Much of our contemporary ancient testimony about hoplite battles, Tyrtaeus, for example, is not that they were nasty affairs, but that they were glorious. Schwartz takes no account of the ample evidence that hoplite battles were not normally gritty and horrible, as a Keegan approach would suggest. Here, the reader might expect some detailed reference to the military historian John Keegan, who stresses the hellishness of war, focusing on the physical discomfort of soldiers (for example, the need to urinate while wearing heavy metal armor in the hot sun). Attached to this section is a separate brief chapter on physical limitations imposed by hoplite equipment, especially the weight of armor. Schwartz can be congratulated for extracting information from the notoriously unhelpful officials at Olympia.įrom protective gear we come to chapters on offensive weapons, spears and swords. Schwartz calculates and reports the restricted peripheral vision in metric terms and concludes: “It is difficult to achieve complete accuracy, but it is certainly safe to say that a helmet of Corinthian type does restrict vision” (p. He also finds an experimental subject to wear the object, presumably a subject with a small head. Schwartz even makes his own replica of a Corinthian helmet (material not specified), using dimensions supplied, he reports, by the Olympia museum.
But the question remains and seems unanswerable: Is 3.360 kilos impossibly heavy or unexpectedly light? 1Īfter shields we get helmets. This exact information is precious since few if any other cuirasses have been weighed. For this surviving bronze we happen to have the exact weight of the bell cuirass, 3.360 kilos, as measured by the French excavators. In the next chapter Schwartz moves on to body armor, beginning with the Argos panoply itself. The shield, we might add, serves as both a defensive and offensive weapon and also determines the simple tactics of the phalanx. Schwartz’s readers then plunge, after these few preliminaries, into a detailed chapter (123 footnotes) on the hoplite shield, beginning with “materials and measurements.” The hoplite shield ( hoplon) comes first evidently because it defines the warrior, since he could discard virtually every other element in his panoply and still be a hoplite. He will focus, he says, on the “practical” side of being a hoplite. as the start of his study and the battle of Chaeronea in 338 as his ending. Schwartz takes the Argos panoply of the 8th century B.C. Finally he presents a select annotated list of recorded battles in which hoplites played some role. Second, he gives a diachronic account of hoplites in Greek history. First, Schwartz minutely examines hoplite military equipage. The book has a number of interesting pages, but the author focuses so narrowly on his vision of his topic that some readers will find more frustration than enlightenment. Schwartz attempts to explicate in a new way the nature and function of hoplite phalanx fighters.
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