jude’s Reviews > A Companion to the Classical Greek World > Status Update

[V]alorizing the agrarian hoplite phalanx also provided a potent ideological tool for internal political struggles. In the late fifth century, Athenian elites looked back to a fictitious ‘‘ancestral constitution’’ [...] to critique the perceived failures of Athenian government. [...] The creation of a hoplite ideology may thus stand as the first important socio-military development of the Classical period.