specifics in Spear fighting combat

[Muzzaguchi]

Well the view in didactic literature for wider 'strategy' is expediency, whatever gets the job done, and whatever you as a general decide to do, ensure it gets done. I think (the Stesilaus incident aside) a similar expedient attitude must have prevailed in duel type combats - There is no odium attached to Ulysses for being 'tricky'. If you won, however that victory was achieved, you won. I don't know of any references to any individual (or general for that matter) being accused of not fighting fair.

At the same time the Spartan view in the Platonic dialogues is that hoplomachia was not useful since in non-phalanx combat a hoplite would 'know what to do'.

The explosion of attested hoplomachia teachers during the last quarter of the fifth century (and then the subsequent move in literature to write down sophistic knowledge) would tend to suggest that there was an appetite for whatever was taught. Of course the only attested hoplomachia handbook comes from much later and is probably spurious. Yet it was clearly a subject connected with sophists early - Gorgias, one of the first sophists, was meant to have taught generalship (synonymous with the teachers of hoplomachia in Plato and Xenophon) and was born in 487.

The derision of Socrates towards these teachers suggests that they may have taught all manner of techniques (when they did not just teach tactics and drawing up the phalanx). But Stesilaus clearly taught some form of technique (its probably going too far to suggest that he taught the dorudrepanon) but the brothers Dionysodorus and Euthydemus are described as teaching generalship, rhetoric and as pankratiastai so actual techniques are not out of the question. Their depiction as charlatans, however, might also suggest that the techniques they taught were a sham and not at all useful. Men who followed the teachings they have received seem to come to a bad end - Proxenos for example.

Unfortunately no source goes into enough detail on what were the right techniques by contrast. The closest we come to that are the very general lyric poetry references in Tyrtaeus and others like Archilochus - stand your ground, grip your shield, bite your lip and face up to the manly work.

Cheers

Murray