Ancient Greek weapons and armor Ft. Overly Sarcastic Productions

A massive thank you to my patrons who support me through Patreon and who have brought this episode of Shadiversity to you. If you would like to support Shadiversity and help me make these videos to the best level that I can, even a $1 donation per video is a tremendous help. There is a link to my Patreon page in the description below, and thank you for watching. Greetings, I'm Shad, and it's high time I do kind of like a deep dive into Greek weapons and armor. Now, you might find that rather surprising or high time, considering I have such a strong focus on medieval weapons and armor, and it's absolutely true. I have an unashamed bias to the medieval period. But to understand kind of the evolution and also the context of medieval weapons and armor, it really helps out to look before this period and see where these weapons and armor actually came from and in differing kind of cultures and periods. So with this video, yes, we're going to be looking at Greek weapons and armor. And as I've studied into these things, I've had a bit of an interest in, you know, the pre-medieval weapons and such. For quite a while, there's some really interesting things that I want to share with you to give us a better understanding and appreciation for these types of, I'm saying weapons and armor a lot, but that's what the video is about, weapons and armor. Yet to get a proper appreciation for how these weapons and armor fit in to the historical period, it's good to understand what's actually going on, what's going on with the culture, what's going on with the times and stuff like that. But I'm not actually an expert on Greek history. So to get a good understanding of this, I think we need a bit of help to establish some context. Context, you say? Hey, Blue, what brings you back to my chair? Holy crap, I'm a cartoon! One of my special powers. Now, it's important that while you're a cartoon, you don't go getting any crazy ideas. Crazy like trying to kill SpongeBob Square- Yes, that's exactly what I mean. You're a real party pooper, you know that? Party pooper in that I'm trying to prevent murder? Yes. I think you might be spending too much time with your swords. Blue, you can never spend too much time with swords. Never. Okay. Anyway, I heard you were talking about Greece, so I kind of immediately zipped across the ocean. Yeah, immediate is right. How'd you get here so fast? Is teleportation also part of your cartoon animated superpowers? Teleportation? Aw, man, I wish. Nah, I just hopped through an underworld passage. Killed a Hydra along the way. Would you like to borrow a sword on your way back? I mean, I do have enough of these things to supply a whole Norman army. Ah, the Normans. Those guys sure knew how to conquer a place. Boy, did they. Anyway, now that you're here, what did you want to say about Greek historical context? Aha, yes. Hey everyone, I'm Blue from Overly Sarcastic Productions, and I'm kind of an ancient history guy. To give you the brief rundown, Greek history splits up pretty neatly into three major sections. There's the Archaic Period, the Classical Age, and the Hellenistic Era. And conveniently for us, the tools and methods of warfare can be categorized the exact same way. First up, we have Archaic Greece, from the time of Homer to the eve of the Persian Wars. You know, 300 and all that. Here, Greece wasn't unified in any significant way, These city-states and their surrounding farmland came in all shapes and sizes, and there were a few dozen that stood out over time, like Sparta, Argos, Corinth, Thebes, and Eretria. Athens, as it happens, didn't really factor in yet at this point. In these days, the battles were fought by citizen militias, so whenever cities tried to take neighboring farmland, it was the citizen farmers themselves that would take up arms. There weren't any long campaigns or big empires, and each city typically fought just one or two battles all year. Since this was pretty small-scale, the armies were all self-equipped, so the gear was fairly rudimentary, but built to last. Even before more famous episodes like the Golden Age of Athens, a lot of the iconic elements of Greek warfare were already in play, such as... The shield, or more specifically in this case, the hoplon, also known as the aspis. Now this is such an iconic shield, though it should be mentioned, it isn't the only type of shield that existed in this period, which sometimes people can assume because it's so iconic. But more specifically, this is the type of shield for the hoplite, okay? And very prominent and iconic for Greek weapons and armor, which is what we're focusing on. Still, some of those other types of shields are kind of interesting, like there's the Assyrian, and that was more like a pointed kind of cone shape that was center gripped. But anyway, I'm getting distracted. Back to the hoplon, and my goodness, is this a really intriguing kind of shield as you go into it. First of all, size and shape. This is a big shield, around 90 centimeters in diameter, and the average weight is 7.5 kilos. That's heavy for a shield. But you can understand why this shield is so big. Being so early on in history, but still in a period of time where warfare was quite common, effective armor is actually difficult to make. It could be made, but it's more difficult. Making a shield, on the other hand, can be kind of straightforward, though there is a surprising level of complexity in making a hoplon, and I'll get to that a bit later. But it creates a very active form of defense that can cover so much of the body. In fact, the hoplon covers the torso all the way down to the bottom of the knee, and it's your shins and kind of head that's really the exposed parts, which, of course, we see companion types of armor being developed later. I've often wondered how these types of shields were made, because they have such a distinct and strong dome on the front, and curving wood can be really, really difficult, and this dome is very even, and it has a very specific shape. It would be really difficult to curve wood in this specific way. In fact, if you did that, you wouldn't really be able to make an even curve in a circle. More often than not, you would end up making a square type of shield that would just have an oval curve in it. Other examples of shields that had a dome kind of shape, they were made out of, like, triangular bits of wood glued together in a circle, but they formed more of a conical or cone-like shield. The Hoplon isn't like this. It has a very even dome. So how on earth were they made? Well, they would get kind of square bits of timber, around 20 to 30 centimeters in, you know, size of the square, right, and appropriate length, glue them together so you'd actually end up with this pretty thick kind of board, and then they would spin it on a lathe and carve out the cone from kind of the inside and then carve it out on the outside and then get the shape in that way. Well, this is at least what Nick Secunda has observed out of his book entitled The Hoplites. Now, it's true that some of these shields had sheets of bronze shaped to the outer edge, but whenever we see a Hoplon shield, they always have bronze on the full cover, okay, leading to the assumption that they were all bronze shields, when actually most of them were wood, okay, and when they did have bronze on them, more often they would have a bronze edge, okay, around the rim. But as you can imagine, wood does not survive nearly as well as bronze, which is why the surviving shields that we have, you know, in museums and such, are the ones that had the bronze layer over top. Still, they were not the most prominent type of Hoplon shield. They certainly were there, okay, bronze shields, just not the most common. So then you have the wood, and sometimes sheets of bronze on the surface, and then on the inside it was lined with leather. One of the reasons for the prominently domed shape of the Hoplon was in direct relation to its size, because with size, they get heavier, all right? And remember, 7.5 kilos, this is a big shield, so of course it's going to get tired. Now, one of the ways in which the Hoplon was carried or used is that the upward lip of that dome could actually come over the shoulder, and then it could actually rest a bit on the shoulder while you are holding it. But that's not to say that the actual, you know, arm strap configuration isn't unique, because it's really interesting, and it's made to work in conjunction with the ability to rest it on your shoulder. But not only that, it's specifically designed for the phalanx formation. Unlike many other shields, including shields that existed in this period, the Hoplon, or Aspis, is not a center grip shield. It's strapped onto the arm, but the other kind of counterintuitive thing about this is that the strap isn't actually centered. Usually when you have a strapped-on shield, the center point of the shield rests right about in the middle of your forearm. The Hoplon is different. The actual side strap that comes over just, you know, after the elbow joint, this is actually with the center of the shield. The side strap is situated on the center of the shield, and then the rope that you grab on the very rim of the shield is on the very rim of the shield. This makes the shield off-centered when held, and it extends further on your left side than on your right. Now, for an individual, okay, who's just fighting someone by themselves, this is not at all the best configuration for combat. In actual fact, it's quite detrimental, and many reenactors have actually tried this and found that this strap configuration is not nearly as effective as, say, something other like a center grip. So again, holding a shield like this is specifically designed for rank formations. Why? Because the left side of the shield extends further to cover the person on your left. Why are they made to do that, not cover the person on your right? Well, most people are right-handed, and this is where their weapon is, okay? And if your shield is extending too far on the right, it's actually getting in the way of your weapon. If you're wanting to use a sword, of course, the main, main weapon in this period is the spear, and getting, you know, that thrusting action, the shield can actually get in the way. But by having the rim of the shield right near where you're holding it, it's much easier for your weapon to get through and attack your enemy. And then the hoplite to your right, his shield is extending a bit further behind him, fully covering him, and then the small gap between you and him, that's being covered, and then the shield would be overlapping just a little bit between the rim of your shield and his shield, leaving a nice kind of V as those two circular shapes join for your weapon to slip through and attack. There's an interesting design feature with the hoplite shield that really gets pointed out specifically, and I think this is because there's a bit of mystery around it. It's the ropes on the inside of the shield. Now, these ropes, they connect the actual section of rope that you use as your handhold, and looking at all the references I can find, it doesn't seem like these ropes could slide and adjust in length. And this is also evident because you need a solid handhold and if you grab that, you know, side rope and pull it and the slack on the other ropes just mean it comes forward, you don't actually have a secure handhold. So no, these were solid and also it means that the slack on the other sections of rope were, they were put there for some specific utility or reason. As to what that was, I haven't found anything definitive. There's debate, there's discussion that it might be used to help prop the shield up on your back or hook it on your, hold it on your back or something like that, or to be able to hook it onto a spear or something like that, that there's some type of handholds or something that you can just help carry it with. Yet still, we don't have anything definitive. We don't fully exactly know why there's an internal, you know, rope going all around the inside of the rim of the shield. I'd certainly love to hear your theories in the comments below if you've heard anything more on the subject than what I was able to look up. But yeah, there you go. Mystery. The typical hoplite soldier wasn't all that highly trained since they were farmers the other 99% of the time. This necessitated a simple, cooperative combat strategy rather than relying on individual strength and skill. And what we got was phalanx warfare. Like Shad said, the hoplon was massive and it was perfectly suited for forming a unified shield wall. It's a pretty straightforward style of fighting. You hold up your shield, walk forward and then just stab at the other guy with your spear. This was the best case scenario for everyone involved since hoplites were easy to train, the tactics were simple, and above all, the casualties were really low even for the losers. Since combat depended on the strength of the phalanx as a whole, the battle ended when one side broke and ran away and it usually only took a handful of injuries or deaths before that happened. So sheer willpower played a surprising role in determining the outcome of these archaic era battles. The sole exception to this rule of citizen-farmer-soldiers was Sparta and they dominated ancient Greek warfare for centuries precisely because their citizens didn't have to farm all the time. The Spartans had subjugated a neighboring people called the Helots and essentially made them do all of the work. With almost the entire economy run on slavery, Spartan citizens spent their whole lives training to fight and their psychological fortitude complemented their outright battle prowess. There's a reason a relatively small band of Spartans could take out some 20,000 Persians at Thermopylae but that's also because of the specific conditions of the terrain they fought on and maybe some other things like the fact that the Persians were fighting with wicker shields which compared with solid bronze is like going into battle with paper plates. So although it may not seem like it, even these early hoplites were considered heavy infantry. Heavy because of their heavy armaments. Now you might be thinking, well hang on, they're not wearing full-like suits of armor but if you look at them from the perspective of the enemy with such a big massive shield like I mentioned previously their only real vulnerable areas are the head and the shins and if you cover those areas which they did with the classic but also less known Greek style helmets and greaves usually made out of bronze there is not many open areas to try and strike at the hoplite. They are in this sense fully armored. The main weapon of the hoplite was of course the spear for a lot of significant reasons but those are kind of a subject unto themselves and in fact I've made a whole video on that subject under appreciated historical weapons the spear and why the spear is actually such an awesome weapon and why it had continued before okay the classical Greek period and well afterwards all the way even until you know early firearms were around the spear was still there in place. It is a devastatingly effective weapon but it's also a surprisingly cheap weapon to make. There's only one major metal component and the rest is wood and wood can be fairly accessible to the average person. Yet the spear wasn't their only weapon because as great as it is there are some drawbacks. For instance spears only have one major striking area the very tip and if you miss that the shaft isn't going to be doing much damage. I mean you can whack people but unless you get a good wind up it's not really going to do much damage after a missed thrust and that leaves opportunity for people to grab the spear and try and take it out of your hands. It is also not good in close combat this is a more long-range weapon so if someone closes the distance the spear also becomes very difficult to use in those circumstances and so in those instances where two phalanxes get really close up against each other and then are just getting into a pushing match the people on the front lines are going to find it very difficult to use those spears to hit these people who are pushing right against them and they're so close. So in this instance you need a weapon that's much better for close range combat and here we come to the sword. The most prominent types of swords used by the classic Greek hoplite was the Xiphos and Kopis. The Xiphos being a double-edged leaf kind of shaped blade and the Kopis being a single-edged blade that kind of has this interesting forward curve on it. These swords are most predominantly made out of bronze though in the later periods we do see iron swords and such and funnily enough we do find swords made out of steel as early as 600 BC. Made a video about it. But focusing in on bronze there is a huge misunderstanding and misconception about bronze style weapons and that is to how fragile they are. Now of course they are far more fragile than say steel weapons and such but so many people including reproductions that you can buy miss out on a very significant and important element in how these bronze swords were made and that is the process known as work hardening. People assume that these bronze swords were just cast and then taken out polished up shaped ground down all made nice and sharp and that that's it. All right. A very important process was also added to it because bronze is soft enough to actually work cold. You can shape it without having to heat it up unlike iron and steel and so what they actually did they pressed down the edge. They hammered the edges compressing them making them much harder rigid and stronger than if they were just left in their cast state. This enabled the edges to get surprisingly sharp and hard far more so than people realize and there are some people who are making reproductions and adding this crucial important element in of work hardening and they've put these blades to the test. This test specifically is done by a good friend to the channel Thane Thrand in which he was sent a properly made bronze sword that had a work hardened edge and he puts it up against a sheet of mild steel. Bronze versus steel and the bronze goes through it like nothing. Nice! You know like a little curve there didn't do much damage to the blade whatsoever matter of fact it's still sharp where it cut. And so there is actually a fairly valid argument in the discussion between bronze versus iron because iron is a much softer you know metal than steel is even though steel has a lot of iron don't get me started on all that but a properly made work hardened bronze sword could actually have properties that might excel and beat certain iron swords if the iron itself wasn't say work hardened or other methods employed on the iron sword to make its properties much better than if it was just in its natural forged state. So in my mind bronze swords actually get a bit of an unfair treatment when people try and figure out how effective they really were. And there are other designs added to these bronze swords to help enhance their properties and avoid say their propensity to bend if struck on a wrong angle and stuff like that because again still even with a proper work hardened edge a hard edge the sword itself can bend easier than other types of swords you can't make it into a spring but one of the ways they fixed this was you can find many bronze swords with a very distinct and quite large central ridge this is to make the sword far more stiff. There is another big misconception around bronze swords specifically the xiphos and that is in regards to their length. People always assume that these swords were only short type swords some blade lengths being considered as short as 30 centimeters there are examples of that though the average does seem to be around 50 to 60 centimeters but there are examples of bronze swords being much much longer both ones designed to emphasize thrusting and other ones that would still be very effective at cutting. Bronze Greek swords were not universally short okay there are long versions of them ones that are surprisingly long actually as long as what we would call an arming sword looking at medieval style swords there's also the iconic leaf shape that is often attributed to the xiphos you have to also understand that this wasn't the only type of blade shape that existed in the Greek period there are other bronze swords that actually have fairly straight uniform edges but this leaf shape is interesting because it is so iconic and it is pretty darn beautiful the design changes up the weight distribution on the blade putting more kind of focus on the end why would you want that? well if there's more weight focused on the tip of the sword it increases its cutting power now this can kind of be a detriment dependent on circumstances because sometimes you want a top heavy sword just to do some really big cuts and if you have good defense being nimble on the hand isn't too much of a priority but because these swords did commonly come short they weren't always short as we mentioned but if you're having a leap style shaped sword that is shorter having more weight at the top end actually isn't going to impact maneuverability to a very detrimental level and you get the added cutting power as a result and so with a good understanding of the weapons and armor that we've just been able to talk about we've gone in depth on the hoplon shield but also mentioning the helmet the greaves the spear and a much better understanding of the swords that's a solid place to start in looking at hoplite warfare and their weapons and armor but they did advance even further than this and things got a little bit more refined in the next major period in Greek history the classical age which started with the persian wars and lasted until alexander the great's campaign the biggest development in this period was the persians showing up which forced the various greek city-states to band together most notably of course athens and sparta who hard carried that win and preserved greek autonomy in the decades and century that followed the main trend was that sparta's legendary military culture and athens' ludicrous wealth strengthened their armies and carried the two head and shoulders above the rest of greece in the 5th century bc so unsurprisingly they started butting heads during the ensuing peloponnesian war and this conflict was so shocking to the greeks because it was completely unheard of for two cities to each exert such dominance over halves of greece armies got bigger athens got an entire navy but that's really its own rabbit hole technology got more effective armor got heavier and the classic look of a greek hoplite starts to solidify as armor became standard issue rather than byob specifically the centerpiece of classical era hoplite armaments and that is the linothorax the linothorax is a really intriguing type of armor and it seems to have been kind of the upgrade from the previous greek bronze belchurus and also musselcurus and in case you didn't know the linothorax is a type of linen or textile armor so if you know my you know unashamed bias and love for the good old gambeson you might get an idea of why i find the linothorax so interesting because again it is a point of evidence for how effective linen armor was and what's also interesting we're looking at a situation why would that be the case? well it could be maneuverability that is lighter and remember bronze isn't steel okay in terms of resisting penetration and stuff like that it actually might have performed worse than what linothorax could because the linothorax they have been experimental archaeologists who have tried to remake this thing in as an authentic method as possible and its defensive ability is actually very impressive first of all how's the linothorax made? okay it is made out of layers of linen and the interesting part about this glued together okay layers of linen glued each one then pressed down dried and you actually get a fairly stiff and rigid plate as a result this is quite interesting because in contrast to this say in the medieval period when we see other you know linen type textile armors being made gambesons they weren't glued they were generally just sewn together and so as to how much more effective this glue makes the armor they'd have to be tested to really be seen and that is a result that i would be keenly interested in because i could see some kind of pros and cons having just sewn together gives a bit more cushion and padding to heavier type of blows but then having something that's fairly solid and rigid that would also be fairly you know protective against harder blows coming in as well so it's hard to tell which would be better yet you can kind of understand that the glue would add a further stiff kind of layer against cuts and thrusts so the glue actually might make the line of thorax even better oh and another reason why the line of thorax might have superseded the bronze one is it could have been a lot easier to make linen is actually quite you know plentiful people will be making cloth out of it already and so if you are having a production system that's already making this material in large quantities and you can make really good effective armor out of it it could be far more cost effective so there we go linen textile armor being one of the most prominently used armors of a certain period even over metal armor and so like i said gambesons in the medieval period again linen type armor they're good okay fully underappreciated in a larger kind of sense by pop culture and things like that and there we go these are the most common weapons and armor that the hoplite would use of the classical period but if you want to see a hoplite look ridiculous then look no further than the last major period in greek history the hellenistic era where alexander the great's big glorious empire fractured into tiny little pieces for our purposes what matters here is the technological arms race for bigger armies and better gear in particular the use of hoplite spears increased from around nine feet to 20 feet just pause and kind of soak that in a 20-foot spear holy crap the idea behind this was to have as many spears as possible pointing at the enemy and so regularly you have the first line of you know hoplites with spears pointing in the second line their spears could kind of go over the shoulders and point and then the line behind that could point and so if you increase the length of spear there's more spears being able to pass you know the hoplite in front of you to poke at the enemy the longest of these spears actually had to be made out of two parts with a metal kind of fitting joining them together it's kind of comical the idea is just throw as many spears at the enemy until the problem goes away so it shouldn't be a surprise that the romans who actually knew what they were doing at this point eventually swooped in to conquer them all so that's been the history of greek weapons and armor shad what do you think? well i think it's very interesting that technology evolved to suit the needs of warfare you still prefer the kite shield don't you? blue there is no beating the kite shield i mean come on yeah that hoplite didn't really stand a chance did it in any case a huge thank you for coming on blue and helping out it is always a pleasure cheers mate always a pleasure to be here now if you'll excuse me i've got to go explain to hades why he's short one hydra later see ya he forgot the sword i was going to give him he'll be all right also thank you guys for watching i hope you've enjoyed and if you haven't checked out overly sarcastic productions huge recommendation you might even see me appear on the channel somewhere in the future or now and of course be sure to stick around to catch my next video so i hope to see you there and until that time farewell