A hoplon is the shield used by Ancient Greek hoplites.
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The defensive armour most used consisted of four pieces: helmet (kranos), cuirass (thorax), shield (aspis) and greaves (knimis). A weapon is called hoplon from which panoply and hoplite (a man with weapons) is derived (initially the shield was called hoplon (όπλον) but today hoplon is a general name for weapon). It was kept holding the antilabe in the border of the shield.
Shields (Greek Hoplon or Roman Scutum) are used primarily to protect the body and can be used , in a phalanx , to push the enemy back to upset their forward momentum .
The hoplite (armoured infantry) carried a 3 yard spear called a doru, a short short called a Xiphos, and a Hoplon shield. They also wore a Bronze breastplate, greaves, and helmet, although later Spartans abandoned the breast plate and helmet, the shield provided enough protection. Their light infantry used bows, javelins, knives and rocks, and were unarmored.
A Hoplite was a Greek armoured foot soldier (hopla= panoply of arms, ie the primary weapon, the spear, sword, shield, sword, cuirass, shield, greaves and helmet). These armaments were expensive, costing probably as much as a small farm, and were either passed from father to son, or acquired from defeated enemy on the battlefield (hence in the epics the struggles for the armour of the fallen). This type of warrior is first depicted on pottery in the late 8th Century BCE. They were drawn from the farming class (mostly poor small-farmers) who formed the city-state militias to defend their land. The Hoplite was displaced in the 4th Century by the Phalangites (soldiers who formed the phalanx and consequently were less heavily armoured as the phalanx itself was an armoured formation). Also, at this stage, professional soldiers progressively supplanted the militias for those cities and kingdoms which could afford them.