character of elegiac verse, the language of both poets is overwhelmingly “Homeric.” But the battlefield
that Callinus and Tyrtaeus describe is very different from that found in the Iliad, where individual
warriors challenge each other to single combat. That sort of combat is what Homer and his audience
imagine (perhaps correctly) to have prevailed in the heroic world of the distant past. But the style of
warfare and the equipment appropriate to it in the time of Callinus and Tyrtaeus were a recent
development, dating from the time around 700 BC.
“I am the monument for Theognis of Sinope, in whose honor Glaucus erected me, in return for long
years of companionship.” (The Greek Anthology 7.509, a sixth- or fifth-century epitaph in elegiac
meter)Warfare in the Greek poleis of the seventh century and later took the form of encounters between masses
of similarly equipped soldiers known as HOPLITES. The hoplite took his name from his characteristic
piece of equipment, the circular shield (hoplon) that he carried on his left arm, and the whole of his
equipment, his “panoply,” included bronze helmet, corselet and greaves, and a thrusting-spear that he held
in his right hand (figure 27). It was necessary for these hoplites to maintain a tight formation and to
advance into battle side by side, in order that each man could protect the exposed right side of the hoplite
to his immediate left. As Tyrtaeus puts it (in West’s translation):