In this blog we take a look at the equipment of the Spartan hoplite Eurysthenes 431 BC. He fights in the siege of Athens under his king Archidamus the second. The city is protected by the Long Walls, enormous fortifications built with the wealth that Athens has accumulated through her empire over the Aegean Sea. In the second half of the fifth century BC, the Greek world was in the grip of an all-encompassing conflict between Athens and Sparta, two old allies who had become arch-enemies over time.

The hoplite and the polis

In ancient Greece, the polis (and citizenship of it) was central to society. Male citizens of these poleis had special rights in addition to economic privileges. They were allowed to participate in exclusive religious rituals and had a say at various levels in the political sphere of their city-state. The position of citizenship in the polis can be compared to the warrior class of other Indo-European societies. Like these related peoples, Greek society was hierarchical and divided into classes, with no distinction made between the warrior class and religious class. Citizenship of a polis was therefore not only a privilege, but also brought with it obligations. The greatest of these was a form of military conscription for male citizens: if you were a member of the city community, you also had to be able to defend it. This connection between political rights and military duties also worked the other way around: the Athenian democracy emerged from the fact that the rowers of the Athenian fleet, because they were given authority by the statesmen Solon and Cleisthenes, precisely because they fought for their city.

Hoplites were as citizen-soldiers in their daily lives farmers or craftsmen with legal personality, who had to gather their own weapon equipment and were mustered in times of war to fight for their polis. This was not always the case: Spartan hoplites were an exception because they also spent almost all their time during periods of peace occupied with politics and the art of war. All other work in Spartan society was performed by the Perioikoi and the Helots, underclasses of non-citizens. Because of their strong culture of small-scale autonomy, competition and self-determination, the Greeks were fierce against any form of external domination; they saw this as a form of slavery compared to Greek 'freedom'. This freedom that the lower (working) class did not have; it belonged to the land and had no legal personality.

Poleis like Athens and Sparta had their own government and urban identity, but shared a common Greek culture of mutual competition. These cities ruled over the surrounding land and constantly came into conflict with each other over power and territory. Every summer was a 'war season' in which cities fought out these conflicts with each other. This was done in battles where the shield walls (phalanx) of both sides clashed and pushed until one of the two lines was broken. The way in which the hoplites fought in these battles reinforced their shared identity: together with friends, family members and acquaintances, they fulfilled their social duty and were protected by the shields of the soldiers (and fellow citizens) next to them. This strong urban warfare culture meant that not only individual heroism was valued by the Greeks, but also a kind of collective heroism for the honor of the city community.

The Athenian empire

After the Greeks had expelled the Persian army of Xerxes in 480 BC from the Greek peninsula, there was great interest among the Greeks to form a defensive alliance that could prevent another invasion. Athens took the initiative to establish this alliance in 477 BC: the so-called Delian League (also called the 'Delian-Attic League').

The league was set up by Athens as a cooperation between equals, but actually existed to create Athenian hegemony over the Aegean Sea. Not all city-states could provide troops or ships and so Athens imposed a financial contribution on them to the league's treasury, first kept on the island of Delos and then the Athenian Acropolis. This treasury was used to build, among other things, the Athenian fleet and the enormous fortifications between Athens and the brand new port city of Piraeus, the so-called 'Long Walls'. When the war with the Persians ended in 449 BC, the Delian League continued to exist, even though the original purpose of the alliance had disappeared.

By exerting economic and military pressure on smaller poleis, Athens spread her democratic system. New colonies and city-states that adopted this political system with Athenian assistance became loyal to the Delian League. The Athenian fleet and democracy offered opportunities for poorer groups to gain political influence. This gave rise to strong democratic (and thus Athenian) movements in many Greek city-states within and outside the league. Through this power politics, Athens became the economic, political and cultural center of the Greek world.

The rulers of aristocratic and oligarchic poleis felt threatened by these developments and feared losing their aristocratic system and independence. They set up a counterweight to Athens, the so-called Peloponnesian League with Sparta as leader. A cold war emerged in the Greek world: Sparta against Athens, aristocracy versus democracy. These alliances were also very asymmetrical from a military standpoint. The Delian League had by far the largest and most developed naval power, but the Peloponnesian League had the strongest land army.

Sparta

Sparta was a prominent city-state in Laconia in ancient Greece. In antiquity, the city-state was known as Lacedaemon, while the name Sparta referred to the most important settlement in the valley of the Eurotas River in Laconia, in the southeast of the Peloponnese. Around 650 BC, Sparta grew into the dominant military land power in ancient Greece.

Sparta distinguished itself from other Greek city-states through its unique social system and constitution, which was said to have been introduced by the semi-mythical lawgiver Lycurgus. His laws transformed Sparta into a militaristic society in which all social institutions of the free class were aimed at military training and physical development. The population was divided into Spartiates (full citizens), mothakes (free non-Spartans of Spartan descent), perioikoi (free non-Spartans) and helots (enslaved non-Spartan local inhabitants). The helots formed the majority of the population and were strictly oppressed by the Spartiates.

An essential part of Spartan military education was the Krypteia. This was a secret service that aimed to keep the helots under control and suppress potential uprisings. The Krypteia was also an extension of the agoge, Sparta's strict education system. After young men completed the agoge at the age of 21, the best among them were selected to fight as hoplites in the Spartan army. The Krypteia can be seen as a Spartan variant of the Proto-Indo-European war bands, known as the koryos, in which young warriors were trained in guerrilla tactics and clandestine operations.

After this period, younger adults became full members of the free class, which in this case was synonymous with membership of the warrior class. The Spartan phalanx was considered one of the best battle formations in antiquity. Free Spartan women enjoyed considerably more rights than elsewhere in the classical world. The Spartans themselves believed that the division of their society was much older. Which is partly correct because this division can be traced back as Proto-Indo-European.

According to their tradition, the helots were descendants of the Achaeans, the original inhabitants of the Peloponnese, who were enslaved by the Dorians after the fall of Mycenaean civilization, the ancestors of the Spartans. This so-called 'Dorian invasion' was said to have been led by the descendants of Hercules, known as the 'return of the Heraclids'. This story played a central role in Spartan identity. Both the Spartans and the helots probably descended from the same Dorian population groups and differed little in ethnicity or culture. Their complex relationship would have arisen from a deep-rooted conflict in the past. Because the Spartiates were numerically in the minority and the hostile helots threatened them, they developed a society entirely geared to the warrior class and transformed Sparta into a military state. At the same time, the helots were forced as a collective into the unfree 'working class'. Thus Sparta created a permanent professional army wholly devoted to warfare.

The Peloponnesian War

The war broke out in 431 BC when the desperate Spartans marched with a land army through Attica to besiege Athens and her port city Piraeus. The Athenians were protected by the Long Walls, but the following year they were hit by a severe plague epidemic. This caused 30,000 deaths, including Pericles, the Athenian statesman who had played a major role in building Athenian power. For the next ten years Athens and Sparta fought each other on the mainland, but from these conflicts no definitive winner emerged. This led to a temporary ceasefire.

The second phase of the war began in 415 BC when Athens under the leadership of Alcibiades tried to conquer Syracuse, the Spartan ally in Sicily. However, this expedition failed so badly that the Athenian fleet and military power were almost completely destroyed. With their tails between their legs, the Athenians fled back to Greece to lick their wounds and quickly rebuild a new fleet. In the meantime, the Spartans also developed their own powerful naval force, almost as strong as that of Athens. They did this with the help of their old enemy; Persian King Darius II supported them with a large amount of silver, hoping that he could reconquer parts of Anatolia from the Athenian empire. In the next naval battle, the Athenians would still have a larger fleet than the Spartans, but their hegemony over the Aegean Sea was broken.

The famous Spartan naval commander Lysander lured the Athenians in 405 BC into an ambush by strangling their grain supply and destroyed the Athenian fleet in the naval battle at Aegospotami. The hopeless Athenians were then pushed back to their Long Walls, but this time they did not hold out the siege for long. The following year, starving Athens finally surrendered after an almost 30-year-long war that had drawn the entire Greek world into it.

Although the city-states of Thebes and Corinth pleaded for the destruction of the city and enslavement of the Athenian population, Lysander was strongly opposed. He reminded them that Athens had played an important role in the Persian Wars and chose to make Athens an oligarchic vassal state of Sparta. This did happen; although it did not take long before the Athenians would rise up in the name of their democracy.

Clothing

Eurysthenes wears a tunic, a belt and a pair of simple leather sandals under his weapon armor. If it rains or if he's cold, he also wears his thick woolen cloak.

Chiton (tunic)

Greek tunics were made of linen, sometimes also of wool. The red tunic that Eurysthenes wears under his hoplite weapon armor is made of wool and has short sleeves, but in the warmer months Greeks often wore light, warm garments that left their arms and shoulders uncovered. Classical Greeks did not wear pants under their tunics, as they considered them barbaric.