Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

The Public Sphere 243
of Eros, the personification of love, shown wielding a thunderbolt.
It was presumably intended as a witty and irreverent counterpart to
the usual assortment of gorgons, lions, bulls, and boars favored by
the majority. Hoplite armor was costly to purchase—approximately
equivalent to a month’s pay for an Athenian artisan—and, for this
reason, it was often handed down from father to son (Plutarch,
Moral Precepts 241f 17). It is estimated that between 30 and 40 percent
of the citizen body could afford hoplite armor. Those who
could afford to purchase a suit of hoplite armor could probably also
afford to purchase and feed a slave, whom they would have taken
on campaign to serve as their batman.
As noted earlier, service in a hoplite army was regarded as a
privilege rather than an obligation, since, initially at least, only
citizens were eligible. It is not accidental, therefore, that the introduction
of hoplite warfare coincided with the rise of the citystate.
Success in battle now depended not on individual deeds of
A Spartan phalanx meets Persian archers at the Battle of Thermopylae,
480 b.c.e. Courtesy akg-images, London: Peter Connolly.