During the Athenian Sicilian campaign the cavalry of the Syracuse became the dominant weapon on the battlefield, stifling the forty thousand strong Athenian hoplites from gaining the advantage in the field. The Athenians in return raised their own cavalry and sent it to Sicily. They weren't the knights of medieval times though, they were small ponies, approximately four and half feet tall, and they lacked stirrups. Hardly frightening, except the Greeks of that time were tiny. Hanson writes:
These tiny mounts, mostly stallions, were only partialled protected with light cloth padding over the face, thighs and chest, and harder to ride than geldings.It was hard to train riders to control the stallions as well as handle a spear and blade in battle.
The difference was that the Greek hoplites were only very small men too. It has only been recently that the diet has been wide enough and consistent enough to produce the six foot giants of men and women that we take for granted today. Hanson continues:
If death by trampling seems unlikely given the small weight and height of the ponies, it is important to remember that infantrymen themselves were about the same size as modern twelve year olds rather than contemporary adults, and fought as clumsy hoplites without javelins or bows.Sobering thought. The Peloponessian War served as a breaking of the old Greek city-state agrarian method of solving disputes through cheap and short pitched hoplite battles. The war was so long and brutal that it meant siege engines, siege defences, political warfare, genocide and cavalry all became the new methods of warfare.
