The Greek Archaic Period (c. 800-480). Much of the hoplite debate thus lives in the Archaic when our evidence is quite thin and often frustratingly ambiguous. And their model of hoplite warfare follows on this: tactically rigid, conducted with very tight ranks in pitched battles. In particular, Grundy believed that the Greeks were racially predisposed to hoplite warfare and thus that the decline of its rigid customs was ‘racial decay,’ thus introducing this strain of the decline of hoplite warfare as a kind of ‘fall of man’ analogy. However as noted above, hoplite orthodoxy was a complete mental model for hoplite warfare, composed of a bunch of interlocking assumptions, chronological, tactical and social.