Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (27 page)

True, archers and other lightly armed missile specialists initially seem to have played a more significant role and may have continued to do so longer than we used to think:
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early poetry, images on vases, as well as, for example, Spartan lead figurines of bowmen leave no doubt about this. Yet this role should not be overestimated, and it seems to have decreased over time. For example, the masses of Spartan lead figurines from the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia show two types of archers in the seventh century and only one in the sixth, but a large variety of “hoplite” types, increasing from fifteen to twenty-six in the same period; those from the Menelaion reflect the same distribution; moreover, the “hoplites” are spearmen and always wear helmet and shield, sometimes greaves; the archers do not.
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The fragments of Archilochus’ poetry mention (non-Greek?) archers in the context of a siege and the storming of a city but spears, javelins, and swords everywhere else; as we shall see, heavy protective armor appears already by the late eighth century, the
Iliad
emphasizes the dominant role of heavily armed fighters in large numbers, and by the second half of the seventh century illustrations on vases, dedications in sanctuaries, reflections in poetry (esp. Tyrtaeus), and new polis institutions leave no doubt that, despite the presence of missile specialists (lightly armed archers, slingers, javelin or stone throwers), in military importance, social prestige, and communal status the hoplite predominated.
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As far back as we can see, therefore, the Greek polis army consisted of soldiers who were “citizens,” farmers, and primarily heavily armed spearmen.

Assyrian evidence reveals a different picture. True, the Assyrians, often receiving land assignations in border areas, were obliged to serve in the army. In the early phase of the Neo-Assyrian state (the “Old Empire”), Assyrian armies consisted largely of citizen levies. But the kings of the “New Empire,” beginning with Tiglath-pileser III in the mid-eighth century, used large-scale citizen levies mostly in emergencies but otherwise relied on standing armies under their own command or assigned to provincial governors.
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These were largely recruited among provincial populations and regularly replenished by large contingents of soldiers from among defeated enemies and thus from newly subjected peoples. For example, after his conquest of Carchemish, Sargon says: “I created a contingent of 50 chariots, 200 men on horseback and 3,000 foot soldiers and added it to my royal corps.” At another occasion, he integrated into his standing army 10,000 archers from Philistia and 30,500 from Bit-Jakin and Elam (as well as the same number of shield bearers).
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These figures are illuminating: bowmen apparently were by far the largest force in the army, several times outnumbering all the others together. According to Sargon II’s
Annals
, the king assigned to the governor of a new province an army consisting of 150 chariots, 1,500 horsemen, 20,000 bowmen, and 1,000 spearmen.
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Such disproportion is all the more remarkable as each bowman, naturally unable to protect himself with a shield, worked in tandem with a shield bearer. The preponderance of archers is confirmed in other texts and in pictorial reliefs where they are highly prominent.
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The Assyrian army thus relied primarily on the long-distance impact of a hail of arrows and on the assault of cavalry and chariots. Infantry capable of hand-to-hand fighting was limited to relatively small units of spearmen armed with a heavy spear and shield.

The Achaemenid Persian armies that invaded Greece in the early fifth century reflect similar preferences. They too were recruited in the whole empire and thus were ethnically mixed (although, as Pierre Briant has demonstrated brilliantly, the fighting army must be distinguished from the “parade army” displaying the ethnic contingents’ native dress and equipment).
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According to Herodotus, Persians preferred to fight in terrain that was suitable for cavalry. At Marathon, he says, they were shocked to see the Athenians attack without support of archers and cavalry—by implication, Greeks commonly expected Persians to rely heavily on such support. Miltiades ordered his hoplites to attack on the run—obviously to minimize their exposure to Persian arrows, and the Persians were handicapped decisively by lacking (for whatever reasons) the support of their cavalry. In close combat the more lightly armed Persian infantry was no match for Greek hoplites, hence the extraordinary disproportion in losses.
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Herodotus says so explicitly when describing the battle of Plataea, where Persian cavalry and archers, bombarding the enemy from behind their shield barrier, caused serious problems for the Greeks but resistance faded quickly once the cavalry general had fallen, the cavalry retreated, and the shield barrier was overrun; the latter also sealed the fate of the Persians at Mycale.
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In his description of the Persian army on the march Herodotus gives for the core contingent of Persians equal numbers of horsemen and spearmen, which may indicate that the Persians placed more emphasis than the Assyrians on the capacity of their armies to sustain close combat, but archers and cavalry apparently still dominated the battlefield. In
Persae
, Aeschylus famously pits the Greek
spear against the Persian bow. Yet Herodotus’s report about the Persians fighting at Plataea seems to suggest that, unlike their Assyrian predecessors, Persian infantrymen were both archers and spearmen: they pelted the enemy with arrows before the armies closed, then fought in the melee with spears and swords.
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Next, equipment. The Greeks themselves were aware of their military borrowings from others. According to Herodotus, they appropriated three inventions from the Carians: “fitting crests on helmets, putting devices on shields, and making shields with handles.” Modern scholars have doubts about these “Carian inventions” or modify them.
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Overall, despite the debt the Greeks owed to the Near East in terms of technology—most importantly, the knowledge of ironworking
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—imitation of specific armor and weapons is surprisingly limited.

The first Greek iron swords may have come from Cyprus and the Levant, but Greek smiths soon mastered the challenge.
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The bronze-plate corselet appears first around 725; it is definitely not Near Eastern (where the scale corselet dominated) and was most likely modeled after a European type ultimately derived from the Celtic urnfield culture, which may in turn have been influenced by Greek Bronze Age technology.
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While earlier helmet types have analogs in a wide area of the eastern and western Mediterranean, the “Corinthian” helmet, usually hammered out of one sheet of bronze and covering the entire head except for a small opening for eyes, nose, and mouth, is Greek and originated in the late eighth century.
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The same is true for the greaves, first visible on vases about 675 but now archaeologically attested some fifty years earlier.
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Round shields were used by the sea peoples, in late Bronze Age Greece, and through the Dark Age; their bronze bosses have analogs on Cyprus. Round shields are frequent too in Neo-Assyrian battle depictions. Where we see their interior, it is clear that they were light, made of wicker, and covered with leather. All these shields were held by a single grip in the middle and could presumably be carried by a strap around the neck. Scholars assume a common origin of this shield type in late Bronze Age Anatolia or Assyria.
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The Greek hoplite shield, larger than earlier round ones, made of wood with bronze applications around the rim or even covering the entire surface, and markedly concave, with its characteristic two handles (
porpax
and
antilabē
), was an entirely new, Greek invention, even if it is possible that, as Snodgrass thinks, the “very large round shield of sheet bronze carried by Assyrian infantrymen, though it had only a single central hand-grip, … influenced the evolution of the Greek type.” But this, he emphasizes, “detracts little from the Greek achievement.” This shield, too, was in use by the end of the eighth century.
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In the aspects, then, that are most characteristic of the Greek hoplite, his defensive body armor made of sheet bronze and his shield with double handle, borrowings from the Near East are not decisive, perhaps even marginal; many of the crucial technological advances were made in Greece. Most remarkably, all this equipment shows up in the late eighth century. Although initially not many fighters may have worn all of it, by the second half of the seventh century vase paintings show the entire assemblage and document that a uniformly equipped line of hoplites had become the ideal.
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Although Snodgrass concludes “that the archaeological facts give little ground for
believing that any unity of purpose lay behind the development of the various items of the panoply,” it seems worth thinking along the lines suggested by Victor Hanson:
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all pieces of this equipment, whatever their origin and original purpose, and whenever they appeared in Greece, were ultimately adapted or combined for one single purpose: fighting straight forward in relatively dense formation. Hence, for example, the Corinthian helmet radically prioritized safety over hearing and peripheral vision. If the spear broke, the sharp iron butt provided a useful weapon before the hoplite had to use his even shorter sword. Corselet and shield were heavy: again, protection was more important than maneuverability. True, the perfection of this fighting system took time, and missiles initially played a significant role. Still, the
idea or principle
of close-order frontal fighting must have been developed early on, apparently earlier than 700. It is tempting to think, as Hanson does, that fighting mode and equipment developed hand in hand, in an interactive process—for which there was no Near Eastern model either—but this is not provable, and I will not press it here.

Third, fighting tactics. Snodgrass thinks that “massed heavy infantry had long been in use among the Oriental kingdoms,” but finds it remarkable that the Ionian Greeks, with their close contacts to the Near East, were not among the Greek pioneers of these tactics. Kendrick Pritchett refers to the famous “Stele of the Vultures,” interpreted by Yigael Yadin as a “heavily armed phalanx of soldiers in a column of six files.”
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Unfortunately, a third-millennium relief is not helpful to us. Neo-Assyrian texts, although effusive about royal campaigns and victories, and often describing the difficulties the king had to overcome, suffice only to make clear that the Assyrian army, in Arther Ferrill’s words, “was an integrated force of heavy and light infantry, consisting of spearmen, archers, slingers, storm troops, and engineers,” relying on chariot corps and cavalry as its major strike force.
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But these texts do not give detailed descriptions of battle formations and tactics. The pictorial record is rich, though, like the Greek vase paintings, stylized, using its own conventions and “language,” and thus not necessarily realistic enough for our needs.
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At any rate, these images delight much more in dramatic sieges than in field battles.
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With good reason. As Israel Eph’al writes, “After the Assyrian Empire had consolidated its power and its military supremacy had been duly demonstrated, there was a considerable decline in its involvement in pitched battles. Assyria was so much more powerful than most of its opponents that only rarely did they dare to confront her in the open field. Accordingly, the massive offensive activities of the Assyrian army, both within and, to some extent, beyond the empire, were aimed at ensuring victory by conquest of cities.” This helps explain the importance of archers in the composition of Assyrian armies: in siege warfare, where walls separate the armies and the attackers fight largely from a distance, archers necessarily assumed a crucial role. Where we do see infantry in battle, archers therefore dominate; the spearmen with shields, helmets, and swords are shown in intensive, chaotic fights in the open field, intermixed with horsemen and archers, and, more often, in their advance, in single files, against a besieged city.
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The latter is due to the constraints of relief sculpture with largely two-dimensional representation that, moreover, juxtaposes in one image sequential scenes and is thus limited in space. Still, so far I have seen evidence for mass battle but
nothing that would suggest dense formation, even in the stylized way the Chigi vase and other Greek vase paintings represent this.

In Greece we know the result of the evolution: the hoplite phalanx, arranged in somewhat dense formation, with a wide front, several rows deep. After clashing, the two armies engaged in fierce hand-to-hand fighting, those in the hind rows replacing those who fell in front, perhaps at some point engaging in a veritable shoving match, until one line broke, turned, and fled.
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The details (how closely packed and how “purely hoplite” this phalanx was, how much fighting occurred before the “shoving match,” and how exactly we should imagine the latter) can be endlessly debated, but they matter less for my present purpose than that, as far back as we can see, the Greeks fought intercommunal wars primarily by meeting each other in frontal assault and fighting it out in person-to-person combat: missile-to-missile, spear-to-spear (by throw and thrust), hand-to-hand. Although the hoplite could fight individually, his strength lay in the formation.
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We grasp this formation in the second half of the seventh century.