Hoplite - History of the word

[Gaius Julius Caesar]

Fragments? :?
The one I saw was hanging on the wall in the Stoa of (Atticus?), the Agora Museum.
It looked pretty conplete except for its crushed state.
Guess I'll have to either dig out my picture of it or go back to Athens for a holiday....hmmmm which sounds more appealing :? roll:

[hoplite14gr]

As the previous gentlemen posted:

ASPIS = shield

OPLON = weapon

OPLITIS (hoplite) the bearer of arms, the warrior.

The confusion of hoplon=shield is because of ancient poets and lexicographs who gave the descrption "ARGOLIKON OPLON" = weapon of the Argives.
The heavy shield in the phalanx formation was not only a defensive instrument, but because of the othismos was effectivelly a weapon.

Egg shaped shileds have in excavated in Thrace but are 3rd century period.
Not one hoplite shield have been identified as oval.

Kind regards

[Giannis K. Hoplite]

The Spartans shield from the Agora museum is fragmentary,it has been restored with putty the same colour as the oxidized bronze,you have to look pretty closely to realize it. There are close up photos in the Aspis revisionism thread
Khaire
Giannis

[Gaius Julius Caesar]

Ahhh, thanks Giannis! I took it for complete! I was amazed when i saw it, thinking how old it was. :roll: :oops:

[PMBardunias]

Sorry for the delay guys. Yes that is the shield I mean. The dimensions I have for it are 0.83 x 0.95 m, but how subjective this is based on reconstruction I don't know. I did some digging and found the original image before it was restored. I'll attach two images from the 1936 dig report. Looking at the shield, I think I agree that the line of crush from one end of the shield to another could surely be expanded into a round shield.

OPLON = weapon

Stephanos, I think that is too narrow a definition. Xenophon uses the word to refer to a breast plate (Eq. 12.2)according Lazenby for example. That's why I used "tool of war".

[hoplite14gr]

"ouch hoplon estin" = it is not a weapon (meaning that the thorax is not a weapon).
Yes, starting from 12.1 he says how to equip the rider (dei hôplisthai)
The term "hopilzo" or "heksoplizo" can be used even today to decribe both arming and equiping.
The term "hoplon" can be used more liberally to refer to a tool (even atool of war) but ther main origina meaning is weapon.

Kind regards

[Kineas]

Also kind of fun to see how very late the term hoplite is in referring to a warrior. One of the reasons that I tend to the heretical Hans Van Wees view and so on is that, if the hoplite revolution occurred in 650 BC, you'd think someone would have coined a useful name like "hoplite" in 650 BC to go with the "new" style. Esoecially as ancient Greekw as pretty fluid "living" language with an almost Germanic kncak for coining terns to name things..like Philosophy...
But instead, it looks to me as if the word first occurs in Aeschylus around 470 BC, although clearly the word was used slightly earlier, as Pindar praises a runner of the hoplitodromos (about 500 BC).

[30] nikaphorôn: lampei de saphês areta
en te gumnoisi stadiois sphisin en t' aspidodoupoisin hoplitais dromois,

I'm a very fallible amateur classicist, and I invite you all to point out for me some earlier uses of hoplite.

[PMBardunias]

Pindar praises a runner of the hoplitodromos (about 500 BC).

Was there another name for the race before 500? It was already around for some 20 years or so. Was the race was named after the troop type?

[Copenhagen]

Dear all,

I’m not sure the race was ever named after a particular troop type. In Pindar’s ?' ??????????????? ???????? ??????? (Isth. 1.23) the word ???????? is an adjective (although the form is similar to plural dative form of ???????) and should be translated ”armed”. The ???????? ??????? is therefore an ”armed races” rather than a ”hoplite races”.
For the first occurance of the noun ??????? one must look to Herodotus. These are, of course, Lazenby and Whitehead’s points.

I might add that the word, to my knowledge at least, does not appear in the epigraphic record before the 430s either. A Rhodian inscription mentioning hoplites (IK 251) is usually dated between 440 and 420. In Athens the earliest record I know of is the treaty between Athens, Argos, Mantineia and Elis (IG I3 83) from 420. It mentions hoplites among other types of troops.

It is, I think, thought provoking that the noun “hoplite” is not attested before the time of the Peloponnesian war – a war which is often described as the ”end of an era” for hoplites.

Christian

[Kineas]

Nicely put, Christian!

[hoplite14gr]

Armed races or hoplitodromy are said first ot have taken palce when Pythia were instigated by Apollo himself but the sources mentioning that are hellenistic and roman period and therefore people are reluctand to date it earlier than the Archaic period. Yet the sources could not be entirely dismissed not to relate to thincs having happened several centuries before their age.
Kind regards

[Kineas]

I wonder if the armed races gave rise to the usage as armed men?

[PMBardunias]

If we have a term "Hoplitodromy", wherein the "dromy" is a foot race and the "hoplit-" defines how one must be equipped for the race, then, if the requirement is for helmet, shield, and greaves (is was wasn't it?), this de facto describes a troop-type. It is moot whether they were called "hoplites" yet, since a man with an aspis, helmet and greaves is the definition of hoplite in later usage. It would be more informative if the term described a function, like "Phalangite", rather than the equipement which could be used by men in many different tactical schemes.

For the race to be one where men were expected to compete with helmet, greaves and shield, there must have already been a troop type defined by helmet, greaves and shield. The "Hoplite" as defined by a discrete and expected panoply had to come first and had to have sufficient cache value to make a race of them worth watching and participating in. As I see it the only other alternative is that a race was constructed de novo with helmet, greaves, and aspis picked arbitrarily or taken from a non-dominant troop type, which is unlikely.

It is, I think, thought provoking that the noun “hoplite” is not attested before the time of the Peloponnesian war – a war which is often described as the ”end of an era” for hoplites.

Doesn't it make sense that a special word for "fully equiped men, with helmet and aspis" should arise at a time when troop types that were not armed with either were becoming more common and making a real impact on the battlefield? I think the late appearance of the term speaks to a commonality of "hoplites" in the preceeding period, not the reverse.

[Kineas]

I don't think that's logical according to the logic of linguistic historians. In Greek--and this is a trend you can follow pretty closely in the 5th C., as soon as something new comes about, people coin a word. People don't ignore a trend because it is "common" and then coin a word later!

I recommend a quick read of Krentz's "The Invention of the Hoplite Agôn " in Hesperia. I think he sums up the arguments succinctly.

The examination of the unwritten rules of Greek warfare suggests that the ideology of hoplite warfare as a ritualized contest developed not in the 7th century, but only after 480, when nonhoplite arms began to be excluded from the phalanx. Regular claims of victory, in the form of battlefield trophies, and concessions of defeat, in the forms of requests for the retrieval of corpses, appeared only in the 460s. Other 5th century changes in military practice fit the theory that the victories over the Persians led to the idealization of massed hand-to-hand combat. Archaic Greeks probably fought according to the limited protocols found in Homer.

The article in full argues that there is no linguistic, literary, or artistic evidence at all for a pure "hoplite" phalanx before 480 or even 460, and quite a bit of evidence to suggest otherwise--and even follows the historiography of the movement to suppress the light-armed from the Phalanx among modern historians starting in 1969.

Paul, drop me a note off the forum and i'll see if I can mail you the article. And thanks to Nicholas for pointing it out to me!

[hoplite14gr]

He has a point but he does not explain everything.
Pausanias describes in Attika and Messianiaka the warriors of the Messenian war fighting in loose order with heavily armed aristokrats leading the way just like homeric battles
but even Homer describes how massed spearmen drasticaly imptove the attitute of aristokratic "swachbucklers".

We tent to asociate the hoplites with ordered rank fighting but initialy that might not be the case.

Kind regards