Hoplite question

[oudysseos]

Cyrus,

Although it is, I suppose, a common assertion that hoplite phalanxes routinely fought with the edges of their shields interlocked like a giant Roman testudo formation, in fact this issue is hotly contested in academic circles and the evidence for technical details about hoplite combat is both very sparse and very far from unequivocal.

The major source for the interlocked shields concept seems to be a passage from Thucydides (5.71.1) which has been commonly translated along the lines of

All armies are alike in this: on going into action they get forced out rather on their right wing, and one and the other overlap with this their adversary's left; because fear makes each man do his best to shelter his unarmed side with the shield of the man next him on the right, thinking that the closer the shields are locked together the better will he be protected. The man primarily responsible for this is the first upon the right wing, who is always striving to withdraw from the enemy his unarmed side; and the same apprehension makes the rest follow him.

However! Careful inspection of the greek text is very revealing. A literal translation from Garrett Fagan, Great Battles of the Ancient World, of the bold-face passage above is

Thinking that the denser their closeness is, the better protected they are.

There is no explicit mention of locked or touching shields in the greek at all- the Perseus website can provide excellent commentary on the greek text if you're interested.
Anyways, 'Close' is a pretty subjective term and depends on context- if you and I were together in an elevator, and we were four or six feet apart I would not think that you were 'close' to me. But if we were standing in the middle of a football pitch, I would find six feet to be quite close (at six feet our shields would not touch).

Furthermore, there are several passages from Xenophon in the Anabasis (1.2.17, 6.5.25) that seem to describe relatively loose formations of hoplites.

It is true that Victor Davis Hanson has long asserted the 'locked shields' concept as if it were established fact, but Hans van Wees, for example, is critical of this position. I suggest reading Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities by the latter author.

So maybe the 'lowest gread knower' does think that hoplites are supposed to fight in a shield wall all the time, but a going a few grades up in knowledge might give you a different perspective.

Dogmatic assertions of any kind are, I think, inappropriate. The truth is no-one will ever ever know the precise technical details of hoplite combat. The written sources don't describe the mechanics of combat because they assumed that the majority of their readers were themselves hoplites.

So it seems that the EB team is not so clearly guilty of such a huge error, after all. And as Foot so patiently pointed out, there are some mini-mod alternatives if you really feel strongly about this.