serpentine smiles

Posted by Bret Devereaux

https://acoup.blog/2026/01/16/collections-hoplite-wars-part-ivb-training-hoplites/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=collections-hoplite-wars-part-ivb-training-hoplites

https://acoup.blog/?p=33260

This is, at long last, the last part of our four-part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, Intermission, IVa). last time we looked at the social status of hoplites and the implications that had for the political and social structure of the polis and even the very basic question of how many people there were in ancient Greece.

I had originally planned for this week’s topic – the amount of training and combat experience hoplites had – to be an addendum to that discussion as it related to how we understand who hoplites are (yeoman soldiers or leisured elites? warrior elites or amateurs?) but there wasn’t the time to work it in. So it sits here almost as a coda to the entire series.

So that is what we are going to look at today: how were hoplites prepared for battle? This topic is going to be a bit more complicated than most of our neat binary orthodox-heterodox divides because they are divisions within the orthodox school here, although oddly those divisions don’t seem to me to be readily acknowledged. In particular, we might identify an old-orthodox position (hoplites drilled and trained), a new-orthodox VDH-position (hoplites fought a lot, but trained little), a non-scholarly and remarkably a-historical pop-orthodox Pressfield-position (hoplites did US Marines boot camp) and finally the heterodox position (hoplites were largely untrained amateurs).

So to tackle this question, we want to ask how often hoplites fought, what kind of training was available to them, when it was available and the degree to which it was compulsory. As we’re going to see, I think the evidence here leans in the heterodox position, though I would argue it doesn’t lean quite as far as Roel Konijnendijk, the heterodox scholar who I think has focused on this issue the most, might have it.

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; I don’t promise not to use the money to buy a full hoplite panoply, but I also don’t not 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 and Bluesky for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.

Understanding the (Very Much Not Boot) Camps

But we should start by trying to get a handle on what everyone’s positions actually are and here I think we do need to be careful to make a distinction between three kinds of ‘training’ involved in warfare. When we say drill, we mean training in groups, focused on practicing moving and fighting as a formation. By contrast, when we say training at arms (or ‘training in arms’) we mean individual combat training on how to use weapons. A good way to think about this is the contrast between how a marching band collectively trains to move together during their shows (drill) and how the individual musicians train independently to play their instruments well (training at arms, except the arms are trombones). Finally there is fitness training, which is focused neither on the specific motions of collective action (that’s drill) or the specific motions of individual fighting (that’s training at arms) but rather on strength, stamina and agility.

You will want to keep those terms separate because of course it is perfectly possible for armies to do one kind of training and not the others. Many types of ‘warriors’ for instance, might train for individual combat (training at arms) and even for personal fitness, but because they do not expect to fight in formation in large groups, they have little use for drill. On the other hand, in some societies where the expectation is that soldiers are recruited broadly from a farming class that is already very physically active, there might be less emphasis on fitness training, but if they expect them to fight in formation, a lot of emphasis on drill. And of course different weapons demand different degrees of training at arms: spears are generally easier to use with less training than swords or muskets and so on.

So we’re interested here in both how much training but also what kind of training and we cannot assume just because we see one kind of training that the others are present.

So with our terms in place, to outline the debate briefly, the early German scholars of our ‘Prussian Foundations,’ when they thought about hoplites largely assumed drill, because it was the ubiquitous understood principle of their day that drill was the way that soldiers could be made to fight in formation together.¹ Consequently early hoplite orthodoxy assumed that hoplite formations must have drilled in order to function. Likewise, extrapolating from their own (gunpowder) warfare, they assumed rigid formations with standard spacing, assigned places in line which maneuvered like early modern musket or pike formations, marching in time and with standard evolutions to move from column into line and such.² It seems to have legitimately not occured to these early scholars that there was any way to do close-order infantry that didn’t involve drill and so even though – as we’re going to see – there’s very little evidence to suggest that hoplites regularly drilled, they just assumed they did. So that is the ‘old’ orthodox position: it assumes hoplites drilled and practiced at arms, without a lot of evidence to support the notion, because that’s simply what – to them – soldiers did.

(This is also, I think, another example of ‘Rome acting as the frog DNA for studying Greece.’ The Romans did drill and practice at arms and we know that because the sources tell us repeatedly. But part of the reason the sources tell us is that the Roman practice was strange to them, which of course in turn suggests you cannot use it to fill in the gaps for Greece or anywhere else!)

That said, the ‘Restatement of the Orthodoxy’ phase – inaugurated by VDH’s The Western Way of War (1989) took an odd turn from this point an in some ways. While WWoW is, for the most part, simply a full-throated restatement of the old orthodoxy on hoplites, one of VDH’s obsessions was the idea (substantially critiqued in last week’s post) of the hoplites as ‘yeoman’ citizen-warriors, which leads him to stress the importance of civilian social bonds (sub-units of the polis, called tribes (φυλαί, ‘phulai’)) and thus not to assume the sort of drill that the older Prussian scholars (on whom he otherwise often relies) do. I haven’t found any specific point where VDH openly disputes the notion that hoplites had drill or training at arms, but he pretty clearly assumes they don’t.³

On the other hand, WWoW assumes that in the ideal, archaic form of hoplite warfare, hoplite battles were really frequent, assuming “battle of some type on an average of two out of every three years.”⁴ So VDH seems to assume that hoplites are untrained but that hoplite army fight so frequently that most hoplites would have a lot of experience, which would make up for being untrained. VDH’s assumptions about the frequency of hoplite battles are, uh, quite flawed, as we’re going to see.

At around the same time (the late 1990s), hoplites, particularly Spartans surged back into the popular consciousness through the action of Frank Miller’s comic 300 (1998) – it gets a film of the same name in (2006) and Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire (1998). These form the bedrock of the modern popular misunderstanding of Sparta and are all terrible guides to the ancient world (despite Gates of Fire, to my eternal annoyance, frequently making military academy reading lists). Both pieces of popular culture are at best only tenuously connected to any actual historical scholarship or the actual historical sources and both, for reasons of their fiction, want to understand the Spartan agoge as super-badass warrior training. Both imagine both drill and training at arms in the context of Spartan training, with Pressfield especially imagining the agoge as an almost direct analogy to modern military training (particularly his own US Marine Corps boot camp). This is essentially a modern version of the same error our 19th century Prussians were making: assuming that armies have always worked the way they work now.

But this notion of hoplites generally and Spartans particularly as highly trained ‘super elite’ warriors persists in popular culture and leads to the sort of shocked incredulity one gets when noting that there is in fact relatively little evidence for extensive drill or any training at arms at Sparta, much less anywhere else.

Finally, there is the heterodox position, which has been most recently compiled and defended by Roel Konijnendijk in Classical Greek Tactics (2018), 39-71. Konijnendijk describes the question of training as a “hidden controversy” and I think that is right: there is in fact a lot of disagreement here, but because it is embedded in the assumptions beneath the arguments rather than the arguments themselves, it is rarely expressed as disagreement. Konijnendijk surveys the evidence and concludes, to quote him, “the typical Greek citizen hoplite knew no weapons drill, no formation drill, and understood only the simplest of signals“⁵ Konijnendijk allows for “modest advances” by smaller, more elite units in the late Classical but largely rejects a developmental model where the amount of training and drill increased over time.⁶ In short, hoplites were consummate amateurs – with the exceptions (Spartans, the Sacred Band, etc.) having still only very limited real training – and remained that way through the Classical period. Real military drill and effective mass-training would have to wait for the Macedonians.⁷

So let’s take a brief look through the evidence and see which of these viewpoints holds up.

How Often Did They Fight?

It may actually be easier to move out of order a bit and deal with the easiest to dispense with position first, which is actually Victor Davis Hanson’s notion that a polis and thus most of its hoplites fought a “battle of some type on an average of two out of every three years.”⁸ VDH provides no supporting evidence for this argument and it does not hold up either as a direct, evidentiary matter or as a matter of its logical implications.

Post-Publication Note! A bit of a goof here! VDH writes in WWoW, as quoted above, “For the citizen of the fifth-century Greek city-state who saw battle of some type on an average of two out of every three years” (WWoW, 89). Which is to say a battle every eighteen months on average. That is such an insane claim that I seem to have edited it in my brain to the also-wrong but at least less facially insane idea of a battle every 2 or 3 years. But, as folks in the comments pointed out, that’s not what VDH said, he said two out of every three. You can tell how VDH has just not considered the implications because on the very same page he comments that, “this long tour of duty meant that in the phalanx as a whole a great number of hoplites were always men over thirty” but at an 18-month (rather than 24- to 36-month) battle tempo, there actually wouldn’t be very many hoplites over 30 (for reasons discussed below)! I am not going to re-run my demographic math below to also figure for a 18-month tempo because there’s not much point to the effort: having demonstrated that a 36-month tempo is unworkable, a tempo twice as fast is already ruled out. However, I have made some light edits to reflect the fact that I am actually testing a much more reasonable case than what VDH has supposed.

The idea here is that, if the polis has a hoplite battle – or even a smaller action – every eighteen months or so, the typical hoplite who survived the roughly forty years of military eligibility – citizens served as hoplites from their late teens to 60 years of age – would see dozens of battles (around 25 of them). The problem with that argument is the obvious one: actual major hoplite engagements (and even minor ones!) don’t seem to have ever been that common. You may recall we listed every major Spartan battle (and a fair number of minor ones) between 500 and 323 B.C. and found 38 of them or one battle every 5 years or so, less than a third of the frequency VDH supposes (Sparta is useful for this exercise because unlike other poleis (other than Athens) we can be pretty confident that basically every major Spartan battle is attested). And that’s a list that includes battles in which there were basically no spartiates present (e.g. Amphipolis (422)) or which were very small actions involving just a few hundred hoplites (e.g. Pylos (425)) or fourteen naval battles. Filtering for all of that, we end up with Sparta fighting a major pitched hoplite battle something like once roughly each decade.

Making that figure even worse, it’s not clear that we can be sure any of those battles involved something like the entire Spartan citizen force. There ought to be something like 8,000 spartiates in 479, but only 5,000 show up for Plataea (479 B.C.; the remainder of the Spartan force are helots and perioikoi). The Spartan force at Mantinea (418), a major battle in Sparta’s backyard, we’re told had five-sixths (Thuc. 5.64.3) of the spartiates present, which comes close to an all-call. But most of these battles are much smaller and involve only a minority of the citizen body.

In short then, when we actually try to run the numbers, the suggestion we get is not that hoplites are rolling out for a major battle every two out of three years – or even once every three years – but rather than a polis probably only fights a major pitched battle around once a decade, with a few minor engagements between and that not every hoplite is at every battle, suggesting the typical hoplite, rather than seeing 25 (or 20 or 15 or 10) actions in his life, might instead see perhaps 3-4. An interesting data-point: we know that Socrates was of military age and fought as a hoplite for Athens during the difficult days of the Peloponnesian War and that he served in three campaigns and saw three battles: Potidaea (432), Delium (424) and Amphipolis (422); given the context – Plato is giving us a full accounting of Socrates’ service to the city in his defense in a period of very high military activity – we can probably assume this is an exhaustive list and perhaps on the high end.⁹ So the idea that a typical hoplite might serve on three or four campaigns and see perhaps that many significant engagements seems to fit with the evidence we have. Some doubtless saw more, some saw less and there are probably a bunch of minor skirmishes scattered in that we can’t see.

Which, as an aside, VDH has to be wrong demographically as well. As Peter Krentz notes,¹⁰ a typical pitched battle between hoplites seemed to produce roughly 10% losses (that is, KIA; ancient sources almost never count WIA), split between about 5% of the victor and 15% of the loser. Needless to say, a society losing 10% of its adult male citizen population every eighteen months on a permanent basis is not going to remain a society for very long.

We can actually quickly run the math on this. As noted above, I ran the math on this question for a significantly slower 30-month battle tempo rather than for the insanely rapid 18-month battle tempo VDH proposes, but the exercise will serve. A polis fighting a hoplite battle at c. 10% deaths would have lost half its population by the sixth battle and by the twelfth only a quarter would be left alive, purely from combat related deaths. Accounting for normal civilian mortality on top of this, a society fighting four hoplite battles (each at 10% casualties) a decade (so a 30-month tempo, rather than 18) would lose half of its generational cohort reaching adulthood by thirty and lose ninety percent of it by age 45. Accounting for male child mortality on top of that, you’d have a society birthing one thousand male babies (so just under two thousand total births) each year to have twenty eight men in that surviving cohort make it to 45 and around fifty or sixty men total living over the age of 45.¹¹ That is simply not the sort of age structure suggested by ancient Greek literature.

In short then it seems like the typical citizen-hoplite saw battle infrequently. It was hardly a wholly foreign experience – the typical citizen hoplite expected to participate in a few engagements and perhaps one or two major battles in their life time – but they were hardly doing this often enough or consistently enough to get a lot of fighting experience. The contrast with the Romans – the average Roman male during the Middle Republic will have had to serve around 7 years to make up the numbers for the Roman armies we see – is marked.¹²

Hoplites simply didn’t campaign that often.

Training and Drill?

So let’s start with training at arms. Was there much training at arms among Greek hoplites?

Broadly, I think the evidence suggests ‘no,’ but I think Konijnendijk is maybe a little too quick to dismiss a developmental model, where the edges of that ‘no’ fuzz over time.

The general sense one gets is that broadly the Greeks did not think that contact fighting requires specific, focused training in the motions and patterns of fighting – that is, training at arms. Note how that doesn’t mean they didn’t think fitness was important – remember, that is separate. This appears to be Xenophon’s view, for instance: in the Cyropaedia (Xen. Cyrop 2.3.9-10, trans W. Miller), Xenophon has his ideal ruler, the Persian Cyrus, arm many of light-armed poor as heavy contact infantry (though with swords, not spears), on the grounds that fighting this way would eliminate the skill distinction (removing the advantage of enemy rich Persians, who trained extensively in archery) because:¹³

“And now,” he continued, “we have been initiated into a method of fighting [that is, hoplite-style fighting], which, I observe, all men naturally understand, just as in the case of other creatures each understands some method of fighting which it has not learned from any other source than from instinct: for instance, the bull knows how to fight with his horns, the horse with his hoofs, the dog with his teeth, the boar with his tusks. And all know how to protect themselves, too, against that from which they most need protection, and that, too, though they have never gone to school to any teacher.
As for myself, I have understood from my very childhood how to protect the spot where I thought I was likely to receive a blow; and if I had nothing else I put out my hands to hinder as well as I could the one who was trying to hit me. And this I did not from having been taught to do so, but even though I was beaten for that very act of putting out my hands. Furthermore, even when I was a little fellow I used to seize a sword wherever I saw one, although, I declare, I had never learned, except from instinct, even how to take hold of a sword. At any rate, I used to do this, even though they tried to keep me from it—and certainly they did not teach me so to do—just as I was impelled by nature to do certain other things which my father and mother tried to keep me away from. And, by Zeus, I used to hack with a sword everything that I could without being caught at it. For this was not only instinctive, like walking and running, but I thought it was fun in addition to its being natural.

Now this is essentially a made-up story that Xenophon is putting in the history of Cyrus II (the Great) who he is presenting as an ideal ruler, so this didn’t happen, but what it suggests very strongly is that Xenophon – an experienced military man, a mercenary general who wrote manuals on tactics – does not think that training at arms is necessary. Instead he stresses that the style of warfare is instinctive – that humans fight in contact warfare, in his view, the same way a bull fights with its horns, entirely untrained.

And that impression extends to much of the rest of our sources. Xenophon’s description of the agoge and broader Spartan rearing program features fitness and obedience training, but not practice with weapons (Xen. Lac. Con. 11, 12.5-6).¹⁴ Tyrtaeus, in a classic passage (West fr. 12) declares that he “would not rate a man worth mention or account either for speed of foot or wrestling skill, not even if he had a Cyclops’ size and strength or could outrun the fierce north wind of Thrace […] no, no man is of high regard in time of war unless he can endure the sight of blood and death and stand close to the enemy and fight,” essentially declaring that all forms of excellence that might result from practice or training were less important than simple personal courage. When Agesilaus was “wishing to practice his army” he offers the cavalry prizes for the best horsemanship, the skirmishers prizes for the best shooting and throwing and the hoplites just a prize for physical fitness, leading to the hoplites to call exercise in the gymnasia (Xen. Hell. 3.4.16). Over and over again we see that when hoplite armies do train, training at arms is unmentioned and instead physical fitness is stressed.¹⁵

On the other hand, we have some interesting references in Plato. In Plato’s Republic, we get a discussion of the military of the ideal city: Plato has Socrates in the dialogue suggest that their ideal, utopian society ought to have a professional army, precisely to allow for this kind of training, but notably he suggests this precisely because Glaucon – his interlocutor at this point – assumes that this ideal politeia will be defended by its untrained citizenry (Plato, Rep. 2.373-4). The implication is that at least some Greeks recognized that skill at arms might be useful, but that the typical hoplite generally didn’t train at it. Likewise, Aristotle (writing decades later and living for some time in the Macedonian court of Philip II) argues directly that mercenary troops were superior to citizen militias precisely because mercenaries actually trained on their weapons (Arist. Eth. Nic. 1116b.7-8). Again, the implication training at arms was understood to be potentially useful, but something everyone assumed citizen hoplite armies did not do.

Alongside this was the emergence of hoplomachoi – trainers at arms for hoplites – and their attendant hoplomachia. Our first references to these fellows are in Plato (Plat. Lach. 181e-183a) and honestly the vibe one gets from our sources is sometimes derisive: Plato has Nicias present this sort of training in arms as good and very helpful for young men, only to be immediately dismissed by Laches who notes quite bluntly that the Spartans – more interested in preparing for war than other Greeks – don’t make use of it, so it must be useless. Xenophon too is mocking (Xen. Anab. 2.1.7; Mem. 3.1). Konijnendijk, I think, maybe reads some of this mockery a little too straight – Xenophon wouldn’t feel the need if many folks did not take these guys seriously – but is fundamentally right to note that individual traveling weapon instructors were hardly going to train entire hoplite armies.¹⁶

The conclusion I think we have to draw here is that the lack of training at arms became a known problem in Greece but that at least in the Classical period, that problem was never ‘solved.’ Notably, it certainly was not solved in Sparta, which seems to have neglected this training entirely; so much for the idea of the agoge as being like a modern boot camp in terms of having practice on specific weapons. On the other hand arranging these reports chronologically, one senses something of a growing awareness – Plato and Xenophon are writing after the Peloponnesian War and Aristotle is a generation younger than them – that this is in fact a problem. Athens is going to make the ephebia, a military training program for young men mandatory in 336/5 (it existed before, but was non-mandatory and unpaid, so probably only for the very wealthy), right at the tail end of the Classical period, which may also be suggestive of something a little more like the ‘developmental’ model. It seems consistent with our limited evidence to suppose that other poleis – for which our evidence is far less complete than Athens – might have been trending in the same way in the late Classical, a trend which might have culminated in the Macedonian army of Philip II and Alexander, which is generally assumed to have been trained at arms and in drill.¹⁷

After training at arms, we can consider drilling, that is training to fight in groups. And here Konijnendijk summarizes the evidence neatly that prior to the 330s (when the Athenian ephebia is made mandatory, as noted above), “there is no evidence for formation drill anywhere outside of Sparta.“¹⁸ As Konijnendijk also notes, this isn’t just a question of pure silence – every so often sources note the absence of such training (.e.g Plato, Laws 831b). The most dramatic is the passage that tells us the Spartans could do formation drills: Xenophon presents as astounding the fact that the Spartans can perform even basic maneuvers “which hoplomachoi [instructors in fighting] think very difficult,” like forming from column into line (Xen. Lac. Con. 11) and elsewhere (Xen. Mem. 3.12.5) explicitly notes there was no public military training at Athens in his day.

Which is to say that the Spartans, the only poleis we have evidence did any sort of formation drill, amazed everyone by being able to do something that, in a broader world-historical sense is an extremely basic formation drill. If you will permit the contrast, in a century Macedonian sarisa-phalanxes are going to be advancing in separate units, charging, giving ground, wheeling under pressure, opening ranks to admit light infantry and even once forming square in combat but the very best that the Classical Greek hoplite can manage – and only in Sparta! – is forming from column into line as a group and a few other quite basic maneuvers that show up elsewhere in Xenophon (largely in the Hellenica). Once again, our ancient authors seem aware that this is a weakness and we might imagine there were some efforts here and there to remedy it, but the overall impression is that outside of Sparta, hoplites generally did not drill at all such that even the relatively modest Spartan achievements in this respect were considered remarkable.

Now I do think, when it comes to training at arms and drill, we probably ought to be alive to the idea that young men of the appropriate social status were probably prepared for the battles they were going to fight informally, at home. We’ve stressed the lack of formal training, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t informal training. Now, it has to be immediately conceded: our sources breath not a word of this to us. No real sense that young men learned to wield a spear or stand a position from their fathers. But there’s a lot about the raising of children in antiquity we don’t really know – this omission isn’t surprising. That said, given the frequent notes on our sources of how limited the capabilities of citizen hoplites were, just how amateurish they were compared to mercenaries or the still-fairly-unimpressive Spartans, this informal training could never have been very thorough, if it happened.

All of which leaves physical fitness training.

The Greeks thought physical fitness training was important and put a fair bit of emphasis on it, although the fact that our sources also assert that poor wiry farmers made the best soldiers (e.g. that Plato, Republic 556cd) – the poor farmers who could not afford to spend a bunch of time training at the gymnasion is rather suggestive about how limited the role of formal fitness training was in most poleis. We do often see ‘picked’ bodies of men in hoplite armies, but these are generally the youngest and fittest fellows picked out, rather than a special unit that trains together (though special units do emerge – things like the Sacred Band – in the late Classical). Indeed, often Greek military fitness programs make the most sense if understood as an effort by the leisured wealthy elite to keep themselves and their sons from falling catastrophically behind the poor farmers in fitness. That certainly seems to be how we should understand the agoge, which included a ton of fitness training, but no training in arms that we are told of (nor any real ‘schooling’ as such, but it did include a lot of child abuse).

That said, alongside an emphasis on fitness training, we also hear complaints that, outside of Sparta (which did emphasize physical fitness), citizen hoplites were often in parlous condition. Xenophon complains of armies “from poleis” including too many old men, some soldiers who are too young and only a few men somaskein (σωμασκεῖν), “train their bodies” (Xen. Hell. 6.1.5).¹⁹ Still, this was something that poleis focused some pretty clear intentional collective action on, instituting physical spaces (gymnasia) and institutions for fitness training among the citizenry or at least among the wealthy citizenry.

Putting this all together, I fall closest to the heterodox position here. I am a bit slower than Konijnendijk to reject a ‘developmental’ model where training at arms and drill become (modestly!) more common over time, but hoplites do not appear to have regularly drilled (outside of Sparta, which did some drill but hardly excelled at it compared to the later practice of the Romans or Macedonians) and they did not regularly train at arms, although some training arms seems to have begun to seep in – not very much, just a bit – by the fourth century. Physical fitness was percieved as more important and central than either, although it is not clear how successful most poleis were at achieving a high fitness standard.

Overall then, the old-orthodox tacit assumption of drill is not based on the evidence. The modern pop-historical vision of hoplites (especially Spartans) as ‘elite warriors’ with rigorous boot-camp like training is functionally entirely a fabrication of modern fiction writers falling into precisely the same trap as some of the Old Prussians did: unable to imagine that a culture often presented to them as ‘familiar’ could in fact do something so alien as fail to have a modern-style drill-and-training tradition. It seems notable to me that while there is intense incredulity that the evidence for hoplite training is what it is, that disbelief does not follow if I say that other ‘non-Western’ cultures didn’t appear to engage in drill or training at arms. I think the underlying problem here is the assumption that the ancient Greeks were ‘like us’ and indeed even more ‘like us’ than modern or early modern people who were ‘non-Western.’ Whereas the truth is, Ancient Greece was a deeply alien place from our modern perspective.

Ancient Greeks were not Romans, but they were also not moderns and there is a specific kind of error (which, let’s be honest, often comes paired with a thick dose of orientalist xenophobia) which wants to imagine they were ‘like us.’ They were not.

Conclusions

So after all of that, where do we find ourselves?

We’ve laid out the two opposing ‘camps’ on hoplites so I suppose it is worth, at this point, doing something of an inventory of the key questions and where I fall.

On the emergence of the phalanx, I think the orthodox model of rapid and early development is simply clearly wrong, disproved by the archaeology for some time and largely abandoned. However, I also think the heterodox model has a problem: it takes an excessively narrow view of what a ‘phalanx’ is, to push back the ‘date of the phalanx’ in a definitional sense further than I think it should go. Instead, it is clear to me that hoplite equipment emerged gradually over the course of the eight and seventh centuries, but that it was likely being used for some kind of ‘shield wall’ from the beginning. I am willing to call that shield wall a ‘proto-phalanx’ early on, as it hasn’t fully excluded the light infantry, but I think it is clearly a kind of phalanx from at least 650 BCE.

That position is in turn supported by my view on hoplite arms and armor, where I effectively reject the ‘strong’ form of both camps. On the one hand, the ‘strong’ orthodox position, that hoplite equipment was so heavy as to be unusuable in anything other than a tight, shoving phalanx is absurd; as heavy infantrymen, hoplites were not particularly heavily equipped. On the other hand, the notion of a ‘skirmishing’ hoplite, as suggested by some ‘strong’ heterodox scholars is also, to me, quite silly: these are heavy infantrymen, not skirmishers and they are using an equipment set that seems tailored to operating in a close-order shield-wall formation. You could do other kinds of warfare in it, and Greek hoplites sometimes did, but the panoply is most clearly suited – from its very emergence – for a shield wall. It is ‘shield wall native,’ as it were.

That in turn informs my view on hoplite tactics. The orthodox ‘shoving othismos‘ rugby scrum has to be rejected – it is not required by the sources and is exceedingly implausible. However, I think the ‘strong’ heterodox position, which imagines ‘skirmishing’ hoplites moving fluidly in masses of men with no fixed formation or firm place, is also wrong – far too much of a correction from the overly rigid orthodox model. Instead, I favor something of a midpoint, a modestly tight (60-90cm file width) formation, with assigned places and an expected if not standard depth and width, which operated principally (eventually exclusively) in shock. That shock engagement in turn took the form of a sequence of ‘micro-pulses’ and ‘micro-lulls,’ not a ‘series of duels’ but in fact a rolling sequence of several-on-severals as the formations ‘acordianned’ forward and backwards. It would be rare for either side to fully disengage after contact, but men would spend a lot of time pulled just out of measure, looking for an opening to surge forward (or fearing their opponents might do the same).

When it comes to the rules of war for hoplites, I think that the heterodox habit of treating battles, raids, sieges and ambushes without distinction and thus insisting that essentially there were no rules is unhelpful and leads to confusion. The orthodox model, which imagines some sort of (unattested) Archaic golden age where the rules were always followed is absurd, but the idea of, if not rules, expectations that governed war between Greek states under certain circumstances (and which might not apply to non-Greeks, or in certain kinds of war) clearly seems true and is the way these things work in basically all cultures. In no culture does the ‘discourse’ of war fully match its ‘reality’ but the degree of disconnect is variable and the discourse does influence the reality. Within that frame, the orthodox scholars are correct to point to the Peloponnesian War as a conflict which ruptured the discourse that existed at the time it was fought, even if they are wrong to suppose that entire discourse had existed unaltered since 650.

In terms of the status of hoplites, I think the heterodox camp is essentially correct: the legally defined ‘hoplite class’ (like the Athenian zeugitai) were significantly smaller and wealthier than the ‘yeoman hoplite’ model advanced in The Western Way of War. Even if we include the ‘working-class’ hoplites who often didn’t enjoy the political privleges of the ‘hoplite class,’ we are still talking about a smaller slice of society than either Beloch or VDH suppose. That has implications for the relative breadth of political participation for the polis (narrower in oligarchies than sometimes supposed),²⁰ the structure of class and wealth in the Greek countryside (meaningfully less equal than supposed) and finally the absolute population of the Greek world (higher than generally supposed). The field of ancient Greek history is beginning to really grapple with some of these implications (albeit not fully with the demographic one, yet).

Finally, in terms of training, while I give the ‘developmental model’ (a very little bit of increasing drill and training in arms over time) a bit more credit, I think the current heterodox position – functionally no drill outside of Sparta, extremely little formal training at arms, but an emphasis on physical fitness (with uneven results) – is the direction in which our evidence, such as it is, points. Hoplites were not drilled early modern soldiers, nor battle-hardened ultra-veterans, nor the products of elite boot camp style training – they were, for the most part, citizen amateurs with relatively little (if any) formal training. One strongly suspects that they were prepared for their military role by parents and other older male relatives, but not in any formal way.

The result is a mental model that is, I suppose, somewhat more heterodox than orthodox, but which does not fit neatly into either ‘camp’ and is instead something of a synthesis of their arguments and ideas. It is ironic that in a running debate about how rigid the phalanx is, both ‘sides’ suffer, I think, from a degree of doctrinaire rigidity. In my view, the next place that the debate needs to go is a synthesis of the two positions, although obviously it will not be me doing that work, as I am not a Greek warfare specialist.

Next week: something different!

https://acoup.blog/2026/01/16/collections-hoplite-wars-part-ivb-training-hoplites/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=collections-hoplite-wars-part-ivb-training-hoplites

https://acoup.blog/?p=33260