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Back Home (News) About this page The Beginning: The City
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The Common Soldier The Common Greek Soldier was called a Hoplite. The common Hoplite usually only carried a sheild and spear. A sheild was the only thing required to be a soldier. But if you were one of the rich soldeirs, you would be dressed in leather straps of armor and metal plates across your chest and legs, and a helmet. And just to show how rich you were you would have a crest(an ornament with one or more feathers) sticking out of the top of your helmet. They usually fight by thrusting the spear either in the underhand thrust or the overhand thrust. Ok, now that you know about a common soldeir, lets go more into detail: The Spartan Way The Spartans had a much different way of fighting then other citystates. They usualy fought in a big group of soldiers called a phalanx. A phalanx was soldiers with there sheilds out to there left and spears out to the right, this way they were protected by the persons sheild next to them and could still attack freely. Phalanxs were usualy of about 40 soldiers, but it could be much more or much less. Alexander the Great had phalanxes of hundreds of soldiers, maybe even thousands! The hoplites in the phalanx held there spear depending on which row they were in. The first row held the spears straight out, the second row a little slanted upward, the third slanted more upward, all the way until the spears were straight up. The phalanx was a great fighting technique, and similar things were copied throughout the ages. But there was one minus about it. The hoplites always moved towards the left while walking! It may not seem like much but Athens proved to them that it was! During the Pelopennsian War Athens won a battle by attacking the right side of there phalanxs and defeated them! Then Sparta regrouped and attacked again and won. But as for boats, they still had strong naval power, since that was their main mode of transportation and trade. A standard boat was of many slaves down inside the hull of the boat rowing many big ors, with many soldiers on top. They had a sort of bridge thing that went out when they were close to another ship and the soldeirs boarded it and attacked. But usualy it wasn't just a run next to the boat and board attack, they usualy had to ram the other ship and board. And if there wern't enough soldiers, they would just ram each other until one sank. That was the standard naval battle. Summary
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