Athenian Hoplite of the Peloponnesian War

In this blog, we take a look at the equipment of the Athenian marine-hoplite Pelagios in 415 BCE. He sails along with the military commander Alcibiades on a trireme to Sicily to besiege the city-state Syracuse, as part of the Peloponnesian War. In the second half of the fifth century BCE, the Greek world was in the grip of an all-encompassing conflict between Athens and Sparta, which was fought far beyond the peninsula itself.

The hoplite and the polis

In ancient Greece, the polis (and citizenship thereof) was central to society. Male citizens of these poleis had not only economic privileges but also special rights. They were allowed to participate in exclusive religious rituals and were able to have 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 obligations with it. The greatest of these was a form of military conscription for male citizens: if you were a member of the city community, you had to be able to defend it. This connection between political rights and military duties also worked the other way around: the Athenian democracy had emerged from the fact that the rowers of the Athenian fleet, because they gained authority from the statesmen Solon and Cleisthenes, were given a say precisely because they fought for their city.

Hoplites were citizen-soldiers who in their daily lives were farmers or craftsmen with legal personhood, who had to scrape together their own weapons and armor and were called up in times of war to fight for their polis. This was not always the case: for instance, Spartan hoplites were an exception because they were also engaged in politics and warfare in times of peace. 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 foreign domination; they saw this as a form of slavery compared to Greek 'freedom'. This freedom meant the lower (working) class did not have it; they belonged to the land and had no legal personhood.

Poleis like Athens and Sparta had their own forms of government and urban identities, 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 pitched battles where the shield walls (phalanx) of both sides clashed and pushed against each other until one of the two lines was broken. The way hoplites fought in these pitched battles meant that their shared identity was reinforced: they fulfilled their societal duty together with friends, family members, and acquaintances, and were protected by the shield of the soldiers (and fellow citizens) next to them. Through this strong urban fighting culture, not only individual valor was valued by the Greeks, but also a kind of collective heroism for the prestige of the city community.

The Athenian Empire

After the Greeks had expelled the Persian army of Xerxes in 480 BCE 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 by founding this league in 477 BCE: 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, so Athens imposed a financial contribution on them to the league's treasury, first kept on the island of Delos and later 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 harbor city Piraeus, the so-called 'Long Walls'. When the war with Persia ended in 449 BCE, 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 its democratic system. New colonies and city-states that adopted this political system with Athenian help became loyal to the Delian League. The Athenian fleet and democracy offered opportunities for poorer groups to gain political say. This created strong democratic (and thus Athenian)-minded movements in many Greek city-states inside 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 established a counterweight to Athens, the so-called Peloponnesian League with Sparta as its leader. A cold war emerged in the Greek world: Sparta against Athens, aristocracy versus democracy. These alliances were also very asymmetrical on the military front. The Delian League had by far the largest and most developed naval power, but the Peloponnesian League had the strongest land army.

The Peloponnesian War

The war broke out in 431 BCE when the Spartans marched with a land army through Attica to besiege Athens and the harbor city Piraeus. The Athenians were protected by the Long Walls, but the following year they were struck 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 it out over the mainland, but these conflicts produced no definitive winner. This led to a temporary ceasefire.

The second phase of the war began in 415 BCE 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 naval power, almost as strong as that of Athens. They did this with help from 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 sea 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 into an ambush in 405 BCE by cutting off their grain supply and destroyed the Athenian fleet in the sea battle at Aegospotami. The hopeless Athenians were then driven back to their Long Walls, but this time they did not hold out the siege for long. The following year, the starving Athens finally surrendered, after an almost 30-year war that had drawn the entire Greek world into it.

Although the city-states Thebes and Corinth argued for the destruction of the city and the enslavement of the Athenian population, Lysander strongly opposed this. 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 didn't take long before the Athenians would rise up in the name of their democracy.

Clothing

Pelagios wears a tunic, a belt, and a pair of simple leather sandals under his armor. If it rains or if he gets cold at sea, he wears his thick woolen cloak.

Chiton (tunic)

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

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Sandaloi (sandals)

Because of the warm, temperate climate in classical Greece and the rest of the Mediterranean, sandals (sandaloi) like these were worn. Although Zeno wears simple military sandals that are less open to better protect the feet, there were constantly new fashion trends for sandals in antiquity, which were determined by fashionable Athens.

In addition to sandals, from the fifth century BCE onwards, people also wore a kind of laced boots (such as endromis and embades) and in winter socks made of felt (piloi) to keep the feet warm.

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Belt / strap

To shape the tunic, both simple leather straps and cloth belts were used.

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Chlamys (cloak)

The chlamys was a woolen cloak worn in classical Greece. It kept clothing clean and offered the wearer protection against weather and wind.

However, the cloak that Zeno wears is not only meant to keep him warm, but also forms part of his armor. On the battlefield, he wraps the cloak around his weapon arm to protect it against spears, swords, and arrows.

The cloak was fastened with a fibula, a metal clothing pin that was often decorated.

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Armor

Pelagios's armor is representative of the average Greek hoplite from the Peloponnesian Wars; he wears a large bronze shield, a 'Corinthian' bronze helmet, linen linothorax, and bronze shin guards to protect his body. He uses a long spear, the doru, to fight in formation and a short sword, the xiphos, as a secondary weapon.

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Hoplon (shield)

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