A Quick Note on “Two Battles in Three Years”

Detail of an early reproduction of the Darius Mosaic in Pompeii. This is in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. I doubt I will return to Russia anytime soon!

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)

It is possible that he helped suppress the Samian revolt in 440 but the single late source is not clear that his trip to Samos was a military expedition: Daniel W. Graham, “Socrates on Samos,” The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 58, No. 1 (May, 2008), pp. 308-313 ↩︎

Land Battles in 5th Century BC Greece: A History and Analysis of 173 Engagements and Greek and Macedonian Land Battles of the 4th Century B.C.: A History and Analysis of 187 Engagements both from McFarland. These are not academic books either but Ray worked to source his claims in ancient evidence. ↩︎

#ancient #bonusPost #DariusMosaic #earlyGreekWarfare #hopliteWars #methodology #SocratesTheHoplite

Bret Devreeaux has another excellent post in his hoplite series https://acoup.blog/2026/01/09/collections-hoplite-wars-part-iva-the-status-of-hoplites/ #histodons #ancMedToot #hopliteWars #militaryHistory #politicalEconomy

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 #crossPost #earlyGreekWarfare #hopliteWars #methodology #response

Ancient Greek Kit is Hard to Make

A Red Figure lekythos (oil flask) with crouched warriors with shields and helmets from around 500 BCE. Image c/o https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/252540 (Object Number: 26.60.76)

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.

A replica hoplite shield by Matthew Amt care of https://www.larp.com/hoplite/hoplon.html

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.

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(scheduled 22 November 2025)

#ancient #bonusPost #earlyGreekWarfare #hopliteWars #methodology #researchHistory #shield