Hoplite shield gay4/18/2023 It’s a core of heavily armed infantrymen in a solid block. So that is what we mean by the hoplite phalanx. It’s because the phalanx would have looked, if you were up on a hill somewhere watching it go by, as though something was rolling across the plain as the men went forward and looking pretty formidable, so that anything in its way would be mowed down in the normal course of events. Phalanx means that these men, each man carrying his hoplon, are lined up first of all in a line, but that line is reproduced going back, so that you end with about - typically, a phalanx would have been eight men deep, eight rows deep, and that block of soldiers, however long it is, or is made up - is called the phalanx, which means something like roller. It’s going to be really hard for you to maintain that grip on that thing all through the course of a whole battle, but that shield is the key, this hoplon which gives the name to the word hoplite, or hoplites, which is hoplite. That is a very heavy thing and it will weigh you down after a while. You need to do that to be able to control the shield that’s as big as that and as heavy as that, because it is made fundamentally of a heavy wood, typically covered by leather, sometimes with some bronze, a bronze sheet across the front of it as well. Can you hear me back there? Is that all right? Imagine a round shield of the size I’ve talked about and one of the things that’s important is that at the end of the shield, the right end from my perspective has a grip on it, but in the middle of the shield, there is also a kind of a loose piece of leather thong that you can put your arm through, so that the shield is resting in part on that grip and on the grip that you hold at this end. It was a great round shield about three feet across and it had - let me step out here so that I can show you. You want to get out of your head the notion of a shield that’s a little thing that you can move around with one hand, like that, real easy that’s not what it was. Hoplite comes from the Greek word hoplites and hoplites is built around the word hoplon which is the name of a kind of shield that the infantrymen, and we are talking about an infantry formation here, carried. The style of warfare that emerges in this period, apparently for the first time, is what we call the hoplite phalanx and each half of that needs to be explained. Their role as soldiers, fighting for the common cause - and that common cause now being not an individual goal, not a family goal, but the goal of the entire civic community, which was coming into being and I suppose would have had to come into being, in order to have this role, fighting for one’s polis. That is the one that I want to turn to today. Now, that same individual who produced the economic wherewithal that would support independent individuals, who are not nobleman, and who could conduct their lives in an autonomous way and who fought ultimately - fought their way onto governmental bodies which allowed them to participate in the key decisions, political decisions, and all other decisions in the state that served the element of their character and of their place in the world. Yale University Militarization An Introduction to the Hoplite PhalanxĮmerging from the “Dark Ages”, there was the emergence and the development of the polis, there is Hanson’s theory about the development of the family farm and the individuals who worked the family farm as a critical element in that story. Greek phalanx illustration / Wikimedia Commons
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |