Kalispera! (That mean good afternoon in ancient Greek.) I’m the Greek gumshoe. I’ve hunted out yet another weapon for you, it’s called the hoplon.
The hoplon was a round shield made of wood. It is where they got the word hoplite (which is the name given to a specific type of Greek soldier). The hoplon had a bronze rim and some had a small circular thin bronze plate in the middle. The hoplon was about one meter in diameter and was about sixteen pounds. The revolutionary part was the grip called an argive (which sounds kind of like archive. Funny!) It was on the left edge of the inside of the shield, and it had a leather forearm strap in the center. This let hoplites move more easily with it.
The shield rested on the hoplite’s shoulders and stretched allll the way to the guy’s knees. (That is one big shield.) The hoplon was unable to cover the right side which made the phalanx (which we talked about in an earlier blog) vulnerable to attack on the right side. One last downside to the hoplon was its thinness. The shields of the first rank in a phalanx tended to break on the impact of the phalanxes smashing together.
Well that’s all I’ve got. Tune in next time so that we can investigate another weapon.
(Thanks to //www.ancientgreekbattles.net/Pages/90087_PhalanxHistory.htm and //wikireedia.net/wikireedia/index.php?title=Hoplites for the images.)
