Missile weapons seem, in fact, to have been comparatively ineffective against the hoplite phalanx, or even against hoplites marching in good order on level ground. At Marathon in 490 BC (Hdt. 6.112) and at Cunaxa in 401 BC (Xen. An. 1.17–20) hoplites charged successfully at the double against Persian archers, whose bows were probably not powerful enough to penetrate Greek shields. At Cunaxa the 'barbarians' had no confidence in the stopping power of their archery, but gave way and ran before the Greeks came within bowshot. Nor were Persian archers and slingers able to overwhelm the Greeks during their long march up the Tigris (Xen. An. 3.1–18); and, more remarkably still, a raiding party of 'about six hundred men,' after it had failed to surprise its intended victim and the countryside had been raised against it, was able to make good its retreat by keeping a circular formation, with shields turned to the enemy arrows and slings. Certainly the Greeks suffered severely, nearly half of them being wounded; but there were apparently few or no fatal casualties (Xen. An. 7.8.8–19). Of all the nations whom Xenophon and his 'Ten Thousand' encountered on their march through Asia, only the Carduchi, the ancestors as it would seem of the modern Kurds, had missiles that would penetrate Greek armor—'bows nearly three cubits long, and arrows of more than two cubits, which went through shields and breastplates. The Greeks used them as javelins when they took them' (Xen. An. 4.2.28).
The triumph of the Greek spear over the Persian arrow had in fact been decided at Plataea in 479 BC, where the Persians shot for a long time (perhaps for hours) against a stationary target of thousands of Spartan hoplites sitting patiently behind their shields. They inflicted casualties: Callicrates, 'the most handsome man in the Greek host,' regretted, as he was carried off the field mortally wounded by an arrow in his side, not that he was dying for Greece but that he had shown no deed worthy of himself, as he had desired (Hdt. 9.72). But the Spartans were not seriously weakened by a total of ninety-one
dead (Hdt. 9.70), while the Persian army was destroyed with the loss of many thousands.
In the campaign of Plataea the Athenians, alone among the Greek allies, were assisted by a corps of archers, who did good service against the Persian cavalry in the first part of the campaign (Hdt. 9.21.3–23.2) and whom the Spartans would gladly have borrowed during the battle itself (Hdt. 9.60.3).20 Archers, including horse-archers, continued to be a valuable part of the Athenian military establishment, but we hear nothing of their use in pitched battles. Hoplites who were defeated by light-armed troops armed with missiles—notably the Spartans by the Athenians on Sphacteria in 425 BC (Thuc. 4.30.4–4.37.5) and the Athenians themselves in Aetolia in 426 BC (Thuc. 3.94.3–98.5)—were generally overwhelmed by superior numbers on rough ground where it was impossible to maintain a regular formation. A great victory of peltasts, armed with javelins, over a regiment of Spartan hoplites on level ground was indeed won in 390 BC by the Athenian Iphicrates; but the peltasts were supported by a large Athenian hoplite and cavalry force (Xen. Hell. 4.5.12–17).
To sum up, the hoplite weapon was the spear, used for thrusting at close quarters, with the sword as a secondary adjunct. Hoplites might have to fight against, or in combination with, light infantry and cavalry in skirmishes and mountain warfare, and in fact their tactics and armor were modified with this possibility in mind during the centuries of hoplite warfare. But these modifications did not affect the form of spear and sword, and so need not be discussed here.
A description of the spear may begin with the wooden shaft. Naturally no complete specimen has survived, but the pictorial evidence suggests that the spear was generally rather longer than the height of the bearer. Traces of the wooden shaft connecting the head and small iron butt of a spear were found in a grave in Macedonia dating from the early Iron Age.' This particular specimen had a total length of 'just over 7 ft 3 in. (2.2 m), but its evidence is not directly applicable to hoplite warfare. Some at least of the spears given to hoplites by the vase-painters seem to be longer—perhaps 8 ft (2.4 m). The 'Pelian ash,' on which Achilles leans in the picture that has given the 'Achilles Painter' (c.450–440 BC) the name by which he is known today, seems longer still.21 Ash-wood was used for the spear of Homeric heroes; Achilles inherited from his father the 'Pelian ash spear' that the Centaur Chiron had gathered on the peak of Mount Pelion (Hom. Il. 19.390) and old Priam's warlike youth is recalled by the epithet 'of the good ashen spear' (Hom. Il. 4.47 etc.). Cornel was
preferred for the sarissa, the great pike of the Macedonian phalanx that eventually overcame the hoplite; according to Theophrastus (Hist. Pl. 3.12.2) the length of the sarissa was limited to 12 cubits (18 ft) by the limited growth of the cornel. Neither wood is very readily available in southern Greece; perhaps the use of less tough substitutes is one reason why the broken spear was such a hazard of hoplite warfare. We are not told what those substitutes may have been. Grattius Faliscus, who wrote a Latin poem on hunting about the beginning of the present era, gives a list of woods suitable for the shafts of hunting spears (Cynegeticon 127–49). These include cornel from the Hebrus Valley, far away in Thrace; myrtle, the plant of Venus; 'Termes' (a smooth leafless branch cut from a tree, but here, where a particular variety is demanded by the context, perhaps wild olive: cf. Hor. Epod. 16.45); yew; pine; broom; and even frankincense. He is thinking (line 147) of light javelins only 5 ft (1.5 m) long, but pine and wild olive at least might have made infantry spears. Another tree with fragrant gum, the styrax, growing on the tops of the Taurus mountains, is said by Strabo (12.7.3) to furnish shafts for javelins (akontismata), which are similar to shafts made of cornel-wood. Clearly hoplite spears are not in question, and there is no need to imagine the Greek city-states importing spear-shafts from the Taurus. The connection between the tree's name and the use of the words styrax or styrakion for the butt of a spear or javelin is obscure (Th. 2.4.3; Xen. Hell. 6.2.19; Pl. Lach. 183E). To the woods used for spear-shafts Virgil (Aen. 11.543) adds oak hardened in the fire; but none of these seems as suitable as ash, when it was available. Spokeshaves for trimming shafts are listed by Xenophon (Cyr. 6.2.32) among the tools that should accompany an ideal army, suggesting that replacements might have to be provided in the field, using whatever wood was available.
On the metal parts of the spear we are better informed, thanks to dedications from the great sanctuaries. Iron spear-heads had replaced bronze after the collapse of Mycenaean civilization, and continued to be used during and after the development of hoplite warfare, from the seventh century BC onward. They are socketed, and were further secured to the shaft by rivets. There is no simple standard type, but a narrow and leaf-shaped blade with a strong central rib is usual. The length also varies: often from about 8 in. (20 cm) to over 1 ft (30 cm). Bronze, already long in normal use for articles, like helmets and cuirasses, that required to be carefully shaped, is reintroduced for spear-heads in the sixth and fifth centuries, without completely
supplanting iron. Very large spear-heads, with decorated blades a metre in length, have been found at the great sanctuaries and are believed to come from Sicily or Southern Italy. Their purpose may well have been ceremonial rather than practical.22
A butt-spike or 'lizard killer' (sauroter), generally made of bronze, was a feature of the classical hoplite spear. The earliest appearance of the word is in the Iliad (Hom. Il. 10.153), in a passage describing soldiers asleep with their heads pillowed on their shields and their spears standing upright, with the sauroter driven into the ground. As so often with Homeric evidence, it is not easy to decide whether these spears belong in the heroic age, as their bronze heads, gleaming from afar, suggest, or to some later period.23 At all events, the sauroter disappears from the archaeological record in southern Greece after the end of the Bronze Age, and reappears possibly during the seventh century, though it remains 'a rarity before the sixth century.'24 It is usually cast solid, a four-sided spike on occasion 'no less than seventeen inches' (40 cm) long,25 but usually perhaps half this length. It is socketed, to receive the end of the spear-shaft. Its primary purpos
e was probably always to enable the spear to be stuck upright in the earth when not in use; but it might also have served for a downward thrust to finish off a fallen enemy, and square holes in pieces of armor found at the great sanctuaries were, it has been suggested, made with the sauroter.26 But there is also a possibility that dedicated armor may have been fixed to boards with spikes; perhaps not all of these holes were made in battle.
For shafted weapons with slashing blades, like the medieval halbert, there was simply no room in the crowded files of the phalanx. Plato (Lach. 183D) describes, and makes fun of, a 'spear-sickle' (dorudrepanon) designed to cut the enemy's rigging in a sea-fight. When the inventor's galley grappled with a merchantman, the blade became entangled in the rigging, and as the ships passed on opposite courses the man had to run the whole length of his own deck, hopping ridiculously when someone threw a large stone at his feet, in order to hang on to his weapon. In the end he had to let go, and the enemy ship went off with the shaft wagging from her rigging. The 'spear-sickle,' many centuries later, enabled Julius Caesar (B.G. 3.14) to win a decisive naval battle against the ocean-going sailing-ships of the Gauls. But in classical Greek naval warfare it played no further part. A few Attic vases of the second half of the fifth century BC show what may be the dorudrepanon, but in the hands of barbarians, not of Greeks. It is represented as a spear, below whose head a sickle-shaped
blade curves forwards and downwards. Held by the bodyguards of eastern monarchs, its function seems to be purely ceremonial, though it is once wielded in battle by an Amazon. This curious weapon is not an actual Asiatic halbert; at least, no text or work of art from the Persian empire provides evidence for it.27
Nor did the battle-axe find a place in the hoplite phalanx—again, presumably, because there was no room to swing it. The Greeks were aware of a light battle-axe (sagaris) used by mounted tribesmen like the Massagetae (Hdt. 1.215.1) and Sacae (Hdt. 7.64.2). It is frequently depicted in Greek art, often in the hands of Amazons; indeed Xenophon (An. 4.4.16) talks of 'a sagaris such as the Amazons have.' This belonged to a Persian captive; Xenophon is perhaps expressing contempt of the feeble weapons (including also a 'Persian bow and quiver') of the enemy. The sagaris is generally depicted as having a small axe-blade backed with a short spike or a rounded butt. The butt of a splendid ceremonial axe found in 1903 at Kelermes in South Russia is ornamented with heraldic animals.28 A sacred axe, supposedly fallen from heaven, was among the treasures of the Scythian royal house (Hdt. 4.5.3).
Homer (Il. 13.611–12; 15.711) gives battle-axes to the Trojans twice. He uses the names pelekus and axine; the ancient commentators suggest (without warrant in the poet's text) that the axes might have been intended to break up the Greek ships, rather than for fighting. But the poet certainly speaks of them as weapons. A modern scholar sees 'a contrast between the Greek with his gentleman's weapon' (the sword) 'and the Trojan with his barbaric and ineffectual tool.'29
There is evidence also for the use of a heavy double-bladed battle-axe as an infantry weapon in Italy in the seventh century and later. A helmet in the University of California museum collection bears marks that may have been caused by a battle-axe, which, though it failed to break through the bronze armor, might well have concussed the wearer.30
The sword, then, was the hoplite's only secondary weapon. And it was quite definitely secondary; there is no classical Greek word for swordsman, and the Greek speaks of plunder, captives, and lands 'won by the spear,' where we might say 'by the sword.' A straight, two-edged cut-and-thrust with a small cross-guard appears in archaic and classical works of art. The blade normally swells slightly from the hilt to reach a maximum width at about two-thirds of its length, before tapering to a point, and appears to be strengthened by a
slight mid-rib. The length of the sword varies, but seems seldom to exceed about 2 ft (60 cm). Surviving specimens, always of iron, confirm the pictorial evidence; for example, a sword from a warrior's grave in Western Locris had a total length of about 20 in. (48 cm) and a hilt of 3.3 in. (8.5 cm).31 This grave contained also a slashing sword (length 53 cm; about 22 in.), a large and a small iron spear-head, a bronze sauroter, and a short dirk, probably the dead man's total armoury of offensive weapons. A thrusting spear and a javelin might have been carried together; but two swords never.32 The slashing sword was not necessarily longer than the cut-and-thrust. A fine specimen of the latter from Olympia measured about 27 in. (68 cm) as preserved, and may originally have been as much as about 32 in. (80 cm) long. When not in use, the sword is shown carried in a scabbard slung from a baldric passing over the right shoulder.33
A single-edged slashing sword becomes common during the fifth century BC. Sometimes the back is nearly straight, as is that of the Locrian example already mentioned,34 and the cutting edge is curved so that the maximum width of the blade is near the tip. Much more often the back of the blade is curved also. The hilt ends in a hook, curved towards the cutting edge of the blade and often ending in a finial shaped like the head of a bird of prey.35 This seems to be the weapon known to the Greeks as the machaera (scimitar) or kopis (cleaver). A smaller blade of this shape is used by the cook who chops up the meat for the banquet of Eurytios on a Corinthian krater of about 600 BC in the Louvre.36 Xenophon (Eq. 12.11) recommends the machaera rather than the sword (xiphos) for the cavalryman, because the blow of a cleaver (kopis) will be more effective than that of a sword when delivered from above. In vase-painting the machaera is frequently given to barbarians or to Amazons as well as to Greek hoplites, or to heroes of the epic past, armed as hoplites. There cannot have been much room to wield it in the press of battle; its use must have come after the ranks were broken. (Compare Polybius (17.30.7–8) on the comparatively loose order of the Roman infantry, which made it possible for them to swing their cutting swords.) The terrible effect of Roman slashing weapons—'bodies maimed by the Spanish sword, with arms cut off along with the shoulder; heads separated from bodies with the whole neck cut away; entrails laid bare and other revolting sights'—was demonstrated in a cavalry action at the beginning of the Second Macedonian War (Livy 31.34.4). The Macedonians, who were used to the less hideous puncture wounds
inflicted by spears, arrows and lances, were severely shaken in their morale.
The Spartans, by contrast, used in the classical period a short stabbing sword—a juggler's sword, easily swallowed, said their enemies. 'Yet the Spartans reach their enemies with these swords' was the reply (Plut. Mor. 191E); and the shortness of the Spartan sword gave rise to several of the sayings that were recorded as illustrations of the stern, self-sacrificing bravery of the Spartans and their women. 'Add one step forward' to the length of your sword, a Spartan mother told her son when he complained of his blade's shortness. 'We use short blades because we fight close to our enemies,' said Antalcidas, a Spartan general and diplomat of the early fourth century (Plut. Mor. 217E, 241F).
It must in fact have been for close fighting that the sword was designed. Its effectiveness when men were closely packed together was unhappily confirmed when the murderers of Dion of Syracuse (354 BC), unable to strangle their victim, called for a sword, and were passed one which was 'short, like the Spartan swords' (Plut. Dion 57–8; Mor. 553D). Such a sword appears on an Athenian gravestone of the late fifth century, now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. An Athenian hoplite, shield flung forward, spear uplifted, strides forward to give the final blow to a fallen opponent, wearing the Spartan pilos, who props himself on his left elbow and stabs upwards with a short, straight-bladed sword in his right hand.37
In passing, it should be noted that the Spartan sword was not the sickle-shaped object called xyele, which formed part of the equipment of young Spartans, apparently in place of the strigil, used elsewhere in Greece to scrape off oil, sweat and dust after athletes had finished exercise.38 'Scraper' is indeed the translation of xyele; the word is also used for the 'spokeshaves' for trimming spears mentioned earlier (p.23). The belief that the Spartan sword was curved (most unsuitably
for sword-swallowing!) and called xyele arises chiefly from two passages in Xenophon's Anabasis (4.7.16; 4.8.25). In the first, the Chalybes, a savage tribe living just south of the Black Sea, are said to have carried at their belts a small sabre (machairion) 'as big as a Laconian xyele, with which they butchered whoever fell into their hands. They cut off their heads and carried them as they went along, and sang and danced when the enemy were going to see them.' (Their principal weapon was a pike 15 cubits long.) The second passage mentions a Spartiate Dracontius, 'who had been exiled from his home as a boy, for the involuntary manslaughter of another boy, whom he
struck with his xyele.' Plutarch (Mor. 233F) has another story of how Spartan boys fought with sickles (drepana). One was mortally wounded, but would not let his friends avenge him, because he would have done as much to his opponent if he had got his blow in first. These passages prove that Spartan boys did indeed possess a curved object which could be used as a weapon, and a deadly one. But the xyele is never called a sword (xiphos)—the word used for the Spartan sword. Nor is it associated with grown men. Iron sickles dedicated in the Roman period by Spartan boys on reaching manhood may represent the classical xyele.39
The average citizen soldier probably received little training in handling his weapons. At Athens, according to Aristotle (Ath. Pol. 42.3) the ephebes (youths entering upon manhood at the age of 18) spent a year in garrison at the Piraeus, during which trainers elected by the people taught them 'to fight with hoplite weapons, archery, javelin-throwing and discharging the catapult.' After a year's training, dining in a common mess paid for by public money, they gave a display of drill (ta peri tas taxeis) to the people in the theatre and received from the city shield and spear—the essential equipment of the hoplite. Aristotle's testimony may refer only to the late fourth century, when the Athenians reorganized their defences in the vain hope of once more making their city a great power. Certainly the catapult did not come into use at Athens much earlier, and the training in javelin-throwing and archery, though useful for garrison troops, had nothing to do with hoplite warfare as such. In its later history, the Athenian ephebeia appears as a sort of military academy, for rich young foreigners as well as for a minority of wealthy Athenians, in which philosophy and literature were taught as well as the martial arts. Perhaps it had already begun to change into something of the sort in Aristotle's time.
Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience Page 4