Before we dive in, we need to clarify some terms and outline periodization or nothing that follows is going to make very much sense.

First we can begin with the very basic question of what is a hoplite?

The term “hoplite” (Greek hoplites (ὁπλίτης), plural hoplitai (ὁπλῖται)) means “equipped [man]” or “armored [man]”, from hoplon (ὅπλον), “equipment, tool, weapon”. You will still sometimes hear that hoplon was the name for the hoplite‘s shield, but this is not quite right: the shield was an aspis, whereas hopla (the plural of hoplon) is used to describe a hoplite‘s full kit. Diodorus offers the etymology of hoplite, “these were earlier called hoplites from the aspides, and then took a new name, peltasts from the pelte [a lighter shield]” which at no point insists that the aspis was called a hoplon (Diod. Sic. 15.44.3).¹ So while many Greek troops are named for their shields – chalkaspides, argyraspides, peltastai, thureophoroi, etc. (notice all of those –aspides!) – especially in the Hellenistic period when Diodorus is writing (which may be why he makes this guess), hoplites were not one of them: they were not named for their shields but for their whole panoply.

We might thus define a hoplite as a “fully equipped man”, where the equipment in question was generally at a minimum the aspis (a large round double-strap grip shield), a doru (a fairly standard one-handed thrusting spear whose only unusual characteristic is that its spear-butt is unusually developed) and a metal helmet; one certainly gets the sense from the sources that some sort of body armor was also an expectation here (e.g. Hdt. 9.63.2, but it is not clear how often that was realized in practice (frequently, it must be said – but perhaps not always). These men also generally carried swords as backup weapons.

By the time we can see them clearly (in the 400s) these fellows generally fight in a formation the Greeks call a phalanx (φάλαγξ), but we need to issue an immediate caution that φάλαγξ is not a technical term in Greek but rather the equivalent to Latin’s acies in that it just means “battle line”. Consequently Greek authors can and will use it to refer to any clear battle line and it gets used of hoplites, but also pike-wielding sarissa infantry and also Roman legions and also barbarians and also chariots and also elephants at points. The word is actually even more general than this and seems to have at its core the idea of a beam or trunk – it can mean the main mass of something (as opposed to its edges), like the trunk of a tree or a beam of wood, it can mean the finger-bone but also is used for rows of eyelashes. And you can kind of get how, metaphorically, you get from finger-bones in a row or eyelashes in a row or beams or planks (in a row at regular distances) or even just the central mass of a tree to either men lined up neatly or the central mass of an army.²

We’re going to get into the particulars of exactly how we might imagine hoplites fought and how exactly a phalanx of them (keeping in mind you can have a phalanx of other things) might fight as we go along. But those are our key terms: a hoplite is a soldier with a specific “full” or “heavy” equipment set (aspis, spear, sword, helmet, cuirass) and hoplites sometimes fight in a close-order shield-wall infantry formation called a phalanx. I don’t want to go much further than this because what we’re going to see in part two is that some of the fights about hoplites and especially about the phalanx are definitional and I don’t want to load those dice here before we’ve even introduced the debate – better to come at it with relatively few assumptions.

On to periodization. We generally break down this period of Greek antiquity into the following periods:

• The Greek “Dark Ages” (c. 1100-c. 800) during which we have no written evidence (the writing of the earlier Bronze Age having been lost and the ancient Greek script we know not having been invented) and thus it is very hard for us to talk with much confidence about how warfare worked (except that it wasn’t phalanxes).
• The Greek Archaic Period (c. 800-480). Writing returns at the beginning of this, but the Greeks won’t start writing their own history until the Classical period, so our sources mostly view the Archaic as the distant past. This is the period where the polis and hoplites are emerging, though as we’ll see the “when” and “how” of that are core to the debate.
• The Greek Classical Period (480-323). This is the period where the independent Greek poleis are at their height and where “hoplite warfare” is the predominant (but not only) method of warfare. It is also much better documented than the others. It ends with Greek independence being shattered and hoplite armies largely replaced by Macedonian armies (which operate under a different, but related, system of close-order heavy infantry).
• The Hellenistic Period (323-31). There are still some hoplite-armed troops around in this period, but they are increasingly less relevant compared to Hellenistic armies, which we’ve already discussed at length. This period ends when the Romans steamroll everyone and set up a Mediterranean-wide empire.

Obviously we’ll be mostly focused on the Archaic and the Classical, the dividing line between which are the Persian Wars (492-490, 480-479) which are also some of the first relatively clear descriptions of Greek warfare in a high degree of detail and which are generally (some hoplite-heterodox scholars contest this) taken to be our earliest solid descriptions of hoplite warfare. But there’s a challenge here because our main source for the Persian Wars (Herodotus) is writing not in 479 but in the 430s. Meanwhile our understanding of the mechanics of hoplite warfare emerges out of Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War (431-404; he’s probably writing c. 400) well into the Classical period. So the sources where hoplite warfare becomes explicit (we’ll talk poetry a bit later) are writing about 480 in 430 or about 430 in 400, but a lot of our questions about hoplites relate to how they fought in the Archaic (800-480).

That means – and this is quite important for what follows – hoplite arms and armor emerge in our archaeological record during the Archaic well before we have literary sources offering solid, detailed descriptions of how men using that equipment fought. Much of the hoplite debate thus lives in the Archaic when our evidence is quite thin and often frustratingly ambiguous.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Hoplite Wars, Part I: The Othismos over Othismos”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-11-14.

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1. Thuc. 7.75.5 is sometimes also offered as an example of hoplon meaning “shield” but it is hard to see how ὑπὸ τοῖς ὅπλοις, “under the equipment[s]” can be taken to mean “under their shields” given that there is no space under an aspis to carry anything: the shield takes up the hand and the elbow and is dished downward. If you want to carry something with it, you must carry upon it. Instead I’d hazard “under their arms” here might mean something like “in a bag, hanging down from the haft of a spear” (cf. the Roman sarcina) or perhaps carried in the hands in a bundle along with tools and weapons (some translators read the phrase as “while under arms” but that doesn’t seem to be the sense of the Greek at all to me).
2. Likewise Latin’s acies is also metaphorical: it means “edge” or “point” – something sharp. So it means “battle line” or “battle formation” in the sense that it signifies the sharp, dangerous leading edge of the army.