Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (26 page)

Some may be tempted to say that the age of the hoplite had come to a close on the battlefield of Chaironeia in 338 BCE, when the hoplite phalanx met with immediate defeat and ultimate replacement at the hands of the Macedonian army. Yet the evidence shows that many elements of the hoplite system and, especially, of the enrollment of citizens for it, still remained in place in the Greek cities for generations after this; nor did the tactics and armor change everywhere overnight. This was not necessarily a token of localized backwardness or conservatism. Rather, as has been argued in an illuminating paper by John Ma (Ma 2000), the system was a central characteristic of the small intercity wars of the Hellenistic age. However much our literary sources may have neglected them in their preoccupation with the major clashes of the successor kingdoms, such wars, documented primarily in the epigraphic record, continued to occur and, for them, established systems were still found most appropriate.

A possible example of such a survival, apparently much regarded at the time although there are interesting differences between the various later accounts of it, is the story of Philopoemen’s reforms of the equipment and tactics of the army of the Achaean League. As told by Pausanias (viii.50.1), Philopoemen actually introduced the traditional phalanx tactics and equipment of the Classical hoplite to the Achaean army, till then entirely equipped as lightly armed: Pausanias makes this explicit by his use of the phrase “Argolic shields,” the time-honored designation for the large round wooden shield of the hoplite; his “longer spears” will then also presumably be those of the hoplite. But this is not quite how our other two sources, Plutarch (
Philopoemen
9.2–3) and later Polyainos (
Strategemata
6.4, 3) tell it. For them, the new equipment was that of the Macedonian phalangite: Plutarch implies this by having Philopoemen directly seek to emulate the superior arms of the Macedonians, while Polyainos explicitly uses the word
sarisa
for the longer spear that he now introduces. This latter version
is the more likely to convince: the episode must belong in or close to the year 208 BCE, a time not long after the Spartans had abandoned the hoplite spear and shield in favor of their Macedonian counterparts (Plutarch,
Cleomenes
xi.2). But even so, the “last hoplites” of John Ma’s account (Ma 2000: 353–57) were still a reality in some Greek cities of this era. This gradual, protracted decline of the hoplite may even have some lessons to teach us about the other end of the story, when, I have argued, gradual change had also been the order of the day.

The disparities in the speed and direction of military development, whether in Archaic or Hellenistic times, as between different regions of Greece, serve to remind us how far the hoplite system fell short of being a Panhellenic phenomenon. The long lapse of time that is attested toward the end, with hoplite equipment still being in use many years after its critical limitations had been exposed on the field of Chaironeia, does at least warn us against the general dangers of any periodization that is too rigid and clear-cut. The hoplite system of fighting was a successful, but not a self-evidently irresistible, mode of warfare: the idea of an immediate and near-universal rush to embrace it still seems to me just as improbable as the notion of a “sudden death” for the system has turned out to be. Even in the Classical period, and surely in the early years too, it had to undergo the occasional serious setback, long before things deteriorated into any kind of steady eclipse. Whether politically or tactically, its greatest strength seems to have lain in defense, which might in certain circumstances limit its value. Admiration for it seems to have been widespread, but we may doubt whether it was at any stage unquestioning. Yet even when faced, toward the end, with evidently superior external methods of warfare, we see that it could still be found fully serviceable by some Greeks in more limited, internal contexts. All these factors, cumulatively, encourage me still to join in supporting a gradualist account of the advent of the hoplite.

Bibliography

Finley, M. I. 1956.
The World of Odysseus
. London: Chatto and Windus.

Kunze, E. 1991.
Beinschienen
(
Olympische Forschungen
21). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Latacz, J. 1977.
Kampfparänese, Kampfdarstellung und Kampfwirklichkeit in der Ilias, bei Kallinos und Tyrtaios
(
Zetemata
66). München: C. H. Beck.

Leimbach, R. 1980. Review of Latacz 1977.
Gnomon
52:418–25.

Lorimer, H. L. 1947. “The hoplite phalanx with special reference to the poems of Archilochus and Tyrtaeus.”
BSA
42:76–138.

Ma, J. 2000. “Fighting
poleis
of the hellenistic world,” in H. van Wees (ed.),
War and Violence in Ancient Greece
, 337–76. London: Duckworth.

Nagy, G. 1997. “The shield of Achilles: Ends of the
Iliad
and beginnings of the polis,” in S. Langdon (ed.),
New Light on a Dark Age: Exploring the Culture of Geometric Greece
, 194–207. Columbia/London: University of Missouri Press.

Pritchett, W. K. 1985.
The Greek State at War
, vol. 4. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Reece, S. 2005. “Homer’s
Iliad
and
Odyssey
: From oral performance to written text,” in

M. C. Amodio (ed.),
New Directions in Oral Theory: Essays on Ancient and Medieval Literatures
, 43–90. Tempe: Arizona State University.

Schwartz, A. 2002. “The early hoplite phalanx: Order or disarray?”
Classica et Mediaevalia
53:31–64.

Snodgrass, A. 1980.
Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment
. London: J. M. Dent.

Snodgrass, A. M. 1993. “The hoplite reform revisited.”
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19:47–61.

Van Wees, H. 1988. “Kings in combat: Battles and heroes in the
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38:1–24.

Van Wees, H. 1994. “The Homeric way of war: The
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CHAPTER 5

Early Greek Infantry Fighting in a Mediterranean Context

KURT A. RAAFLAUB

Some of my work has long focused on two projects: to understand “Homeric or epic society,” including epic battle descriptions, and to situate the emergence of political thinking in archaic Greece in a broader Mediterranean context.
¹
I posit that the Greek polis with its institutions, and political thought or, to put it differently (without intending to pursue this here), the polis and “the political,” developed in a long interactive process.
²
Polis institutions included political (assembly, council, offices) as well as religious (cults, festivals, rituals), social (for instance, ritual dining in public contexts), and military ones. I have therefore suggested that the polis as a type of community, the form and composition of its army, and its fighting tactics evolved together and in interaction as well.
³
If I see this particular evolution as a long process, I do not exclude ruptures or accelerated spurts of development, but I expect continuity and integration of innovations into an ongoing process to prove more important than revolution or abrupt new beginnings. Among others, Hans van Wees, too, emphasizes a “slow and steady process” that, he thinks, lasted “throughout the archaic and classical periods which transformed Greek infantry tactics from the kind of fluid long-range skirmishing found in ‘primitive’ societies into the kind of close-order hand-to-hand combat found in more developed city-states.”
⁴
I shall return to this later. I have discussed elsewhere why and to what extent I think “epic society” reflects a historical society, and take this for granted here.
⁵
To forestall criticism, even if I deliberately simplify and generalize here, suggesting a uniform “Greek” development, I am very much aware of vast differences among Greek regions, individual poleis, and between poleis and
ethnē
, but this is not the place to emphasize these.
⁶

To return to my overall thesis, if polis, institutions, and political thought evolved in an interactive process, political thought must be studied in this broader social and political context. It matters, for example, that already around the mid-seventh century in Cretan Dreros “the polis decided” (literally:
tad’ ewade poli
) to enact a law limiting iteration of the chief office, and the Spartans regulated the process of communal decision making and formally attributed the final decision (
kratos
and
nikē
) to the assembly.
⁷
Such rules and laws reflect a high level of communal awareness and a certain priority attributed to the community (as opposed to individual leaders or groups of
elite families).
⁸
This could not but influence the political thinking that emerged in these communities and among their members. The same, I suggest, is true if members of this community (whatever the criteria determining participation) regularly met for communal feasting, eating, and drinking, or if many of its men (whatever criteria determined inclusion or exclusion) fought in the communal army to defend community and territory. I am therefore interested in early Greek military practices in themselves (because of Homer’s description of wars and battles) but also because they were a crucial part of the social context in which early Greek political thinking evolved.

Moreover, the archaic Greeks interacted intensively with the highly developed civilizations in the ancient Near East (from Anatolia to Egypt). They absorbed an enormous range of cultural impulses, from crafts and technology to law and literature.
⁹
My project tries to assess the impact of all this “orientalizing” on early Greek political thought.
¹⁰
Here I wonder about “orientalizing” influences on early Greek military developments, especially, of course, on that of the hoplite phalanx.

After Anthony Snodgrass’s seminal work,
¹¹
little attention has been paid to this aspect. As far as I can see, Hans van Wees pretty much ignores it. In the recent
Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare
, Everett Wheeler observes: “A definite command structure and the use of column and line formations characterize state (as opposed to pre-state) warfare, so the phalanx need not be a Greek peculiarity. A lack of detailed information for Bronze and Iron Age Near Eastern infantry deployments precludes proving either that the phalanx developed independently or that it imitated Near Eastern practice.”
¹²
True enough: such detailed information is lacking, but this does not need to be the end of the story.

Although some continuities in equipment are documented through the Dark Age, I do not think that Near Eastern influences on Greece in the Bronze Age matter for our present purposes. At the end of the Bronze Age and again from the tenth century Greek civilization experienced major changes, if not ruptures, and these deeply affected military culture and customs as well. Moreover, by the eighth century pieces of equipment that may have been “imported” from the Near East more than four hundred years earlier would long have been firmly integrated into Greek military tradition.
¹³
For my present purposes the period in which polis and phalanx developed (eighth to early fifth century) is more immediately important. From this period we have some information about warfare in the Near East, especially about Neo-Assyrian and, later and to a lesser degree, Persian military practices.
¹⁴
A comparison seems promising, and I suggest focusing on three aspects. One is the composition and organization of armies, that is, their recruitment (citizens vs. professionals, seasonal vs. standing), the categories of fighters, and the emphasis placed on each category (chariots, cavalry, infantry, and, among the latter, heavily vs. lightly armed and specialists such as spearmen, archers, and slingers). A second aspect concerns arms and armor: here we explore possible connections between early Greek military equipment and Near Eastern models, and examine the way the Greeks adapted such “imports” to serve their own (and possibly new and different) purposes. A third aspect involves formations and fighting tactics. By combining comparison of these three aspects, we may be able to determine more precisely what the Greeks borrowed from the Near East,
how they adapted it, and how this contributed to the development of phalanx fighting. This in turn will allow us to define more precisely the Greeks’ own contribution, and especially how this contribution relates to communal development.

I limit my comparison primarily to the Neo-Assyrian empire because the evidence (both textual and pictorial) is rich and authentic (rather than, as is the case with the Persians, seen and conveyed largely through Greek eyes and pens) and because we know that Greeks both served as mercenaries in the Near East from at least the early seventh century and were aware of military and other aspects of Assyrian culture.
¹⁵
It suffices to mention here Sarah Morris’s brilliant explanation of the Trojan horse as reflecting knowledge of Assyrian siege engines that indeed look somewhat like giant battle horses, and Erwin Cook’s recent comparison of Alkinoös’ palace in the
Odyssey
with specific features of Near Eastern palaces.
¹⁶

First, then, the composition of armies. Although Homer mentions agrarian property only when speaking of the leaders and Hesiod largely ignores war when talking about the life of his farmers, there is no good reason to doubt that Greek polis armies (as opposed to raiding bands of individual warlords) consisted early on of independent farmers (elite and “middling,” wherever the line was drawn on the lower end): all members of the community who were capable of doing so and met the criteria set by each community fought in the polis’s wars.
¹⁷
These same men (and those beyond fighting age) formed the assembly and played there a communally indispensable political role.
¹⁸
A couple of generations after Homer, Tyrtaeus’ Sparta illustrates all this well, and Sparta was not unique even if these matters for specific reasons were probably more pronounced there than elsewhere. Importantly, already Alcaeus alludes to the formula “the men are the polis.”
¹⁹