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The town, the city, the polis does not provide
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the fighters with their defensive armor.
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They might sometime give them their weapons,
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but not their defensive armor.
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You can't fight as a hoplite, in other words,
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unless you can afford to pay for your equipment
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and that excludes a goodly number of citizens
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who are too poor to fight in the phalanx.
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This becomes a very, very large issue
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because the notion that there should be a real connection
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between citizenship in the full sense
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and military performance is totally a Greek idea--I mean,