Fighting by the Rules: The Invention of the Hoplite Agôn

Abstract

This examination of the unwritten rules of Greek warfare suggests that the ideology of hoplite warfare as a ritualized contest developed not in the 7th century, but only after 480, when nonhoplite arms began to be excluded from the phalanx. Regular claims of victory, in the form of battlefield trophies, and concessions of defeat, in the form of requests for the retrieval of corpses, appeared in the 460s. Other 5th-century changes in military practice fit the theory that victories over the Persians led to the idealization of massed hand-to-hand combat. Archaic Greeks probably fought according to the limited protocols found in Homer.