Roel Konijnendijk | Session 6 of the Battle of Plataea Conference

Herodotos on the fighting at Plataia

Roel Konijnendijk (University of Edinburgh)

Herodotos explained the Spartan victory at Plataia as the triumph of heavy hoplite arms and armour over inadequate Persian equipment and the disorganised tactics of the men who used it. Modern scholarship has taken this as proof that (a) the Spartans formed and fought in a regular hoplite phalanx of the kind described by Thucydides and Xenophon, and (b) this made the Greek victory inevitable, since even the finest Persian infantry had no answer to the cohesion and sheer force of an advancing hoplite phalanx. But Herodotos never suggests the Spartans were so organised; he never uses the language of Classical hoplite tactics to describe their behaviour at Plataia. Instead, he offers glimpses of a very different kind of infantry action, in which light and heavy infantry mixed together, and hoplites took a much more passive stance.
Scholarship has usually dismissed these glimpses as irrelevant, impossible, or simply inconvenient to how we “know” the battle must have unfolded. But if we choose to take Herodotos seriously, his account of Plataia may offer precious evidence of an intermediate stage in the development of Greek infantry tactics – a “missing link” between the fluid fighting of the Archaic period and the regular rank-and-file formations of the Classical period.