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This is the second part of what looks like it’ll be end up as a four part series discussing the debates surrounding ancient Greek hoplites, the heavy infantry of the Archaic (800-480) and Classical (480-323) periods. Last week, we outlined the contours of the debate: the major points of contention and the history of the debate and how it has come to its current – and I would argue, unsatisfactory – point.

This week, I want to stay laying out my own sense of the arguments and what I see as a viable synthesis. I’ve opted to split this into three parts because I don’t just want to present my ‘answers’ but also really use this as an opportunity to contrast the two opposing camps (hoplite orthodoxy and hoplite heterodoxy) in the process of laying out where I think the firmest ground is, which as we’ll see is something of a blend of both. That is a larger project so I’ve opted to split it up. This post will cover the question of equipment, both the date of its emergence and its use and function (which have implications for chronolgy and tactics). Then the next post will cover the question of tactics, both in terms of how the phalanx might have functioned on an Archaic battlefield where light infantry and cavalry remained common and important and how it may have functioned in a late-Archaic or Classical battlefield when they were less central (but still at least sometimes present). Then, at long last, the final post will cover what I think are some of the social and political implications (some of which falls out of the first ideas), which is actually where I think some of the most explosive conclusions really are.

However before I launch into all of that, I want to be clear about the perspective I am coming from. On the one hand, I am an ancient historian, I do read ancient Greek, I can engage with the main bodies of evidence (literary, archaeological, representational) directly, as an expert. On the other hand, I am not a scholar of hoplites: this is my field, but not my sub-field. Consequently, I am assessing the arguments of folks who have spent a lot more time on hoplites than me and have thus read these sources more closely and more widely than I have. I can check their work, I can assess their arguments, but while I am going to suggest solutions to some of these quandaries, I want to be clear I am coming at this from a pose of intellectual humility in terms of raw command of the evidence.

(Although I should note this post, which is on equipment basically is square in my wheelhouse, so if I sound a bit more strident this week it is because while I am modestly familiar with hoplites, I am very familiar with hoplite (and other pre-gunpowder) equipment.)

On the other hand, I think I do come at the problem with two advantages, the value of which the reader may determine for themselves. The first of these is simply that I am not a scholar of hoplites and so I am not ‘in’ one of these ‘camps;’ an ‘outsiders’ perspective – from someone who can still engage directly with the evidence – can be handy. The second of these is frankly that I have very broad training as a military historian which gives me a somewhat wider base of comparative evidence to draw on than I think has been brought to bear on these questions before. And that is going to be relevant, particularly this week, because part of my core argument here is that one mistake that has been repeated here is treating the hoplite phalanx as something special and unique, rather than as an interesting species of a common phenomenon: the shield wall, which has shared characteristics that occur in many cultures at many times.

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The Emergence of the Hoplite Panoply

We need to start with three entwined questions, the nature of hoplite equipment, the dates at which it appears and the implications for the emergence of the ‘true’ phalanx (and its nature). As I noted in the first part, while the two ‘camps’ on hoplites consist of a set of linked answers to key questions, the strength of those linkages vary: in some cases, answer A necessitates answer B and in some cases it does not. In this case, the hoplite orthodox argument is that hoplite equipment was too cumbersome to fight much outside of the phalanx, which in turn (they argue) necessitates that the emergence of the full panoply means the phalanx must come with it. Consequently, hoplite orthodoxy assumes something like a ‘hoplite revolution’ (a phrase they use), where hoplites (and their equipment) and the phalanx emerge at more of less the same time, rapidly remaking the politics of the polis and polis warfare.

By contrast, hoplite heterodoxy unlinks these issues, by arguing that hoplite equipment is not that cumbersome and so need not necessitate the phalanx, while at the same time noting that such equipment emerged gradually and the fully panoply appeared rather later than hoplite orthodoxy might suggest. But this plays into a larger argument that hoplites developed outside of close-order formations and could function just as well in skirmish or open-order environments.

As an aside, I want to clarify terminology here: we are not dealing, this week, with the question of ‘the phalanx.’ That term’s use is heavily subject to definition and we need to have that definitional fight out before we use it. So instead, we are going to talk about ‘close order‘ formations (close intervals (combat width sub-150cm or so), fixed positioning) as compared to ‘open order‘ (wide intervals (combat width 150cm+), somewhat flexible positioning) and skirmishing (arbitrary intervals, infinitely flexible positioning). And in particular, we’re interested in a big ‘family’ of close-order formations I am going to call shield walls, which is any formation where combatants stand close enough together to mutually support with shields (which is often not shoulder-to-shoulder, but often more like 1m combat widths). We will untangle how a phalanx fits into these categories later.

We can start, I think, with the easy part: when does hoplite equipment show up in the evidence-record. This is the easier question because it can be answered with some decision by archaeology: when you have dated examples of the gear or representations of it in artwork, it exists; if you do not, it probably doesn’t yet. We should be clear here that we’re working with a terminus post quem (‘limit before which’), which is to say our evidence will give us the latest possible date of something: if we find that the earliest, say, Archaic bell-cuirass we have is c. 720, then c. 721 is the last possible date that this armor might not yet have existed. But of course there could have been still earlier armors which do not survive: so new discoveries can shift dates back but not forward in time. That said, our evidence – archaeology of arms buttressed by artwork of soldiers – is fairly decent and it would be a major surprise if any of these dates shifted by more than a decade or two.

(An aside before I go further: I am focused here mostly on the when of hoplite equipment. There is also a really interesting question of the where of early hoplite equipment. Older hoplite orthodox scholars assumed hoplite equipment emerged in Greece ex nihilo and was peculiar to the Greeks, but this vision has been challenged and I think is rightly challenged (by, e.g. J. Brouwers, Henchmen of Ares (2013), reviewed favorably by Sean Manning here. In particular, the fact that a lot of our evidence comes from either Southern Italy or Anatolia is not always well appreciated in these debates. We don’t have the space to untangle those arguments (and I am not versed enough on the eastern side) but it is well worth remembering that Archaic Greece was not culturally isolated and that influences eastern and western are easy to demonstrate.)

And what our evidence suggests is that Anthony Snodgrass was right:² hoplite equipment emerges peicemeal and gradually (and were adopted even slower), not all at once and did so well before we have evidence by any other metric for fighting in the phalanx (which comes towards the end of the equipment’s developmental timeline).

The earliest piece of distinctively hoplite equipment that we see in artwork is the circular aspis, which starts showing up around c. 750, but takes a long time to displace other, lighter shield forms, only pushing out these other types in artwork (Diplyon shields with ‘carve outs’ on either side giving them a figure-8 design, squarish shields, center-grip shields) in the back half of the 600s. Metal helmets begin appearing first in the late 8th century (a couple of decades behind the earliest aspides), with the oldest type being the open-faced and Kegelhelm, which evolved into the also open-faced ‘Illyrian‘ helmet (please ignore the ethnic signifiers used on these helmet names, they are usually not historically grounded). By the early seventh century – so just a few decades later – we start to get our first close-faced helmets, the early Corinthian helmet types.

Via Wikipedia, a black-figure amphora (c. 560) showing a battle scene. The warriors on the left hold *aspides* and wear Corinthian helmets, while the ones on the right carry diplyon shields (which look to have the two-points-of-contact grip the *aspis* does). I useful reminder that non-hoplite equipment was not immediately or even necessarily very rapidly displaced by what became the hoplite standard.

Coming fairly quickly after the appearance of metal helmets is metal body armor, with the earliest dated example (to my knowledge) still being the the Argos cuirass (c. 720), which is the first of the ‘bell cuirass’ type, which will evolve into the later muscle cuirass you are likely familiar with, which appears at the tail end of the Archaic as an artistic elaboration of the design. Not everyone dons this armor right away to go by its appearance in artwork or prevalence in the archaeological record – adoption was slow, almost certainly (given the expense of a bronze cuirass) from the upper-classes downward.

Via Wikipedia, a picture of the Argos bell cuirass with its Kegelhelm-type helmet dated to c. 720. Apologies for the side-on picture, I couldn’t find a straight-on image that had a clean CC license.

This element of armor is eventually joined by quite a few ‘add-ons’ protecting the arms, legs, feet and groin, which also phase in (and in some cases phase out) over time. The first to show up are greaves (which are also the only armor ‘add on’ to really stick around) which begin to appear perhaps as early as c. 750 but only really securely (there are dating troubles with some examples) by c. 700. Small semi-circular metal plates designed to hang from the base of the cuirass to protect the belly and goin, ‘belly guards,’ start showing up around c. 675 or so (so around four decades after the cuirasses themselves), while other add-ins fill in later – ankle-guards in the mid-600s, foot-guards and arm guards (quite rare) in the late 600s. All of these but the greaves basically phase out by the end of the 500s.

Via Wikipedia, a late classical (c. 340-330) cuirass and helmet showing how some of this equipment will develop over time. The cuirass here is a muscle cuirass, a direct development from the earlier bell cuirass above. The helmet is a Chalcidian-type, which seems to have developed out of the Corinthian helmet as a lighter, less restrictive option in the fifth century.

Pteruges, those distinctive leather strips hanging down from the cuirass (they are part of the textile or leather liner worn underneath it) start showing up in the sixth century (so the 500s), about two centuries after the cuirasses themselves. There is also some reason to suppose that textile armor is in use as a cheaper substitute for the bronze cuirass as early as the seventh century, but it is only in the mid-sixth century that we get clear and unambiguous effort for the classic stiff tube-and-yoke cuirass which by c. 500 becomes the most common hoplite armor, displacing the bronze cuirass (almost certainly because it was cheaper, not because it was lighter, which it probably wasn’t).

Via Wikipedia, from the Alexander Mosaic, a later Roman copy of an early Hellenistic mosaic (**so quite a bit after our period**), Alexander the Great shown wearing a tube-and-yoke cuirass (probably linen, clearly with some metal reinforcement), with visible pteruges around his lower waist (the straps there).
Note that there is a second quieter debate about the construction of the tube-and-yoke cuirass which we’re just going to leave aside for now.

Weapons are less useful for our chronology, so we can give them just a few words. Thrusting spears were, of course, a bronze age technology not lost to our Dark Age Greeks, but they persist alongside throwing spears, often with visible throwing loops, well into the 600s, even for heavily armored hoplite-style troops. As for swords, the Greek hoplites will have two types, a straight-edged cut-and-thrust sword of modest length (the xiphos) and a single-edged foward curving chopper of a sword (the kopis), though older Naue II types – a continuation of bronze age designs – continues all the way into the 500s. The origin of the kopis is quite contested and meaningfully uncertain (whereas the xiphos seems a straight line extrapolation from previous designs), but need not detain us here.

So in summary, we do not see a sudden ‘revolution’ in terms of the adoption of hoplite arms, but rather a fairly gradual process stretched out over a century where equip emerges, often vies with ‘non-hoplite’ equipment for prominence and slowly becomes more popular (almost certainly faster in some places and slower in others, though our evidence rarely lets us see this clearly). The aspis first starts showing up c. 750, the helmets a decade or two after that, the breastplates a decade or two after that, the greaves a decade or two after that, the other ‘add-ons’ a few decades after that (by which point we’re closing in on 650 and we have visual evidence of hoplites in close-order, albeit with caveats). Meanwhile adoption is also gradual: hoplite-equipped men co-exist in artwork alongside men with different equipment for quite a while, with artwork showing unbroken lines of uniformly equipped hoplites with the full panoply beginning in the mid-to-late 7th century, about a century to a century and a half after we started. It is after this, in the sixth century, that we see both pteruges – which will become the standard goin and upper-thigh protection – and the tube-and-yoke cuirass, a cheaper armor probably indicating poorer-but-still-well-to-do men entering the phalanx.

Via Wikipedia, the Chigi Vase (c. 650). Its hoplite scene is (arguably) the oldest clear scene we have of hoplites depicted fighting in close-order with overlapping shields, although the difficulty of depth (how closely is that second rank behind the first?) remains.

Consequently, the Archaic hoplite must have shared his battlefield with non-hoplites and indeed – and this is one of van Wees’ strongest points – when we look at Archaic artwork, we see that a lot. Just all over the place. Hoplites with cavalry, hoplites with light infantry, hoplites with archers (and, of course, hoplites with hoplites).

Of course that raises key questions about how hoplites function on two kinds of battlefield: an early battlefield where they have to function within an army that is probably still predominately lighter infantry (with some cavalry) and a later battlefield in which the hoplite is the center-piece of the army. But before we get to how hoplites fight together, we need to think a bit about what hoplite equipment means for how they fight individual.

Hoplite or Hopheavy?³

If the basic outlines of the gradualist argument about the development of hoplite equipment is one where the heterodox camp has more or less simply won, the argument about the impact of that equipment is one in which the orthodox camp is determined to hold its ground.

To summarize the arguments: hoplite orthodoxy argues, in effect, that hoplite equipment was so heavy and cumbersome that it necessitated fighting in the phalanx. As a result orthodox scholars tend to emphasize the significant weight of hoplite equipment. Consequently, this becomes an argument against any vision of a more fluid battlefield, as orthodox scholars will argue hoplites were simply too encumbered to function in such a battlefield. This argument appears in WWoW, along with a call for more archaeology to support it, a call which was answered by the sometimes frustrating E. Jarva, Archaiologia on Archaic Greek Body Armour (1995) but it remains current. The latest attempt I am aware of to renew this argument is part of A. Schwartz, Reinstating the Hoplite (2013), 25-101.

By contrast, the heterodox camp argues that hoplite equipment was not that heavy or cumbersome and could be used outside of the phalanx (and indeed, was so used), but this argument often proceeds beyond this point to argue that hoplite equipment emerged in a fluid, skirmish-like battlefield and was, in a sense, at home in such a battlefield, as part of a larger argument about the phalanx being quite a lot less rigid and organized than the orthodox camp imagines it. Put another way at the extremes the heterodox camp argues there is nothing about hoplite equipment which would suggest it was designed or intended for a close-order, relatively rigid infantry formation. There’s a dovetailing here where this argument also gets drawn into arguments about ‘technological determinism’ – a rejection of the idea that any given form of ancient warfare, especially hoplite warfare, represented a technologically superior way of fighting or set of equipment – which also gets overstated to the point of suggesting weapon design doesn’t particularly matter at all.⁴

This is one of those areas where I will make few friends because I think both arguments are actually quite bad, a product of scholars who are extremely well versed in the ancient sources but who have relatively less training in military history more broadly and especially in pre-modern military history and especially especially pre-modern arms and armor.

So let me set some ‘ground rules’ about how, generally speaking, pre-modern arms and armor emerge. When it comes to personal combat equipment, (almost) no one in these periods has a military research and development department and equipment is rarely designed from scratch. Instead, arms and armor are evolving out of a fairly organic process, iterating on previous patterns or (more rarely) experimenting with entirely new patterns. This process is driven by need, which is to say arms and armor respond to the current threat environment, not a projection of a (far) future threat environment. As a result, arms and armor tend to engage in a kind of ‘antagonistic co-evolution,’ with designs evolving and responding to present threats and challenges. Within that space, imitation and adornment also play key roles: cultures imitate the weapons of armies they see as more successful and elites often use arms and armor to display status.

The way entire panoplies – that is full sets of equipment intended to be used together – tend to emerge is part of this process: panoplies tend to be pretty clearly planned or designed for a specific threat environment, which is to say they are intended for a specific role. Now, I want to be clear about these words ‘planned,’ ‘designed,’ or ‘intended’ – we are being quite metaphorical here. There is often no single person drafting design documents, rather we’re describing the outcome of the evolutionary process above: many individual combatants making individual choices about equipment (because few pre-modern armies have standardized kit) thinking about the kind of battle they expect to be in tend very strongly to produce panoplies that are clearly biased towards a specific intended kind of battle.

Which absolutely does not mean they are never used for any other kind of battle. The ‘kit’ of an 18th century line infantryman in Europe was designed, very clearly for linear engagements between large units on relatively open battlefields. But if what you had was that kit and an enemy who was in a forest or a town or an orchard or behind a fence, well that was the kit you had and you made the best of it you could.⁵ Likewise, if what you have is a hoplite army but you need to engage in terrain or a situation which does not permit a phalanx, you do not suffer a 404-TACTICS-NOT-FOUND error, you engage with the equipment you have. That said, being very good at one sort of fighting means making compromises (weight, mobility, protection, lethality) for other kinds of fighting, so two equipment sets might be situationally superior to each other (panoply A is better at combat situation Y, while panoply B is better at situation Z, though they may both be able to do either and roughly equally bad at situation X).

Via Wikimedia Commons, a black figure amphora (c. 510) showing a mythological scene (Achilles and Ajax) with warriors represented as hoplites, but carrying two spears (so they can throw one of them).

Naturally, in a non-standardized army, the individual combatants making individual choices about equipment are going to be considering the primary kind of battle they expect but also the likelihood that they are going to end up having to fight in other ways and so nearly all real-world panoplies (and nearly all of the weapons and armor they use) are not ultra-specialized hot-house flowers, but rather compromise designs. Which doesn’t mean they don’t have a primary kind of battle in mind! Just that some affordance has been made for other modalities of warfare.

If we apply that model to hoplite equipment, I think it resolves a lot of our quandaries reasonably well towards the following conclusion: hoplite equipment was a heavy infantry kit which was reasonably flexible but seems very clearly to have been intended, first and foremost, to function in close order infantry formations, rather than in fully individual combats or skirmishing.

Now let’s look at the equipment and talk about why I think that, starting with:

Overall Weight.

I am by no means the first person to note that absurdly heavy estimates dating back more than a century for the hoplite’s ‘combat load’ (that is, what would be carried into battle, not on campaign) are absurdly high; you will still hear figures of 33-40kg (72-90lbs) bandied about. These estimates predated a lot of modern archaeology and were consistently too high. Likewise, the first systematic effort to figure out, archaeologically, how heavy this equipment was by Eero Jarva, skewed the results high in a consistent pattern.⁶ Equally, I think there is some risk coming in a bit low, but frankly low-errors have been consistently less egregious than high-errors.⁷ Conveniently, I have looked at a lot of this material in order to get a sense of military gear in the later Hellenistic period, so I can quickly summarize and estimate from the archaeology.

Early Corinthian helmets can come in close to 2kg in weight, though later Greek helmets tend much lighter, between 1-1.5kg; we’re interested in the Archaic so the heavier number bears some weight. Greek bronze cuirasses as recovered invariably mass under 4.5kg (not the 4-8kg Jarva imagines), so we might imagine in original condition an upper limit around c. 5.5kg with most closer to 3.5-4.5kg, with probably 1-2kg for liner and pteruges; a tube-and-yoke cuirass in linen or leather (the former was probably more common) would have been only modestly lighter, perhaps 3.5-4kg (a small proportion of these had metal reinforcements, but these were very modest outside of Etruria).⁸ So for a typical load, we might imagine anywhere from 3.5kg to 6.5kg of armor, but 5kg is probably a healthy median value. We actually have a lot of greaves: individual pieces (greaves are worn in pairs) range from ~450 to 1,100g, with the cluster around 700-800, suggesting a pair around 1.4-1.6kg; we can say around 1.5kg.

For weapons, the dory (the one-handed thrusting spear), tips range from c. 150 to c. 400g, spear butts (the sauroter) around c. 150g, plus a haft that probably comes in around 1kg, for a c. 1.5kg spear. Greek infantry swords are a tiny bit smaller and lighter than what we see to their West, with a straight-edged xiphos probably having around 500g (plus a hundred grams or so of organic fittings to the hilt) of metal and a kopis a bit heavier at c. 700g. Adding suspension and such, we probably get to around 1.25kg or so.⁹

That leaves the aspis, which is tricky for two reasons. First, aspides, while a clear and visible type, clearly varied a bit in size: they are roughly 90cm in diameter, but with a fair bit of wiggle room and likewise the depth of the dish matters for weight. Second, what we recover for aspides are generally the metal (bronze) shield covers, not the wooden cores; these shields were never all-metal like you see in games or movies, they were mostly wood with a very thin sheet of bronze (c. 0.25-0.5mm) over the top. So you can shift the weight a lot by what wood you use and how thick the core is made (it is worth noting that while you might expect a preference for strong woods, the ancient preference explicitly is for light woods in shields).¹⁰ You can get a reconstruction really quite light (as light as 3.5kg or so), but my sense is most come in around 6-7kg, with some as heavy as 9kg.[/efn_note]See K.R. de Groote, ‘”Twas When my Shield Turned Traitor!’ Establishing the Combat Effectiveness of the Greek Hoplite Shield” OJA 35.2 (2016) for a rundown.[/efn_note] A bigger fellow might carry a bigger, heavier shield, but let’s say 6kg on the high side and call it a day.

How encumbered is our hoplite? Well, if we skew heavy on everything and add a second spear (for reasons we’ll get to next time), we come out to about 23kg – our ‘hopheavy.’ If we skew light on everything, our ‘hoplight’ could come to as little as c. 13kg while still having the full kit; to be frank I don’t think they were ever this light, but we’ll leave this as a minimum marker. For the Archaic period (when helmets tend to be heavier), I think we might imagine something like a typical single-spear, bronze-cuirass-wearing hoplite combat load coming in something closer to 18kg or so.¹¹

And now we need to ask a second important question (which is frustratingly rarely asked in these debates – not never, but rarely): is that a lot? What we should not do is compare this to modern, post-gunpowder combat loads which assume very different kinds of combat that require very different sorts of mobility. What we should do is compare this to ancient and medieval combat loads to get a sense of how heavy different classes of infantry were. And it just so happens I am wrapping up a book project that involves computing that, many times for quite a few different panoplies. So here are some brief topline figures, along with the assigned combat role (light infantry, medium infantry, heavy infantry):

A fully plate-armored late 14th/early 15th century dismounted knight: 24-27kg (Heavy Infantry).¹²
Hop-heavy, c. 23kg
Roman Hastatus/Princeps of the Middle Republic: c. 20-24kg (Heavy Infantry)
Macedonian Phalangite: c. 20kg (Heavy Infantry)
Typical Hoplite, c. 18kg
Hellenistic Peltastai: c. 17-18kg (Heavy Infantry, modestly lighter than above)
Gallic Warrior: c. 14kg (Medium infantry, assumes metal helmet, textile armor so on the heavy side for the Gauls)
Hop-light, c. 13kg.
Iberian Warrior: c. 13kg (Medium infantry)
Celtiberian Warrior: c. 11.5kg (Medium Infantry)
Hellenistic thureophoroi: c. 10.5kg (Medium Infantry)
Roman veles: c. 8kg (Light infantry).¹³

Some observations emerge from this exercise immediately. First combat role – which I’ve derived from how these troops are used and positioned in ancient armies, not on how much their kit weighs – clearly connects to equipment weight. There is a visible ‘heavy infantry range’ that starts around 15kg and runs upward, a clear ‘medium’ range of lightly-armored line-but-also-skirmish infantry from around 14kg to about 10kg and then everything below that are ‘lights’ that aren’t expected to hold part of the main infantry line.¹⁴

But I’d argue simply putting these weights together exposes some real problems in both the extreme orthodox and extreme heterodox views. On the one hand, the idea that hoplite equipment was so heavy that it could only function in the phalanx is clearly nonsense: the typical hoplite was lighter than the typical Roman heavy infantryman who fought in a looser, more flexible formation! Dismounted knights generally fought as close-order heavy infantrymen, but certainly could fight alone or in small groups and maneuver on the battlefield or over rough terrain and they are heavier still. So the idea that hoplites were so heavily equipped that they must fight in the extremely tight orthodox phalanx (we’ll come to spacing later, but they want these fellows crowded in) is silly.

On the other hand hoplites are very clearly typically heavy infantry. They are not mediums and they are certainly not lights. Can you ask heavy infantrymen to skirmish like lights or ask light infantrymen to hold positions like heavies? Well, you can and they may try; the results are generally awful (which is why the flexible ‘mediums’ exist in so many Hellenistic-period armies: they can do both things not-great-but-not-terribly).¹⁵ So do I think soldiers wearing this equipment generally intended to fight in skirmish actions or in truly open-order (not that Roman combat spacing, while loose by Greek standards, is still ‘close order’)? Oh my no; across the Mediterranean, we see that the troops who intend to fight like that even a little are markedly lighter and those who specialize in it are much lighter, for the obvious reason that running around in 18kg is a lot more tiring than running around in 8kg or less.

So the typical hoplite was a heavy infantryman but not the heaviest of heavy infantry. If anything, he was on the low(ish) end of heavy infantry, probably roughly alongside Hellenistic peltastai (who were intended as lighter, more mobile phalangites)¹⁶ but still very clearly in the ‘heavy’ category. Heavier infantry existed, both in antiquity and in the middle ages and did not suffer from the lack of mobility often asserted by the orthodox crowd for hoplites.

But of course equipment is more than just weight, so let’s talk about the implications of some of this kit, most notably the aspis.

The Aspis

Once again, to summarize the opposing camps, the orthodox argument is that hoplite equipment – particularly the aspis (with its weight and limited range of motion) and the Corinthian helmet (with its limited peripheral vision and hearing) – make hoplites ineffective, almost useless, outside of the rigid confines of the phalanx, and in particular outside of the ‘massed shove othismos‘ phalanx (as opposed to looser phalanxes we’ll get into next time).

The moderate heterodox argument can be summed up as, “nuh uh.” It argues that the Corinthian helmet is not so restricting, the aspis not so cumbersome and thus it is possible to dodge, to leap around, to block and throw the shield around and generally to fight in a more fluid way. The ‘strong’ heterodox argument, linking back to development, is to argue that the hoplite’s panoply actually emerged in a more fluid, skirmish environment and the phalanx – here basically any close-order, semi-rigid formation fighting style – emerged only later, implying that the hoplite’s equipment must be robustly multi-purpose. And to be clear that I am not jousting with a straw man, van Wees claims, “the hoplite shield did not presuppose or dictate a dense formation but could be used to equally good effect [emphasis mine] in open-order fighting.”¹⁷

The short version of my view is that the moderate heterodox answer is correct and very clearly so, with both the orthodox and ‘strong’ heterodox arguments having serious defects.

But first, I want to introduce a new concept building off of the way we’ve already talked about how equipment develops, which I am going to call appositeness which we can define as something like ‘situational effectiveness.’ The extreme orthodox and heterodox arguments here often seem to dwell – especially by the time they make it to public-accessible books – in a binary can/cannot space: the hoplite can or cannot move quickly, can or cannot skirmish, can or cannot fight with agility and so on.

But as noted above real equipment is not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but ‘situationally effective’ or not and I want to introduce another layer of complexity in that this situational effectiveness – this appositeness – is a spectrum, not a binary. Weapons and armor are almost invariably deeply compromised designs, forced to make hard trade-offs between protection, reach, weight and so on, and those tradeoffs are real, meaning that they involve real deterioration of the ability to do a given combat activity. But ‘less’ does not mean ‘none.’ So the question is not can/cannot, but rather how apposite is this equipment for a given function – how well adapted is it for this specific situation.

You can do almost any kind of fighting hoplite armor, but it is very obviously adapted for one kind of fighting and was very obviously adapted for that kind of fighting when it emerged: fighting in a shield wall. And that has downstream implications of course: if the aspis is adapted for a shield wall, that implies that a shield wall already existed when it emerged (in the mid-to-late 8th century). Now we may, for the moment, leave aside if we ought to call that early shield wall a phalanx. First, we ought to talk about why I think the hoplite’s kit is designed for a shield wall but also why it could function (less effectively) outside of it.

So lets talk about the form of the aspis. The aspis is a large round shield with a lightly dished (so convex) shape, albeit in this period with a flat rim-section that runs around the edge. The whole thing is typically about 90cm in diameter (sometimes more, sometimes less) and it is held with two points of contact: the arm is passed through the porpax which sits at the center of mass of the shield and will sit against the inside of the elbow of the wear, and then holds the antelabe, a strap near the edge of the shield (so the wearer’s elbow sits just to the left of the shield’s center of mass and his hand just to the left of the shield’s edge). That explains the size: the shield pretty much has to have a radius of one forearm (conveniently a standard ancient unit called a ‘cubit’) and thus a diameter of two forearms, plus a bit for the rim, which comes to about 90cm.

Via Wikimedia Commons, a Corinthian black-figure alabastron (c. 590-570) showing hoplites in rows, which really demonstrates just how **big** the *aspis* can be. A 90cm shield is a **really big shield** although the artist here has certainly chosen to emphasize the size.

In construction, the aspis has, as mentioned, a wooden core made of a wood that offers the best strength at low weight (e.g. willow, poplar, not oak or ash) covered (at least for the better off hoplites) with a very thin (c. 0.25-0.5mm) bronze facing, which actually does substantially strengthen the shield. The result is, it must be noted, a somewhat heavy but very stout shield.

And here is where I come at this question a bit differently from my peers: that description to me demands comparison but the aspis is almost never compared to other similar shields. Two things, however, should immediately stand out in such a comparison. First, the aspis is an unusually, remarkably wide shield; many oblong shields are taller, but I can think of no shield-type that is on average wider than 90cm. The early medieval round shield, perhaps the closest comparison for coverage, averages around 75-85cm wide (with fairly wide variation, mind you), while the caetra, a contemporary ancient round shield from Spain, averages around 50-70cm. The famously large Roman scutum of the Middle Republic is generally only around 60cm or so wide (though it is far taller). So this is a very wide shield.

Via Wikimedia Commons, an Attic black-figure Kylix (c. 560) which gives us a good look at the two-point grip of the *aspis* (though note this aspis is something of a diplyon-hybrid with two small cutouts!).

Second, the two-points-of-contact strap-grip structure is a somewhat uncommon design decision (center-grip shields are, globally speaking, more common) with significant trade-offs. As an aside, it seems generally assumed – mistakenly – that ‘strap-grip’ shields dominated European medieval shields, but this isn’t quite right: the period saw a fair amount of center-grip shields, two-point-of-contact shields (what is generally meant by ‘strap grip’) and off-center single-point of contact shields, with a substantial portion of the latter two supported by a guige or shield sling, perhaps similar to how we generally reconstruct later Hellenistic version of the aspis supported by a strap over the shoulder. So the pure two-point-of-contact porpax-antelabe grip of the aspis is actually fairly unusual but not entirely unique.

But those tradeoffs can help give us a sense of what this shield was for. On the one hand, two points of contact give the user a strong connection to the shield and make it very hard for an opponent to push it out of position (and almost impossible to rotate it): that shield is going to be where its wearer wants it, no matter how hard you are hitting it. It also puts the top of the dish at shoulder level, which probably helps keeping the shield at ‘ready,’ especially because you can’t rest the thing on the ground without taking your arm out of it or kneeling.

On the other hand the two-point grip substantially reduces the shield’s range of motion and its potential to be used offensively. Now this is where the heterodox scholars will point to references in the ancient sources to war dances intended to mimic combat where participants jumped about or descriptions of combatants swinging their shield around and dodging and so on,¹⁸ and then on the other hand to the ample supply of videos showing modern reenactors in hoplite kit doing this.¹⁹ To which I first say: granted. Conceded. You can move the aspis with agility, you can hit someone with it, you can jump and dodge in hoplite kit. And that is basically enough to be fatal to the orthodox argument here.

But remember our question is appositeness: is this the ideal or even a particularly good piece of equipment to do that with? In short, the question is not ‘can you use an aspis offensively’ (at all) but is it better than other plausible designs at it. Likewise, we ask not ‘can you move the aspis around quickly’ but is it better at that than other plausible designs. And recall above, when the aspis emerged, it had competition: we see other shield designs in early Archaic artwork. There were alternatives, but the aspis ‘won out’ for the heavy infantryman and that can tell us something about what was desired in a shield.

In terms of offensive potential, we’re really interested in the range of strikes you can perform with a shield and the reach you can have with them. For the aspis, the wearer is limited to variations on a shove (pushing the shield out) and a ‘door swing’ (swinging the edge at someone) and both have really limited range. The body of the shield can never be more than one upper-arm-length away from the shoulder (c. 30cm or so)²⁰ so the ‘shove’ can’t shove all that far and the rim of the shield can’t ever be more than a few centimeters in advance of the wearer’s fist. By contrast a center-grip shield can have its body shoved outward to the full extension of the arm (almost double the distance) and its rim can extend half the shield’s length in any direction from the hand (so striking with the lower rim of a scutum you can get the lower rim c. 60cm from your hand which is c. 60cm from your body, while a center-grip round shield of c. 80cm in diameter – smaller than the aspis – can project out 40cm from the hand which is 60cm from the body).

So that two-point grip that gives the shield such stability is dropping its offensive reach from something like 60 or 100cm (shove or strike) to just about 30 or 65cm or so (shove or strike).²¹ That is a meaningful difference (and you can see it represented visually in the diagram below). Again, this is not to say you cannot use the aspis offensively, just that this design prioritizes its defensive value over its offensive value with its grip and structure.

And then there is the question of coverage. Can you swing an aspis around, left to right, blocking and warding blows? Absolutely. Is it good at that? No. It is not and I am always surprised to see folks challenge this position because have you seen how a center-grip round shield is used? And to be clear, we know the Greeks could have used center-grip shields because center-grip dipylon shields show up in Archaic Greek artwork (though many diplyon shields have the same two-point grip-system as aspides as well): they had the other option and chose not to use it.²² With a two-point porpax-antelabe grip, the aspis‘ center of mass can never be more than an upper-arm’s length (again, c. 30cm) away, which really matters given that the average male might be c. 45cm wide. In practice, of course, it is hard to get an elbow much further than the center of one’s chest and that is basically the limit for how far to the right the center of the aspis can be. Likewise, there’s a real limit to how far you can cock your elbow backwards.

By contrast, the center-point of a center-grip shield can be wherever you fist can be, which is a lot wider of a set of places: you can get a center-grip shield all the way to the far side of your body, you can pull it all the way in to your chest or push your entire arm’s length into the enemy’s space. Moreover, with just a single point of contact, these shields can rotate around your hand. You can see the difference in coverage arcs below which honestly also understates how much easier it is to move a center-group shield into some of these extreme positions because it isn’t strapped to your arm.

Note: We’re going to return to the ‘side on’ vs. ‘straight on’ question in a future post, but I’ve provided both for now. The heterodox school (van Wees, *op. cit.*, 168-9) supposes a side-on stance but in practice hoplites must have been transitioning frequently between side-on and straight-on simply to use their weapons (you bring your back leg forward when striking to get your whole body into the blow) or to march (these guys did not run sideways into battle, even if they might turn sideways as they reached the enemy). However I will note that you can see very clearly that it is only in the ‘straight on’ (or nearly so) position that Thucydides’ statement about the tendency of hoplites to drift right-ward to seek to protect their unprotected right side makes **any sense** (Thuc. 5.71.1), something Thucydides says “all armies do so” (ἅπαντα τοῦτο) and so must have been a general feature of the warfare he knew.

So the aspis‘ design has significantly compromised offensive potential, mobility, maneuverability and the range of coverage on the sides. What it gains is a stout design, a very stable grip and an unusually high amount of width and we know they chose these trade-offs because the aspis replaced other shield designs that were present in the Archaic, at least for this kind of combatant (the emerging hoplite). The question then is why and here certainty is impossible because the Greeks do not tell us, but we can approach a plausible answer to the question in two ways: we can ask in what situation would those positive qualities – stoutness, stability and width – be more valuable or we could look at how similar shields (large round shields) are used in other cultures.

A very wide shield that covers a lot of space in which the combatant is not is not particularly useful in skirmishing or open-order fighting (cultures that do that kind of fighting tend to drift towards either large oblong shields or small buckler-style shields). But that extra width is really handy if the goal is to create an unbroken horizontal line of protection without having to crowd so tightly with your buddies that you can’t move effectively. A hoplite can ‘join shields’ with his mates even with a file width of 90cm, which is certainly closed-order, but not absurdly tight – a Roman with a scutum has to pull in to about 60-65cm of file width to do the same. Where might you value stoutness over mobility or range of motion? Well, under conditions where you expect most strikes to come from a single direction (in front of you), so you are more concerned about your ability to meet those strikes effectively than your ability to cover angles of attack that aren’t supposed to be threatened in the first place – such as, for instance, a situation where that space is occupied by a buddy who also has a big shield. In particular, you might want this if you are more worried about having your shield shifted out of position by an enemy – a thing that was clearly a concern²³ – than you are about its offensive potential or rapid mobility (or its utility for a shoving match).

What is the environment where those tradeoffs make sense? A shield wall.

Alternately, we could just ask, “what contexts do we tend to see large, solid and relatively robust round shields” and the answer is in shield walls. Or we might ask, “where do we see infantry using two-point grip shields (like some kite shields, for instance)” and find the answer is in shield walls.

I thus find myself feeling very confident that the aspis was designed for a shield wall context. Which, given how weapons develop (see above) would suggest that context already existed to some degree when the aspis emerged in the mid-to-late 8th century, although we will leave to next time working out what that might have looked like.

A Brief Digression on the Corinthian Helmet

We can think about the Corinthian helmet in similar terms. Victor Davis Hansen, who can only compare Corinthian helmets to modern combat helmets – because again a huge problem in this debate is that both sides lack sufficient pre-modern military comparanda – suggested that hoplites wearing the helmet could “scarcely see or hear” which essentially forced hoplites into a dense formation. “Dueling, skirmishing and hit-and-run tactics were out of the question with such headgear.”²⁴ The heterodox response is to dispute the degree of those trade-offs, arguing that the helmets don’t inhibit peripheral vision or hearing and are not as heavy as the orthodox camp supposes.²⁵ That dispute matters quite a lot because again, as we’ll get to, the ‘strong’ heterodox position is that hoplite equipment didn’t develop for or in a shield-wall formation, but for skirmishing, so if the Corinthian helmet is a bad helmet for skirmishing, that would make its emergence rather strange; we’ll come back to the question of early Archaic warfare later. Strikingly, there is a lot of effort in these treatments to reason from first principles or from other later ancient Greek helmets but the only non-Greek comparandum that is regularly brought up is the open-faced Roman montefortino-helmet – other closed-face helmets are rarely mentioned.

Via Wikimedia Commons, a relatively early design (c. 630) Corinthian helmet, showing the minimal nose protection (albeit there was some more here before it was broken off) and very wide gap over the face. The punch-holes are presumably to enable the attachment of a liner.

Via Wikimedia Commons, a sixth century Corinthian helmet (so the ‘middle’ stage of development) – the face gap is not yet fully closed, but we have the fully developed nose guard and more curved overall shape.

So does the Corinthian helmet limit vision? It depends on the particular design but a general answer is ‘perhaps a bit, but not an enormous amount.’ The eye-slits in original Corinthian helmets (as opposed to sometimes poorly made modern replica) are fairly wide and the aperture is right up against the face, so you might lose some peripheral vision, but an enormous amount. The impact to hearing is relatively more significant, but what I’ve heard from reenactors more than once is that it only gets bad if you make noise (which then is transmitted through the helmet), but that can include heavy breathing.²⁶ Of course the best evidence that the impact to hearing was non-trivial (even if the wearer is still able to hear somewhat) is that later versions of the helmet feature cutouts for the ears. Breathing itself is a factor here: the width of the mouth-slit varies over time (it tends to close up as we move from the Archaic towards the Classical), but basically any obstruction of the front of the face with a helmet is going to be felt by the wearer when they are engaged in heavy exertion: if you are running or fighting your body is going to feel just about anything that restricts its ability to suck in maximum air.

Via Wikipedia, a 13th century German great helm, showing the narrowness of the vision-slits and the breaths (breathing holes).

But those drawbacks simply do not get us to the idea that this was a helmet which could only be used in a tight, huddled formation for the obvious reason that other, far more enclosed helmets have existed at other points in history and been used for a wider range of fighting. 13th century great helms also have no ear cutouts, feature even narrower vision-slits and use a system of ‘breaths’ (small circular holes, typically in patterns) to enable breathing, which restrict breathing more than at least early Corinthian helmets (and probably about the same amount as the more closed-front late types). Visored bascinets, like the iconic hounskull bascinet design likewise lack ear-cut outs, have breaths for air and notably move the eye aperture forward away from the eyes on the visor, reducing the area of vision significantly as compared to a Corinthian helmet. And yet we see these helmets used by both heavy infantry (dismounted knights and men-at-arms) and cavalry in a variety of situations including dueling.²⁷

Via Wikipedia, a hounskull visored bascinet. The visor was attached via hinges so that it could be swung open (some designs have them swing upwards, others have two points of contact and swing horizontally). The large bulge beneath the eyes served in part to make breathing easier, creating a larger air pocket and more space for the breaths.

Which puts us in a similar place as with the aspis: the Corinthian helmet is a design that has made some trade-offs and compromises. It is capable of a lot – the idea that men wearing these were forced to huddle up because couldn’t see or hear each other is excessive – but the choice has clearly been made to sacrifice a bit of lightness, some vision, a fair bit of hearing and some breathing in order to squeeze out significantly more face and neck protection (those cheek pieces generally descend well below the chin, to help guard the neck that Greek body armor struggled to protect adequately). That is not a set of compromises that would make sense for a skirmisher who needs to be able to see and hear with maximum clarity and who expects to be running back and forth on the battlefield for an extended period – and indeed, skirmishing troops often forgo helmets entirely. When they wear them, they are to my knowledge invariably open-faced.

Via Wikimedia Commons, an early classical (and thus ‘late’) Corinthian helmet design (c. 475). The face has almost totally closed off and the eye-gaps have narrowed, although there is still a decently wide cutout to avoid harming peripheral vision.

Instead, when we see partially- or fully-closed-face helmets, we tend to see them in basically two environments: heavy cavalry and shield walls.²⁸ Some of this is doubtless socioeconomic: the cavalryman has the money for expensive, fully-enclosed helmets while the poorer infantrymen must make do with less. Whereas I think the aspis was clearly developed to function in a shield wall (even though it can be used to do other things) I am less confident on the Corinthian helmet; I could probably be persuaded of the idea this began as a cavalryman’s heavy helmet, only to be adopted by the infantry because its emphasis on face-protection was so useful in the context of a shield wall clashing with another shield wall. What it is very obviously not is a skirmishers helmet.²⁹

Conclusions

As you have probably picked up when it comes to equipment, I find the ‘orthodox’ position unacceptable on almost every point, but equally I find the heterodox position unpersuasive on every point except the ‘soft’ gradualism in development (the Snodgrass position) which I think has decisively triumphed. Of the entire debate, this is often the part that I find most frustrating because of the failure of the scholars involved to really engage meaningfully with the broader field of arms-and-armor study and to think more comparatively about how arms and armor develop, are selected and are used.

On the one hand, the idea that the hoplite, in full or nearly-full kit, could function as a skirmisher, “even in full armour, a hoplite was quite capable of moving back and forth across the battlefield in the Homeric manner” or that the kit could be “used to equally good effect in open-order fighting” is just not plausible and mistakes capability for appositeness.³⁰ Hoplite equipment placed the typical hoplite very clearly into the weight-range of ‘heavy infantry,’ by no means the heaviest of heavy infantry (which fatally undermines the ‘encumbered hoplite’ of the orthodox vision) but also by no means light infantry or even really medium infantry except if substantial parts of the panoply were abandoned. Again, I could be sold on the idea that the earliest hoplites were, perhaps, ‘mediums’ – versatile infantry that could skirmish (but not well) and fight in close order (but not well) – but by the early 600s when the whole panoply is coming together it seems clear that the fellows with the full set are in the weight range for ‘heavies.’ We’ll talk about how we might imagine that combat evolving next time.

Moreover, key elements of hoplite equipment show a clear effort to prioritize protection over other factors: shield mobility, offensive potential, a small degree of vision, a larger but still modest degree of hearing, a smaller but still significant degree of breathing, which contributes to a larger tradeoff in endurance (another strike against the ‘skirmishing hoplite’). The environment where those tradeoffs all make sense is the shield wall. Which in turn means that while the ultra-rigid orthodox vision where these soldiers cannot function outside of the phalanx has to be abandoned – they’re more versatile than that – the vision, propounded by van Wees, that the hoplite worked just as well in open-order is also not persuasive.

Instead, it seems most plausible by far to me that this equipment emerged to meet the demands of men who were already beginning to fight in shield walls, which is to say relatively³¹ close-order formations with mutually supporting³² shields probably already existed when the hoplite panoply began to emerge in the mid- and late-8th century.

Long ago in the 1990s when I was in high school, my chemistry+physics teacher pulled me aside. "Avery, you know how the Internet works, right? I have a question."

I now know the correct response to that was, "Does anyone really know how the Internet works?" But as a naive young high schooler I did not have that level of self-awareness. (Decades later, as a CEO, that's my answer to almost everything.)

Anyway, he asked his question, and it was simple but deep. How do they make all the computers connect?

We can't even get the world to agree on 60 Hz vs 50 Hz, 120V vs 240V, or which kind of physical power plug to use. Communications equipment uses way more frequencies, way more voltages, way more plug types. Phone companies managed to federate with each other, eventually, barely, but the ring tones were different everywhere, there was pulse dialing and tone dialing, and some of them still charge $3/minute for international long distance, and connections take a long time to establish and humans seem to be involved in suspiciously many places when things get messy, and every country has a different long-distance dialing standard and phone number format.

So Avery, he said, now they're telling me every computer in the world can connect to every other computer, in milliseconds, for free, between Canada and France and China and Russia. And they all use a single standardized address format, and then you just log in and transfer files and stuff? How? How did they make the whole world cooperate? And who?

When he asked that question, it was a formative moment in my life that I'll never forget, because as an early member of what would be the first Internet generation… I Had Simply Never Thought of That.

I mean, I had to stop and think for a second. Wait, is protocol standardization even a hard problem? Of course it is. Humans can't agree on anything. We can't agree on a unit of length or the size of a pint, or which side of the road to drive on. Humans in two regions of Europe no farther apart than Thunder Bay and Toronto can't understand each other's speech. But this Internet thing just, kinda, worked.

"There's… a layer on top," I uttered, unsatisfyingly. Nobody had taught me yet that the OSI stack model existed, let alone that it was at best a weak explanation of reality.

"When something doesn't talk to something else, someone makes an adapter. Uh, and some of the adapters are just programs rather than physical things. It's not like everyone in the world agrees. But as soon as one person makes an adapter, the two things come together."

I don't think he was impressed with my answer. Why would he be? Surely nothing so comprehensively connected could be engineered with no central architecture, by a loosely-knit cult of mostly-volunteers building an endless series of whimsical half-considered "adapters" in their basements and cramped university tech labs. Such a creation would be a monstrosity, just as likely to topple over as to barely function.

I didn't try to convince him, because honestly, how could I know? But the question has dominated my life ever since.

When things don't connect, why don't they connect? When they do, why? How? …and who?

Postel's Law

The closest clue I've found is this thing called Postel's Law, one of the foundational principles of the Internet. It was best stated by one of the founders of the Internet, Jon Postel. "Be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept."

What it means to me is, if there's a standard, do your best to follow it, when you're sending. And when you're receiving, uh, assume the best intentions of your counterparty and do your best and if that doesn't work, guess.

A rephrasing I use sometimes is, "It takes two to miscommunicate." Communication works best and most smoothly if you have a good listener and a clear speaker, sharing a language and context. But it can still bumble along successfully if you have a poor speaker with a great listener, or even a great speaker with a mediocre listener. Sometimes you have to say the same thing five ways before it gets across (wifi packet retransmits), or ask way too many clarifying questions, but if one side or the other is diligent enough, you can almost always make it work.

This asymmetry is key to all high-level communication. It makes network bugs much less severe. Without Postel's Law, triggering a bug in the sender would break the connection; so would triggering a bug in the receiver. With Postel's Law, we acknowledge from the start that there are always bugs and we have twice as many chances to work around them. Only if you trigger both sets of bugs at once is the flaw fatal.

…So okay, if you've used the Internet, you've probably observed that fatal connection errors are nevertheless pretty common. But that misses how incredibly much more common they would be in a non-Postel world. That world would be the one my physics teacher imagined, where nothing ever works and it all topples over.

And we know that's true because we've tried it. Science! Let us digress.

XML

We had the Internet ("OSI Layer 3") mostly figured out by the time my era began in the late 1900s, but higher layers of the stack still had work to do. It was the early days of the web. We had these newfangled hypertext ("HTML") browsers that would connect to a server, download some stuff, and then try their best to render it.

Web browsers are and have always been an epic instantiation of Postel's Law. From the very beginning, they assumed that the server (content author) had absolutely no clue what they were doing and did their best to apply some kind of meaning on top, despite every indication that this was a lost cause. List items that never end? Sure. Tags you've never heard of? Whatever. Forgot some semicolons in your javascript? I'll interpolate some. Partially overlapping italics and bold? Leave it to me. No indication what language or encoding the page is in? I'll just guess.

The evolution of browsers gives us some insight into why Postel's Law is a law and not just, you know, Postel's Advice. The answer is: competition. It works like this. If your browser interprets someone's mismash subjectively better than another browser, your browser wins.

I think economists call this an iterated prisoner's dilemma. Over and over, people write web pages (defect) and browsers try to render them (defect) and absolutely nobody actually cares what the HTML standard says (stays loyal). Because if there's a popular page that's wrong and you render it "right" and it doesn't work? Straight to jail.

(By now almost all the evolutionary lines of browsers have been sent to jail, one by one, and the HTML standard is effectively whatever Chromium and Safari say it is. Sorry.)

This law offends engineers to the deepness of their soul. We went through a period where loyalists would run their pages through "validators" and proudly add a logo to the bottom of their page saying how valid their HTML was. Browsers, of course, didn't care and continued to try their best.

Another valiant effort was the definition of "quirks mode": a legacy rendering mode meant to document, normalize, and push aside all the legacy wonko interpretations of old web pages. It was paired with a new, standards-compliant rendering mode that everyone was supposed to agree on, starting from scratch with an actual written spec and tests this time, and public shaming if you made a browser that did it wrong. Of course, outside of browser academia, nobody cares about the public shaming and everyone cares if your browser can render the popular web sites, so there are still plenty of quirks outside quirks mode. It's better and it was well worth the effort, but it's not all the way there. It never can be.

We can be sure it's not all the way there because there was another exciting development, HTML Strict (and its fancier twin, XHTML), which was meant to be the same thing, but with a special feature. Instead of sending browsers to jail for rendering wrong pages wrong, we'd send page authors to jail for writing wrong pages!

To mark your web page as HTML Strict was a vote against the iterated prisoner's dilemma and Postel's Law. No, your vote said. No more. We cannot accept this madness. We are going to be Correct. I certify this page is correct. If it is not correct, you must sacrifice me, not all of society. My honour demands it.

Anyway, many page authors were thus sacrificed and now nobody uses HTML Strict. Nobody wants to do tech support for a web page that asks browsers to crash when parsing it, when you can just… not do that.

Excuse me, the above XML section didn't have any XML

Yes, I'm getting to that. (And you're soon going to appreciate that meta joke about schemas.)

In parallel with that dead branch of HTML, a bunch of people had realized that, more generally, HTML-like languages (technically SGML-like languages) had turned out to be a surprisingly effective way to build interconnected data systems.

In retrospect we now know that the reason for HTML's resilience is Postel's Law. It's simply easier to fudge your way through parsing incorrect hypertext, than to fudge your way through parsing a Microsoft Word or Excel file's hairball of binary OLE streams, which famously even Microsoft at one point lost the knowledge of how to parse. But, that Postel's Law connection wasn't really understood at the time.

Instead we had a different hypothesis: "separation of structure and content." Syntax and semantics. Writing software to deal with structure is repetitive overhead, and content is where the money is. Let's automate away the structure so you can spend your time on the content: semantics.

We can standardize the syntax with a single Extensible Markup Language (XML). Write your content, then "mark it up" by adding structure right in the doc, just like we did with plaintext human documents. Data, plus self-describing metadata, all in one place. Never write a parser again!

Of course, with 20/20 hindsight (or now 2025 hindsight), this is laughable. Yes, we now have XML parser libraries. If you've ever tried to use one, you will find they indeed produce parse trees automatically… if you're lucky. If you're not lucky, they produce a stream of "tokens" and leave it to you to figure out how to arrange it in a tree, for reasons involving streaming, performance, memory efficiency, and so on. Basically, if you use XML you now have to deeply care about structure, perhaps more than ever, but you also have to include some giant external parsing library that, left in its normal mode, might spontaneously start making a lot of uncached HTTP requests that can also exploit remote code execution vulnerabilities haha oops.

If you've ever taken a parser class, or even if you've just barely tried to write a parser, you'll know the truth: the value added by outsourcing parsing (or in some cases only tokenization) is not a lot. This is because almost all the trouble of document processing (or compiling) is the semantic layer, the part where you make sense of the parse tree. The part where you just read a stream of characters into a data structure is the trivial, well-understood first step.

Now, semantics is where it gets interesting. XML was all about separating syntax from semantics. And they did some pretty neat stuff with that separation, in a computer science sense. XML is neat because it's such a regular and strict language that you can completely validate the syntax (text and tags) without knowing what any of the tags mean or which tags are intended to be valid at all.

…aha! Did someone say validate?! Like those old HTML validators we talked about? Oh yes. Yes! And this time the validation will be completely strict and baked into every implementation from day 1. And, the language syntax itself will be so easy and consistent to validate (unlike SGML and HTML, which are, in all fairness, bananas) that nobody can possibly screw it up.

A layer on top of this basic, highly validatable XML, was a thing called XML Schemas. These were documents (mysteriously not written in XML) that described which tags were allowed in which places in a certain kind of document. Not only could you parse and validate the basic XML syntax, you could also then validate its XML schema as a separate step, to be totally sure that every tag in the document was allowed where it was used, and present if it was required. And if not? Well, straight to jail. We all agreed on this, everyone. Day one. No exceptions. Every document validates. Straight to jail.

Anyway XML schema validation became an absolute farce. Just parsing or understanding, let alone writing, the awful schema file format is an unpleasant ordeal. To say nothing of complying with the schema, or (heaven forbid) obtaining a copy of someone's custom schema and loading it into the validator at the right time.

The core XML syntax validation was easy enough to do while parsing. Unfortunately, in a second violation of Postel's Law, almost no software that outputs XML runs it through a validator before sending. I mean, why would they, the language is highly regular and easy to generate and thus the output is already perfect. …Yeah, sure.

Anyway we all use JSON now.

JSON

Whoa, wait! I wasn't done!

This is the part where I note, for posterity's sake, that XML became a decade-long fad in the early 2000s that justified billions of dollars of software investment. None of XML's technical promises played out; it is a stain on the history of the computer industry. But, a lot of legacy software got un-stuck because of those billions of dollars, and so we did make progress.

What was that progress? Interconnection.

Before the Internet, we kinda didn't really need to interconnect software together. I mean, we sort of did, like cut-and-pasting between apps on Windows or macOS or X11, all of which were surprisingly difficult little mini-Postel's Law protocol adventures in their own right and remain quite useful when they work (except "paste formatted text," wtf are you people thinking). What makes cut-and-paste possible is top-down standards imposed by each operating system vendor.

If you want the same kind of thing on the open Internet, ie. the ability to "copy" information out of one server and "paste" it into another, you need some kind of standard. XML was a valiant effort to create one. It didn't work, but it was valiant.

Whereas all that money investment did work. Companies spent billions of dollars to update their servers to publish APIs that could serve not just human-formatted HTML, but also something machine-readable. The great innovation was not XML per se, it was serving data over HTTP that wasn't always HTML. That was a big step, and didn't become obvious until afterward.

The most common clients of HTTP were web browsers, and web browsers only knew how to parse two things: HTML and javascript. To a first approximation, valid XML is "valid" (please don't ask the validator) HTML, so we could do that at first, and there were some Microsoft extensions. Later, after a few billions of dollars, true standardized XML parsing arrived in browsers. Similarly, to a first approximation, valid JSON is valid javascript, which woo hoo, that's a story in itself (you could parse it with eval(), tee hee) but that's why we got here.

JSON (minus the rest of javascript) is a vastly simpler language than XML. It's easy to consistently parse (other than that pesky trailing comma); browsers already did. It represents only (a subset of) the data types normal programming languages already have, unlike XML's weird mishmash of single attributes, multiply occurring attributes, text content, and CDATA. It's obviously a tree and everyone knows how that tree will map into their favourite programming language. It inherently works with unicode and only unicode. You don't need cumbersome and duplicative "closing tags" that double the size of every node. And best of all, no guilt about skipping that overcomplicated and impossible-to-get-right schema validator, because, well, nobody liked schemas anyway so nobody added them to JSON (almost).

Today, if you look at APIs you need to call, you can tell which ones were a result of the $billions invested in the 2000s, because it's all XML. And you can tell which came in the 2010s and later after learning some hard lessons, because it's all JSON. But either way, the big achievement is you can call them all from javascript. That's pretty good.

(Google is an interesting exception: they invented and used protobuf during the same time period because they disliked XML's inefficiency, they did like schemas, and they had the automated infrastructure to make schemas actually work (mostly, after more hard lessons). But it mostly didn't spread beyond Google… maybe because it's hard to do from javascript.)

Blockchain

The 2010s were another decade of massive multi-billion dollar tech investment. Once again it was triggered by an overwrought boondoggle technology, and once again we benefited from systems finally getting updated that really needed to be updated.

Let's leave aside cryptocurrencies (which although used primarily for crime, at least demonstrably have a functioning use case, ie. crime) and look at the more general form of the technology.

Blockchains in general make the promise of a "distributed ledger" which allows everyone the ability to make claims and then later validate other people's claims. The claims that "real" companies invested in were meant to be about manufacturing, shipping, assembly, purchases, invoices, receipts, ownership, and so on. What's the pattern? That's the stuff of businesses doing business with other businesses. In other words, data exchange. Data exchange is exactly what XML didn't really solve (although progress was made by virtue of the dollars invested) in the previous decade.

Blockchain tech was a more spectacular boondoggle than XML for a few reasons. First, it didn't even have a purpose you could explain. Why do we even need a purely distributed system for this? Why can't we just trust a third party auditor? Who even wants their entire supply chain (including number of widgets produced and where each one is right now) to be visible to the whole world? What is the problem we're trying to solve with that?

…and you know there really was no purpose, because after all the huge investment to rewrite all that stuff, which was itself valuable work, we simply dropped the useless blockchain part and then we were fine. I don't think even the people working on it felt like they needed a real distributed ledger. They just needed an updated ledger and a budget to create one. If you make the "ledger" module pluggable in your big fancy supply chain system, you can later drop out the useless "distributed" ledger and use a regular old ledger. The protocols, the partnerships, the databases, the supply chain, and all the rest can stay the same.

In XML's defense, at least it was not worth the effort to rip out once the world came to its senses.

Another interesting similarity between XML and blockchains was the computer science appeal. A particular kind of person gets very excited about validation and verifiability. Both times, the whole computer industry followed those people down into the pits of despair and when we finally emerged… still no validation, still no verifiability, still didn't matter. Just some computers communicating with each other a little better than they did before.

LLMs

In the 2020s, our industry fad is LLMs. I'm going to draw some comparisons here to the last two fads, but there are some big differences too.

One similarity is the computer science appeal: so much math! Just the matrix sizes alone are a technological marvel the likes of which we have never seen. Beautiful. Colossal. Monumental. An inspiration to nerds everywhere.

But a big difference is verification and validation. If there is one thing LLMs absolutely are not, it's verifiable. LLMs are the flakiest thing the computer industry has ever produced! So far. And remember, this is the industry that brought you HTML rendering.

LLMs are an almost cartoonishly amplified realization of Postel's Law. They write human grammar perfectly, or almost perfectly, or when they're not perfect it's a bug and we train them harder. And, they can receive just about any kind of gibberish and turn it into a data structure. In other words, they're conservative in what they send and liberal in what they accept.

LLMs also solve the syntax problem, in the sense that they can figure out how to transliterate (convert) basically any file syntax into any other. Modulo flakiness. But if you need a CSV in the form of a limerick or a quarterly financial report formatted as a mysql dump, sure, no problem, make it so.

In theory we already had syntax solved though. XML and JSON did that already. We were even making progress interconnecting old school company supply chain stuff the hard way, thanks to our nominally XML- and blockchain- investment decades. We had to do every interconnection by hand – by writing an adapter – but we could do it.

What's really new is that LLMs address semantics. Semantics are the biggest remaining challenge in connecting one system to another. If XML solved syntax, that was the first 10%. Semantics are the last 90%. When I want to copy from one database to another, how do I map the fields? When I want to scrape a series of uncooperative web pages and turn it into a table of products and prices, how do I turn that HTML into something structured? (Predictably microformats, aka schemas, did not work out.) If I want to query a database (or join a few disparate databases!) using some language that isn't SQL, what options do I have?

LLMs can do it all.

Listen, we can argue forever about whether LLMs "understand" things, or will achieve anything we might call intelligence, or will take over the world and eradicate all humans, or are useful assistants, or just produce lots of text sludge that will certainly clog up the web and social media, or will also be able to filter the sludge, or what it means for capitalism that we willingly invented a machine we pay to produce sludge that we also pay to remove the sludge.

But what we can't argue is that LLMs interconnect things. Anything. To anything. Whether you like it or not. Whether it's bug free or not (spoiler: it's not). Whether it gets the right answer or not (spoiler: erm…).

This is the thing we have gone through at least two decades of hype cycles desperately chasing. (Three, if you count java "write once run anywhere" in the 1990s.) It's application-layer interconnection, the holy grail of the Internet.

And this time, it actually works! (mostly)

The curse of success

LLMs aren't going away. Really we should coin a term for this use case, call it "b2b AI" or something. For this use case, LLMs work. And they're still getting better and the precision will improve with practice. For example, imagine asking an LLM to write a data translator in some conventional programming language, instead of asking it to directly translate a dataset on its own. We're still at the beginning.

But, this use case, which I predict is the big one, isn't what we expected. We expected LLMs to write poetry or give strategic advice or whatever. We didn't expect them to call APIs and immediately turn around and use what it learned to call other APIs.

After 30 years of trying and failing to connect one system to another, we now have a literal universal translator. Plug it into any two things and it'll just go, for better or worse, no matter how confused it becomes. And everyone is doing it, fast, often with a corporate mandate to do it even faster.

This kind of scale and speed of (successful!) rollout is unprecedented, even by the Internet itself, and especially in the glacially slow world of enterprise system interconnections, where progress grinds to a halt once a decade only to be finally dislodged by the next misguided technology wave. Nobody was prepared for it, so nobody was prepared for the consequences.

One of the odd features of Postel's Law is it's irresistible. Big Central Infrastructure projects rise and fall with funding, but Postel's Law projects are powered by love. A little here, a little there, over time. One more person plugging one more thing into one more other thing. We did it once with the Internet, overcoming all the incompatibilities at OSI layers 1 and 2. It subsumed, it is still subsuming, everything.

Now we're doing it again at the application layer, the information layer. And just like we found out when we connected all the computers together the first time, naively hyperconnected networks make it easy for bad actors to spread and disrupt at superhuman speeds. We had to invent firewalls, NATs, TLS, authentication systems, two-factor authentication systems, phishing-resistant two-factor authentication systems, methodical software patching, CVE tracking, sandboxing, antivirus systems, EDR systems, DLP systems, everything. We'll have to do it all again, but faster and different.

Because this time, it's all software.