Defender of the West
Greek Hoplite 150mm white metal miniature
This model is very unique, and old,
and no longer available (I reckon). It is an almost solid hunk of lead alloy and is
150mm's tall.
I won awards with this model at the Southern California Military Miniatures competition in
1977 (if my memory serves me).
Photos were taken and an article written about it for Military Modeler Magazine, back when
I worked for them.
Certain changes were made to the stock model. The helmet was added to the head and
the shield was placed on the ground at the rest.
Some hair was added, this is fringe from denim pants. The spear (doru) was replaced
by a wooden cooking skewer.
The figure represents a Spartan
soldier, called a hoplite, during the Persian Wars. The word hoplite derives from
the panoply of armor and weapons that the soldier wore. An armored soldier
with the large bronze faced round shield was called a hoplite, as he was a soldier fully
equipped to stand in the ranks of the phalanx amongst his peers. The hoplite's
shield (called an aspis), has a unique personal design rather the commonly depicted lambda
(symbolic for Lakonia), a state symbol later on used to separate friends from foes in
battles against other Greeks. He wears bronze greaves to protect his shins, making
him armored from head to toe when crouching forward behind his aspis. I like the
symbol of the dove for the shield, it's a strong symbol... strength deters war... well
that's the theory behind it, eh! And it is a striking shape.
As a Spartan, he wears his crimson cloak and has a fully enclosed Corinthian helmet.
This hoplite is wearing combined linen and lameller style armor, labled by
experts as a "Composite" type, which is a type of bridge between the older solid
metal cuirasses worn in archaic times to the lighter armor made completely of linen or
leather worn at the end of the era of the hoplite's dominance. Generally folks
nowadays believe that at Thermopylae the Spartans still wore the archaic "Bronze
Bell" cuirass, but it is possible that some of the newer lighter styles of armor may
have started to take hold, even in traditionalist Sparta. Later, during the long
drawn out wars against the other Greeks, hoplite gear got lighter still, with greaves
disappearing and lighter conical helmets becoming more popular as soldiers often served
the whole year rather than just a brief campaign season before harvest time.
The era of Greece being "fettered" by Macedonia, led to a period where the hoplites returned to heavier armor in an attempt to compete with the Macedonian phalanx. Eventually, however all the Greek states lost their hoplite class, and most Hellenic soldiers adopted the thureos (Celtic shield), or took up the pike and Macedonian equipment. In the last battles of free Sparta against the Antigonids, in the late 3rd century BC, they may have fielded a small amount of allied hoplites, but by then they put most of their emphasis on creating a Macedonian style pike phalanx.
JJ
