The popular image of the Greek hoplite, the one most commonly seen in both tabletop and computer wargames, Hollywood movies, and in endless images of internet art, is so relentless that I can close my eyes and picture it effortlessly – a muscular man in a shining bronze Corinthian-pattern helmet with a horsehair crest. He wears a muscled bronze cuirass (always of the later, more realistic fifth century BC style, cut high to allow movement at the hips), or a linothorax or spolas ‘tube and yoke’ cuirass, and a pair of bronze greaves, also of the later fifth century BC ‘clipon’ variety, realistically muscled and extending from the ankle to the top of the knee, cut away at the back to allow for flexion of the leg. On his arm is the famous aspis with its Argive grip – the porpax enclosing the forearm, the antilabe grasped in the left hand.
There is nothing else. The thighs are protected only by the pteryges descending from the cuirass. The arms and neck are completely bare.
This image of a hoplite's armour is fixed in the popular imagination, dipped in temporal amber. When asked what an ‘ancient Greek’ looked like when going to war, this is the image that most non-scholars – the audience of magazines like this one, the wider audience that popularizers such as myself strive to reach – have in their
