HOPLITE TECHNOLOGY IN PHALANX BATTLE

body armor, greaves, round shield, and thrusting-spear—were known

in some form or another to the earlier Mycenaean and Dark Age
Greeks, and also to particular Eastern and European peoples.6
Controversy, though, arises surrounding the exact sequence and nature
of events which led to the alteration, sudden or otherwise, between
725 and 675 BC, of these earlier designs into a new, codified, heavy
set of bronze and iron arms and armor (double-grip, concave, shield,
Corinthian helmet, bell-corselet, pliable, laceless greaves, double-
pointed spear, short sword)—the so-called ‘hoplite panoply’ and hence
a relationship to the tactics of the phalanx.
Currently the more influential hypothesis (the ‘gradual change’ to
the phalanx school) correctly stresses that the introduction of such
‘hoplite’ equipment was piecemeal, a slow twenty-five-year or even
longer process. Thus, the birth of the phalanx, in this view, need not
be simultaneous nor necessarily interdependent; no intrinsic connection
must exist between the two phenomena, separated as they were by
many decades.7 To support this thesis, it is usually pointed out that
archaeological finds prove the presence of many items of hoplite
equipment in the last quarter of the eighth century BC, but there is
no corresponding pictorial evidence on vases or references in literature
to (what this school would call ‘true’) phalanxes until much later,
perhaps not until 650 BC at the earliest. On the other hand, the ‘sudden
change’ to the phalanx thesis usually concentrates on the shield, arguing
that the adoption (around 700 BC) of the unique double-grip, the
porpax and antilabe, immediately necessitated an abrupt
transformation in the very manner of fighting, with all the well-known
social and political ramifications.8
The former school, then, sees gradual changes in weaponry, a
phalanx after or around 650 BC, and no accompanying wider social
revolution; the latter envision a brilliant breakthrough in technology,
followed very quickly in or near 700 BC by fresh phalanx tactics, all
indicative of an undeniable military surge forward of a new potent,
land-owning middle class. Both schools, remember, postulate that
new tactics, either around 700 or 650 BC, followed the adoption of
novel equipment.
The economic, political, and social implications of this so called
‘hoplite reform’ need not be discussed again here.9 But a few
considerations, mostly military, arise which question the validity of
both these abrupt and gradual theses and thus of the entire notion
itself of a revolution in tactics. First, because chronology is absolutely
crucial to the two hypotheses, although in diametrically opposed ways,

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