The helmet, heavy spear and shield were the equipment that defined the Greek hoplite warrior. Contemporary vase paintings clearly show the many different images that were painted onto shields. Were these mainly decorative or did the painters follow some early system of heraldry? The scholar George Henry Chase made the first extensive and systematic study of hoplite shield devices, originally published nearly a century ago. The basis of the study was a catalogue of some 268 different shield blazons, collected chiefly from vase paintings; an alphabetical listing from Amphora to Wreath. Chase's purpose was to investigate why these different subjects might have been chosen by the individuals who bore the shield. He came up with twelve different categories.
Needless to say, there is a large amount of interplay between these various categories and considerable scope for debate, but Chase was able to support his analysis with literary evidence. The most interesting categories are 4 and 5, 'family devices' and 'state devices', and are the main focus of this article. After the catch-all categories '12. Devices chosen purely from individual fancy or caprice' and '1. Devices purely decorative', perhaps the most popular was '3. Devices chosen with reference to the cult of a god'. The rising importance of the cult of Apollo in the late sixth century is reflected in the huge number of Apolline symbols on hoplite shields shown in Greek art. The tripod supporting a cauldron is a particularly common device. It was a symbol of Apollo and represented the tripod at Delphi from which his priestess delivered her oracular utterances. There are hosts of other Apolline symbols which are not immediately obvious. For example single or multiple ball or circle symbols are sun symbols connected with Apollo. Lunar crescent symbols are connected with the moon goddess Artemis, Apollo's sister, which may explain why the two sometimes appear together.
Family shield devices
Chase chose his words carefully when he described his category 5 as 'Devices chosen with reference to family or descent'. It is clear that there was no formally developed heraldic system, such as those of medieval Europe, or the Saracen or Japanese worlds. Nevertheless, some literary passages do indicate that hoplites did choose devices that were of family significance.
These passages are mostly mythological in context. The traveller Pausanias, who visited Greece in about AD 150, saw a bronze group of statues of the Achaean warriors who took part in the Trojan War drawing lots to decide who would accept Hector's challenge to single combat. One of the warriors, the Cretan Idomeneus, a descendant of Minos, bore a shield with the shield device of a cock on it. 'Idomeneus,' Pausanias explains, 'was descended from the Sun-god Helios, the father of Pasiphae, and the bird is sacred to Helios and announces when he is about to rise.' The statue was the work of Onatas of Aegina, a sculptor working around the beginning of the fifth century BC. Despite the centuries between the sculptor and the traveller, there is no reason to doubt Pausanias' interpretation. It seems he saw nothing strange in shield devices being chosen 'with reference to family or descent'. In another passage from Euripides' tragedy Phoenissa, the hero Parthenopaios is described as bearing a 'family' blazon showing Atalanta (his mother) slaying the Aetolian boar. Chase argued that this passage 'gives us a hint that the poet was familiar with devices chosen with reference to the family of the bearer'. Outside the sphere of mythological heroes, however, our evidence for the widespread use of family shield devices is very limited.
In another passage Pausanias explained the serpent device he saw on the shield over the tomb of Epaminondas as 'intended to signify that Epaminondas was by descent of the race of the so-called Spartoi (the sown men)'. The mythical founder of Thebes, Kadmos, had sown the teeth of the serpent of Ares from which had sprung a harvest of armed men, who immediately fought each other until only five remained. These helped Kadmos found Thebes and became the mythical ancestors of the Theban nobility. This reference would seem to indicate that many members of the Theban nobility decorated their shields with the device of a serpent.
There is some further evidence in support of this supposition from the writing of Plutarch. He tells us that in 394 BC the Lakedaimonian general Lysander was killed at Haliartos in Boeotia whilst leading an expedition against the Thebans. An oracle had warned Lysander to be on his guard 'against a noisy Hoplites and an earth-born dragon cunningly coming behind'. Lysander was slain at a stream called the Hoplites by a man from Haliartos called Neochoros, whose shield emblem was a snake. In this case Plutarch, who was himself a native of Boeotia, may well have had local knowledge. Although Neochoros was a native of Haliartos, he may have been related to the Theban Spartoi by marriage.
The literary evidence for Athenian family shield devices is also scant. A fragment of the historian Satyros tells us that the general Alkibiades played the dandy even when he was a general, for he carried a shield of gold and ivory on which was the unwarlike device of Eros (Cupid) with a thunderbolt poised like a javelin. Satyros the Peripatetic, a younger contemporary of Aristotle, lived in Ptolemaic Alexandria in the early third century BC so was not too far removed from Alkibiades in time to record genuine information. The biographer Plutarch also tells us that Alkibiades had a golden shield made for himself 'bearing no ancestral device' but an Eros armed with a thunderbolt. However, Plutarch wrote much later, in the late first and early second centuries AD and we cannot be sure if he is quoting Satyros, or a common earlier source used by both biographers. Therefore we cannot be sure that the phrase 'bearing no ancestral device' was in the original source, or is an observation of Plutarch's.
Numerous attempts have been made to explain badges found on Athenian coins or depicted on hoplite shields as belonging to particular clans. These are all dubious. The adoption of the 'triskeles' by the Alkmaionid clan as its shield device is the only association which has any literary evidence to support it. The triskeles symbol has three running human legs bent at the knee and joined at the hip, similar to the armoured legs of the coat-of-arms of the Isle of Man. The triskeles is frequently shown in white in Attic black-figure vase paintings. This device is one of a number of 'running' symbols connected with the course of the sun through the heavens, like the swastika, and was sacred to Apollo, linking this device to Chase's category 3.
In Aristophanes' comedy Lysistrata the men in the Chorus encourage each other to become young again, to shake off their old skin, calling themselves 'Whitelegs, we who went against Leipsydrium'. Leipsydrium in northern Attica was occupied and held against the Athenian tyrants in about 513 by a group of aristocrats under the leadership of the Alkmaionid clan. An ancient commentator annotated the manuscript 'Whitelegs on account of their having a white badge upon their shields; Aristophanes means the people now known as the Alkmaionids'. The evidence seems fairly cut and dried. However, the word actually written was lykopedes meaning 'Wolflegs' rather than leukopodes 'Whitelegs'. And other sources tell us that the hirelings of the tyrants had wolf-skins on their legs and wolf blazons on their shields. Therefore this identification cannot be taken as certain, even though it fits quite well with what we know of the Alkmaionidai. They did have close connections with the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, and the adoption of an Apolline symbol as their family badge would be entirely appropriate. Some modern commentators have suggested the single leg shown on other vase paintings may also be an Alkmaionid badge, a simple variant of the triskeles symbol. Thus in the case of the Alkmaionid clan the 'family' shield device was ultimately religious in origin too.
State shield devices
'State' shield blazons were mostly religious in origin too. One of the earliest literary references is a fragment of a poem by Bacchylides. The fragment is preserved in a note written by a scholar onto the manuscript of Pindar's later Olympian Odes. In this note the scholar quotes a passage that tells us that the Mantineians used the trident as their blazon as it was a symbol of Poseidon, their patron god who had a temple in their city. Didymus then cites Bacchylides, who asks us to behold 'the Mantineians, bearing the trident of Poseidon on their finely wrought shields of bronze'. It has been suggested that this fragment must come from a work listing the different contingents of a Greek allied army, but the context is completely unknown. Bacchylides seems to have been born around 520 BC, and if this date is correct he would have been a little over forty when the battle of Plataea was fought in 479. Thus it is at least possible that this fragment comes from a list of the allied contingents at Plataea. But there were other, later conflicts in the Peloponnese which could supply an equally plausible context for this fragment, and we have no other evidence for state shield devices being used as early as the Persian Wars. The last dated poem of Bacchylides was written in 452. Herodotus, who wrote the most complete and nearest to contemporary account of these wars, makes no reference to 'state' shield devices at all. Furthermore we have some references, though mostly in later and less reliable sources, to the use of personal shield devices by individual hoplites in the Persian Wars.
In fact it appears that few states had introduced standardised shield devices by the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, the contemporary historian of that war, tells us that at the battle of Delion, fought in 424 BC, many Athenians were killed by their fellow-countrymen by mistake. The Boeotian left wing had collapsed and only the Thespian contingent stood its ground. The victorious Athenian line got into confusion as it circled round the Thespian contingent and surrounded it. Some of the Athenian hoplites fought and killed one another when they met at the other end, mistaking their countrymen for the enemy. It is obvious from this and other sources that state shield devices were not in general use down to the last quarter of the fifth century. However, it can be seen how evolution from the more formal hoplite encounters of earlier times, one city against another, and the trend towards larger-scale and more complex engagements was creating the need for better identification of forces in battle.
By the time of the second battle of Mantineia, fought in 362 between the Thebans and their allies and the Lakedaimonians with their allies, the practice seems to have become much more general. Xenophon tells us that the Arcadian allies of the Thebans painted clubs on their shields 'as though they were Thebans'.
We can assume that the use of state shield devices had become fairly universal between these two dates.
The club was yet another sacred symbol, the badge of Herakles, patron god of Thebes.
As well as religious symbols the Greeks also used the initial letter of their state as a shield device. The most famous and feared of these was the letter lambda for Lakedaimon. The first attested use of this device comes in a fragment of Eupolis preserved by Photius, an extremely deeply read Byzantine scholar of the ninth century. His Lexicon was compiled from earlier dictionaries. Under the letter lambda we have the following information: 'The Lakedaimonians painted a lambda onto their shields while the Messenians painted an M — Eupolis.' Eupolis was an Athenian comedy writer whose first play was produced in 429 BC. He died some time after 415 BC 'in the Hellespont, during the Peloponnesian War' according to an entry in another Lexicon (by Suidas). We know that at least one of his plays dealt with the Mantineian campaign of 418 BC. Consequently it has been suggested that the fragment refers to the battle of First Mantineia. However, the Messenians did not participate in the battle, so the quotation presumably comes from another work.
The Lakedaimonians may have been using the lambda as their state shield device for some time before the Peloponnesian War. One wonders, however, why the Lakedaimonians chose a prosaic letter rather that the badge of a protecting deity. One of the symbols of Lakedaimon was a serpent 'terrible in the attack' (Apollodorus). Pausanias describes a painting of the fall of Troy by Polygnotos, a painter active in the second quarter of the fifth century, in which the Lakedaimonian king Menelaus has a shield with a serpent blazon on it 'as a memorial of the monster that appeared on the victims at Aulis'. The reference is to the victims which the Greeks sacrificed at Aulis before starting the expedition against Troy. The serpent would, however, have been already too widely used to be adopted as a 'state' shield device. Perhaps all suitable symbols had already been taken by other states. Possibly, however, the single letter was chosen on account of its simplicity, in keeping with the simple Spartan lifestyle.
The use of letters as state shield devices may have derived from their use on the shields used in the hoplitodromos (hoplite race). This was introduced at the games in Olympia in 520 BC and Delphi in 498 BC as a result of initial Greek contact with Persian archery. The race was originally run over a distance of 400 metres, which equated to the 'beaten zone' covered by the enemy archers which the hoplites had to charge over to engage with the Persian line, as described by Herodotus in his account of the battle of Marathon in 490. The hoplite race helped the ephebe (youth in military training) become used to carrying the shield and developed his strength generally. When the race is shown on Attic vases the shields frequently have identical repeated blazons. This indicates that the state owned sets of 'sports shields' of matched weight, especially for the hoplite race. Inventories of arsenals or temple magazines often mention sets of shields or 'light shields' (aspidiskoi) which would have been kept there for this use. The shield devices are normally symbols of the particular god in whose temple they were kept, and at whose festival the hoplite race would be run. We come across the letters A or ATHE for Athena and sun or swastika symbols for Apollo on such shields.
Standardised devices in the form of the initial letter of the deity who 'owned' them appeared earlier on sports shields than on war shields and may then have been the origin of the latter. This certainly seems to have been the case in Athens. State devices appear to have been introduced later there than in many other states. Our evidence for this is a series of lead tokens, dating from the very end of the fourth or beginning of the third century BC, showing shields decorated with the letter alpha. We can compare this device directly with earlier vase paintings showing alpha shield devices painted onto sports shields used in the hoplite race.
by Nicholas Sekunda
Further Reading
Cassin-Scott, Jack, Men-at-Arms 69: The Greek and Persian Wars 500-323 BC (Osprey, Oxford, 2004)
de Souza, Philip, Essential Histories 36: The Greek and Persian Wars 499-386 BC (Osprey, Oxford, 2003)
de Souza, Philip; Heckel, Waldemar, and Llewellyn-Jones, Lloyd, Essential Histories Specials 5: The Greeks at War (Osprey, Oxford, 2004)
Sekunda, Nick, Elite 7: The Ancient Greeks (Osprey, Oxford, 1986)
Sekunda, Nick, Elite 66: The Spartan Army (Osprey, Oxford, 1998)
Sekunda, Nick, Warrior 27: Greek Hoplite 480-323 BC(Osprey, Oxford, 2000)