Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (37 page)

Who did fight in the Archaic phalanges? By the time of the Peloponnesian War, lightly armed troops fought separately from the hoplites, as emerges clearly from Thucydides’ description of the battle of Syracuse (6.69.2): “The stone-throwers, slingers, and archers of either army began skirmishing, and routed or were routed by one another, as might be expected between light troops.” Following this inconclusive skirmishing, the seers sacrificed and the trumpeters blew, and only then did the hoplites move forward. So the phalanx of hoplites existed before any surviving source names it. When was the exclusive hoplite phalanx invented? How historians have answered this question makes for an interesting story.

Before George Grote, historians maintained that the Dorians introduced “the method of fighting with lines of heavy armed men, drawn up in close and regular order,” since Homer describes a different mode of combat and an anecdote in Polyainos credits the Herakleidai Prokles and Temenos with using pipers to help their men advance in rhythm in an unbreakable formation against the Lakedaimonians.
¹⁶
Grote objected that the correctness of this view “cannot be determined … we have no historical knowledge of any military practice in Peloponnesus anterior to the hoplites with close ranks and protended spears.”
¹⁷
Late nineteenth-century scholars then limited themselves to claiming that the Lakedaimonians had a trained mass formation by the time of the Messenian Wars in the eighth and seventh centuries. In his narrative of these wars, the traveler Pausanias says that it was traditional for the Lake-daimonians not to pursue too quickly, because they preferred to maintain their formation rather than to kill anyone running away (4.8.11). Several ancient sources, starting
with Thucydides, say that pipers helped the Lakedaimonians maintain formation.
¹⁸
“In this context,” opined Hans Delbrück, “the piper is nothing other than the tactical formation.”
¹⁹

In the nineteenth century, no one mentioned any of the soldiers’ equipment as suitable only for a close-order formation. No one was talking about how heavy and unwieldy the
porpax
shield was—no doubt because, according to the conventional wisdom of Rüstow and Köchly, it weighed only half as much as the earlier great oval shield (6–7.5 kg compared with 14–15 kg).
²⁰

Credit for connecting the
porpax
shield and the phalanx formation goes to Wolf-gang Helbig. In 1909 he suggested in a page or two that the phalanx developed gradually.
²¹
Only after the development of the close-order formation had made considerable progress did Greeks adopt the
porpax
shield, which Helbig pronounced suitable only for fighting in close ranks. Two years later, he developed this view in a long article, ‘Über die Einführungszeit der geschlossenen Phalanx,” in which he looked not to late sources such as Pausanias and Polyainos, but to Archaic poets.
²²
He argued that Euboians distinguished between hoplites and lightly armed men, excluding everyone but hoplites from the ranks during the Lelantine War, which he dated to the middle of the seventh century. Since the Lakedaimonian poet Tyrtaios, whom he put in the second half of the seventh century, did not describe an exclusive phalanx, Helbig concluded that the Euboians, not the Spartans, created it. In his view, there was a longish period of development lasting until the sixth century. He cited the Chigi olpe, which was then dated to the early sixth or even fifth century, as the earliest definite depiction of a hoplite phalanx. Though he found this depiction inadequate in some ways, he did think that the piper on the Chigi vase proves a close-order formation advancing in step. This Protocorinthian jug fit his theory that the hoplite phalanx originated on the island of Euboia, because he believed that Protocorinthian pottery was in fact produced in Chalkis.
²³

The details of Helbig’s theory no longer seem tenable.
²⁴
Yet many distinguished scholars have accepted Helbig’s innovative claim that the
porpax
shield would only work in a close-order formation, so that once Greeks had that shield, they had the hoplite phalanx.
²⁵
These scholars stress that the shield’s weight and distinctive handling system meant that it provided better protection for the left side than the right, and they cite Thucydides’ comment that in all armies each man, out of fear, gets his unprotected side as close as possible to the shield of the man stationed next to him (5.71.1). They disagree about whether the phalanx or the shield came first, and they credit different Greek poleis with being first in the field: H. L. Lorimer and Paul Cartledge favor Corinth and Athens, Antony Andrewes Argos, Marcel Detienne Sparta. But they all date the invention of the exclusive phalanx to the first quarter of the seventh century.

Other writers, starting with Johannes Kromayer, have argued that the
porpax
shield could have been used in a mixed fight.
²⁶
While it is true that this shield protects the left side better than the right (as any shield carried in the left hand does), a hoplite could get squarely behind the shield by turning sideways with his left foot forward. Greeks found the
porpax
shield suitable for climbing ladders and fighting on ships.
²⁷

I do not see any way of resolving this dispute through further reading of ancient texts, vase paintings, and monuments. The problem is a practical one, a matter of what
Delbrück would have called “die Realität der Dinge.” Since modern soldiers do not fight with
porpax
shields, we have to look at police (who are not using replicas of Greek
porpax
shields) and reenactors (who are not really trying to kill each other).

Police first. Adam Schwartz has cleverly compared hoplites to Danish riot control police using double-handled, Plexiglas shields weighing less than 3 kg each. The police found them “suitable only for defensive fighting: policemen would typically form a line, advance to the combat zone and keep their position. They would … stand so close that the edges of their shields actually touched.”
²⁸
If they needed to act more aggressively, they would bring in men armed with modified shields, cut almost in half so they weighed less and could be swung around more easily. Unlike the complete shields, “the adapted version could therefore be used offensively, combined with little or no body armour to ensure crucial mobility. These policemen, cowering behind the wall of shields held by the front line in full combat gear, would then be able to dart forward and close with rioters who had ventured too close to the defensive police line.”
²⁹

So the solid wall of riot police was not always solid, but flexible and permeable enough to permit these mobile troops to dart forward and then back for cover. The formation sounds to me like inclusive phalanges, rather than an exclusive hoplite phalanx.

Reenactors next. Anyone who doubts that a
porpax
shield can be manipulated against attacks from various sides and angles should watch Allen Pittman’s YouTube video “Allen teaching Hoplite shield and spear.” Pittman is admittedly a martial arts expert who spent a year training with a
porpax
shield, but he is also using one that weighs 9 kg without the metal attachments.
³⁰

To my mind, therefore, looking at police and reenactors supports the view that warriors could have used
porpax
shields in a mixed formation. I can agree with Schwartz that the
porpax
shield was better suited to fighting in phalanges than to fighting an individual duel in an open field, but the protection needed by a warrior armed with this shield could be provided by a lightly armed fighter as well as by other men with
porpax
shields. Depending on the nature of the threat, a lightly armed fighter might provide
better
coverage than someone more weighed down could. Leaders might have organized all their men into phalanges for getting to the killing zone. The old argument that a piper proves hoplites and only hoplites marching in step is invalid. Everyone could benefit from walking in rhythm together.
³¹

How far apart were the men in Archaic phalanges? After collecting the evidence for the width of file, Pritchett concluded that hoplites deployed in files spaced about three feet apart.
³²
Most writers have accepted Pritchett’s conclusions, but two have argued recently for a tighter formation, at least on some occasions. Their ideas deserve attention.

Allen Pittman suggests that hoplites overlapped their shields slightly, each man using his left hand to grab not only the leather loop at the edge of his shield but also his neighbor’s shield cord.
³³
This cord is visible in many vase paintings, making a complete loop around the interior of the shield. Pittman suggests that its function was to give the next man something to grasp in order to form a shield wall, and he has posted another YouTube video in which he and a friend demonstrate how this wall would work.
³⁴
The two men do move together well, raising and lowering and shifting their shields together. But the idea seems impractical for an entire line of men. What would
happen when one man faced a threat to the right and his left-hand neighbor one to his left? They would pull in opposite directions and would have to break the wall. They could separate quickly, as they demonstrate on the video, but such disparate threats would come so quickly that the shield wall would break apart almost immediately. I think we’d do better to find another function for the cord.

Christopher Matthew has revived Delbrück’s view that each man sometimes occupied only a foot and a half. He relies on the Hellenistic tactician Asklepiodotos (4.3), who mentions an offensive formation called
pyknosis
in which each man had two cubits (about 90 cm) and a defensive formation called
synaspismos
in which he had only one (about 45 cm). Matthew argues that “the characteristics of the hoplite’s shield (
aspis
) demonstrate that the interval of the close-order phalanx had to be the 45 cm outlined by Asclepiodotus. One of the terms used to describe the close-order formation is ‘with interlocked shields’ (
synaspismois
). For the shields of the hoplite phalanx to effectively interlock, each man can occupy a space no bigger than half of the diameter of the shield he is carrying.”
³⁵
Matthews imagines that Greek phalanxes sometimes lined up in
pyknosis
formation and sometimes in
synaspismos
formation, so that hoplite fighting was “much more varied and dynamic in its nature” than scholars have conceived. A battle between phalanxes in the same formation would have differed a lot from a fight between phalanxes in different formations.

While I like Matthew’s stress on difference and variety, his interpretation relies heavily on the translation of
synaspismos
as “interlocked shields,” though it literally means only “shields together.” The word itself does not require interlocked shields. Polybios uses it to describe a formation allotting each man three feet.
³⁶
In fact Polybios uses
pyknosis
and
synaspismos
as synonyms to describe this three-foot formation, so whether there was a tighter formation is doubtful. And even if Asklepiodotos is correct and the Macedonians did sometimes fight with interlocked shields, his description might not apply to the earlier Greek hoplites, who had larger shields and shorter spears. But the biggest difficulty is imagining a battle between one side with shields interlocked and the other with men spaced twice as far apart. However impenetrable the shield wall, it would have been massively outflanked on both wings unless it had overwhelming superiority in numbers. Yet as best we can tell, when facing odds greater than 3:2, Greeks did not go out to fight another Greek army.

On the other hand, van Wees and I have both argued that Greek warriors might have had more space. Polybios says that against the Macedonian phalanx each Roman occupied three feet and had another three feet between himself and the next man in any direction.
³⁷
This spacing seems about the maximum for comfort, and it might satisfy Thucydides’ “as close as possible,” given that a man would want some space to feint and duck and manipulate his spear and sword.

The Charge

How did the battle begin? Once the men were in position, the general sacrificed the
sphagia
, the simple battlefield sacrifice that meant, in Michael Jameson’s words, “I kill.
Let me kill,” and led the men in a paean.
³⁸
The biographer Plutarch, who uses the phrase “marching paean” in his
Lykourgos
, seems to have thought the Spartans sang a paean to the accompaniment of pipes all along their advance. But Thucydides’ famous passage about the Spartans advancing in step to the sound of pipes (5.70) does not mention the paean and stresses that the purpose of the music has nothing to do with religion. A passage from Xenophon makes clear that doing the paean differed from marching in time to pipes (
Anabasis
6.1.11). Paeans before battle are best understood as a subset of paeans in general, which Ian Rutherford has elucidated as song-dances performed by men to honor the god and to demonstrate a sense of community among men.
³⁹
Soldiers performed the paean before they began their final advance into battle, as aorist participles often suggest.
⁴⁰
The commander had to choose the right moment to begin the paean. Too soon, and the men might lose their edge before they reached the enemy; too late, and faint-hearts might have dropped out before the unifying and invigorating chant began. A good commander, such as Cyrus the Younger in Xenophon’s
Anabasis
, would walk to within about 600 m from the enemy, perform the paean, and then advance to within 200 m before ordering the final charge (1.8.17).