Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 14, 2025
The enterprise proved disastrous in the extreme. Tolmides was defeated and slain near Chaeronea, a large number of the hoplites also fell in the engagement, while a still larger number were taken prisoners. This last circumstance proved fatal to the interests of Athens in Boeotia.
The allied forces were also considerable—some twenty-four thousand hoplites, besides light troops and cavalry, and these were mustered at Corinth, where they took up a defensive position. The Lacedæmonians advanced to attack them, and gained an indecisive victory, B.C. 394, which secured their ascendency within the Peloponnesus, but no further.
The strangers and the rest of the multitude came out of curiosity, desiring to witness an enterprise of which the greatness exceeded belief. No armament so magnificent or costly had ever been sent out by any single Hellenic power, tho in mere number of ships and hoplites that which sailed to Epidaurus under Pericles and afterward under Hagnon to Potidæa was not inferior.
Meanwhile Demosthenes had not been idle: having drawn his three remaining ships under the shelter of the fort, and protected them in front by a stockade, he armed the crews with such weapons as he had, including a number of wicker-shields, taken from a thirty-oared Messenian galley which had recently come to his assistance with a force of forty hoplites.
You must send a fleet to Sicily at once, with hoplites who can row the ships themselves, and serve in the army as soon as they land, and with them a Spartan commander, to organize the fighting men of Sicily, and compel those who are hanging back to do their duty. Such a man will be a host in himself, and will infuse new life and energy into the defence.
The citizens of Carthage still at the conquest of the city amounted to 700,000, including women and children, and were probably at least as numerous at the close of the fifth century; in that century they were able in case of need to set on foot a burgess-army of 40,000 hoplites.
Thus there served in it 84 centuries or 8400 men, of whom 6000 were hoplites, 4000 of the first division, 1000 from each of the two following, and 2400 light-armed, of whom 1000 belonged to the fourth, and 1200 to the fifth division; approximately each levy-district furnished to the phalanx 2100, and to each century 25 men.
For this force Iphicrates introduced those improved arms and tactics which form an epoch in the Grecian art of war. His object was to combine as far as possible the peculiar advantages of the hoplites and light-armed troops.
But their good fortune had now reached its culminatiug point. They were defeated by the Boeotians with great loss at the battle of Delium, which was the greatest and most decisive engagement fought during the first period of the war an interesting feature of the battle is that both Socrates and his pupil Alcibiades were engaged in it, the former among the hoplites, the latter in the cavalry.
In the maritime warfare of that period hoplites and archers no doubt fought from the deck, and projectile machines were also plied from it; but the ordinary and really decisive mode of action consisted in running foul of the enemy's vessels, for which purpose the prows were furnished with heavy iron beaks: the vessels engaged were in the habit of sailing round each other till one or the other succeeded in giving the thrust, which usually proved decisive.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking