Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (67 page)

A Century-Long Orthodoxy

Finally, recent questions about hoplite war are too often framed as a revisionist questioning of an orthodoxy that grew up in the last twenty years among a “face-of-battle” group of scholars influenced by John Keegan and others.
³³
In fact, the orthodoxy of late eighth- to early fourth-century hoplites of a middling group of citizens, neither rich nor poor, colliding with like kind in heavy armor, finally pushing en masse in efforts to break apart the cohesion of an enemy phalanx, in frequent wars over borderlands, was established, in varying degrees, over a centuries-long tradition in scholarship by historians as diverse as F. E. Adcock, J. K. Anderson, H. Delbrück, Y. Garlan, A. W. Gomme, G. B. Grundy, J. Kromayer, W. K. Pritchett, A. Snodgrass, and dozens of others who had no allegiance to any particular ideology, approach, or politics, but rather drew conclusions from their own close reading of Greek texts, inscriptions, and representations on vase paintings and stone.

One of the oddest elements of the present controversy over the grand narrative is the explaining away of what Greek authors themselves thought in the abstract about hoplite battle—in a variety of genres and over hundreds of years.

To discredit the narrative, one must assume that Aristotle was wrong when he said that once early hoplite soldiers gained knowledge of orderly formation and deployment, and their numbers increased, they naturally began to take a greater share in the consensual government of the polis, and that hoplites were useless without cohesive arrangement (
Pol
. 4.1297b16–24); that Herodotus was in error when he made the Persian Mardonius ridicule Greek hoplite battle as “silly” (
môria
) for its emphasis on fighting openly on “the most level ground,” where both sides settled the issue by convention and mutual agreement (7.9.2); that Demosthenes was confused when he complained that the warfare of his own mid-fourth century did not resemble prior generations of hoplite armies that fought mostly seasonally, and did not count on the advantages of money, but followed customs and protocols (
Third Philippic
48–52); that Polybius (13.3–6) was rhetorical when he complained that his ancestors avoided fraud, fought openly, accepted conventions, and settled their contests not with missiles but at close quarters, hand-to-hand—and that phalanxes have only one set time and place to fight, on clear and level ground (18.31.2–7).

The hoplite narrative has a long scholarly pedigree because it best accommodates both the extant literary and archaeological evidence about phalanx fighting and the larger social, economic, and political role of the hoplite. The narrative likewise makes logical sense about how most soldiers in unusually full armor might fight, both individually and collectively, and so it has withstood most revisionism. And while it is salutary always to reexamine the narrative’s components—the precise weight of the
hoplite ensemble, the exact status and class of the combatants, the degree to which other nonhoplitic forces were employed, and the Greeks’ own views on hoplite battle—the main scholarly consensus of the last two centuries about hoplite battle is not likely to change.

Notes

    
1
. For brief discussions about the difficulty of reconstructing early hoplite battle, see Con-nor 3–29; Frost 183–86; Hanson 2000a: 40–45; Wheeler 125–26; and most recently, Whitby 53–84. For most of the mid-twentieth century there had been a reaction against the
Sachkritik
of Hans Delbrück (cf. 33–52) and other German scholars, who on occasion rejected ancient literary accounts if they were deemed at odds with what they felt were the logical parameters of battle as seen from contemporary military thinking. Yet more recently theorists in general have once again returned to frequent skepticism of ancient authenticity; cf. Hornblower 22–53.

    
2
. The problem of artistic representation of hoplites is often remarked upon; e.g., cf. Ahlberg 49–51; Cartledge 21; Pritchett 4.41; Salmon 91. There is still no consensus about how phalanxes might have been properly represented in cramped two-dimensional scenes on Greek black-figure vases. Early bronze sculptures of hoplites inform only about solitary figures; even temple friezes show largely only one side of warriors in linear battle. Scholars often fault the lack of clear-cut artistic expressions, but if they were themselves asked to paint a phalanx on a curved pot, or sculpt a row of fighting hoplites on a flat stone surface, the results of the more gifted might not be all that much different from what we often see in seventh- and sixth-century representations.

    
3
. Early hoplite battle, for example, has variously been explained as a populist assault of tyrannies that overthrew mounted aristocrats; as aristocratic infighting among a rather small elite; as the rise of a broader base of middling agrarians; or simply as militarily efficacious fighting without much class significance and carried on at times by various social groups. It is certainly true that the Greeks often exaggerated the actual strategic importance of hoplites, and considered their losses far more grievous to the commonwealth than the deaths of other warriors: cf., e.g., Thuc. 6.17.5, 6.72.5, where Alcibiades inflates the importance of hoplite armies; and for hoplite chauvinism, see Arist.
Pol
. 8.1326a; Thuc. 3.98.4.

    
4
. See most recently the grand narrative in Hunt 108–46. Cf. more of the standard view in Osborne 170–76. Perhaps the most traditional picture of heavily armed soldiers fighting en masse and pushing—as a reflection of a new agrarian class (e.g., “peasant-farmers”) with a novel social and economic agenda—is elaborated upon by Murray 159–80.

    
5
. On technology reflecting a preexisting tactical need versus the less plausible idea of it emerging ex nihilo to create new tactical possibilities, see Hanson 1991: 75–78.

    
6
. On hoplite rituals, see Connor 3–29, and Ober 53–71. I do not think that the acknowledgment of such ritual components to hoplite fighting negates the obvious fact that at all times and places people sometimes refuse to follow rules and protocols. That ancient Greeks early on in the sixth and fifth centuries often resorted to ambushes, missile weapons, night attacks, raiding, and skirmishing does not nullify the simultaneous hoplite ideal that looked down on such “alternative” weapons and tactics.

    
7
. The emphasis of ancient authors on the moral role of the hoplite shield—not as a tool of the individual fighter, but as central to the protection of both the man at the side and the integrity of the entire line of battle—is quite striking. Cf. Plut.
Mor
. 220a; Thuc. 5.71; cf. Plut
Pel
. 1.5 (a valuable reminder why states did not punish those who abandoned offensive weapons like the spear or sword); Eur.
HF
190ff.

    
8
. For the role of geography in defining the parameters of the spread and commonality of hoplite warfare, see Hanson 2000b: 207–11. For those who believe that fluidity was central to hoplite battle, it would then be harder to see how geography would play much of a role in determining which areas were more likely prone to go hoplite. Indeed, the proverbial notions that hoplites were confined to particularly level and clear terrain, that their ranks and files reflected singular solidarity and interconnectability, that they did not undergo or need a great deal of weapons training, and that they had limited sensory perception—all make little sense if armored men dueled out of formation against like individuals. Fluid fighters might instead fight on far more rugged terrain.

    
9
. For a review of earlier scholarship that made the connection between the rise of hoplite warfare and an emerging farming class and/or middle class, see Hanson 1999: 476 n. 4; cf. 463 n.21. This idea of middling farmer hoplites goes back to the nineteenth century, and was embraced by a host of prominent scholars; see the survey of such prior arguments in Hanson 1996: 308 n. 4.

  
10
. For some examples of prominent recent critics of the grand narrative, cf. van Wees 2004: 1–2; and, in general, Krentz 2002.

  
11
. See most prominently van Wees 2004: 47, where his chapter subsection is titled “The Myth of the Middle Class Hoplite,” and argues mostly from the idea of supposedly common misinterpretations of Aristotle’s notion of the
mesoi
, centering on the above-mentioned passage in the
Politics
. (But see also van Wees 2004 elsewhere at p. 55: “The typical working-class hoplite was probably a small but independent farmer who owned about 10–15 acres of land (4–6 ha), worth 2,000 to 3,000 drachmas, and who could just about afford a hoplite panoply.”) For a good example of the standard middling agrarian hoplite view, see Raaflaub 1997: 57, “The land-owning farmers, from the very beginning formed an integral element, both military and politically, in the evolving
polis
. Owing to this triple role of landowners, soldiers, and assembly-men, they naturally became
the
essential part of the citizen body.”

  
12
. On the natural, moral connection between farming and fighting, and the borrowing of war metaphors from farming, see Xen.
Oec
. 5.7, 14; Arist. [
Oec
.] 1.1342b5–7. Cf. Tyrt. 19.16; Xen.
Hell
. 4.4.12; Aesch.
Pers
. 818 (
thines nekrôn de kai tritospórôi
). The reformist Plato’s call for more formal training (e.g.,
Resp
. 2.374c), to his chagrin, assumes citizens normally were too busy to train extensively for phalanx battle. Van Wees 2004: 37, cites both philosophical calls for a break between agrarianism and hoplite service, and such realities in Sparta, Crete, and Thessaly—but that exceptionalism is more an argument
against
, not for, a widespread presence of a leisured or professional class of nonfarming hoplites in most of the city-states.

  
13
. There is a vast modern literature on “middleness” and plenty of ancient referents. See Rahe 42; Spahn 7–15, 174–82; the corpus of notable ancient examples on
mesoi
is collated in Hanson 2000b: 112–21.

  
14
. Farmland calibrated by its ability to raise hoplites: Arist
. Pol
. 2.1270a16; Plut.
Mor
. 414a; Theopompus
FGrH 115
fr. 225; Dem. 23.199. Combined hoplite and agrarian chauvinism: Pl.
Leg
. 4.707c; Thuc. 3.98.4. 4.126. 6.17.5; Hdt. 5.97. Borderlands as the catalysts for hoplite battle: Hdt 5.49; Plut.
Mor
. 213e3; cf. Hanson 2000b: 214–18.

  
15
. The quote is from van Wees 2004: 55. On estimates of Attic acreage accounting for a large body of middle hoplite agrarians, see, in general, Jameson 1996.

  
16
. E.g., cf. the classic synopsis of Arnaldo Momigliano, “War was an ever present reality in Greek life…. War was the centre of Greek life…. The Greeks came to accept war as a natural fact like birth and death about which nothing could be done” (120).

  
17
. Cf. Pl.
Leg
. 626a. For the revisionist view, see, again, van Wees 2004: 3.

  
18
. For the proverbial frequency of war making by the fifth-century Athenians, see Chamoux 162; de Romilly 1968; Zimmern 354; and for reasons why democracies are so prone to make war so often, see Hanson 2001: 17–26. For the toll taken on early fourth-century Sparta by constant military service, cf. Hodkinson, especially 153–57. Kyra Orgill in an unpublished 2005 MA thesis at California State University, Fresno, attempted to quantify the years Athens was at war in the fifth century and confirmed the traditional view of a near-constant bellicosity. (cf. the abstract at
http://www.csufresno.edu/gradstudies/thesis/Spring2005pdfs/ABSTRACTKOrgill.pdf
).

  
19
. Note also that Pagondas gives here a defense of the doctrine of preemption and assumes that city-states would naturally attack others considered weak; and likewise, a state always must consider hitting a presumed enemy first, before it has a chance to attack with greater lethality. For some ancient examples of preemption, or, in addition, more general preventative war, see the Spartans’ thinking that led them to invade Attica (Thuc. 1.118.2. 4.92.5), and Alcibiades’s call to hit Sicily before it attacked Athens (6.18.3)—and the Syracusan democratic leader Athenagoras’s recommendation for the Syracusans themselves to preempt: “It is necessary to punish an enemy not only for what he does, but also beforehand for what he intends to do, if the first to relax precaution would not also be the first to suffer.” (Crawley translation, 6.39.5). The common thinking is that even when war is not actually breaking out, there is a constant tension between states that requires eternal vigilance.

  
20
. The most prominent advocate of the “nonpushing” school is Krentz (see his essay and references in this volume), who emphasizes both the fluidity of hoplite battle, and the ubiquity of trickery and ambush in Greek warfare. But the dispute over the phalanx scrum is a long one, with a vast bibliography; see, for example, the review of the ancient and modern literature in Goldsworthy 1997; Krentz 2002; Luginbill 1994.

  
21
. On these terms of mass shoving, breaking a line, and the use of the mass in Greek, see Pritchett 4.65–74. I do not know why some see much significance in an ancient author’s choice of either the verb (
ôtheô
) or the synonymous abstract noun (
ôthismos
). For superior body strength and its role in battle, cf. Diod. 12.70.3, 15.39.1, 15.87.1; Plut
Mor
. 639e; cf. Theban depth: Thuc. 4.93.4; Xen.
Hell
. 3.2.13, 18; 6.4.12. On the need for hoplites to keep in rank and maintain order, cf. Lazenby 94–96.

  
22
. For battles where hoplites are said to have run toward the enemy, cf. passages collected at Hanson 2000a: 135–51. There is an entire corpus of moral literature surrounding the shield that emphasizes that it is the one weapon of the panoply necessary for the entire line (see note 7). In addition, cf. the more generic references to the need to fight together that assume some sort of cohesiveness on the battlefield that is hard to reconcile with individual dueling and fluidity (e.g., cf. the idea that without cohesive formation hoplites “are useless” [Arist.
Pol
. 4.1297b20; Xen.
Oec
. 8.4 ]). There are a surprising number of references to broken spears in literature (and in scenes in Greek art; cf., e.g., Hanson 1999: 244; Hanson 2000a 87–88; 164; 245n).