Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (7 page)

Grundy emphasizes the overall simplicity of hoplite tactics throughout the fifth century, conditioned as they were by “the nature of the country and the circumstances of the population.” “In point of fact the hoplite phalanx was of such a nature,” Grundy reasons, “that any great elaboration of tactical design in its evolution was practically impossible. Manoeuvres which a less heavily-armed soldier could have carried out would have been impossible for them.”
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Grundy attributes the nature of hoplite tactics not only to the geography of Greece; he points out that the Greek infantryman was a citizen above all, neither a mercenary nor a professional soldier.

Poverty explains in part why the Greek states did not employ mercenary forces. In addition, the democratic idea that those who profit from the existence of the state should serve it in their persons traces its origins to the time when the army was the political assembly. “The fifth-century democrat converted the idea. Aforetime a man
had been a citizen because he was a soldier; now he was a soldier because he was a citizen.”
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The fact that most citizens were farmers affected their attitudes toward war.

Such armies are not adapted for prolonged continuous service. Hence Greek wars tended to be short and sharp, and … decisive. Thucydides ascribes their brevity to lack of capital. That no doubt has something to do with it. But the dislike of the agriculturalist to be called away from home during a season of harvest, which inasmuch as it included the gathering of the produce of cereals, vines, and olives, extended throughout the greater part of the campaigning season, had a great deal more to do with it; and the fact … that a state when invaded, had either by submission or battle, to bring matters to a prompt decision, was most of all responsible for this feature of Greek warfare.
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The use of farmer-citizen-soldiers in the armies of the poleis discouraged the employment of mercenaries. But the situation changed throughout the course of the twenty-seven years of the Great War. The periods of activity were longer and the service more exacting than any prior experience of Greek citizen armies.

Year after year the cultivator was called from his land, and the trader from his business, at the very season at which his presence was most needed, if the land and the business were not to go to ruin. It was naturally suggested to the mind of the Greek that it was better to support the burden of paying someone to take your place in the field rather than be robbed altogether of the means of supporting yourself.
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Thus, the idea of employing mercenary troops took root and grew rapidly during the last third of the fifth century. A direct impetus to employing professional soldiers on land came from an experience early in the war. The Athenians operating in Chalcidice learned to appreciate “the fact that light-armed could be employed effectively against hoplites, and, generally speaking, that a hoplite force by itself was not by any means invincible or invaluable on ground and under circumstances which differed fundamentally from those which were characteristic of Greece.”
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In Aetolia, moreover, light-armed troops had inflicted a humiliating defeat on Athenian hoplites after they forced them to act on ground unsuited to their usual tactics and without the assistance of an efficient light-armed force. Indeed, Demosthenes’ experience fighting in northwest Greece had so impressed him with the potential of lightly armed troops that he made use of them against the Spartans at Sphakteria.

Yet Athens still did not have any regularly organized light infantry at the time of the battle of Delium. The main role of light-armed fighters in the fifth century was to protect the flanks of advancing heavy infantry. In any event it was not until the fourth century, with the rising importance of light infantry, peltasts in particular, that Greek armies became much more professional. Grundy argues that it would have been very difficult to persuade a citizen soldier to lighten his defensive armor to attain greater freedom of movement. He would have been reluctant to give up the personal security afforded by his heavy armor, since he did not regard war as his trade. Besides, “the Greek soldier, like other soldiers, was tenacious of old ideas. Could he have put them
off, he might have put off his armour. But he clung to the one, and so he clung to the other.”
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It took fighting outside Greece to initiate developments in the use of efficient light-armed troops; experience with peoples such as the Thracians inspired the development of the more mobile and highly trained bodies of peltasts who served under commanders like Iphikrates in the early fourth century. But in the Great War itself, “the Greek had never discovered that there was a sort of mean between the extremes of his heavy-armed and light-armed troops, and sufficient offensive and defensive armour to cope successfully, or, at any rate, with a fair hope of success, with bodies of hoplite troops.”
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It was only in situations in which hoplites were caught on ground unsuited for their formation and tactics that light-armed troops decided a battle.

Cavalry also played a limited part in the wars of Greece. For the most part cavalry seems to have been of considerable value only if used in combination with heavy infantry. Horsemen could guard the flanks of an army and protect or harass scattered bands of foragers. But cavalry of the fifth century was not good enough to employ against a hoplite force in close formation; however, having cavalry provided distinct advantages over an enemy without it. For example, the Athenian cavalry at Mantinea helped them overcome the fierce resistance of the Corinthian hoplites. Grundy explains that the weakness of cavalry among the Greeks had a different set of causes than was the case with light infantry. Above all, the very poor pasturage of the greater part of Greece makes it especially unsuited for horse breeding.

The Greeks could not develop the cavalry because they had not the horses. Apart from that, an effective cavalry force such as would be required against hoplites, is very expensive to maintain. Its existence is only possible under two conditions: abundance of good horses, and a numerous and hardy nobility of sufficient wealth to supply themselves with horses and the horseman’s panoply.
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As a result only Thessaly and Boeotia developed effective cavalry. And despite the significance of their cavalry the Boeotians themselves considered the horseman inferior in importance to the hoplite. It was only under the military genius of Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander that a Greek state created a force of heavy cavalry from the nobility of the country. Alexander realized the possibility of using heavy cavalry as the striking force of his army, “while the phalanx, more heavily armed than ever, and consequently more immobile, should give solidarity and rigidity to the resisting power of the line of battle.” On the other hand, Grundy points out the ultimate supremacy of the phalanx for the Greek art of war. “The effectiveness of the cavalry declined as its personnel became scattered over the whole of Western Asia, but the phalanx remained as the type of all that men thought best in the military art, until it was wiped out of existence by those soldiers who combined all the best fighting qualities of the hoplite and the peltasts, the Roman legionaries.”
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The analysis of Grundy has heavily influenced discussions of the classical hoplite phalanx for the past century. Hoplite armies comprised farmer-citizen-soldiers. The strategy and tactics of the phalanx required little training, because it relied on heavy
infantry and did not integrate efficient light-armed troops or cavalry. The Greeks emphasized the cohesion of their ranks in their massed charge into battle; solidity and weight were of paramount importance in the initial collision with the enemy; in order to break apart and put to rout the opposing phalanx, a general attempted to roll up the enemy line from left to right by deploying his best troops on the right wing. Significant changes in the art of war occurred during the course of the last third of the fifth century, but did not fully take shape until the generation after Thucydides wrote. Later scholars would apply Grundy’s description of hoplite warfare to the fighting that took place two centuries before the battle of Marathon.

Since Grote first published his
History of Greece
, scholars have come to view the development of the phalanx as the driving force of a revolution not only in military tactics; they argue that the hoplite helped shape the political and social structures of the early polis as well as transform the cultural values of archaic Greece. The progress of modern scientific archaeology has been one of the key factors in advancing the idea. For example, at about the time Grundy was writing, Wolfgang Helbig in 1909 used datable finds of hoplite arms and equipment, above all the shield, to ask when the Greeks first adopted their characteristic style of close combat in the phalanx. In addition, Helbig provided the first analysis of the Chigi vase. It was Martin Nilsson, however, who first gave the classic statement of the hoplite orthodoxy in his seminal article of 1929.

The appearance of the phalanx in art, especially the Protocorinthian Chigi vase, provides the basis for Nilsson’s thesis. The Chigi vase shows two lines of hoplite warriors attacking with raised spears, preceded by a flute player. The vase provides a lower limit for the introduction of mature hoplite tactics by the second half of the seventh century and a vivid contrast with Homeric warfare:

In Homer, we find a completely different battle style…. The aristocrats have the role of champions, the battle finds its resolution in solo combats and the large mass of soldiers only provides a background, being given but little consideration. Even when the epic poets exaggerate the deeds and importance of single individuals for the sake of their aristocratic public, there remains an unbridgeable difference.
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Nilsson points out the difficulty in setting a higher date for the phalanx because of the problems involved in interpreting the poetry of Tyrtaeus. On the one hand, Wilamowitz
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had argued that Tyrtaeus describes the large tower shield found in Homer, “cover with the wide belly of the shield your thighs and shins below and your chest and shoulders.” On these grounds he rejected passages that mention the round hoplite shield and the phalanx as interpolations.
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It was also problematic that the elegies mention the Homeric word for champions,
promachoi
. But Nilsson saw the possibility that this term had taken on a new meaning in the context of Tyrtaeus. And even if Tyrtaeus indicates that the Spartans had not yet adopted the phalanx by the Second Messenian War,
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Nilsson cites the unambiguous shields that turned up in the then unpublished Spartan excavations of 1906–1910 and 1924–1927 discussed by Woodward:
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I do not remember a single shield of the figure-8 type on any Geometric or archaic work of art…. In these periods the Spartan shield was essentially the round one…. I cannot believe that the countless lead figurines of soldiers would all have a round shield unless this was the normal type; and the only clay votive model of a shield, found in 1926, is also circular; I think we may regard the collective evidence as convincing against the figure-8 shield having been in use at Sparta in post-Mycenaean times.

Nilsson accepted that the evidence of Tyrtaeus was inconclusive. The passages in question may “refer to a time when the hoplite tactic was still in its state of development and that the tightly packed phalanx first began to supersede the champions gradually.” In fact, a stage of transition seemed likely.
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The hoplite tactic was introduced in the seventh century at the latest, or more rightly was finalized. Because, of course, it did not step into the world in one go, but first people gradually learned how to repel and to dash to the ground the impetuous attack of the champions using the close-serried ranks of hoplites, a transition, which, as an aside, we can with some good will infer from a few passages of Tyrtaios. Maybe it did not go so dramatically as long ago, when the knightly army of Charles the Bold was annihilated by the pikes of the Swiss, rather, the new tactic developed more gradually and proved its superiority.
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Yet the sheer numbers of the archaeological finds left no doubt that the tower shield had never been in use at Dorian Sparta. If anything, the apparent Homeric references to it must illustrate the poetic language that Tyrtaeus had inherited from the epic. Nilsson used Solon and the timocracy he set up in Athens to fix the introduction of the hoplite phalanx high in the seventh century. He saw the economic demand placed on the hoplite to provide his own panoply as the forerunner to the thinking behind Solon’s census classes. “The principle of the demarcation of political rights and responsibilities according to wealth was so naturalized and well developed in the first years of the 6th century that Solon could employ it for a real timocracy in his division of classes.”
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Nilsson could not imagine the Greek polis without the introduction of the phalanx. “The Greek polis in its distinctiveness is inconceivable without the hoplite army, where the solidarity, of which the polis availed itself, was manifestly inculcated in the citizens.”
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The phalanx made cavalry obsolete and caused a breakdown in the aristocratic state. Nilsson draws an analogy between the feudal knight and the Homeric champion. The invention of gunpowder destroyed the military effectiveness of the knight and transformed the values of the medieval world. Likewise, hoplite tactics introduced a change in mentality and made futile the heroes’ drive for preeminence and individual glory.
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Nilsson describes how the new military order signaled the downfall of the aristocracy and gave birth to the short-lived tyrannies. “One can imagine the course of events, so that the hoplites, with the economic boom, gradually becoming more and more powerful and fit for military service, initially together with the
unpropertied mass, turned against the aristocracy and accepted the tyranny, since it supported their economic interests; but then, with growing importance and increasing political-confidence, strongly contributed to preparing the end of tyranny.” The immediate benefactors of the fall of the tyrants, however, are not the poor. “Not the mass, but rather the middle class has raked in the profit. In the motherland—for this is the concern here—a fully developed democracy does not follow from the rule of the tyrants, but a more or less moderate one, which corresponds to the interests of the middle class.” Nilsson extends his thinking even into the early years of the democracy. “We see this, for example, in Korinth and in Athens, where the so-called rule of the Areopagus lasted for about 20 years after the Persian war; it is little known, but it demonstrates the moderate way that we must necessarily attribute to a middle class fit for military service.”
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The work of Nilsson anticipates the recent debate about Tyrtaeus and the idea that the development of phalanx tactics may have been gradual. But for Nilsson, much like Grote, the rise of the polis was inconceivable without the emergence of the middling hoplites, their values, and their ability to demand political change.