bookandswordblogA quick note on "two battles in three years" https://www.bookandsword.com/2026/01/18/a-quick-note-on-two-battles-in-three-years/ #histodons #researchHistory #ancMedToot #antiquidons #militaryHistory
SeanAncient 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.htmlAny 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
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