Subject: ἱππεύς cavalry warrior

Culture: Archaic-Classical Greek

Setting: Greece/Italy 7th-5thcBC

Event Photos

* Department of Greek and Roman Art 2000-10 online

"In Athens, military service was determined by a citizen’s social and economic position. In the early sixth century B.C., the archon Solon instituted four classes defined by income and gave each class a proportionate measure of political responsibility. The second wealthiest class, the hippeis (“horsemen”), earned enough from their land to maintain a horse and so fought as cavalry; the third wealthiest group, the zeugitai, were able to afford the equipment of a hoplite; the wealthiest class, the pentakosiomedimnoi (“five-hundred-bushel men”), supplied the leaders for the armed forces; and the poorest class, the thetes, were hired laborers who served as oarsmen in the Athenian fleet, or as archers and light-armed men on land."

Primary Sources

* Greenhalgh 1973 p147

"Corinthian and Attic vases depict mounted hoplites throughout the seventh and sixth centuries (or at least until the middle of the sixth century in the case of Corinth, whose ceramic evidence then disappears). The evidence for the warfare of other states is much poorer, but what there is attests mounted hoplites elsewhere both in Old Greece and in the colonies of the East and West. For Sparta there is at least one representation which suggests that the name of the royal bodyguard of classical times derived from Hippeis who were mounted hoplites in the seventh century. In seventh-century Euboea, our reconstruction of the warfare of the Eretrian Hippeis and the Chalcidian Hippobotae indicates that they rode to battle and fought on foot, probably in hoplite panoply and close formation but relying on the sword rather than the thrusting-spear at close quarters. For a state which was most probably a Greek colony only in the West, the 'Chalcidian' pottery attests mounted hoplites in the second half of the sixth century, and it may also reflect a style of warfare which colonists had taken to the West from Euboea. For East Greece the evidence is not so explicit, but it is clear that the wealthy occupants of the painted sarcophagi fought as hoplites, and there are indications that they rode to war. The personal advantages of riding to war accompanied by a mounted squire are not limited to those who intend to fight from horseback. And there are obvious strategical advantages for states with a class of horse-owning gentry sufficiently large to mount a whole phalanx."

Secondary Sources

Field Notes