Running Hoplites

[RichT]

May I recommend The Greek Hoplite Phalanx by Richard Taylor for this and pretty much every other question about hoplites. I hear it's pretty good! It's also more up to date and less generally dodgy than VD Hanson. The fact that Hanson is well known and frequently quoted and Taylor's book is virtually unknown is one of those sad consequences of the vagaries of publishing. 

Running has seven separate references in the index of TGHP, the main one being pages 337-41. There are a number of examples (with the caveat that just because a translator uses 'run' or 'charge' it doesn't mean the original author meant 'run'). Spartans are said not to have run but to have advanced steadily, and running was often an indication of indiscipline.

The hoplitodromos was introduced early - the 65th Olympiad (520 BC) according to Pausanias (5.8.10), which is long before Marathon (490) where Herodotus claims the Athenians were "the first Hellenes whom we know of to use running against the enemy" (6.112.3). So maybe the point of the hoplitodromos was general fitness, not to practice a specific tactic (would we learn much about modern militaries, or even 19th C ones, by studying the Modern Pentathlon?)

A running charge might have been a specific response to the threat of archery, but if so it was certainly used on other occasions, between hoplites - not always with happy results.

[Martin Smith]

Saw this one recently- in Sanary sur Mer, Fr.,  marked up as 'Etruscan or Italic, 510-450 BC', and noted by guide as "probably in a running race, as helmet was 'up'..." . Around 6-8" high, at a guess:-