ABSTRACT
The hoplite system was an institution perfectly suited to the poleis of ancient Greece. The ruling classes, which were normally the middling classes, staged, managed, and fought their own wars. As V. D. Hanson has suggested, the hoplite clashes reflected the simplicity of agricultural life. The Macedonians parceled the onus and the benefits of warfare first according to class, then ethnic group, and finally the type of alliance or terms of service. The Great Persian Wars must have strengthened the belief that this system of war-making was ideal. The army of Republican Rome in the third century through most of the second century B.C. was quite different from both classical Greece and the Hellenistic states of the Successors of Alexander. The Roman armies too were made up of citizens, whose role on the battlefield was based on their economic status.
