Conquest 85
right foot forward while actually hurling the javelin or driving the thrusting
spear home, he would have turned willy-nilly to face the enemy; and, when he
was in this posture, the aspís left the right half of his body unprotected and
exposed, and it extended beyond him to the left in a fashion of no use to him
as a solo performer. Even if the hoplite ordinarily stood, as one scholar has
recently suggested, in an oblique position, braced with his legs wide apart and
his left foot a bit in advance of his right so that he could rest his shield on his
left soldier, his right side will have been in some measure exposed. As this
analysis should suggest, when infantrymen equipped in this fashion were op-
erating on their own, cavalry, light-armed troops, and enemy hoplites in for-
mation could easily make mincemeat of them; and the same was apt to happen
when agile light-armed troops equipped with javelins caught hoplites in a sit-
uation unsuited to seeking a decision by way of phalanx warfare. The hoplite
Figure 2. Fallen hoplite with hollow shield and pórpax (Trojan warrior), probably
Laomedon, situated on the east pediment of the Aphaia temple at Aegina, ca. 505–500
(now in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek in Munich; Photograph:
Daderot, Wikimedia Commons, Published September 2016 under the following
license: Creative Commons CCO 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication).