The Lycian hoplite

Scholarship has long crossed theoretical swords over the famous hoplite of ancient Greece. From the armour and weapons he wielded, to his way of fighting, to even the social and political impact he may – or may not – have had on the early Greek city-state (polis), the hoplite is a historical warrior entrenched within a modern war of words (for an excellent overview see Echeverría 2021, pp. 75-97).

While it seems there is no end in sight to this “hoplite debate”, and everything that can be said has already been said (and often repeated, in some form or other), a new drive in scholarship has begun to seek answers to “one of the most important and fiercely debated subjects in ancient history and classics” – a sentence used to advertise Donald Kagan and Gregory Viggiano’s 2013 volume Men of Bronze – beyond the very borders of Greece itself.

The hoplite problem

The hoplite has traditionally been viewed by modern historians as a distinctly “Greek” warrior, one invented in Greece proper as a product of local technological innovation that was so effective – or “revolutionary” – in warfare that it quickly spread across all of Greece to birth a unique and distinct Greek warrior: the hoplite (Lorimer 1947, Andrewes 1956, Snodgrass 1964, 1967).

This narrow outlook on the origin of the hoplite (and technical innovation and influence more broadly) has often been used to champion a military dominance of Greece across the ancient Mediterranean in the Archaic and Classical periods, used to explain why Greece was able to defeat the Achaemenid Empire during the Persian Wars of the fifth century BC – especially at Marathon – and why “Eastern” rulers sought to hire Greek mercenaries early on in the Saite Dynasty of Egypt and much later under Persian rulers of the fourth century BC (Marathon: e.g. Lacey 2011, pp. 149-77. Mercenaries: e.g. Hale 2013, p. 190).

This supposed dominance of the Greek hoplite over Persia and the ‘East’ went on to be used to provide historical support to dangerous – but very popular – Orientalist polemics that championed a Western superiority over the “East” (Hanson 1989, 2001), one that newspaper outlets would soon report directly influenced the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq (Secor 2003, Whittell 2003, Tempest 2004)!

These polemics have long been (heavily) criticised from political standpoints and much broader military–historical ones (duBois 2001, Lynn 2004, Porter 2009), but their very core – the dominance and uniqueness of the Greek hoplite – has largely gone untouched, with popular support still rallying behind the effectiveness of this type of warrior over “others”, especially amongst general readers. Only in very recent years have scholars sought to situate the Greek hoplite within his broader context in the ancient Mediterranean and ask: how uniquely “Greek” really was the “Greek hoplite”?

Looking beyond Greece

The publication of Brill’s Beyond the Phalanx in 2021 (edited by Roel Konijnendijk, Cezary Kucewicz, and Matthew Lloyd) has set the stage for researchers – and general readers! – to explore this new(er) avenue. Here, Joshua Hall (pp. 266-292) looked West to the Greek colonies of Magna Graecia (Southern Italy) and found that Western Greeks early on, unlike their mainland counterparts, prioritised cavalry engagements and sieges over pitched battle between opposing forces of hoplites.

Josho Brouwers (pp. 64-82) looked the other way – East, to Anatolia – to find pockets of Anatolian influence on early Greek warfare (and vice versa). So too did Hans van Wees (pp. 293-344) demonstrate that the hoplite was just one of many versions of heavy infantry that arose across the early Mediterranean, and that Egyptian rulers hired hoplite mercenaries (from Ionia and Caria) simply because they were (yet another) readily available source of heavily armoured infantry, not specifically because they were hoplites.

Even within Greece proper, the present author has found the likelihood that Greek hoplites from Ionia, Aeolia, and the Cyclades fought on the Persian side at Marathon, questioning long held assumptions of Greek hoplite superiority over the “naked” Persian (Coulson-Haggins forthc.)!

One region that sits beyond the borders of Greece and offers a valuable case study for this new approach is Lycia – Trm̃mis in the local language – located on the Southwest coast of Anatolia (modern-day Türkiye, specifically the provinces of Antalya and Muğla).

Evidence from Lycia

Lycia provides a uniquely rich source of surviving archaeological evidence through its diverse range of tomb monuments, so many of which still stand that it remains unknown to this day how many exist in the region. Most of these tombs are undecorated, but around 30 or so belonging to the Greek Archaic and Classical periods – known more locally as the Lycian Dynastic Period (ca. 540-360 BC) – are highly decorated with carved reliefs of warriors in various contexts (both in and out of battle), including scenes of very large and complex land battles between co-ordinated armies of infantry and cavalry.

From the earliest surviving examples of art from Lycia (ca. 540 BC, in Xanthos), warriors adorned in the hoplite panoply – that is, the round “Argive” shield with its distinctive porpax and antilabe, tunic, cuirass, helmet, greaves, and single thrusting spear and/or sword – dominate the representations of warriors on local tombs. There is quite a significant variation in the levels of armament of these hoplites, but this is also seen in vase painting and sculptured reliefs from Greece proper (e.g. Muth 2008, pp. 142-238) and in all likelihood was probably the reality for hoplites in real life.

In some rare cases – on the Nereid monument from Xanthos (now on display in the British Museum, London) and the Heroon of Trysa (now on display in the Ephesus Museum, Vienna) – hoplites are depicted with aprons attached to the bottom of their shields, a piece of cloth – or possibly of leather – that protected the wielders groin and legs better from arrows. This invention is first recorded on the highly decorated Clazomenain sarcophagi from Ionia (further up the coast of Anatolia) in the late Archaic period and seems to have transferred to nearby Lycia.

Hoplites are most often depicted fighting other hoplites in single “duels” or battling in small groups, usually of three. Traditionally, modern researchers have viewed scenes from Greek art that display fighting in this way as entirely “heroic fiction”, belonging to the mythical realm of Homer since hoplites aren’t shown in any recognisable formation.

However, Fernando Echeverría (2015) and Cezary Kucewicz (2021, pp. 79-100), amongst others, have recently challenged this age-old view, and shown that “duel” scenes are steeped within the real world, especially since warriors are shown wielding the (very much real) hoplite panoply. In Lycian reliefs too, much like in Greek art, there is almost never any signifier that identifies the sculpted scene as an episode from myth – how then could viewers know what myth the relief was depicting? In short: they couldn’t.

This “historicity” of Lycian battle scenes is also attested at times by accompanying inscription, where figures in the scene are named and the overall relief and inscription together report a real, historical event from the lifetime of the tomb owner himself. This is famously displayed on the so-called “Inscription Pillar” in Xanthos (in situ), where both relief and inscription report the killing of seven Arcadian hoplites by the deceased dynast, who is also shown dressed as a hoplite (either Chergia or his successor Cherẽi – the topic is hotly debated amongst philologists).

As a result, to dismiss the bulk of Lycian battle scenes as entirely “heroic” (in the Greek sense) – or to put it differently, fake – rests on very shaky grounds indeed. Of course, scenes that show fighting in duels and/or small groups should not be read literally – a “duel” would not have occurred in isolation, even in Homer(!) – but instead offer a “zooming in” or “close-up shot” (to use filmmaking terminology) of real, broader massed fighting.

Where Lycian art does shine brighter than Greece, however, is in its reliefs of large, co-ordinated battle scenes that show hoplites in what can only be perceived as the phalanx – the famous close-ordered formation formed exclusively of hoplites fighting shoulder to shoulder as a single unit.

Anyone who has visited British Museum will likely have stumbled upon the Nereid monument (it’s hard to miss), dated to ca. 380 BC. Here, four hoplite phalanxes are depicted (for certain) on the smaller frieze of the base. Although shown amongst the context of a siege, phalanxes face enemy hoplites fighting in pitched battle outside the walls of the city (although one does break down so hoplites can scale battlements). Each phalanx is directed by a pointing commander.

Similarly, on the lid of the “City Sarcophagus” in Telmessos (in situ), two phalanxes approach one another outside the walls of a city under the guise of a commander (who points towards the city) and a seated figure (the dynast himself?). The Heroon of King Pericle – not to be confused with the famous Athenian statesmen – in Limyra (now on display in Antalya Archaeological Museum) also displays a phalanx of hoplites amongst a larger scene of Pericle’s army marching out to war.

Interpreting the Lycian images

These representations of hoplite warfare, including the large and complex scenes of massed formation and co-ordinated group action, are not “new”, in that modern researchers have studied them for over a century. However, despite the clear and highly detailed depictions of hoplite warfare from Lycia – depictions more complex than any battle scene that survives from Classical Greece – scholars have repeatedly doubted their authenticity.

Instead, they viewed the reliefs as: (a) derivative, simply copying from Greek art with no consideration whatsoever of reflecting real, local reality; or (b) since the hoplite is deemed uniquely “Greek”, the hoplites of Lycian art must be Greek mercenaries under the employment of Lycian dynasts, not local warriors. Both views – which stand in the way of the historical “Lycian hoplite” – rest on the presumption that Greek culture was, in some way or another, the dominant force across the ancient Mediterranean. In essence, the “Lycian hoplite” is fiction, not fact.

First, art. It is true that Lycian art was produced by Greek artists working in the region. Following Athenian defeat to Sparta during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), the production of art in Greece – especially Athens – declined dramatically, forcing local artists to look East and find employment in Anatolia (e.g. Smith 2021, pp. 101-103).

Despite this, researchers now recognise that Lycian art was unique: it was neither Greek, nor Persian, nor the awkwardly combined “Greco-Persian”, but something distinctive to the region (e.g. Colas-Rannou 2021, 2023). Lycian reliefs combined Greek art alongside Persian and (more broadly) Anatolian art with completely unique artistic motifs to produce complex scenes that were entirely Lycian – what German archaeologists coined “epichoric” (Borchhardt 1968, Jacobs 1987).

Concerning warfare, this specific “uniqueness” of Lycian art can be seen in motifs where the victorious hoplite stands raising a second, captured hoplite shield in triumph to symbolise his victory, a motif found nowhere else in art beyond Lycia. It is too simplistic to force Lycian art into a binary of Greece and/or Persia, a view that wrongfully ignores any and all local cultural elements. As a result, labelling representations of the hoplite as entirely “Greek” is also too simplistic, especially since Lycian reliefs strongly prefer to depict historical scenes over those from myth that reflect the life of the deceased buried in the very tomb they decorate.

Second, mercenaries. The view that hoplites in Lycian reliefs must be Greek mercenaries stems from (now outdated) assumptions that the hoplite was a uniquely “Greek” warrior, a view that has been countered by a steadily growing number of scholars outlined at the beginning of this article.

John Anderson (1970, pp. 33-36) and Duncan Head (1992, pp. 56-58, 2018, pp. 12-13) – both of whom strongly advocated for the Greek mercenary in Lycia – rested their identification on the fact that warriors are shown wearing the same panoply as Greek hoplites, as if the hoplite panoply was (somehow) physically restrained to Greece. There is no evidence in Greek sources whatsoever for the phenomenon of mercenary service in Lycia, and there is very little evidence that supports the hiring of mercenaries from Lycia proper. One part of the Inscription Pillar might connect Arcadian hoplites to mercenary service under a dynast of Tlos, but even this is highly uncertain (Thonemann 2009, pp. 167-194).

The variety of facial features and helmet types amongst hoplites on the Heroon of Limyra might imply King Pericle hired mercenaries from across Greece or the broader Aegean in the fourth century but could just as likely reflect local Limyraean hoplites or a broader group of Lycians (Borchhardt & Pekridou 2012, p. 279). Anderson (1970, pp. 33) asserted the pilos helmet signifies Arcadian hoplites since Arcadians are showing wearing the helmet on the reliefs of the Inscription Pillar, but the pilos is commonly depicted across Lycian iconography, and the mixtures of different helmet types (as well as degrees of armament) is so significant that it is impossible to draw any conclusion regarding the ethnicity of the wearer based off specific helmet type (Landskron 2015, p. 214).

Identifying the hoplites as mercenaries raises more problems that it solves: how does this explain instances where the tomb owner is depicted in hoplite dress, like on Lycian pillar tombs? How does this explain instances when there is a just a “duel” scene between two hoplites decorating the tomb? Are we to assume neither are the tomb owner? What of instances where a hoplite is shown with regional variations in his panoply, like the three sickle-sword wielding hoplites on the Heroon of Trysa? Beyond Lycia, what of the dancing sickle-sword wielding hoplites on the painted beams of Tatarlı (ancient Phrygia)? Or the warriors in local dress but with hoplite shield and thrusting spear on the walls of the painted Karaburun tumulus II (ancient Milyas)?

It seems interpreting hoplites in Lycian (and broader Anatolian art) as entirely Greek mercenaries is problematic, to say the least. Even the Nereid monument – the tomb that both Anderson and Head fixated on – depicts hoplites with long hair, a distinctive feature attributed to Lycians in Greek sources ([Arist.] Econ. 2.1348a).

Closing remarks

There is little – other than the restraints imagined and upheld by modern researchers – that stands in the way of identifying the hoplites in Lycian art as artistic reflections of the military reality for local warriors. The nature of surviving evidence from Lycia does not, at the time of writing, allow us to trace when the hoplite panoply was first adopted in the region (other than that it was there by the time the Lion Tomb was constructed in Xanthos in ca. 540 BC), nor does it allow us to detect if there was any Lycian influence on the hoplite panoply itself.

However, the reliefs of Lycia, often overlooked or quickly dismissed as derivative, do reveal a region that actively participated, adapted and localised hoplite warfare. The Lycian hoplite is not a cheap Greek copy, but a product of his own local history and identity, one that arose via a broader shared culture of warfare that extended beyond borders. Ignoring or actively challenging this upholds outdated (and borderline Eurocentric) views of ancient warfare that too simplistically privileges the “Greek” hoplite in the face of a much more complex ancient Mediterranean.