Where to Find Kopis and Machaira Swords

Over on corporate social media, I often see people looking at copies of Illyrian and Iberian swords to understand Greek cleavers. Long war knives spread from Anatolia to Iberia before the Roman empire, but each culture had its own interpretation of these knives. The Iberian swords are very charismatic with decorative fullers and inlays and deep bends, but different from the Greek version of this weapon. Modern copies always differ from the originals, and most of them are based on other modern copies not the artifacts themselves. So this month I will talk about where to find photos and drawings of the original artifacts, then about why these images take a bit of work to find. I hope that will interest different parts of my readership and that I have time for a different topic in March.

Books with Original Artifacts

People reading this post are probably looking for in the weapons with handguards and hooked pommels in the form of a bird’s head (similar swords from other cultures often have hilts shaped like a horse’s head). However, these grew out of earlier large knives and cleavers which might have been weapons or might have been more tools for butchers and priests sacrificing livestock. Archaeologists are interested in development over time so often cover both the earlier and the later forms.

• Probably the best place to start is Marek Verčík‘s book. He has scaled drawings with cross-sections of 14 weapons, a typology with eight nine groups, and a catalogue of 86 from the Balkans with full citations (although some of the works cited are not in the bibliography).1 They are not highly technical. His drawings and measurements are taken from earlier publications. Marek Verčík, Die barbarischen Einflüsse in der griechischen Bewaffnung (Rahden-im-Westf.: Verlag Marie Leidorf GmbH, 2014)
• There are all kinds of artifacts from northern Greece in the John S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation e-Library. The online viewer is a bit awkward and there are no downloads but anyone with a high-speed Internet connection can view these books. Ask your favourite library to request a free print copy.
• There are weights, measurements, and cross-section drawings of several from Olympia in: Holger Baitinger, Die Angriffswaffen aus Olympia (De Gruyter, 2001). This is out of print but available in academic libraries and scans of the section on swords are available on the International Hoplite Discussion facebook group under “files.”
• The sanctuary of Apollo at Kalapodi was full of edged weapons when the Persians burned it in 480 BCE. You can find scale drawings and measurements and a typology in Hans-Otto Schmitt, “Die Angriffswaffen” in Rainer C.S. Felsch, ed., Kalapodi: Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen im Heiligtum der Artemis und des Apollon von Hyampolis in der antiken Phokis, Band II (Philipp von Zabern: Mainz-am-Rhein, 2007) pp. 423-551, Taf. 67-106
• Imma Kilian-Dirlmeier has excellent scale drawings of a few as well as studies of their construction and historical development. This was published in the series Prähistorische Bronzefunde but covers steel swords and long knives as well. Imma Kilian-Dirlmeier, Die Schwerter in Griechenland (ausserhalb der Peloponnes), Bulgarien und Albanien (Franz Steiner Verlag: Stuttgart, 1993)
• There is one very nice kopis from Golyamata Mogila in Daniela Agre, The Tumulus of Golyamata Mogila near the villages of Malomirovo and Zlatinitsa (Sofia: Avalon Publishing, 2011). You can download this book from academia.edu and I have blogged about it.
• There are photos and drawings of a kopis from Sardis on the Sardis Expedition website (Sardis no. M95.007).
• There are photos of another machaira from Seyitömer Höyük in Anatolia in an article by Gökhan Coşkun in the journal Adalya (2017) https://izlik.org/JA22RY85DF
• Yvone Innall has photos and measurements of three from Italy in section 5.3 of her PhD thesis: Yvonne L. Inall, A Typological Assessment of Iron Age Weapons in South Italy (PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 2009) pp. 123-126 (type 5) http://hdl.handle.net/2123/5464
• Fernando Quesada Sanz covers Italian single-edged swords in his books and articles on their relatives in Iberia, above all: Fernando Quesada Sanz, El Armamento Ibérico. Estudio tipológico, geográfico, functional, social y simbólico de las armas en la Cultura ibérica (siglos VI-I a.C.) (1997). I have not seen this one yet!

There is one more from Asia Minor and many from Illyria (Albania and former Yugoslavia). I’m not going to go into those because the books and websites above will give you plenty to get started and are relatively accessible for English speakers.2 None should give your library’s Interlibrary Loan service too much trouble, but a Bulgarian article from the 1930s might.

What Those Artifacts Look Like When Excavated

Greece is short of marshes, deep muddy rivers, and peat bogs. Most ancient weapons survive because they were buried with the dead or devoted to the gods at temples which were burned down or decided to bury some old offerings to make room for new ones. (At Olympia they used them to fill in wells and reinforce the banks of the stadium).

Its hard to keep iron and steel from rusting for 2500 years. Buried iron is often covered with active red rust as soon as it is exposed to fresh oxygen. And many of these weapons were not in good shape when they entered the ground. Weapons from burials were often ritually destroyed by heating them up and folding them like an accordion or breaking off projecting parts. Many of these were extremely quick and light weapons despite being made of soft steel (no ancient Greek, Roman, or Mesopotamian weapon is known to have been successfully quenched).3 The thinner the steel, the less has to rust away before the weapon falls to pieces. Many were buried in their scabbards which have decayed and left encrustations on the blades. This is good if you study textiles and leather from the traces they left, but frustrating if you want to understand the blade (the famous Kirkburn Sword from the Arras Culture in Yorkshire rusted into its enameled bronze and iron sheath in the 2300 years it spent in a grave). So it takes long and tedious work in the conservation laboratory to preserve these weapons, and after conservation they are blackened, twisted, and misshapen. They often fall apart into several pieces.

One of the technical terms is mineralization: the remains of these weapons are no longer iron and steel, but something like very rich iron ore in the shape of the lost weapon. You can study mineralized iron but its not as easy to work with as wrought iron or bloomery steel.

Archaeologists in the early 20th century were not very interested in rusted lumps of iron, and in southern Greece burials no longer contain weapons by the time that the fighting knives with handguards appear. So early excavations of cemeteries and city centres did not turn up many. In recent times, most archaeological finds are stuck in the country where they were found. Most of the serious archaeology in Greece and Bulgaria is by Greeks, Bulgarians, and Germans. So the original objects are in museums in Greece, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria and published in continental European languages. Photographs are not very helpful, you need to spend hours sitting with the objects and drawing them, after the conservation team spent weeks carefully cleaning the iron and stopping the active rust.

Books with all those drawings and measurements are expensive because they need archival-quality paper and skilled editing and have a limited audience. Tens of thousands of people are not willing to buy books about ancient Greek weapons. Often a few edged weapons are published with hundreds of other artifacts, and the price of the book has to cover all of those. There is not yet a large market of makers and reenactors who study the artifacts like in Viking Age archaeology or Imperial Roman archaeology. Without that large market, print runs remain around 200-400 copies, and the price of each copy is high.

There is now a move towards open access in academia: share the book or article freely online and let those who want a paper copy pay for it. This has only been practical for the past twenty years or so and it raises big questions of how to pay for services like layout and proofreading and image processing. There is also a movement towards open data (making individual images or databases searchable) but that requires even more IT services. In the long run open access will be the solution, but academia moves slowly, especially fields which are being dismantled. The Sardis Expedition database and the journal Adalya above are excellent open-access projects.

Why Some Museums Don’t Publish Their Images Online

Many ancient weapons are in regional museums with very limited budgets and IT staffs. Finds in big museums in national capitals are better known. For example, Peter Connolly painted a kopis from Korfu in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, and today there are several reproductions of it. The thing that distinguishes this from a dozen other weapons is that its on display in a museum that almost every visitor to Greece sees, whereas only a few people see the regional museum in Korfu. Professional photography with good lighting and a neutral background is not free either, it takes time to set up and clean up and a display area may have to be closed down during visiting hours. The Royal Ontario Museum can afford to digitalize much more than a museum in rural Macedonia, even before the chatbot swarms started to use up expensive bandwidth and drove some sites offline or behind paywalls. Many museums and regional archaeological services have large backlogs of objects that need conserving and cataloguing, so anything else they do has to be better than that. And of course they prioritize sharing things in the language that the taxpayers who fund them speak.

Why Doesn’t Someone Else Do It?

Books on ancient warfare for a general audience, from publishers such as Osprey and Pen & Sword, could print photos and drawings of these objects. I think that one reason they rarely do this is that contacting institutions in another country that speaks a minority language seems intimidating. Museum bureaucracy can be cumbersome at best, and a language barrier makes that even more difficult. People who write books like this are often in a hurry, so they start with big institutions in their own country and objects that people already recognize. Peter Connolly picked an unusually well-preserved kopis to paint, and many people have made copies of that.

Another reason is that people who buy illustrated books want to see pretty things. Bronzes and ceramics are prettier and easier to understand than lumps of rust that were once edged weapons. It takes skill and money to draw a twisted and rusted weapon, and not every book is written by an artist like Peter Connolly, Ewart Oakeshott, or Roland Warzecha who can see what the original was like.

I know two people who have spent time in small museums in northern Greece sketching and weighing and photographing ancient weapons. If you can travel there, it can be done. Some museums have friendly staff, just nobody dedicated to researching ancient weapons.

Its also possible for anyone to start a list like this on a service like WordPress or Pinterest. Fans of other periods do this all the time. Closed services that you have to log in to see are not the best choice, and ‘free’ services have risks too, but anything you share and collaborate on is better than nothing. Just give as much information as you can about where something came from (reverse image search tools like TinEye are your friend).

I previously wrote about how ancient Greek kit is hard to make. Archaeologists have published most of what you need to know to make it, but you have to track down difficult books in foreign languages. You just can’t get all that information with a quick Google search, and it won’t be as easy to interpret as a sixteenth-century sword in a vitrine. That is frustrating in some ways, but its also what makes this a stimulating hobby.

(scheduled 26 February 2026)

Edit 2026-03-05: mentioned missing bibliography entries, nine not eight types

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

More Hoplite Wars

While I am limiting myself to one blog post per month, over on Bret Devereaux’ blog his fourth essay on the hoplite debates has comments by me and friends-of-the-blog like Richard Taylor, Paul Bardunias, and Heregrim. If you are jonesing for a bookandsword fix, check it out!

Paul Bardunias also has an essay on his hoplite experiments in an open-access volume. The editor is Maciej Talaga whom I have mentioned before.

Maciej Talaga, ed., Moving the Past: Embodied Research in the Studies on Discontinued Movement Cultures (Archaeopress Publishing: Bicester, Oxfordshire, 2025) https://www.archaeopress.com/

(scheduled 14 December 2025)

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)

Cross-Post: Ways Forward in the Study of Ancient Greek Warfare

Back in 2014, archaeologist Josho Brouwers and I both headed west to give talks in different cities on why the study of warfare in the middle of the first millennium BCE is not very scientific, and how it could be brought up to the standards expected in other areas of ancient world studies. Mine, on the study of Near Eastern warfare, is still in press in the proceedings of Melammu-Symposium 8, but Josho has dug up his paper from 2014 on warfare in the Greek world and posted it in all its uncensored glory (most academics try to give their talks in an entertaining way, then print a more moderate version):

First of all, students examining ancient Greek warfare tend to be myopic (i.e. hellenocentric), in the sense that they focus almost entirely on ancient Greece itself and ancient Greek sources, usually from a particular period, with little or no use made of comparative data. Compare this, for example, with the study of Roman warfare, where it is commonplace to compare Roman equipment, tactics, and so forth, with those of the peoples that they fought against, such as the Etruscans, Carthaginians, and various Celtic tribes.
…
Secondly, and by extension, ancient historians, classicists, and archaeologists tend to put their focus squarely on their own material. Thus, ancient historians and classicists rely almost entirely on texts, each with a different approach, while archaeologists limit themselves to producing detailed overviews of arms and armour. Whenever use is made of another discipline’s evidence, the treatment is often simplistic
…
Thirdly, there is little scientific rigour that students of Greek warfare apply to how they approach their material. Theoretical frameworks, preconceived notions, and the like, are never made explicit, and one gets the impression that proper interpretation of the sources is on the same level as connoisseurship in the study of Greek vases
…
Lastly, ancient Greek warfare seems to be one of the few areas of ancient history where rampant nineteenth-century colonialist ideology is still commonly accepted … it is still commonplace to regard the ancient Greeks as immediate ancestors of Western nations (mostly the United States and Western Europe), as inventors of democracy, philosophy, and a “Western”-style of warfare, despite literally decades’ worth of research that have proven these notions false.

Josho Brouwers, “Phalanx and fallacies: Ways Forward in the Study of Ancient Greek Warfare,” 3 July 2014

In my view, the debate between ‘hoplite revolution’ theorists and gradualists (“orthodoxy” and “heretics”, “California school” and revisionists) lasted roughly from 1985 to 2013. Most of the former school dropped out of the debate as they found they could not answer questions from other schools of thought. Since 2013, the interesting debate has been between the majority of gradualists like Peter Krentz and Hans van Wees and some young bucks who think that they did not go nearly far enough and that a true study of Greek warfare needs to include the whole Greek world from Marseilles to Abu Simbel, and a study of hoplites needs to include Sidonians and Phrygians as well as Laconians.

Further Reading

“War and Soldiers in the Achaemenid Empire: Some Historiographical and Methodological Considerations.” In Sebastian Fink and Kerstin Droß-Krüpe (eds.) Melammu-Symposia 8 and 10 (ÖAW: Wien) pp. 495-515 {IN PRESS AS OF ORIGINAL POST: a PDF is now available here}

Warin, Isabelle (2011) “Review: Reinstating the Hoplite by Adam Schwartz.” L’Antiquité Classique 80 pp. 456-459 https://www.jstor.org/stable/antiqclassi.80.456 (in French)

Edit 2025-11-15: formatting, linked public-domain article in Melammu-Symposia

#ancient #crossPost #earlyGreekWarfare #methodology

Staring Evil in the Face: Some Thoughts on Hanson’s “The Other Greeks”

Victor Davis Hanson, The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (The Free Press: New York, 1995)

I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labour of the other. Broad and general as is this assertion, it is fully borne out by history. This is not the proper occasion, but, if it were, it would not be difficult to trace the various devices by which the wealth of all civilized communities has been so unequally divided, and to show by what means so small a share has been allotted to those by whose labour it was produced, and so large a share given to the non-producing classes. The devices are almost innumerable, from the brute force and gross superstition of ancient times, to the subtle and artful fiscal contrivances of modern.

– John C. Calhoun, “Slavery a Positive Good,” 6 February 1837 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Slavery_a_Positive_Good

I finally read The Other Greeks by Victor Davis Hanson in summer 2018. This book, published in 1995, contains an argument that farmers working 9- to 13-acre (20-30 3 to 5 hectare) plots were key to Greek culture wrapped in two rants about the decline of the American family farm and the decadence of American academics. Victor Davis Hanson’s writings on ancient agrarianism are less famous than his political columns and his ideas about Greek warfare, but I enjoyed working through this book. Farming is obviously a topic that Hanson cares deeply about, and because he put so much care into this book I can tell that he sees some of the implications of his argument.

The ancient history in this book is interwoven with the story of a 40 acre farm near Selma, California which the Hansons have held for five generations (only three generations were able to make a living from it, his parents got jobs in town and he tried to keep the farm going after his grandfather retired but found that the only way was to use his salary and royalties from teaching and punditry to subsidize the farm). In his view, both classical Greek and modern US culture were at the best while society was dominated by rural small farmers, and any threat to this class is a threat to freedom and democracy.

To my knowledge, Victor Davis Hanson has never written about why his Swedish great great grandparents were able to take a share of “the richest farmland in the world” for a token price in 1875, just like Wikipedia estimates that the indigenous population of the San Joaquin Valley fell 93% from 1850 to 1900 but falls silent on what exactly happened (today all the nations of the Yokuts are a few thousand strong, about as many as one of the little farming towns Hanson loves).

There is a debate about what share of the population belonged to the traditional property-owning, hoplite-fighting, speaking-in-the-assembly class. If you read this book quickly, you will see that the families with 10 acres or so of land who he calls yeomen made up “half to a third” or “a near majority” of the free male population (pp. 207, 208, 459 et passim). At first that seems like a large proportion, but his yeomen have “small farms for a family and a slave or two” (pp. 207, 208, 459). He estimates 80-100,000 adult citizens, 10,000? adult metics, 80-150,000 slaves, total “perhaps nearly 200,000 adult residents of Attica” in the fifth century BCE (p. 209), and 12,000 hoplites out of 60-000-70,000 adult residents of Boeotia. So Hanson believes that there was a glorious age of freedom as long as Greece was run by “yeomen” farmers, and believes that his “yeomen” families made up 15-22% of the population of Attica and 13,000-25,000 adult men.

Many other experts think this is too high. In “The Myth of the Middle-Class Army” (p. 54), Hans Van Wees estimates that they comprised 9 to 30% of the citizens of Athens (between 3,000 and 10,000 adult men). In another article he argues that there were three slaves for every free person in Athens a few years after the death of Alexander (“Athens’ property classes and population in and before 317 BC: Demetrius and Draco,” Journal of Hellenic Studies (2011) 131 pp. 95-114.) In Men of Bronze, Lin Foxhall argued that there is no sign of a dense network of medium-sized farms in the archaeological record until the end of the sixth century BCE. Part of the dispute is technical issues such as whether half the grain fields were left uncultivated in a given year: Hanson’s “yeomen farms” are smaller than van Wees zeugitai farms because he thinks they could get more from a smaller piece of land, and Hanson relies mostly on literature whereas Foxhall focused on archaeology. But I want to focus on what Hanson is arguing, not whether he is correct.

If you read The Other Greeks carefully, you see that “a third to one half” of the citizens being yeomen farmers translates to a fifth or a sixth of the population. And while Hanson says again and again that he does not like big estates worked by gangs of slaves, in a footnote on page 457 he tells you how these one or two slaves fit into the lives of his yeoman farmers with 10 or 12 acres:

Agricultural slavery, even more than homestead residence, made intensive agriculture possible. It prevented the spread of helotage. It sharply defined the independence and freedom of the rising Greek yeoman in a way not found elsewhere.

And he also admires the way Greek colonists gave each other equal plots of land in a beautiful grid designed with Greek geometrical science (pp. 194-196). He does not have a lot to say about whose land it was before they arrived, but readers of The Western Way of War or Carnage and Culture can get the general idea. When Macedonian or Persian barbarians threaten to conquer “westerners” Hanson launches into a flow of eloquent speech about freedom and slavery, but when “westerners” are about to conquer and murder or enslave foreigners he slips into a flat descriptive mode or just drops the subject. And he is very frank about the tyranny of ancient and modern farmers over their wives (pp. 130-135).

So when you look closely, The Other Greeks is arguing that its wonderful balanced regimes of homesteaders were ruled by about 15-20% of the population. We hear about a widow spinning for piece-work pay in the Iliad, and male and female labourers hired by the year in Hesiod’s Works and Days, but Hanson seems to think it was important for Greek freedom that these lowly free workers were replaced with slaves: he describes the poor Athenians who accepted pay for jury service as “the mob on the dole” (p. 5) and hired farm workers as “shiftless” (p. 70). And he thinks that slaves may well have formed the majority of the population of Attica in this period. That kind of argument that slavery is a positive good and necessary for anyone to live a civilized life was last current before the American Civil War, although Hanson does not approve of large plantations or race-based slavery.

“Agricultural slavery … sharply defined the independence and freedom of the rising Greek yeoman”? I think Hanson has read and understood the ideas of thinkers like Samuel Johnson (“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”) or Edmund Morgan (American Slavery, American Freedom) who observe that people who talk about freedom often mean the freedom to dominate and enslave. He just does not find that kind of freedom despicable.

Underlying and fundamental to our most basic philosophy is our concern and respect for the dignity of the individual. … Upon reflection, it is easy for us to realize that our conception of the dignity of the individual could have originated only in Christianity. … the Christian religion, born on the border of East and West, found its acceptance in the West, and became a part of the heritage and culture of the West, as contrasted to the East of the Orientals. … There are also those in this world who are the devisees of a totally different heritage and with whom we have no identity in either antiquity or modern times…. Our society may well be said to be… the exemplification of the maximum development of the Western civilization…. At the opposite extreme exists the Eastern heritage, different in every essential, not necessarily in a way that it is inferior, but different…. The chasm of difference between the two… is in heritage, the force that shapes the man to form unchangeable, except, if at all, by the infinite passage of time…. Oriental and Hawaiian groups constitute in excess of 70% of Hawaii’s population. This large segment of the population has a heritage… in a word, Eastern…. There is serious doubt in my mind as to whether the Hawaiian people would not be seriously handicapped, possibly even precluded, in defending themselves from such as the communist-dominated Longshoremans Union by the imposition upon them of Western institutions of government, since their heritage has not equipped them to comprehend the philosophy essential to the effective operation of these institutions. … There is even greater doubt in my mind that the Hawaiian people could contribute to the degree of harmony remaining in the conduct of affairs of our Federated Republic…. An abandonment of the United States of America in favor of a United States of America and Pacific— precedenting a United States of the World— would actually benefit no one but toll the death-knell of our Federated Republic…

– US Senator (for South Carolina) Strom Thurmond, a prominent opponent of the Civil Rights Act and supporter of racial segregation who angrily denied that he was a racist, “Against Hawaii Statehood” (1959) https://delong.typepad.com/files/thurmond-hawaii.pdf

In sum, the Greek agrarian city-state had been able to fashion an unusually egalitarian social, political, and military system, but one (like many modern liberal states) closed to the larger, ever-present (and growing) world of have-nots surrounding the polis, the other who desperately wanted the economic and social advantages of polis life. Herein lay the dilemma. To open up the discriminatory gates of polis citizenship was- as modern states have often discovered- to corrupt the carefully constructed equilibrium and the unifying agricultural heritage that had evolved over two centuries of agrarianism. For the Greek geôrgoi to refashion the traditional polis for all residents might just as likely lose it for everyone.

– Victor Davis Hanson, The Other Greeks (1995), p. 364

To Hanson (and Thurmond) creating the good community for some requires holding others outside or keeping them as hewers of wood and drawers of water. And at some point, whether you define those others in terms of race, “heritage,” religion, or culture is an academic quibble. Most people look, talk, and worship like their parents and schoolmates, so talking about race, culture, or religion lets you exclude the same people. As Roel Konijnendijk has written, Hanson’s vision of the good society is white supremacist in practice, even though he firmly rejects racial theories. If you poke around in the darker corners of the internet, you can find open racists like F. Roger Devlin lecturing him for lacking the courage to push his arguments as far as they can go or begging him to contribute to their journals (both links are to the Wayback Machine- ed.)

One of the reasons for the primacy of violence is that, unlike the industrial world, in the agrarian world wealth can generally be acquired more easily and quickly through coercion and predation than through production. Consequently ‘specialists in violence are generally endowed with a rank higher than that of specialists in production.’

– Moshe Berent, “Anthropology and the Classics: War, Violence, and the Stateless Polis,” The Classical Quarterly 50.1 (2000), p. 258 (thanks Josho Brouwers)

If you know some world history or ethnography, you know that there are plenty of societies where most families have about the same size of house, the same quality of diet, and bury their dead with the same things as most people of the same age and gender (and yes Mr. Thurmond, there were millions of Christians in Egypt, Ethiopia, Syria, and India before the first white Anglo-Saxon Protestant arrived). Those societies were not always organized around patriarchy and private land ownership, and sometimes they even let women work in the fields, but they didn’t leave a lot of writing because until recently the materials were too expensive (and because settler states in the 19th and 20th century often destroyed their records, or just declared them irrelevant so that eventually someone threw out grandpa’s box of old books to make room for a new television). If civilization, however defined, is going to survive this century, I think that self-organized communities of equals committed to humane values are more likely to save it than Hanson’s violent farmers who care about nothing more than passing on the farm better than their father left it to them (and there is a lot of inspiration for those communities in classical Greek texts, just not the bits of those texts which are cited in this book). I think we need to look forward to the way we can make a changing world as consistent with our values as possible, not pump ourselves up with stories of a vanished golden age and higher cultures erasing lower ones. (And The Other Greeks sort of agrees, there is praise for Parent-Teacher Associations and farmers’ co-ops alongside the warnings that political action is useless, your neighbours will steal your water and your vine-props, and the family farm in the United States is doomed). But I think it is important to be frank that our disagreements are not just about what the ancient world was like, but about what kinds of social order are worth defending, and that you can’t divide Hanson’s books into some that describe the past and others which try to change the present.

This blog is not funded by a public-sector pension or The National Review Online, just by my gentle readers

This post was written in ?2018? and edited and scheduled at the beginning of 2020 before the present tragic situation in Europe. I delayed it from its scheduled publication date of 21 March.

Further Reading: If you want works on early agriculture by someone who believes that early Greek and Roman small farmers achieved something special but doesn’t argue that slavery was a positive good, check out the works of Geoffrey Kron (although I am a bit concerned to read a 33 page article on the classical Greek economy which focused on “equality” but does not mention slaves in Greece at all and only mentions serfs in Greece once). Two Oxen Ahead by Paul Halstead sounds fun and describes actual Greek farmers raising staple crops. And if you want a direct attack on this kind of politics, check out Gwynne Dyer’s Waiting for the Canadian Hordes (2004) or Gabriel Schoenfeld’s Sophistry in the Service of Evil (2019).

If I ever publish these ideas in print, I may track down and talk about a passage on “whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically?” in “Editorial: Why the South Must Prevail,” William F. Buckley Jr. ‘s The National Review, 24 August 1957

Edit 2020-04-29: Corrected the figure in hectares (although I don’t have a paper copy of the book available to check)

Edit 2021-04-16: For another statement by a far-right American that the ideal government would be run by the richest 20%, see David Forbes, “The Secret Authoritarian History of Science Fiction” https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ak7y5/the-secret-authoritarian-history-of-science-fiction “In ‘Constitution for Utopia,’ written in 1961, (editor and crank John W.) Campbell (Jr.) argued outright that the best possible government would only allow the wealthy—specifically the wealthiest fifth of the population—to vote.” This essay was reprinted by other hard-right science fiction writers like Jerry Pournelle.

Edit 2021-09-28: converted to block editor after migrating to self-hosted wordpress

Edit 2021-10-21: fixed links which were broken when WordPress introduced the block editor

Edit 2014-08-24: some more threads to pull on the relationship between Greek slavery and Greek freedom

This invites comparison to the frequently noted relationship between the growth of both personal freedom and civic rights, on the one hand, and chattel slavery, on the other, in Greek poleis: these two trends not merely coincided but reinforced each other (Finley (1981), (1998); O. Patterson (1991)).

Walter Scheidel, “Monogamy and Polygyny,” in Beryl Rawson, ed., A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Wiley 2010) pp. 112, 113

#ancient #bookReview #earlyGreekWarfare #modern #settlerColonialism #slavery #victorDavisHanson

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