He also finds an experimental subject to wear the object, presumably a subject with a small head. Schwartz even makes his own replica of a Corinthian helmet (material not specified), using dimensions supplied, he reports, by the Olympia museum. But the question remains and seems unanswerable: Is 3.360 kilos impossibly heavy or unexpectedly light? 1Īfter shields we get helmets. This exact information is precious since few if any other cuirasses have been weighed. For this surviving bronze we happen to have the exact weight of the bell cuirass, 3.360 kilos, as measured by the French excavators. In the next chapter Schwartz moves on to body armor, beginning with the Argos panoply itself. The shield, we might add, serves as both a defensive and offensive weapon and also determines the simple tactics of the phalanx. Schwartz’s readers then plunge, after these few preliminaries, into a detailed chapter (123 footnotes) on the hoplite shield, beginning with “materials and measurements.” The hoplite shield ( hoplon) comes first evidently because it defines the warrior, since he could discard virtually every other element in his panoply and still be a hoplite. He will focus, he says, on the “practical” side of being a hoplite. as the start of his study and the battle of Chaeronea in 338 as his ending. Schwartz takes the Argos panoply of the 8th century B.C. Finally he presents a select annotated list of recorded battles in which hoplites played some role. Second, he gives a diachronic account of hoplites in Greek history. First, Schwartz minutely examines hoplite military equipage. The book has a number of interesting pages, but the author focuses so narrowly on his vision of his topic that some readers will find more frustration than enlightenment. Schwartz attempts to explicate in a new way the nature and function of hoplite phalanx fighters.
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