Ancient Greek warfare item of armor or equipment, thus 'hoplite' may approximate to 'armored man'. Hoplites were the citizen-soldiers of the Ancient Greek City-states. They were primarily armed as spear-men and fought in a phalanx (see below). Hoplite armor was extremely expensive for the average citizen, so it was commonly passed down from the soldier's father or relative. Alexander’s Macedonian army had spears called sarissas that were 18 feet long, far longer than the 6–9 foot Greek dory. The secondary weapon of a hoplite was the xiphos, a short sword used when the soldier's spear was broken or lost while fighting. The origins
Ancient Greek Greek in the Hellenistic period. Recent epigraphic discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia, such as the Pella curse tablet, suggest that ancient Macedonian might have been a variety of North Western Ancient Greek. Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics, Ancient Greek words could end only in a vowel or ; final stops were lost, as in "milk", compared with "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in phonemic inventory: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek. Ancient Greek had long and