The Hoplite Heresy: Why We Don't Know How the Ancient Greeks Waged War

Hoplites are probably one of the first things that come to mind when one thinks of “Ancient Greece”. Equipped with a bronze spear and wearing bronze armor or a linothorax, and hefting the aspis—the hoplite’s bronze shield—they fought in phalanxes. The classic mode of fighting in this formation was the “othismos”, the push, with the aim being to disrupt the enemy phalanx and break their formation. But, over the past few decades, views on hoplite warfare have been called into question and seriously revised, because there are problems in the source material. So, what are these problems, and how do historians of Ancient Greece understand hoplite warfare?