Tirteu, I break up II, 31-34 (=8 Diehl) ' ' That it if places foot against foot and that forces its shield against one another shield, Top of a mountain against top of a mountain and helmet against helmet. That it approaches its chest of one another chest and if has beaten against its adversary, Cerrando firmly in its hand its sword or its lana.' ' Calinos, I break up, I, 5-19 ' ' That it can hurl its spear a last time while agonizes, Therefore he is honroso and glorious that a man fights For its country, its children and its loved wife Against the enemy. The death will come When the destination to want, But all, humble and great, carry the same fight when a warrior suffers. The suffering of this man of strong soul reaches the people all, Case it dies. If it lives, it receives the honors due to heris.' ' The verses of the elegacos poets Tirteu and Calinos seem to evoke, being losted in thought its poetical or purely aesthetic value, the basic question of the wakening of a new form of combat in the Greek world, of the combat in mass of a commanded group and coeso, that is, the archaic hopltica phalanx. Tirteu was, what he seems, contemporary of the Second Messnia War, occured in the second half of century VII B.C., for return of 640-50 Calinos B.C. Recently Andy Florance sought to clarify these questions.
(sc. VII B.C.), as its Tirteu contemporary, was notabilizou for the composition of the probably older poetries of the elegaco sort. The verses of both the poets allow to elucidate some aspects of the hoplita combat and its warlike tactics, already then ressignificadas in terms of innovations techniques. But it is excessively more excellent to this analysis, stops beyond the strategical aspects of war, to point out the events in relation to the great moment of transistion in which if they insert, crucial moment and remarkably marked by deep vicissitudes in the Greek societies, and that corroborates in the direction to point a new organizacional axle of uncosteded importance in history Greek who if follows to it: the reality of the plis, the city-state par excellence.