Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Ancient Warfare Answers with me, Murray, your weekly fix of ancient warfare.

Now, this one has come to me personally by email, so kind of been reminded that, yes, indeed, you can email me personally.

I'm Murray at Carvansarai Publishers.com.

So you can, of course, ask us a question of your own about a topic relating to ancient warfare.

And if we can, we will attempt to answer it based on our knowledge and what we can find out.

Several questions come through where the answer is we don't know.

And that's not just me or Jasper. Me or Jasper not knowing, it's we don't know and that's not just me or jasper not me or yasper not knowing it's

it's we don't know in general so we don't try and answer those questions because they'll be very short

answers uh now this one however from jonathan thank you johnathan came through on my email and saying

what was the standard line depth of uh sorry what was the standard depth of a hoplight line?

I see eight mentioned all the time, were there any others?

Now that is right up my alley, shall we say, in terms of things that I find fascinating.

So here goes.

And I'll mention that you can also ask questions at the end rather than the beginning.

So the depth of the hoplight line, you will indeed find lots of modern sources talking about eight being the average.

Now, that's not actually true.

We get one source which tells us of an average depth of eight, and that's the Spartan line at the Battle of Mantonea in 418 BC.

And weirdly, what Thucydides tells us in that case is that the individual Spartan commanders of each Locos, the Locko-Goi, so there's seven of them at the Battle of Mantonea.

They designated a different depth per Locos, and the average was eight, which of course

implies that some of them were deployed deeper and some of them were deployed more shallowly.

So we might have between six and ten or different there.

And when we start to look at the sources that specifically name a depth for a hoplight line, there are very few.

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