which then shows up in his politics, which we will not deal with here or in the comments).

That said a lot of the influence of WWoW lies in how vividly it evokes the orthodox vision of the experience of hoplite battle and in particular the physical pressing ‘rugby scrum’ that it imagined for the concept of othismos referenced by ancient scholars. One frankly wonders if the nature of othismos would have such a central place in the hoplite debates that followed if it wasn’t such a central, evocative park of VDH’s book, even though as you can see above it is really at best quite a peripheral part of the concept of hoplites.

What then follows, of course , is the grand reaction to hoplite orthodoxy, a sort of Hoplite Reformation working in the groundwork laid in part by Snodgrass (both in his evidence but also his approach – these scholars are using more archaeological and especially representational evidence). Like the 16th century Reformation, the scope of this response to hoplite orthodoxy widened rapidly: what had been largely a chronological dispute between the immediate adoption of the orthodox and the ‘gradualist’ arguments of Snodgrass and others (some of our heterodox folks will end up even more gradualist than he), rapidly expanded into the parallel vision above, with different assumptions on tactics and also critically social role and status.

This substantial expansion of the argument begins with key articles by George Cawkwell (“Orthodoxy and Hoplites” Classical Quarterly 39.2 (1989)) and Peter Krentz (“The Nature of Hoplite Battle” Classical Antiquity 4.1 (1985)), both of which called into question the basic tactical assumptions around the othismos. These arguments get quite technical, but the main thrust, especially for Krentz, was that the evidence, which had always been interpreted within the pre-existing model (what Konijnendijk would call the ‘Prussian’ model) was, in fact, ambiguous. Was there artwork that showed hoplites packed tightly together? Sure, but also artwork that didn’t and both are hard to interpret. Did Thucydides describe a ‘shields-together’ (synaspismos) formation – sure, but there’s no reason to suppose Thucydides’ fifth-century synaspismos worked the same way as Polybius’ second century or Asclepiodotus’ first century understanding of term. Othismos can mean a physical pushing, but it can also be metaphorical, and so on.

In short, Krentz was showing that the orthodox tactical vision was not required by the sources.

However as noted above, hoplite orthodoxy was a complete mental model for hoplite warfare, composed of a bunch of interlocking assumptions, chronological, tactical and social. Thus what the assault on hoplite orthodoxy required as a complete competing model which was in turn supplied by Hans van Wees’ Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities (2004), which is at this point the ur-text for hoplite heterodoxy. Notably, where WWoW is a Face of Battle-style experiential book, Myths and Realities is developmental in its focus, because where VDH is proposing an almost eternal, ideal form of hoplite battle, van Wees is suggesting significant development, with the classic form emerging only in the 500s if even then (thus taking an even more gradualist view than Snodgrass).

Van Wees incorporates and expands on Krentz’ vision of a hoplite battle as a “multiplicity of individual combats,” rather than organized shoving: hoplites broke into a run at perhaps 200m but then slowed and did not crash into each other at all. Instead they stopped eis doru (‘at spear’s reach,’ a phrase from Xenophon) pulsing forward and back to stab at enemies or evade blows. Eventually morale pressure – not physical pressure – is what destroys the phalanx’s cohesion and it is these forward ‘pushes’ (into the ‘no man’s land’ of a spear-thrust’s length between the lines) that are the othismoi, ‘presses, pushes’ of our sources.¹³

That style of combat could, in turn, emerge much more gradually. Van Wees argues that we can see the origins of the phalanx as early as Homer (writing c. 750), but in a form so hybridized as to not even remotely resemble the orthodox model. Instead, he argues that cavalry and light infantry – archers, javelin men, etc. – were not excluded from the phalanx to make a single body of close-order heavy infantry until very late (he argues this mostly using Archaic artwork showing hoplites alongside archers and such). Instead this Archaic combat involves sometimes lines and masses of men, but frequently in more fluid combat; van Wees tries to generalize from patterns of warfare recorded in the historical period from highland Papua New Guinea.¹⁴ Cheaper, more lightly armored infantry thus persist quite a lot longer in van Wees’ model, through essentially the whole of the Archaic which, if you are watching closely, obliterates almost entirely the long period of ‘pure’ Archaic hoplite warfare that the orthodox model assumes both in its assumptions about the economic and social role of hoplites and also the ‘fall of Man’ vision of tactical change in the 400s. Instead, the ‘oops, all heavy infantry’ hoplite army, if it ever existed (more on that in a moment) in van Wees’ model is a relatively brief apparition of the 500s which is largely gone by the end of the 400s. The Peloponnesian War is thus not the end of a long tradition of ‘pure’ hoplite battle, but rather just one more episode in the continuous change and evolution of Greek warfare that began at least as early as the mid-8th century.

Van Wees also revisits the social standing of the men that make up hoplites and attacks the ‘yeoman farmer’ vision of VDH. Instead, van Wees crunches the numbers on the wealth requirements for hoplites and notes that while poorer men might serve, it sure seems like the typical man of the hoplite class (those with the wealth to be required to serve) was actually quite wealthy, with farms probably 20+ acres in size, far from the tiny 3-7 acre farms a typical peasant might have; these households will have almost certainly included a fair bit of enslaved labor and many of them may have had enough land not to work much of it personally (making some of these fellows more gentry than peasant). More ‘working class’ hoplites must often have served (especially in the Classical period), but van Wees supposes their farms to have been typically 10-15 acres or more, which is still quite big compared to typical peasant farms, putting these ‘working class’ hoplites closer to ‘rich peasants.’ These might be joined by even poorer men with incomplete panoplies (perhaps in the rear ranks) who still desired the social status of one who fights in the infantry-line, but there’s a clear class divide here. Van Wees thus imagines the hoplites thus not as a broad cross-cut of a yeoman-society, but in fact a narrower agricultural elite, perhaps a quarter, third or at most half of the free male population.

To give a sense of what a difference that makes remember that VDH’s model is, in some ways, thinking in terms of – and I should be clear he never frames it this way – as “what if Greek poleis mobilized basically like the Roman Republic.” And the Roman Republic probably kept something on the order of two-thirds of its adult male population (free and non-free) or about 80% of its free adult male population on the muster roles. By contrast, in van Wees’ vision, your typical polis might be mandating service from maybe a third of its free male population. That is an enormous difference in social involvement in this kind of warfare, which has huge implications for how we understand the polis (which we’ll get to later).

The battle lines drawn, the two sides advanced and…

The Stalled othismos

…stalled out.

So to summarize: hoplite orthodoxy initially formed form its Prussian Foundations from the mid-1800s to the first decade of the 1900s, before jumping the language barrier into English Orthodoxy in the 1910s (from which point onward, the debate will remain ‘Anglophone’ – most of the scholars writing on it do so in English) and the implications of hoplite-orthodoxy are worked out from the 1910s to the 1960s. It is as that point that we see the first objections to orthodoxy relating to its chronology (Cracks in the Armor) in the 1960s and 1970s, which in turn triggers Victor Davis Hanson’s Restatement of Orthodoxy in the 1980s and 1990s, which in turn is answered by the Hoplite Reformation led by Peter Krentz and Hans van Wees (inter alia) which begins as early as the 1980s but really breaks through in the 2000s and represents the preponderance of the scholarship from 2000 to the present.

This brings us to the current phase, which one is tempted to call counter-reformation but really feels like Stagnation.

Hoplite-orthodox replies appeared to van Wees’ model. Notable among these are some of the chapters from Kagan and Viggiano, Men of Bronze (2013), particularly Viggiano’s “The Hoplite Revolution and the Rise of the Polis” and VDH’s “The Hoplite Narrative.” Adam Schwartz also produced a monograph length response, Reinstating the Hoplite (2013) in the same year. Both sets of works, to my mind, suffer from a problem of inflexibility, refusing to give ground in places where the heterodox crowd clearly has a point and instead basically just restating the orthodox position rather than defending it or revising it.¹⁵ That problem – where hoplite-orthodoxy scholars end up mostly just restating old positions – is a product of the fact that hoplite orthodoxy is a 175-year-old thesis that has had its implications thoroughly (perhaps too thoroughly) worked out. If one is not prepared to give ground, there is nothing much left to do but to restate the old positions, which certainly isn’t going to convince anyone new.

It is also, I should note, a problem of people. The key hoplite-orthodox figures – VDH most notably – have not trained graduate students and so there is no young-and-hungry up-and-coming generation of hoplite-orthodox scholars to argue with the heterodox (whereas van Wees, along with Krentz and others, have trained another generation of hoplite-heterodox scholars, who now have no interlocutors!).

Meanwhile, on the heterodox side, scholars are left to sort out the implications of their new model, but of course those are the implications of a new model whose acceptance is not universal: if you do not hold the heterodox view on hoplites, then the question of “what does the heterodox view imply for [society/tactics/warfare/training/etc]” is not a very interesting one. That said it is undeniable that the weight of activity since 2000 has been on the side of heterodoxy: these fellows publish more and have more to say, in part because they have a whole new theory to work out and in part because they are still trying to convince everyone else.

Notable in these ‘working out’ efforts are works like F. Echeverria’s “Taktike techne: the neglected element in Classical ‘Hoplite’ Battles'” Ancient Society 41 (2011) and R. Konijnendijk, Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History (2018), both of which aim to grind away the notion of limited and ritualistic warfare in favor of Greek polities trying to win within the available framework, albeit – as Konijnendijk stresses – with armies composed of largely untrained and undrilled soldiers and amateur generals.¹⁶ Further works by van Wees and Peter Krentz (particularly companion chapters, such as the former in the Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Warfare and the later in the Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece) have also continued to flow forth. I should note that what I have offered here is hardly a comprehensive review of either ‘camp’ – I have had to leave key works out for space and this is particularly true for the heterodox side because they have published quite a bit more in the last three decades.

The problem has become, frankly, that without a strong but actually novel restatement of an orthodox – or at least anti-heterodox – hoplite position since 2013, the hoplite-heterodox scholars find themselves with no one to argue against (VDH in particular has essentially declared victory and then quit the field and is so unavailable as an interlocutor), but at the same time, no one has really moved in fifteen years at least. Meanwhile, there is the question of the audience, because of course most ancient historians do not work on hoplites: this debate is relevant to basically anyone working on Greece or Rome (who must thus teach ancient Mediterranean world surveys in which these questions – particularly the social/political ones – matter a lot), but of course very few of those folks work on hoplites.

If the audience had decisively shifted, we could simply pronounce at this point one side or the other the ‘winner’ (for now, at least) – the way we can say with some certainty that the low-counters ‘won’ the Roman demography debate (or at least the high-counters lost) and that the modernists have, with reservations ‘won’ the Roman economy debate (or at least the hard-primitivists have lost). But my sense is that this shift in the communis opinio (‘the common opinion’) has not really happened in a durable way.

I hesitate to bring up Everett Wheeler here because I know that his often sharp and acerbic writing has left quite a few folks in this debate more than a little sore (and not unjustifiably so), but I think he serves a useful bellwether for how scholars of ancient warfare outside of the two hoplite camps have received the arguments, albeit less vehemently in all cases. As we noted when we chatted Roman strategy, few alive know more about ancient warfare and Wheeler, writing very bluntly, has at times almost played ‘referee’ in these debates.¹⁷ And on the one hand, Wheeler is quick to point out that the heterodox camp has revealed serious deficiencies in the orthodox model: the cumbersome hoplite will not do, the idea that head-on-head no-trickery-or-tactics battles were normal rather than ideal cannot stand, the evidence for the early Archaic is too ambiguous and complex for the simplistic orthodox developmental model and so on.¹⁸ At the same time, Wheeler is venomously dismissive of some of the heterodox methods (particularly van Wees’ reasoning from warfare in Papua New Guinea) and repeatedly notes that the existence of exceptions does not imply the absence of rules pushed for by the heterodox camp when it comes to tactics and trickery.¹⁹ In both cases, he often critiques both camps for being excessively rigid and dogmatic, too secure in their rightness to accept that their opponents might have a point on this or that thing. Of course given the time and effort he has also put into insulting everyone involved, were he to offer a synthesis one cannot imagine it would be greeted with friendly eyes.

To my mind – and I too am essentially a bystander in this argument – the current place the debate has settled is not ideal, because it has not resolved, it has merely stopped. My vague sense is that more than a few academic bystanders are slipping back into orthodox positions mostly out of habit, which is not good because some of those positions really have been quite significantly undermined – a sort of thoughtless ‘counter-reformation of inertia,’ which is not a good outcome given the significance this debate has for how we understand the polis itself.

My own view is that a synthesis is required. This is not my specialty, so I am not going to be the one to write that book, but for the next post, I am going to outline why I think this argument remains significant and the grounds where I think synthesis – a blending of the camps – is possible.

https://acoup.blog/2025/11/14/collections-hoplite-wars-part-i-the-othismos-over-othismos/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=collections-hoplite-wars-part-i-the-othismos-over-othismos

https://acoup.blog/?p=31809