Very Powerful Peltasts

[tk-421]

1) The term peltast meant different things over the centuries. At the time of the Peleponesian war peltasts essentialy were poor slobs with a few javelins and a wicker shield whose job was to keep the enemy occupied until the hoplites could decide the battle.

I've been reading Thucydides and The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan simultaneously and I have been getting the impression hoplites were not as important in the Peloponnesian War as they had been in the past or they would be in later wars. It seems to me that, outside of Delium and Mantinea, that hoplites decided the outcome of very few important battles. Peltasts, cavalry, and ships, to me, seemed to have been much more important in the war. In Aetolia light armed troops dominated the hoplites, the second Sicilian Expedition seems to have been decided more by the Syracusans' superior cavarly rather than the Athenians' better hoplites, and the major battles of the latter half of the war were mostly naval. Perhaps I am making the wrong assumptions about hoplites in what I read or am reading the wrong books (although I don't think I could go wrong with Thucydides).