Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (11 page)

Hanson discusses exactly how this mass pushing was accomplished as “each hoplite pressed with the center of his shield against the back of the man to his front, probably steadying his balance at times with his upright spear shaft as he leaned forward. The shaft in this way served as a staff of sorts—used to push off, it provided extra momentum as well as balance.”
¹¹⁹
The construction of the hoplite shield figures directly into the nature of the pushing.

From reconstructions of the hoplite shield, evidence of vase painting, and suggestions in Greek literature, we know that the lip of the top rim of the hollow Greek model was ideal for precisely that steady pushing; the hoplite supported the shield on his shoulder as he drove it against the backs of his friends ahead. That way the weight was distributed over the entire body rather than the left arm alone, while the shield’s broad surface ensured that such pressure would be distributed evenly across the back of the man in front, neither tripping him nor forcing him off balance. Polybius simply declared that men push by “the weight of their bodies”; that same image of pushing is found again in many varieties of authors and can only confirm our belief that men in fact shoved everyone forward as they dug their bodies into the spacious dish of their own shield.
¹²⁰

Descriptions in the sources referring to “men who either were trampled down or literally suffocated as they stood” underline the tremendous force generated by this “mass of shields.”
¹²¹
This critical phase in battle of the “push” ultimately gave way to a collapse, in which the warriors of one side succeeded in tearing open and breaking apart the other side’s phalanx, and then pouring in through the gaps they had created. The fighting ended in a general rout of the enemy’s surviving troops.

Battle degenerated into a massive, pushing contest as rank after rank struggled to solidify and increase local advantages until the entire enemy’s formation was destroyed. Yet, if the defeated could somehow maintain enough cohesion, a fighting withdrawal of sorts was possible. A great number died only when there was a sudden collapse, a collective loss of nerve, when the abrupt disruption of the phalanx sent men trampling each other in mad panic to the rear, either in small groups or, worse, individually to save themselves from spear thrusts in the back. Even when one side was swept suddenly off the battlefield,
casualties in such a disaster remained low by modern standards…. Long drawn-out pursuit was also rare.
¹²²

For more than three hundred years Greece thrived under such a structured system of conflict between amateurs, where the waste of defense expenditure in lives and lost work from agricultural produce was kept within “limits.”
¹²³

The account of hoplite battle in
The Western Way of War
follows the basic sequence of the orthodoxy as laid out by Grundy and Adcock. On the other hand, Hanson provides by far the most ambitious, detailed, and vivid portrayal of the hoplite’s experience of battle, incorporating a wide array of primary and comparative sources. As a result,
The Western Way of War
has become the most cited and popular, as well as the most controversial depiction of the modern orthodoxy.
¹²⁴
In his next work,
The Other Greeks
, Hanson advanced the most far-reaching theory as to who these hoplites were. How and why did they emerge in the early polis to become the dominant force that shaped not only the fighting style but also the political forms, values, and culture of the Greeks?

The Other Greeks

Probably the most influential book written in the last two decades on the emergence of hoplite warfare and its relation to the rise of the Greek polis is Victor Davis Hanson’s
The Other Greeks: the Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization
. Hanson argues in the long tradition of the hoplite orthodoxy, but differs in remarkable ways from any of his predecessors. First, the idea that a new commercial economy underlies the hoplite phenomenon,
¹²⁵
even of the moderate variety proposed by Forrest, is absent. For Hanson, “Greek fighting of the
polis should never be discussed outside the context of farming
.”
¹²⁶
In the thousand or so agrarian city-states outside Athens and Corinth, the craftsmen and traders were few in number and exerted limited influence. “The real political, social, economic, and military issues were over land, not arising from commercial rivalry among a purported large class of manufacturers and tradesmen.”
¹²⁷

Second, scholars have often seen overseas colonization as simply an attempt to relieve population pressure at home or to further a new commercial economy. But Hanson thinks that starting in the eighth century an underlying change was taking place in the early polis. “Colonization of the eighth and seventh centuries did not alleviate the need for local agricultural change, but rather was a symptom that
such transformation was already occurring in Greece proper
.”
¹²⁸
He refers to the gradual
internal
colonization of marginal lands. In short, the increase in the population of the late Dark Age created pressures on land use, which inspired a revolution in agricultural technique that led to the birth of a new economic class, the independent middling farmer. Third, Hanson minimizes the significance of individual figures such as the Greek tyrants in creating the political revolution. “Although at some city-states tyrants at the head of a phalanx could bring about a dramatic end to old aristocracies … more often they simply were
not needed. Farmers themselves, through their own agricultural expertise and agrarian ideology, had ensured their economic, political, and military superiority.”
¹²⁹

Fourth, Hanson envisions that an agrarian revolution was well on its way before the military revolution that took place with the creation of the hoplite phalanx. He objects to both “gradualists” and “sudden change” theorists who postulate that new battle tactics, whether at 700 or 650 BC,
followed
the adoption of hoplite equipment.
¹³⁰
The references to mass fighting of infantry in Homer’s
Iliad
may be historical and demonstrate that phalanx tactics of some type existed
before
the complete adoption of the hoplite panoply.
¹³¹
“Most likely a less rigid style of massed attack had already been present in the eighth century [apart from formal hoplite equipment].”
¹³²
On the other hand, Hanson sees little merit in arguing for men fighting in the hoplite panoply apart from the phalanx, in
any
formation.

Could a man in heavy armor battle in small groups or alone outside the phalanx in all sorts of terrain? Consider carefully the particular elements of the hoplite panoply, especially the concave wooden shield. Seventy pounds of arms and armor were difficult to wear and somewhat expensive to fabricate. They were also disadvantageous for fluid fighting and individual combat. The image of a metal-encased pikeman scrambling alone over rocks, darting across a plain in groups of twos and threes, or perched on a charger is unconvincing.

How did this agricultural revolution, which lies at the base of all the changes associated with the rise of the polis, take place? Hanson views the increase in population as the force behind the need to intensify agriculture. By contrast, the Late Bronze Age was characterized by a command economy controlled by an autocratic, centralized, and bureaucratic government that stifled innovation in farming.

The Mycenaean bureaucracies apparently practiced collectivized agriculture under central control, the age-old anathema to productive agriculture. Such a system could never have led to the free farming of the
polis
era. Much of the land in Mycenaean times had been allotted to local political and religious officials. They supervised vast herds of sheep, crop selection, and agricultural technique, closely monitoring returns, reimbursing seed, and bringing produce back up to the palace stores. True, there was a certain efficiency to such regimentation, but it was a redistributive system of both public and private landholding that ensured little agricultural innovation. Its rigorous complexity could not have allowed much for personal initiative, and thus maximum utilization of both human and natural resources. No city-state, no community of peers could have emerged out of that environment.
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Mycenaean society had had a narrow distribution of wealth. The elites of the palace controlled most of the land, food production, and social life. There seems to have been little advance in viticulture and arboriculture, and a small range of domesticated species of fruit trees and olives. The moderate population density resulted in a low intensity of labor and productivity. Either external or internal pressure or some combination of the two destroyed the elite of the agricultural hierarchy in the twelfth
century. That led to the collapse of the vulnerable Mycenaean system. The majority of farmers who had depended on palace authority were now left without directors to organize them. The ensuing Dark Age of 1100–800 BC, however, laid the groundwork for the agrarian revolution that followed in the eighth century.

Paradoxically, for all the ensuing human misery, the disruption and devastation of this “banking system” [which received, stored, exchanged, and lent surplus crops, both locally and overseas] at the end of the twelfth century could in time facilitate real agricultural change.
If
Greek farmland was eventually allowed to fall into as many private hands as possible, and
if
farmers themselves could retain their own crop surpluses, people could quickly learn new potentialities for land use, novel methods of food storage, grafting and propagation of an entire range of domesticated species of vines and olives. Dissemination of agricultural knowledge and expertise was practicable if—and only if—a large number of farmers gained title to their own pieces of ground, if they became freed from outside interference from the top. In the case of Greece, the process took nearly four hundred years.

In the eighth century these conditions began to be met when individual decision-making authority came into the hands of the middling farmers. This was made possible by the decentralization of the Dark Age.

Once Mycenaean palace authority was done away with, there was a second opportunity for agrarian transformation by the sheer
process of neglect and unconcern
, should other critical factors—mainly population growth—ever come into play. The Dark Age chieftain, in an environment where efficient land use was not necessary, seems to have been indifferent to agriculture. He was more intent on raiding by land and sea, and in acquiring large herds of cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs; if anything, he was more a thug than a bureaucrat.
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The low population density and physical environment of Greece lent itself to livestock and nomadic herding in preference to intensive agriculture. Since the food needs of the people were easily met as long as the population remained stable there was little incentive for agricultural change even in the absence of a powerful and rigid hierarchy. “Both Mycenaean and Dark-Age Greeks were relatively ignorant of intensive farming technique for entirely different reasons.”
¹³⁵
It was not until the rise of the Greek
polis
that domesticated species were cultivated on a wide scale and came to predominate over wild varieties of trees, vines, and cereals.

At the end of the Greek Dark Age there was a gradual increase in domesticated species as population pressure forced the end of traditional land use. Hanson’s idea of a renaissance in viticulture and arboriculture opposes the common view that there was little change in farming technique or crop species from Mycenaean to Hellenistic times. This is critical for his argument that innovative farmers from the eighth century on liberated agriculture from the control of Mycenaean palace authority and the neglect of Dark Age nobles. “They [the
georgoi
] found specialized varieties for particular locales, thus increasing the potential for viticulture and arboriculture as a whole in Greece.”
¹³⁶
In order to feed a growing population a greater number of farmers transformed the conditions of agriculture. These farmers “must have changed the fundamental conditions of land tenure. Thus arose the
kleros
, or the idea of a privately held plot attached not to any one person, but rather in perpetuity to a single farm-family or
oikos
.” The autonomy of farmers who owned their own plots fostered a new ideology.

Renters, serfs, indentured servants, or lessees cannot invest in capital crops such as trees or vines in any efficient manner. Nor will they take the considerable risks entailed in viticulture and arboriculture without clear title to the land they farm. Farmers, especially planters of trees and vines, will soon demand to own their own land if they are to invest labor and capital in order to enrich the surrounding community. Once they own land, and plant permanent crops there, a transformation in both values and ideology ensues.
¹³⁷

The slow but steady population growth of the late Dark Age ensured the spread of revolutionary family-owned, independent, and intensively worked small farms. “In the case of Greece, like many other nonindustrial societies, population growth may have come first: it often initiates, drives, and maintains agricultural intensification.” Growing numbers of people needed to eat, so they had to develop better methods of producing food and organizing themselves in the countryside. “After centuries of strict agronomic control, followed by the other extreme of relative agrarian neglect, agriculture in Greece was finally becoming the property of numerous individual and autonomous families.”
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