This horseman carries two spears, one long and one medium-sized. The grave marker of Panaitios of the deme Hamaxanteia in Athens who died around 400 BCE. His longer spear is 1.62 times as long as he is tall, which would make it about 275 cm (9′) if he were an average ancient Greek man 170 cm tall. Athens Greece, National Archaeological Museum of Athens, accession number 884. Adapted from Wikimedia Commons
Because most of the participants in the old hoplite debate were English-speaking philologists not German-speaking archaeologists, English speakers have many misconceptions about the things Greek hoplites carried. Many people today believe that most Greek hoplites carried a long spear with an iron-clad or bronze-clad butt. I don’t know any basis for this in an ancient text, and in my experience much less than half of all warriors with round shields in Greek art have a spike (saurotēr) on the butt of their spear. But we can check this against archaeology. By the 6th century BCE it was not common to bury people with weapons in southern Greece, but it was common to dedicate arms and armour to the gods at sanctuaries. These were sometimes buried when there was no more room for them (as at Olympia) and sometimes buried when the site was destroyed by invaders (such as at Kalapodi in central Greece, which was probably destroyed by Xerxes’ troops in 480 BCE). Josho Brouwers summarized the weapons from these sites in his PhD thesis.
Detail from a New Kingdom relief of soldiers in the Museo Civico, Bologna. Photo by Sean Manning September 2018.
I have said that the ‘hoplite debate’ from 1989 to 2013 was an argument between people who were very similar to each other. One way they were the same was that they were almost all men. Is that because academic military history in general is male-dominated? That would not be a very good argument because military history is so marginal at universities that most people who do it have another research field. But more importantly, I can think of about two dozen40fifty sixty women who have made significant contributions to the study of war in the ancient and medieval worlds. From my point of view, a doctoral dissertation, scholarly book, or several influential articles are enough to be significant.