Hoplite Hell: How Hoplites Fought
Hoplite Hell: How Hoplites Fought
This chapter takes aim at Victor Davis Hanson's The Western Way of War and its highly influential and popular conception of how hoplites fought. It critiques the orthodox view—especially the version of Hanson—concerning the actual weight of the hoplite panoply, which the chapter argues was far lighter than the traditional estimate of about seventy pounds. The chapter proposes a different interpretation of the various stages of hoplite battle, such as the hoplite charge into battle. In this view, the evidence supports neither the picture of a mass collision between armies nor the concept of a mass pushing of troops or the account of the othismos as a rugby scrum. Furthermore, this chapter contends that the phalanx did not consist exclusively of hoplites before Marathon. It suggests, however, that even in the fifth century hoplites never actually fought in a cohesive formation.
Keywords: The Western Way of War, hoplite fighting, hoplite panoply, hoplite orthodoxy, hoplite battle, mass collision, hoplite formations
Princeton Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
