On Trip-Hammers and Rolling Mills

Over on his site Bret Devereaux has a good description of a problem in Roman Military Equipment Studies. In book 6 of his histories, Polybius says that most Roman infantry wear a plate of bronze a span broad called a kardiophylax “heart-protector” on their breast, except for the wealthy who wear coats of mail. No such plate survives from a Roman site after 300 BCE, and no sculpture or painting shows it. As Roman rule expands across Italy, locals stop building tombs with detailed paintings full of arms and armour, and body armour tends to be a rare find. By the fifth century BCE, Samnites and Campanians had replaced simple disc breastplates with more complex arrangements of a breastplate, a backplate, a bronze belt and armoured straps over the shoulders and under the arms. We therefore have to assume that Romans either reverted to a style of armour from several hundred years before, or that Polybius’ description just mentions one-part of a seven-part armour. To my knowledge, no other surviving writer says that Romans wore such a breastplate, and there are no carvings or paintings which show Romans wearing them (Varro’s pectorale was made of strips of leather, De Lingua Latina 5.24). Both interpretations match objects from the ancient Mediterrean, and both match later armour from other cultures such as the “good iron for his body” worn by Robert the Bruce’s militia in 13181 and char-aina “four mirrors” armour in the Persianate world. I am doubtful that most Romans could afford not only a helmet, a sword, and and iron-bound shield but most of a bronze breastplate, but Devereaux is more confident. There are a lot of things to think about here, such as why the Roman Republic, a relatively egalitarian society, did not leave much art which showed ordinary soldiers. However, this week I will write down my thoughts about one technical question which I took the time to work through.

I think that if you wanted to make a bronze breastplate in the ancient world, you took an ingot and hammered it thin (possibly starting by melting it and pouring it onto a broad flat stone). You need to stop frequently, heat, and cool in air or quench in water to anneal it so it does not get too hard and brittle and crack. Devereaux thinks that they were “probably produced from sheet metal (sheet bronze, in particular), rather than forged from an ingot.” In a comment he referred me to David Sim in the UK.

I don’t own Sim’s book Iron for the Eagles but I do own Roman Imperial Armour (Oxbow Books, 2012) by David Sim and J. Kaminski which presents Sim’s theory (and Sim’s article in Journal of Roman Military Equipment Studies 2003/4). Sim’s argument seems to take the following form (pp. 49-57): some armour from the Roman empire has smooth, parallel surfaces and consistent thickness. I don’t know any way to do this by hand or with powered up-and-down motion, but I can do it with a pair of rollers turned by hand and an assistant feeding metal between them. Such rollers would likely have been recycled when no longer needed and mounted in wooden machines, therefore would have left no archaeological evidence.

I don’t know how common the iron or copper-alloy sheet with smooth, parallel surfaces actually is. Table 7 of the book shows that one part of a Roman armour or shield usually varies in thickness across its surface by a factor or 2 or 3 which is typical of low-tech armour. The main examples of smooth parallel surfaces seem to be scale armour and layers within a sheet of iron or steel, and the paper on that steel notes that the same could probably be achieved with a trip-hammer (Fulford, Sim, and Doig 2004: 201). A trip-hammer is a long hammer on a pivot, whose long end comes close to a turning shaft driven by water or a motor. Pegs on the shaft lift the hammer and cause it to strike an anvil in a steady rhythm with more than human force, so the operator just has to focus on positioning the work.

Whereas trip-hammers were widely used in the Roman empire, late medieval Europe, and China, roller mills for sheet metal only appear in Europe in the 18th century, and mills for making bar iron into rods for nails only in the 16th century. That is almost 2000 years later than Polybius. Forming two cylinders and mounting them parallel to one another with handmade tools is harder than it looks, and making an adjustable mill that can produce more than one thickness is even harder. It was hard to justify specialized machines before the 20th century, because labour was cheap and markets were unstable. You could not rely on making one specialized thing for a distant market, because one day the seas would be closed by pirates or the road over the mountains would be shut to keep the plague out. If you wanted to keep in business, you needed to produce a variety of goods, or simple and versatile goods like nails. Copper alloys were traded in ingots, and iron was traded in bars, because skilled metalworkers could make anything you wanted from the raw material. If you bought specialized pre-made forms, you might find that there was no market for finishing them.

To make a breastplate, you do not want sheet metal of uniform thickness. You will want the front and center to be thicker and stronger, and the sides to be thinner, because you are most concerned with being stabbed or shot through the vital organs by someone in front of you. As you stretch the metal to fit around your body, it will get thicker in some places and thinner in others, and if you have time to take care you will put the thick metal in the middle and thin near the edges. Nobody but you and your servant will ever see the inside, so it does not matter if the inside is lumpy and oxidized as long as the outside is smooth and beautiful. So there would be no benefit to using rollers, as there would be for making 0.3 mm stock for scale armour and applied decorations.

Sim’s approach in Roman Imperial Armour seems quite a contemporary one, with a focus on specialized labour-saving machines, uniform properties and dimensions. Moving between contemporary and traditional approaches often takes some adjusting, as when I volunteer on carpentry projects with no wood-to-wood joinery and everything butted and nailed together and my inner fourteenth-century person has to take a lie down and drink some ale. Reenactor Matthew Amt has some disagreements with how Sim makes pilum heads and spearheads, and a specialist in reproducing ancient metalwork did not like the book:

Roman Imperial Armour: The Production of Early Imperial Military Armour overreaches in basing so many of its assertions on the limited experience of a hobbyist blacksmith. It would be presumptuous for a metal-detectorist to write a treatise on archaeological practice, but for some reason academics think that any experience at all qualifies them to extrapolate on ancient craft industries.

Iron for the Eagles has a very good reputation and I hope to read it one day.

Also, a roller mill is a crank-based mechanism. Cranks were probably invented in Iberia around the fifth century BCE. In the last few centuries BCE, Italians were starting to adopt them for purposes like milling grain. The famous rotary querns from Pompeii were a new and high-tech way of making your flour. It is only in the past few decades that it became clear when and where rotating millstones were invented. Sim and Kaminski know some of this history because they cite L. Sprague de Camp’s 1963 The Ancient Engineers. However, they don’t notice that if cranks were a new technology, its unlikely that they were immediately applied to milling. Europeans had been using cranked grindstones for at least 700 years before they started to use cranked roller mills for metalworking. That suggests that adapting the crank mechanism to metalworking is not an obvious next step. And central Italy in the third and second century BCE was not a center of mechanical and metallurgical innovation, but a place which was dazzled by Celtic swords and Hellenistic devices like the Antikythera mechanism. Slaves from the east seem to have replaced Italy’s native textile traditions by the end of the Republic because they were cheap and clever and it was easier to let them do what they knew how to do than retrain them.

There were a few ares where Imperial Roman technology was similar to 16th-18th century Europe, such as the size of ships and the availability of iron. Celts and Romans did use a lot of thin iron, bronze, silver, and brass sheet, and making such sheet by hand and then smoothing it out is time-consuming and wasteful. The shield from Dürrnberg grave 373 had many iron reinforcements just 0.15-0.20 mm thick after corrosion.2 I am open to the possibility that trip-hammers or stamping mills were used to beat out sheet in the Roman empire, since they were used for other tasks. I might even be convinced that rolling mills were used in some places for specific purposes like making very thin brass sheet for strapends, lanterns, and scale armour. The Roman empire had large-scale production in centralized locations for distribution by sea and fairly extensive use of water power. However, I would want much more evidence to believe in roller mills in Polybius’ Italy, and I expect that if some shops had trip-hammers to bang out helmets and buckets, others just used teams of sweaty men with hammers. As late as the First World War, some firearms were made in giant factories, and others were made with hammers and files in one-room workshops in Spain.

There are lots of threads I would like to pull further, like when sheet metal in standard gauges first appeared, and my onetime teacher John Peter Oleson’s argument about whether the ships from Lake Nemi in Italy had cranks on their pumps (in 1984, he thought the cranks were “archaeologically a fantasy” based on misinterpreting fragments of wood). I never got around to finishing Panagiota Manti‘s thesis on casting ancient Greek helmets. However, I hope that this shows why I am open to the use of articulated cuirasses in Polybius’ Italy, somewhat less open to the use of trip-hammers, and quite skeptical of the use of roller mills or armourers who started with sheet metal. Ancient metalworking is an exciting topic where archaeologists, metallurgists, and makers can work together, but its hard to keep up with.

Unlike ancient metalworkers, I am not secretive about my methods! But unlike many ancient writers I am not independently wealthy. If you can, please support this site.

Further Reading

Michael Fulford, David Sim, Alistair Doig, “The production of Roman ferrous armour: a metallographic survey of material from Britain, Denmark and Germany, and its implications,” Journal of Roman Archaeology, Volume 17 (2004) pp. 197-220

(scheduled 6 April 2026)

Edit 2026-04-06: first photo is in the wrong museum! Had a quick look at the book by Oleson.

A Quick Note on “Two Battles in Three Years”

Twice in The Western Way of War (1989, my copy Oxford University Press 1990) Victor Davis Hanson makes similar statements:

In the fifth and fourth centuries, battle broke out in the Greek world nearly two out of every three years, so the chances were good that a man would have to leave his farm, take up his arms, fight in repeated engagements, and fall wounded or die one summer’s day in battle. (p. 31)

For the citizen of the fifth-century Greek city-state who saw battle of some type on an average of two out of three years, the changes were good that he would not die a natural death: in one of those years of his long service he would likely become one of the dead or wounded (p. 89)

A moment’s thought shows that this is incorrect. Even during the Peloponnesian Wars Athens or Sparta only fought a battle every few years, and not all Athenian hoplites or Spartiates fought in every battle. Plato’s Socrates was proud to have fought in one battle, a siege, and an expedition and he was an adult during intensive warfare (Plato, Apology, 28e, Symposium 219-221).1 What could Hanson have meant by the passages above?

There is no way to know for sure where Hanson found this figure because Western Way of War was written as a trade book without footnotes or endnotes. It was originally published with Alfred A. Knopf, and only taken over by Oxford University Press when it sold well. Even though it is included on many grad-school reading lists, its not written to academic standards of evidence.

Fred Eugene Ray Jr. has found about 360 historically-attested battles involving Greeks in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.2 While scholars in the 1980s might not have listed all of them, I doubt that Hanson had a statistic for the number of battles per year which showed less than one battle per year.

It looks to me like Hanson read (or heard in a lecture?) some statistic along the line of “Classical Athens was at war almost two years out of three.” He then started to generalize this and sharpen it. Classical Athens stood for “the fifth-century Greek city-state.” This is the Everest Fallacy, because Athens was very large, wealthy, and warlike and is the center of most surviving sources. The USA is bombing some other country almost every year, but Denmark can go decades without sending troops into combat. It would not be accurate to say that NATO countries bomb someone almost every year when just the UK, France, and Germany have wildly different experiences.

As Hanson sharpened his rhetoric, “at war” became “fighting” became “seeing battle” even though most ancient Greek warfare was raids, marching through enemy territory burning, stickups, piracy, naval battles, being let into a city by a discontented faction, and skirmishes. Battles were prestigious but not the most common form of warfare and did not involve all of a large city’s forces. This also often happens as people retell stories and quotes are reworded or assigned to more famous or ‘appropriate’ people.

Hanson never wanted to be a research academic, he wanted to be a farmer who gave talks to people in small-town California, and he only reluctantly submitted to the standards of academic writing like fact-checking and making sure that your logic holds up. In forty years he has only published a handful of traditional academic publications, most of them before 2001. He wrote The Western Way of War as a busy assistant professor with small children at home, and as he became rich and famous he never went back and revised it.

I have asked some colleagues and will update this post if we can guess which statistics about Athens being at war two years in three Hanson had read. Roel Konijnendijk has found the claim that Classical Athens was at war almost two years out of three in Yvon Garlan’s La Guerre dans l’Antiquité (Editions Fernand Nathan: Paris, 1972). For more discussion see Bret Devereaux’s original post.

Edit 2026-01-26: the exact passage is the first page of the main text of Garlan’s book (page 3 of the French edition):

Athènes, par example, durant le siècle et demi qui va des guerres médiques (490 et 480-479) à la bataille de Chéronée (338), guerroya en moyenne plus de deux ans sur trois, sans jamais jouir de la paix pendant dix ans de suite.

That Athens was at war more than two years out of three is not quite the same statement as either of the passages in WWoW, but its close enough for a busy writer writing a book without footnotes or endnotes in the days before Google Books and the ability to submit interlibrary loan requests at 11 pm from your home office.

Help keep me posting my notes as polished writing on the web not sentence fragments on Obsidian. Support this site.

(scheduled 17 January 2026, updated and posted 18 January 2026)

There Was No Typical Polis

Bret Devereaux recently published a strong post in his series on the hoplite wars. This was an especially strong post because it drew on his research focus. His current book creates financial and demographic models of the Roman Republic, Carthage, and the Hellenistic kingdoms and argues that the Romans were able to get citizens and allies to contribute more military service, arms, and armour than their rivals, while some of their rivals had higher incomes in silver. Victor Davis Hanson and Hans van Wees also created detailed models of early Greek farms and how the men with panoplies (hoplites and horsemen) fit into ancient Greek societies: how many of them were there, how wealthy were they, and where did their incomes come from? Even in Athens the sources are not as good as Polybius and Livy on the Roman Republic, but Hans van Wees was able to believe in them because he came from Homeric studies where the evidence is even worse. van Wees has long suspected that there was no hoplite class, but a leisure class who could easily afford a panoply and a group of small farmers and shopkeepers who could afford it at the cost of suffering. This week I will go over some of the ideas in Devereaux’ post from a slightly different perspective and show where they lead me. This post has consumed two days of writing time and is not as polished as I wish it was.

Empires Make Things Simple

Its hard to write history outside the context of an empire or a powerful state. Everything goes in different directions, one story does not have a clear connection to another, and there are so many names and relationships to learn. So since classical antiquity, and again since the nineteenth century, people have tried to simplify early Greek military practices into a single story. Thucydides and Aristotle try to tell the story of how the armies and navies of their times might have developed in the misty past, even though nobody wrote Greek prose at that time so they cannot have known what really happened. This trope is related to another Greek custom of describing foreigners in ethnographic terms. Athenian writers present Spartans as exotic and write more about their customs than they write about other kinds of Hellenes. Macedonians received similar attention during the reign of Philip of Macedon. If you take this approach to history, you can signal out some peoples as exotic and alien, while implying (without actually saying) that everyone you do not describe is like you. Just like histories tend to be about men unless the authors deliberately include women, many introductions to ancient Greece give the impression that ancient Greece was like Athens except for Sparta and Macedon which were different, and they achieve this by not saying much about parts of the Greek world far from Athens.

As Devereaux says, the Roman Republic spent several hundred years engineering Italy to provide the SPQR as many well-equipped infantry as possible. When it conquered nations in Italy, it often confiscated some of their land and divided it into small equal plots for a colony of Roman citizens. When it elbowed them into being ‘allies’ (socii) it demanded that they provide armies similar to a Roman legion. One of the main taxes on citizens, the tributum, was a tax on families who owned property but did not have a man in the army that year. While there are many questions about how exactly this worked (the Romans did not mint coins at all until the third century BCE, and for a long time just minted whenever they ran short rather than every year) the Romans engineered Italy to produce families which could provide a well-equipped man for the army. So we can speak in general about Italian armies and Italian society, even though we know very little about allied forces.

The Neo-Babylonian kings, Teispids, and Achaemenids had a policy of expanding irrigation in Babylonia. While no source tells us why they did this, the obvious answer was that large numbers of people clustered along canals provided more labour and taxes than small numbers of people drifting across the steppes of Iraq. We can also speak in general about armed force in Neo-Babylonian, Teispid, and Achaemenid Babylonia although we have no solid numbers for population and income.

The Greek World was Anarchic

However, Archaic and Classical Greece had no Roman Republic and no Great King who forced them to contribute to a single military system. They were a glorious anarchy of independent communities and clans which were sometimes organized into a league or under a hegemon. I have written before about how in some Iron Age Greek cemeteries, early steel swords are daggers 40 cm long, while in other cemeteries they are great slashing things a meter long. The first Greeks to use steel swords did not all want them for the same purpose. By the fifth and fourth century BCE, when we have written sources, we see that different Greek societies had very different armed forces.

Thessaly had many serfs, an elite of horseowners, and a modest number of light-armed peltasts with spears and cheap shields. Crete was divided into many little feuding cities whose men used distinctive bows and arrows and small bronze-faced shields. Laconia had an elite of leisured Spartiates who fought as spearmen on foot and bossed around their neighbours and helot serfs. Their city of Sparta was proudly unwalled and lacked the impressive monuments of cities like Athens or Corinth. Thessalians, Cretans, and Laconians were all Greeks (Hellenes), but they did not fight the same way. The wider Greek world from Massilia among the Celts, Sicily facing Punic Africa, Cyrene in North Africa with its charioteers, and the cities of Crimea and Scythia must have been even more diverse.

We would not have to worry about all this diversity if the Greek world had been a nice simple empire. But since it was not, trying to generalize about the social structure of Archaic Greece or the class basis of the hoplite phalanx will only lead to half-truths. Even the focus on hoplites can be a way of not talking about the many different ways that Greeks fought, or that some of the men with bronze breastplates rode into battle on chariots or galloped into the fray on horseback, jumped off to fight on food, and let their squires lead the horse out of the hail of spears and stones (hippobatai and hippostrophoi).1 Italian hoplites may have never given up their second spear like Athenian hoplites eventually did. Most of these studies stick to Boeotia, Attica, and Laconia because we have the best evidence for how armies fit into Boeotian, Athenian, and Spartan society. There was a vast Greek world which we cannot study this way, and we have hints from the swords in early cemeteries to the Corinthian pots with knights and squires that those other Greeks did things differently. If we had the collection of constitutions compiled by Aristotle and his students, we might be able to say more about the range of variations, but almost all of those have been lost.

We can survey the physical remains of cities and speak of a statistical Normalpolis (one with a few thousand inhabitants under constant threat from neighbours or under the thumb of a major power like the Persian King or the city of Thebes). But social structures are not something like “how many children do people have?” which varies through a small range with a simple statistical distribution. They are much wilder, and much harder to understand without detailed written sources. As scholars realized that the men with panoplies fought in many different ways and had many different class backgrounds and could even be barbarians, sometimes they question whether these are really hoplites rather than expand their mental model to include more of the ancient reality. Models should serve data not pretend to be its master.

Devereaux argued that early Greece could not have many small equal farms because it did not have a Roman Republic to redistribute the land and tax large holdings and pay the money back to small farmers in the form of military pay. I argue that for the same reason, the Greek world could not have a single relationship between fighting and land ownership. It had too many different regimes with too many different ideas about the ideal society, and too many accidents of history like a colony which gave every settler the same amount of land, or the Spartan inheritance laws which let wealth become more and more concentrated and caused the number of Spartiates to shrink. The Boeotians let their population explode in the fourth century BCE, the time they were briefly one of the greatest powers in mainland Greece, and it may have reached an all-time high before collapsing and never recovering.2

Three Generalizations

Rather than narratives about hoplites, I think it would be possible to start a history from three generaizations about early Greek warfare. The first is as certain as anything can be in ancient history, the second is controversial, and the third is speculative.

• By about 650 BCE, Greeks shared some common military equipment and practices such as bronze helmets, round shields shaped like a soup-plate, riding horses into battle, and landing from the sea in long galleys with bronze rams. This equipment was very expensive, and early on armourers and bladesmiths competed to show off wealth with intricate embossed designs, long cutting swords, and beautiful castings. They were nothing at all like the arms and arms of the Hjortspring people with their simple affordable materials, minimalist design, and lack of decoration. They were also unlike the simple Montefortino helmets and pila of Middle and Late Republican Italy.
• Most early Greek societies were minoritarian regimes where a minority of the free male population (and an even smaller minority of the free and slave population) had political rights and was expected to provide itself with arms and fight when called upon. Hanson and van Wees agreed about this, they just disagreed whether up to 50% or up to 25% of Athenian men were obliged to fight as hoplites. The Iliad has a wealthy class who fight in armour and a vaguely described world of spinners and farmhands in the similes.
• Over time, kit got simpler, durable goods became more common, and the share of the population with a long spear and a strong shield ready to fight in a line increased. Aristotle thinks that in the best polis, those who keep arms and have political rights should barely outnumber those who lack both (Politics 1297b). Neither Hanson not van Wees thinks that this describes most cities in the fifth century BCE or earlier. Note that this is a narrative of progress and increased inclusion, whereas Hanson tells a narrative of a golden age before the Persian Wars and a fall from grace afterwards.

Within these three general constraints, there was vast variation. While many Greeks used shields with rims, Boeotians, Illyrians, and Macedonians sometimes used smaller round shields without rims. Some men with panoplies fought from horseback or rode into battle, hopped off, and let a squire lead the horse to safety. Some Greek societies had serfs and others did not. Some had many slaves and others had few. Some had many warships who needed rowers and others had few. A Cretan with a beautiful feathered helmet, a bronze-faced shield, a well-balanced spear, and a horn bow with a quiver of heavy bronze-tipped arrows might wear as much wealth as a Corinthian hoplite without fighting the same way. Since 2013, our task has been finding ways to think and write about all this wonderful contradictory diversity in the wider Greek world which are not so complicated that only a few dozen specialists can use them. I think the contrast between the Roman republic’s engineering all of Italy, and thousands of Greek cities and confederations engineering their small parts of the Greek world, might be one place to start.

Keep reading for a bonus thought on the estimates of ancient Greek incomes in comparison with another society.

Although I’m not weighed down by armour, I can’t keep dodging my other responsibilities forever while I am paid CAD $30/mo for my writing. If you can, please support this site.

Back in 2020, Jonathan Dean noted that ancient historians think you needed much less land to be a well-armed infantryman than medieval historians think. I would like to lay out some of those contrasting figures for your consideration, using a book I have on my shelves and an article I have on my laptop.

People who believe in the Solonic wealth classes think that the zeugitai of Athens had to own a panoply and fight as hoplites and had a minimum income of 200 medimnoi of produce (a volumetric measure different for grain and liquids)3. Hans van Wees estimated that a mixed farm with wheat, barley, olives, and grapes could produce that much on 7.4 hectares (18 acres) plus fallow (up to 12.7 ha / 30 acres) – ed.4 Its traditional to compare peasant incomes in terms of volumes of grain so lets estimate how big 200 measures of wheat is (there were all kinds of ways to cheat, such as piling your bushel high to make it big, or including inedible waste such as the chaff and husks).

In 1299, Robert le Kyng was a serf with a yard of land (as much land as two oxen could plough in a season) at Bishop’s Cleeve in Gloucestershire. We will assume 30 acres of arable land and a three-field system to get his production as high as possible, although yards varied in area and some farmers used a two-field system (half the land fallow to kill weeds and feed livestock, half cropped to feed people). Medievalist Christopher Dyer estimated his productivity as follows:5

Oats and barley are not as nutritious per volume as wheat. The Romans punished soldiers by replacing their wheat rations with barley. These are products before Robert le Kyng has to pay tithes or rent. So Dyer’s comfortable peasant produces about 8,000 L of grain and peas per year, and van Wees’ leisured farmer produces 10,000 L of tasty wheat.

Edit: Dyer estimates that a family of two adults and three minor children would consume 10 quarters (80 bushels) of grain per year plus meat, cheese, and dairy (so the Robert’s farm produced enough for three families before deducting seed grain), while van Wees (p. 48) suggests that a family of five would consume 44 to 58 measures of wheat, oil, and wine a year (so his minimum zeugites farm would support 3 or 4 families before deducting seed grain). Robert’s family drank ale and spread their bread with butter, so didn’t need olives or grapes. A poor family might feed more people by going hungry and eating less nutritious grains, but “how many comfortable families could this farm support?” is not a bad way of comparing these two farms.

Dyer imagines Robert hiring farmhands to help with the harvest or thatch his roofs, not having year-round help or being able to leave most of the work to his farmhands. He certainly could not sublease the land and still live well, and was not a rich peasant (traditionally reckoned at £5 / year in income, whereas Robert’s income was probably closer to £3 or £4). He was in the top quarter of peasants by landholding, but still had to work the fields with his own back and his own oxen.6 Under King Henry’s decree de forma pacis conservande of 1242, he was supposed to equip himself with sword, bow, arrows, and knife if he was not excused for holding land as a serf. Nobody with his income was expected to have a helmet or any sort of armour.

With almost twice the land a similar amount of land, Robert is well short of the standard of living that many ancient historians imagine a zeugites had. Edit: Zeugites is usually thought to come from a yoke (zeugos ζεῦγος) of oxen for drawing a plow and a cart, just what a yardlander was able to afford. End Edit. I am not a specialist in ancient agriculture or demographics but I think it would be very useful for ancient historians and medieval historians to have a conversation about why they come to different conclusions.

Edit: Lin Foxhall notes farmers at Methone in the Peloponnese living off mixed farms of around 3.5 hectares (8-9 acres) in the 1970s.7 These farmers aimed to produce some excess grain to sell and used some modern fertilizer but no tractors. So van Wees’ zeugites farm is only about twice as big as fed a family in the 1970s.

(scheduled 11 January 2026)

Edit 2026-01-12: link Arist. Pol. and Arist. Ath. Pol. Include estimates of how many families each farm could support, cite Foxhall.

Edit 2025-01-14: add back in van Wees’ allowance for fallow land

Ancient Greek Kit is Hard to Make

Bret Devereaux has published his second essay about the debate about early Greek warfare with some back and forth from Richard Taylor and Hergrim. This week I will follow up on one of the questions which newcomers to the debate often have, namely why until around 2015 researchers rarely obtained replica kit and tried it out. There are many reasons, but the biggest reason is that ancient kit is hard to make.

For this post lets focus on the ancient Greek hoplite shield, the Argive shield (Greek aspis Argolike) or clipeus. The Greeks mostly just called it a shield (aspis) but its hard for English speakers to say that word without snickering. This shield is shaped roughly like a soup plate with a socket that the arm goes through and a grip for the hand.

Any clever teenager with access to a garage and a hardware store can make a flat or trough-shaped shield like a Roman scutum, a Viking round shield, or a Norman kite shield in a weekend. It will probably be too thick and too heavy but even those problems can be solved with the right materials. A domed shield is much more difficult to make. Most workers today use one of three techniques: either they glue thick boards together and hollow them out with gouges and chisels, or they glue the same boards and spin them on a power lathe, or they glue rings of wood on top of each other and grind them down with power tools. The solution with the power lathe is very dangerous because if any of the glued seams fail, a large piece of timber will go flying at high velocity. It also requires a specialist woodworking shop with trained workers. The solution with gouges and chisels is slow and a shield can need to be discarded if the glue fails. My second attempt on a smaller shield was more successful. Gouges (chisels with C-section blades) are not in every toolbox either. Matthew Amt’s Greek Hoplite Page has a few links on the ring method.

There are many other steps in making a shield, like covering it with canvas or rawhide and then gesso to paint. I hope I have time to post about them on Patreon one day.

Greek shields also have many little metal fittings, from rings around the wall of the bowl which hold a mysterious rope, to the grip for the fist, to reinforcements for the sleeve which goes over the wielder’s forearm (this sleeve was probably usually of wood or perhaps hide, but that has rotted away leaving the bronze face or reinforcing strap). Many of these are decorated. Sometimes the face of the shield or the rim of the shield is covered in very thin bronze sheet. You cannot buy copper-tin bronze sheet wider than 6″/15 cm, and the widely available brass (copper-zinc) and phosphorus bronze behave differently than true bronze. So to make a good replica, you need coppersmithing skills, and possibly some casting or engraving. The more steps, sets of tools, and skills in a project, the more likely you are to abandon it half way done.

These days there are makers in India, Pakistan, and low-wage parts of Europe who will make Argive shields. But shipping those shields is also expensive. A fragile package 90 cm wide, 90 cm long, and 10-15 cm deep is not something you can just toss on your bike and drop off at Canada Post on the way to work. To test moving as a group or fighting in a line, you need at least a dozen shields. Making those one at a time by hand is a bother, and importing them or shipping them to a distant event is expensive.

Today some people have made plastic shields with injection moulding or similar technologies. Those were not available until recently, and require negotiating with a specialty shop and paying in advance for the tooling. Ordering them from a distant factory has similar issues to ordering a wooden shield. The plastic shields will tend to be the wrong weight, but are very durable. Paul Bardunias recommends taking a disc of plywood, cutting a hole for your upper arm and drilling four holes for straps, sticking your arm through and gripping it from the outside if you just want to feel what you can do while holding a big domed shield. The International Hoplite Discussion group on Facebook has people who love to talk about the pros and cons of various options (no link because Facebook- ed.)

Its hard to even learn what you need to learn about what the ancient shields were like. The first handy reference was a painting and description of a shield in the Vatican Museum by Peter Connolly in the 1970s. Then in 1982 British archaeologist and engineer Philip Henry Blyth published a report on the same shield, but it was printed in a journal best obtained by visiting the Vatican Museum gift shop. In 2004 Basilike G. Stamatopoulou published a whole PhD thesis on the Argive shield in her native language of Modern Greek. There are also a variety of specialist archaeological publications in German. Only in 2016 did Kevin Rowan de Groote publish an article in English which summarized research on the hoplite shield in other European languages. The first book to suggest that two lines of hoplites came together like a rugby scrum was published in 1911, so there was one hundred years between the theory appearing in print and it becoming easy to learn what ancient shields were actually like. Because information about the real shields is hard to obtain, people often rely on their memories of visits to museums and vague impressions. Argive shields are certainly large and heavy as shields go, but not nearly as heavy as some people expect.

A bad replica can be worse than no replica at all. Almost all copies of ancient arms and armour are at least 50% too heavy, because the originals seem too delicate and it takes more skill to work thin bronze or thin wood without cracking it. Victor Davis Hanson’s back-field trials in the 1980s reinforced his idea that hoplite kit was heavy and bulky, because he and his students didn’t have any way of knowing what materials to use or how heavy they should be. Students at a newly-founded program at a small town in California were not going to obtain and translate site reports in German and Peter Connolly’s book just had a few notes!

If you are an academic in natural science, or work for a well-funded business with expense accounts, its hard to understate how limited the funds for studying the ancient world are. All kinds of research and service are completed at the author’s expense in time freed from teaching and administration and conventional research (not to mention one’s partner, children, parents, pets, and non-academic friends). A few thousand dollars and the need to coordinate three or four different contractors can be a barrier too great to overcome. People with entrepreneurial instincts rarely become philologists and ancient historians.

So its hard and expensive to learn what you need to learn about ancient Greek shields, then to make one or have someone else make one. Its even harder to make up or buy a batch of them to try things out in groups. That is one major reason why the academic debate about early Greek warfare tended to be an armchair debate until about ten years ago. The growing connections between academia and reenactment are not a magic wand, but certainly better than just trying to understand by reading the old texts and staring at the old paintings and sculptures.

Writing takes time and I am poor. If you can, please support this site.

(scheduled 22 November 2025)

Four Theses on the Hoplite Wars

Over on his website historian Bret Devereaux has started a series on debates about early Greek warfare. The first post in that series is well worth reading. It puts me in a dilemma because I see some things differently than he does, but I can’t spare the time for such a lengthy and carefully footnoted essay. So I will respond with four theses about those academic controversies, using vivid bloggy writing and linking to my earlier posts and academic publications. I will follow his lead by avoiding discussion of Victor Davis Hanson’s political project although I had to address it in my review of The Other Greeks. Hanson’s ideas about early Greek warfare were not original in 1989. His great achievement was expressing them in clear and contemporary language which spread outside the lecture hall and the seminar room.

First, I agree with Devereaux that there were two debates: one about what happened on ancient Greek battlefields, and the other whether Greek warfare was basically the same everywhere from 750 to 432 BCE, or varied across time and space. These two debates are not inherently connected and many people have put forward theories about combat mechanics without claiming that these theories have some profound implications for ancient cultures. Roel Konijnendijk ignored the debate about massed shoves or metaphorical pushes in his monograph on early Greek warfare without that affecting his argument. Many scholars argued against a massed push by whole lines of hoplites without arguing that Greek warfare varied from place to place and time to time.

Second, I think that the debate about hoplite battles is undecided, while the debate about revolution or gradual change ended in a decisive victory by the Krentz-van Wees school (the former heretics). Neither the California School (Victor Davis Hanson and sympathizers) with their ideas about rugby scrums, nor the Krentz-van Wees school with their ideas about loose crowds of soldiers, had ideas about how battles worked which convince most thoughtful observers. This is understandable since none of them had much experience in combat sports and none sought out people with that experience before forming their basic views.

Third, in many ways, the intense scholarly debate about combat mechanics, and emotional language like “orthodoxy” and “heretics,” disguised how much the parties agreed about. The debate about ancient Greek warfare from 1989 to 2013 was a classical philologist’s game (and incidentally an American and British man’s game). Victor Davis Hanson made an argument based on texts describing southern mainland Greece, supplemented with a casual use of archaeology and art from the wider Greek world, and critics responded with more rigorous arguments about the same type of evidence. They didn’t have to learn about Egyptian paintings or the Stele of the Vultures or weapons in Italian tombs. Even an adventurous scholar like Hans van Wees leaned heavily on a single comparison (with war in Highland New Guinea before the gun) and that was one of the most controversial aspects of his theories. The two sides were in agreement about how to fight, like Georgian duelists counting out their paces in some foggy field.

Fourth, the debate drastically shifted in 2013. On one hand, van Wees’ former student Josho Brouwers published a book on early Greek warfare which centered archaeology and put Greece in its broader cultural context. Archaic Greece was not much like Pericles’ Athens, proud of its separation from and superiority to barbarians, and more like the Norse world of the Viking Age, eagerly learning from, mixing with, and robbing Slavs, Persians, Romans, Franks, and Irish. Many cultures in the eastern Mediterranean had lines of spearmen with bronze helmets and large shields, and the ancients said that many nations had hoplites or men “armed like Greeks.”1 Trying to decide whether the hoplites on the Amathus bowl are Greeks, Carians, or Phoenicians is fruitless.

On the other hand, hoplite reenactment began to grow more organized and scientific, and the spread of high-speed Internet made it easier to share videos. Since about 2013, it has become more common to try out theories about moving troops, pushing with shields, or fighting in lines. These trials cannot replace traditional scholarship: nobody dies in them and they are not always carried out or written up with academic strictness. However, we can now say that it is indeed possible for whole lines of men with shields to push on each other without suffocating because we tried it; just like we can refute the myth of the heavily burdened hoplite because we looked at ancient artifacts and they were small and light. Its easier to agree on the weight of a helmet than on how to interpret the Iliad. Since about 2013, new empirical evidence has started to flow into debates about early Greek warfare, and archaeologists and specialists in Italy or Anatolia have published lively work which goes farther than Krentz or van Wees dared to. The debate since 2013 has not been stalled just because a few people still hold to the old California School or because nobody can agree about just what happened when two lines of spearmen came together.

Some of these theses might be controversial, especially the fourth. Its unfortunate that nobody in Josho Browers’ circle ended up in a stable research job, but not surprising at a time when institutions that study the ancient world are being demolished. While I am not shy about criticizing approaches to the ancient world which I disagree with, we all have a common interest in keeping people teaching and studying antiquity. While it can feel tedious to keep writing about Greek hoplites, its also exciting that people without academic training are interested in what we have to say.

Good scholarship takes time! Help keep me blogging at least once a month by supporting this site.

Further Reading

Sean Manning, “War and Soldiers in the Achaemenid Empire: Some Historiographical and Methodological Considerations.” In Kai Ruffing, Kerstin Droß-Krüpe, Sebastian Fink, and Robert Rollinger (eds.), Societies at War: Proceedings of the 10th Symposium of the Melammu Project held in Kassel September 26-28 2016 and Proceedings of the 8th Symposium of the Melammu Project held in Kiel November 11-15 2014 (Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: Vienna, 2020) pp. 495-515 (PDF copy here)

Cross-Post: Ways Forward in the Study of Early Greek Warfare (Josho Brouwers’ take after reading the 2013 conference proceedings Men of Bronze)

Edit 2025-11-16: added image, linked review of Bardunias’ book, added one sentence about how doubting massed pushing does not imply doubting other aspects of the California school/English orthodoxy

(scheduled 15 November 2025)

#ancient #bonusPost #earlyGreekWarfare #methodology #response

Comments on the Djurhamn Sword

(response to a request from Martin Rundkvist https://archaeo.social/@mrundkvist)

A complex-hilted sword was found in 2007 at Djurhamn on an island in the Stockholm Archipelago. In the middle ages and early modern period the island was very important for merchant and royal ships, but post-glacial rebound has shrunk the nearby harbour. The find spot was just below a line of boulders marking the Late Medieval shoreline, as if it was dropped off a later dock or wharf.

Latin Christian Europe from 1000 to 1450 had strict and austere ideas of what a sword should be: straight, two-edged, with a crossguard, a pommel, and minimal decoration. Swords were understood as Christian crosses, and clearly distinguished from other long bladed weapons like sabres and falchions. In the fifteenth century and especially the sixteenth century these rules began to be broken, and it becomes hard to make general statements and create categories. As it became common to wear swords again, their role as male jewelry came to the forefront, and the hilts and pommels started to receive more ornament.

Unfortunately, there is no profession that gets paid to research swords from armouries and stately homes, like archaeologists get paid to study swords from graves. Most research on swords after the Viking Age is by amateurs like Ewart Oakeshott, James G. Elmslie (Facebook), Peter Johnsson, and Maciej Kopciuch, with the occasional curator like A.V.B. Norman (Wikipedia), Marko Aleksić (Serbian Wikipedia), or Alfred Geibig (German Wikipedia). With limited resources, most have not tried to create typologies, just studied groups of similar swords like British backswords or the swords of the Munich town guard. Its necessary to combine typologies of the medieval sword such as Ewart Oakeshott’s with Norman’s typology of complex hilts.

The following comments are based on a photo gallery, the museum catalogue page, and the Swedish Wikipedia page for the sword. I don’t have a paper copy of Norman’s book and the nearest copy is in Calgary but it can be borrowed from the Internet Archive. There are measurements of the sword in an academic article from 2009.

General Remarks

Functionally a sword like this is good for chopping up people at close quarters, but not stabbing at armour or pushing someone out of the saddle. The rounded point won’t stick in the rings of mail and the broad flat blade will bend like a spring.

A date around the 16th century seems reasonable.  This sword would have been the latest thing in the late 15th century, by the late 16th century broad cutting blades were falling out of fashion and narrow stiff blades were becoming admired.  By the early 17th century it would have been definitely old-fashioned.

Up to about 1540, broad swords with complex hilts were often worn by lightly-armoured infantry and men in civil dress. There was an old tradition that an honest man should not wear stabbing weapons in peacetime because they killed too easily.1 Around 1540 the first cutler mounted a complex hilt on a narrow stiff blade, creating what we now think of as a rapier. Two of the oldest surviving examples are the sword of Gustav Vasa (Statens Historiska Museer, Stockholm, object 13502_LRK) and Francesco Negroli’s sword for Emperor Charles V (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, object 04.3.21). After 1540, broad swords with relatively simple hilts are increasingly worn to war by men who want to look like the knights of old, while people at court or in town preferred narrower swords with better hand protection. A good example of a modest military hilt is the Saxon Military Sword by Arms & Armour of Minnesota, but many hand-and-a-half swords with blades like the Djurhamn Sword and complex hilts survive in the Rüstkammer in Dresden.

Three of the four nicks in the edge are all in the half of the blade towards the tip, and the fourth is approximately in the middle. This suggests that it was damaged while striking, since fencers usually strike with the half of the blade towards the point (the weak or debole) and parry with the half of the blade towards the guard (the strong or forte).

Blade

Swords with broad flat parallel-sided blades appear in most societies with metalworking. In 15th-17th century western Europe they tend to have short fullers and be hexagonal in section, wheres swords of the high middle ages tend to have fullers that extend past the midpoint of the blade and often have a lenticular cross-section2. This sword appears to have a shallow fuller near the base of the blade which is about 1/3 or 1/4 as wide as the blade. Martin Rundkvist did not notice one when he examined the sword in 2007 and 2008, but a shallow fuller seems visible in the photographs above. The ricasso (blunt area at the base of the blade) is also characteristic of swords after the year 1300 with finger rings. Overall the blade fits into Oakeshott’s type XIX which was used from the 14th century onwards. The sword from the Alexandria Arsenal below is a good example, as are Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, object 930.26.43 and Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, object 2014.95.

The blade is 77.1 cm long and 4 cm wide. These are typical measurements for a single-handed sword of the period. Type XIX tends to be somewhat narrower than earlier types. The maximum thickness of the blade is relatively high at 5 mm (stiff thrusting swords are often twice as thick at the base).3 Knowing the length of the fuller would be useful.

Hilt

Hilts with down-turned crossguards and two finger rings first became popular in fifteenth-century Iberia and can be seen in the Pastrana Tapestries from 1471. They had reached the southern fringe of Germany by around 1500. An early depiction is a crucifixion from Cologne (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, object 12.169a-e). A finger ring both protects the pointer finger when it is bent over the crossguard, and stops weapons which are sliding down the blade before they endanger the top of the hand. The earliest art with finger rings shows them just on one side of the blade, the side towards the knuckles (like one of the swords from the Mamluke arsenal at Alexandria, Royal Armouries, Leeds, object IX.950). While in theory a sword can be turned in the hand so that either edge is towards the knuckles, in practice the second finger ring is probably for symmetry and visual balance.

Oakeshott does not cover hilts with more than a simple crossguard in his typology, but this would be a Norman hilt 15 like the sword of Admiral Jacob van Heemskerck (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, object NG-KOG-987-2-1). This type seems to have been most common from 1465 to 1520, but came back into fashion around the year 1600. Several swords of this type from the early 17th century are said to be in the War Museum in Copenhagen. That collection is not online, but the example in the Wallace Collection is, and that sword has a stiff four-sided blade (object A539). The shape of the broad flat hilt feels early to me, but the pommel is typical of later swords, so it could be from the heyday of the harbour c. 1500 or the declining days in the early 17th century.

A common variant added a U-shaped ‘staple’ or ‘post’ joining the two rings perpendicular to the sword blade. This provided additional protection to the top of the hand as weapons slid down the blade, and reinforced the rings. Norman called this hilt 16.

Pommel

Whereas the pommels of knightly swords are usually broad and flat, the pommels of sixteenth-century swords tend to be long, narrow, and equally thick in all directions like a cherry or a pear. This shape would probably belong somewhere in Oakeshott’s Type T if he had continued into the 16th century. While the long rounded pommels give more freedom to the wrist, and the wide pommels help keep the sword from being dragged out of the hand as it cuts something, the change was probably driven by changing taste more than any practical concerns. All types of blades tend to receive the new pommels.

The single incised line at the base and decorative nut are modest ornaments. Arms and armour of the 16th century often have lines cut into them, perhaps with a spinning wheel.

A.V.B. Norman would have called this pommel 16 or pommel 18 (he does not define his types clearly). He cites parallels like a Saints Peter and Paul in Palermo and a Madonna and saints in the Berliner Gemäldegalerie). The saints’ swords don’t have buttons on the ends of the pommels. Pommel 16 appears as early as 1470, but the nut or button is more typical of the sixteenth century. As the team at Arms & Armor explain, the nut makes it easier to file off the peened end of the tang to remove the hilt without scratching the pommel, so it became more useful as hilts became more ornate. Hilts were often swapped onto a new blade, favourite blades were often remounted with the latest hilt, and heavily used swords often start to rattle and will look and sound tidier if they are taken apart and rebuilt. Some medieval swords have pommel nuts (eg. Wallace Collection, London, object A460), but they become more popular in the sixteenth century.

Chronology

Stylistically this sword best fits the periods 1470-1520 and 1600-1650. The earlier date is most consistent with the archaeological context although a sword could be buried in a pit near the seventeenth-century shore as well as dropped or thrown off a fifteenth-century dock. The earlier date would make it roughly contemporary with the Gribshunden, a caravel-built ship armed with breechloading guns for King Hans of Denmark. Princes in the Baltic brought the latest style of ship from warmer parts of Europe, and humbler men could have brought the latest type of sword.

It would be useful to know if Swedes imported broad straight two-edged swords with single-handed grips like they imported single-edged curved dussacks in the sixteenth century. The relatively simple hilt and flat blade was a very common combination around the year 1500, and less common by the seventeenth century. At that time, the flexible cutting blades tend to be mounted on hilts with as much hand protection as possible. Admiral van Heemskerck wore a very similar sword in the seventeenth century, but he probably did not expect to use it as often as the musketeers on his flagship drew their swords.

You can relive the excitement of the original blogging boom (without the original pictures) at https://aardvarchaeology.wordpress.com/?s=sword

Help me build and repair my own equipment by supporting this site on Patreon or elsewhere. I need all my fingers to type with!

Further Reading

Martin Rundkvist, “Landarkeologi vid Djurhamn 2007–2008,” in K. Schoerner (ed.), Skärgård och örlog. Nedslag i Stockholms skärgårds tidiga historia. Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, Conferences 71 (Stockholm 2009) pp. 139-148

Appendix: Dimensions of the Djurhamn Sword (after Rundkvist 2009: 148)

Measurements taken September 5, 2008 after the sword was conserved.

Total length: 926 mm
Greatest width over the guard: 184 mm
Greatest width of the blade: 40 mm
Width of the ricasso: 30 mm
Greatest width of the tang: 13 mm
Minimum width of the tang: 10 mm
Length of the tang: 82 mm
Hilt length: 155 mm
Blade length: 771 mm
Length of the pommel: 63 mm
Diameter of the pommel: 36 mm
Weight: 829 g
Thickness of the guard at the center: 22 mm
Thickness of the guard at the end: 6 mm
Thickness of the blade near the base: 5 mm
Location of the nicks in the edge, measured from the tip: 64, 163, 285, 390 mm

Edit 2025-11-08: s/in 2017/in 2007;

Edit 2025-11-10: added Aleksić as a curator

Edit 2025-11-13: cite 1599 Künstbuchlein

Edit 2026-01-29: trackback from https://meneame.net/story/comentarios-sobre-espada-djurhamn-eng

(scheduled 5 November, based on an email sent 3 November)

The Ridgeway to the Left and to the Right

#BonusPost #FingerPostFriday #Hiking #TheRidgeway #Photography