The Greek Shield: More than a Weapon | Ancient Greece Revisited

When the first American ships appeared off the coast of Japan in 1853 they found a land frozen in time. Their arrival marked the end of Sakoku, the self-imposed isolation that had closed the country off to any foreign influence, preserving its culture unchanged for a total of nine generations. As they walked through this strange island, one of the first things to catch the sailors' attention was the total absence of modern firearms, guns and pistols. Back in the US, kids as young as five could be seen training with old American-style six-shooters, but the Japanese seemed to know nothing more powerful than a sword. What the American sailors could have never imagined, however, was that before the United States was even a country, the Japanese were producing some of the best rifles and cannons in the whole world, but mysteriously chose to forget all about them, their production forbidden by royal decree, their warriors, the mighty samurai, choosing to remain forever faithful to kendo, the way of the sword. Exactly why this occurred remains uncertain, but at least one hypothesis suggests that although superior, modern firearms just didn't fit inside of a culture of warrior nobles and so they were willingly forgotten, leaving behind nothing more than a word, teppo, that a local shouted when he noticed the pistols on the sailors' waist. And if the samurai can be said to have followed the way of the sword, then the Greek hoplite, the soldier who fought in the tight formation of the phalanx, followed the way of the shield because more than the weight of their metal, these two weapons carried something far greater. They carried the most crucial ideals of the cultures that forged them for battle. Reading from Homer's first epic, the Iliad, or even watching it on film through Hollywood's Troy starring Brad Pitt, there is little to suggest that those semi-barbaric warrior kings who fought for nothing but glory would eventually morph into those highly sophisticated citizens who populated Greek cities during classical antiquity. But even in Homer's own lifetime, at the dawn of the 8th century before Christ, and as the Age of Heroes sang its dying song, a cultural revolution was well underway. One that would see the emergence of a new institution that spread like wildfire throughout the Greek world. It was called polis, or city-state, a community as independent as Switzerland is today with cities like Athens and Sparta being perhaps the most memorable example. These polis became the first communities in human history where people came together to create common laws by which to live by. Laws that were independent both from religious scripture and the will of divinely ordained kings. Together with this radical transformation in government, came a new way of fighting. One that would reflect the ideals of citizenship in the battlefield. It was called the phalanx, a tight formation of heavily armoured shock troops who used the power of othismos, or thrust, to push against the lines of its enemy until a break would open in one of the two rival camps forcing it into a tropée, a turning back signalling its defeat. The soldiers of this phalanx were not warrior kings like Achilles but free citizens who participated as equals in the management of their city. Each paying for his own armour privately while training part-time along with his daily job. Surprisingly, and instead of a half-baked mass of amateurs the result was the most effective military machine the world had ever seen. One that would prove its worth by defending Europe twice against the consecutive invasions of Persia. An empire that could draw resources from across Asia and could maintain an upper class of professional warriors dedicated solely to training. But even by ancient standards, and for most of their history, Greek city-state remained relatively poor and so their citizens had to raise their new battalions from the only material they had available. Themselves. As they stepped to fill the ranks citizens became known as hoplites a word that derives from hoplon which in modern Greek simply means weapon but was originally used to describe the main weapon that a Greek soldier depended on his shield. Hoplite meant shield-bearer as he was baptized after the weapon that defended him together with his city. This shield was a round piece of wood three feet in diameter covered with a thin sheet of bronze it occupied the entire left arm of each soldier while simultaneously and as long as he stayed in formation it protected a part of his comrade's right used correctly and by soldiers brave enough to keep the line from breaking the shield became the critical link both physical and spiritual to a chain of trust where each soldier could expect to keep half of his body protected by the man standing on his right while protecting the man on his left in return. It was the same chain of trust that cities needed during peacetime because in the absence of divine rulers so typical of Asian kingdoms the Greeks needed to be constantly alert and keep each other free. As the poet Alcaeus puts it Neither stone nor timber makes polis but the men who know how to keep themselves safe. As we all know from history of course this radical experiment in self-rule didn't exclude the use of slaves who composed an increasing amount of the population nor did it come with the notion of gender equality with women being as far from voting rights as children were and yet it was exactly those who enjoyed freedom the most free adult men who were also asked to take up arms and defend them In the culture that quickly developed within the walls of Greek city-states the notion that you could be called to war at any given moment was never challenged even by the most radical of thinkers and Socrates himself is heard chastising a friend who was out of shape saying that one must always keep his body ready to serve the city when the time comes as he himself had done in numerous battles and during their short but glorious history the phalanx and the city protected stood side by side as expressions of the same idea an idea that we might call political freedom but of a type that was definitely not about inclusion an aristocratic egalitarianism perhaps an equality among those who bear arms and protect it an equality that despite what we said initially about the remoteness of Homeric heroes still echoes in the freedoms demanded by warrior kings who stood as equals against the faceless mass of peasants and slaves that Homer cared so little about Likewise, and within the lines of the Greek phalanx hoplites stood in the context of an equality that was unparalleled for its time with each soldier wearing the same type of armour while young and old marched, fought and died together so much that a fallen helmet could reveal the head with its first beard as easily as it could with a full set of white hair There is an old saying that refers to Sam Colt the man behind the modern revolver as seen in western films that says that God created man but Colt made the meekle and it was precisely this type of equality that was feared more than anything else in imperial Japan a culture of powerful rulers supported by an elite warrior class armed with weapons against which the peasants stood no chance These Japanese rulers must have known well enough that pistols possessed the power to tip this balance over and so they managed to embrace the entire technology leaving only the memory of a word behind and just like the sailors of the first American vessels to moor on the port of Japan so would a Japanese warrior find in himself no place inside of a Greek city-state because in Greece the samurai's idea of single combat ended with Homer and yet the idea of aristocratic equality equality among those who can protect it was strangely transformed into the collective way of life that Greeks had chosen for themselves and so perhaps underlining the violence and destruction that war always brings the logic of the phalanx was the logic that would eventually lead to democracy