Four Theses on the Hoplite Wars

Over on his website historian Bret Devereaux has started a series on debates about early Greek warfare. The first post in that series is well worth reading. It puts me in a dilemma because I see some things differently than he does, but I can’t spare the time for such a lengthy and carefully footnoted essay. So I will respond with four theses about those academic controversies, using vivid bloggy writing and linking to my earlier posts and academic publications. I will follow his lead by avoiding discussion of Victor Davis Hanson’s political project although I had to address it in my review of The Other Greeks. Hanson’s ideas about early Greek warfare were not original in 1989. His great achievement was expressing them in clear and contemporary language which spread outside the lecture hall and the seminar room.

First, I agree with Devereaux that there were two debates: one about what happened on ancient Greek battlefields, and the other whether Greek warfare was basically the same everywhere from 750 to 432 BCE, or varied across time and space. These two debates are not inherently connected and many people have put forward theories about combat mechanics without claiming that these theories have some profound implications for ancient cultures. Roel Konijnendijk ignored the debate about massed shoves or metaphorical pushes in his monograph on early Greek warfare without that affecting his argument. Many scholars argued against a massed push by whole lines of hoplites without arguing that Greek warfare varied from place to place and time to time.

Second, I think that the debate about hoplite battles is undecided, while the debate about revolution or gradual change ended in a decisive victory by the Krentz-van Wees school (the former heretics). Neither the California School (Victor Davis Hanson and sympathizers) with their ideas about rugby scrums, nor the Krentz-van Wees school with their ideas about loose crowds of soldiers, had ideas about how battles worked which convince most thoughtful observers. This is understandable since none of them had much experience in combat sports and none sought out people with that experience before forming their basic views.

Third, in many ways, the intense scholarly debate about combat mechanics, and emotional language like “orthodoxy” and “heretics,” disguised how much the parties agreed about. The debate about ancient Greek warfare from 1989 to 2013 was a classical philologist’s game (and incidentally an American and British man’s game). Victor Davis Hanson made an argument based on texts describing southern mainland Greece, supplemented with a casual use of archaeology and art from the wider Greek world, and critics responded with more rigorous arguments about the same type of evidence. They didn’t have to learn about Egyptian paintings or the Stele of the Vultures or weapons in Italian tombs. Even an adventurous scholar like Hans van Wees leaned heavily on a single comparison (with war in Highland New Guinea before the gun) and that was one of the most controversial aspects of his theories. The two sides were in agreement about how to fight, like Georgian duelists counting out their paces in some foggy field.

Fourth, the debate drastically shifted in 2013. On one hand, van Wees’ former student Josho Brouwers published a book on early Greek warfare which centered archaeology and put Greece in its broader cultural context. Archaic Greece was not much like Pericles’ Athens, proud of its separation from and superiority to barbarians, and more like the Norse world of the Viking Age, eagerly learning from, mixing with, and robbing Slavs, Persians, Romans, Franks, and Irish. Many cultures in the eastern Mediterranean had lines of spearmen with bronze helmets and large shields, and the ancients said that many nations had hoplites or men “armed like Greeks.”¹ Trying to decide whether the hoplites on the Amathus bowl are Greeks, Carians, or Phoenicians is fruitless.

On the other hand, hoplite reenactment began to grow more organized and scientific, and the spread of high-speed Internet made it easier to share videos. Since about 2013, it has become more common to try out theories about moving troops, pushing with shields, or fighting in lines. These trials cannot replace traditional scholarship: nobody dies in them and they are not always carried out or written up with academic strictness. However, we can now say that it is indeed possible for whole lines of men with shields to push on each other without suffocating because we tried it; just like we can refute the myth of the heavily burdened hoplite because we looked at ancient artifacts and they were small and light. Its easier to agree on the weight of a helmet than on how to interpret the Iliad. Since about 2013, new empirical evidence has started to flow into debates about early Greek warfare, and archaeologists and specialists in Italy or Anatolia have published lively work which goes farther than Krentz or van Wees dared to. The debate since 2013 has not been stalled just because a few people still hold to the old California School or because nobody can agree about just what happened when two lines of spearmen came together.

Some of these theses might be controversial, especially the fourth. Its unfortunate that nobody in Josho Browers’ circle ended up in a stable research job, but not surprising at a time when institutions that study the ancient world are being demolished. While I am not shy about criticizing approaches to the ancient world which I disagree with, we all have a common interest in keeping people teaching and studying antiquity. While it can feel tedious to keep writing about Greek hoplites, its also exciting that people without academic training are interested in what we have to say.

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Further Reading

Sean Manning, “War and Soldiers in the Achaemenid Empire: Some Historiographical and Methodological Considerations.” In Kai Ruffing, Kerstin Droß-Krüpe, Sebastian Fink, and Robert Rollinger (eds.), Societies at War: Proceedings of the 10th Symposium of the Melammu Project held in Kassel September 26-28 2016 and Proceedings of the 8th Symposium of the Melammu Project held in Kiel November 11-15 2014 (Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: Vienna, 2020) pp. 495-515 (PDF copy here)

Cross-Post: Ways Forward in the Study of Early Greek Warfare (Josho Brouwers’ take after reading the 2013 conference proceedings Men of Bronze)

Edit 2025-11-16: added image, linked review of Bardunias’ book, added one sentence about how doubting massed pushing does not imply doubting other aspects of the California school/English orthodoxy

(scheduled 15 November 2025)

1. Examples include many nations in Hdt. 7.61–99, the ὁπλῖται Αἰγύπτιοι “Egyptian hoplites” of Xen. An. 1.8.9 and ὁπλῖται Ἀσσύριοι “Assyrian hoplites” of Xen. An. 7.8.15, the apparent use of characters armed like Egyptians or “like the Persians in pictures” (but not called hoplites) to teach lessons about combat between Greek hoplites in Xen. Cyr., the Persian kardakes at Issos who Arrian calls ὁπλῖται (Arr., Anab. 2.8.6), and the πολιτικόι στρατιωτόι “citizen soldiers” of Sidon at Diodorus 16.42.2 (this list is taken from note 38 of the article in the conference proceedings above) ↩︎