Photo by Warhaftig Venezian Photographers for the Maritime Museum of Haifa. This spectacular piece of early Greek metalworking is now on display at Israel’s National Maritime Museum in Haifa, which overlooks the waters where the helmet lay hidden for some 2600 years. Such elaborate decoration is rare on Corinthian helmets, though more common in the Archaic period than in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Rich decoration had been applied with chasing hammers and punches: two snakes curling above the eye-holes a palmette or peacock’s tail on the forehead and heraldic lions on the cheek-pieces. A glittering coat of gilding covered the exterior, some of which still remains to testify to the wealth and elite status of the helmet’s original owner. The helmet had been shaped by a master craftsman from a lost-wax bronze casting less than 2 mm thick, with a riveted nose guard 11 mm thick to provide extra protection to the warrior’s face. Following conservation by the Israel Antiquities Authority, the helmet emerged as a remarkable example of the type of closed “Corinthian” helmet traditionally associated with Greek hoplites.
In 2007, a Greek helmet of gilded bronze was recovered from Haifa Bay, Israel, during commercial dredging operations. The contributors include Paul Cartledge, Lin Foxhall, John Hale, Victor Davis Hanson, Donald Kagan, Peter Krentz, Kurt Raaflaub, Adam Schwartz, Anthony Snodgrass, Hans van Wees, and Gregory Viggiano. Instead of reaching a consensus, the contributors have sharpened their differences, providing new evidence, explanations, and theories about the origin, nature, strategy, and tactics of the hoplite phalanx and its effect on Greek culture and the rise of the polis. Men of Bronze gathers leading scholars to advance the current debate and bring it to a broader audience of ancient historians, classicists, archaeologists, and general readers.Īfter explaining the historical context and significance of the hoplite question, the book assesses and pushes forward the debate over the traditional hoplite narrative and demonstrates why it is at a crucial turning point. Indeed, the revisionists have persuaded many specialists that the evidence demands a new interpretation of the hoplite narrative and a rewriting of early Greek history. But over the past thirty years scholars have criticized nearly every major tenet of this orthodoxy. Throughout the twentieth century scholars developed and refined this grand hoplite narrative with the help of archaeology. Men of Bronze takes up one of the most important and fiercely debated subjects in ancient history and classics: how did archaic Greek hoplites fight, and what role, if any, did hoplite warfare play in shaping the Greek polis? In the nineteenth century, George Grote argued that the phalanx battle formation of the hoplite farmer citizen-soldier was the driving force behind a revolution in Greek social, political, and cultural institutions.
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