Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (28 page)

In our intense debates over every detail we tend to forget what seems to me crucial: both Tyrtaeus’s poetic exhortations and Homer’s descriptions of armies marching into battle, clashing, and fighting convey in numerous ways an impression not only of mass fighting but also of relatively dense formations. I have argued for this in detail elsewhere and will say here only that all the Homeric evidence adds up to an impression that made at least Polybius, an experienced general, think of a phalanx. We may try to prove him wrong, but that is the way he read it, and, I think, this corresponds to the poet’s intention.
⁴⁸

I have also suggested that Homeric battles, lasting all day, are stitched together from large-scale but infinitely varied type scenes by alternating between “normal battles” and “chaotic flight and
aristeia
scenes,” in which the poet gives his fantasy free rein, heroes reach spectacular levels of achievement, “special effects” are frequent, and gods as well as chariots play an important role. By contrast, I argue, the “normal battles,” lasting from march into battle in dense formation and intense fighting in a long line of duels to flight of one side, essentially reflect a reality familiar to poet and audience. If we look for anything coming close to historical reality, we have to focus on these “normal battles.”
⁴⁹
Even here, as I have insisted all along, Homer does not describe anything resembling the fully developed hoplite phalanx. But what he depicts is much closer to at least a “protophalanx” than the much looser and disorganized model, the “kind of fluid long-range skirmishing found in ‘primitive’ societies,” that Hans van Wees sees in Homer.
⁵⁰

At any rate, my reconstruction of epic fighting fits well with the date established by archaeology for the emergence of various pieces of hoplite equipment. By the time Homer’s epics were composed, therefore, that is, by the early seventh century at the latest, the Greek development toward the hoplite phalanx was well under way.
⁵¹

Let me summarize and draw some conclusions. The Assyrian kings’ armies consisted of levies from among citizen farmers, mostly for seasonal campaigns, and, from the mid-eighth century, increasingly of standing armies composed largely of provincials and replenished by units formed from among subject populations. These armies
combined various types of arms; in numbers and importance, archers (protected by shield bearers), chariots, and cavalry dominated, while shock troops of spearmen (some more heavily, some more lightly armed) seemed to be less important. The Persians continued to rely heavily on archers and cavalry, while assigning a more significant role to shock troops: their archers were also spearmen. In both empires the latter attacked and fought en masse, though often intermixed with archers and horsemen and apparently not in tight formation. Although Assyrian spearmen are mostly represented as wearing light round wicker shields, it is possible, as Snodgrass suggests, that in some cases the shields were larger, heavier, and covered with metal. If so, this is the only Near Eastern piece of military equipment that may have influenced the development of the Greek hoplite panoply.

On the Greek side independent citizen-farmers fight in the communal army. Despite Homer’s focus on the great leaders, it is clear that all fighters matter and contribute, and they all share in the booty that is distributed by “the army,” that is, by collective communal authority.
⁵²
Although archers, slingers, and javelin throwers play a nonnegligible role, the battle is dominated already in Homer both numerically and physically by the heavily armed spearmen. As it will be for centuries to come, this battle is decided in frontal clashes of mass (and somewhat massed) armies and in person-to-person combat. With the possible exception of some aspects of the shield, none of the defensive armor of the future hoplite is derived from Near Eastern models. Crucial inventions and adaptations (the Corinthian helmet, the shield’s
porpax
,
antilabē
, and typical concave shape, the greaves, and the iron spear butt, among others) that were used to develop and perfect frontal fighting in the phalanx’s massed formation—these are all Greek. All parts of the hoplite equipment seem to have been in use before 700. Homer’s battle descriptions reflect some awareness of the value of dense formations and close support among fighters.
⁵³
Hence, as said before, by Homer’s time the development that would result in the phalanx seems to have been well under way, both in terms of equipment and in terms of fighting tactics. This is why I have been arguing that, as big, profound, and perhaps “revolutionary” as this transformation was overall, it was mostly the result of a long process of gradual change in which I do not see one specific moment for a “hoplite revolution” of the kind that was postulated in the past.
⁵⁴

Overall, then, the military development that eventually produced the phalanx was essentially a Greek one.
⁵⁵
As said at the beginning, by 700, and perhaps earlier, Greek mercenaries and their elite officers were fighting in the Near East; Homer reflects awareness of Assyrian military motifs. Information about Assyrian armies and ways of fighting was thus available in Greece. Yet the Greeks of the early seventh century did not have any use for the Assyrians’ highly developed siege technology and tactics, and they did not do what military specialists have been telling them forever they should have done: they did not develop, in imitation of the Assyrians, an “integrated force of skirmishers, light infantry, heavy infantry, and light and heavy cavalry,” although, as Ferrill insists, such forces are “more effective and less demanding on society,” especially, as already Herodotus’s Mardonius points out, in a country that seems mostly unsuitable for hoplite armies.
⁵⁶
Chariots were not useful for fighting in Greece,
⁵⁷
but
horses were available, at least in modest numbers, outside Thessaly and Macedonia, and bows, arrows, and slings were much cheaper than the panoply. Yet the Greeks did not imitate the eastern empires’ systematic use of large corps of archers. Archery remained the specialty of geographically marginal areas (Crete and Thrace), and the tendency, clearly attested in the fifth century, to look down on the archer is perceptible already in the
Iliad.
⁵⁸
Instead, the Greeks developed an army focused predominantly on heavily armed spearmen.

In the military aspects of Greek social culture, it seems, therefore, that Near Eastern influence can be ruled out almost entirely. Why this is the case is of great interest and crucial importance. Many scholars have tried to explain this Greek peculiarity, focusing on the phalanx as part of the Greek “way of life, a code of manliness and morality” and on the essential correspondence, characteristic of Greek social values, between tilling the land and fighting.
⁵⁹
Reluctantly, I refrain from entering this debate here: it would exceed the scope of this chapter. Instead, I mainly want to draw attention to what this tells us about the nature of early Greek polis communities. I suggest that by the time information about Assyrian armies and modes of fighting began to arrive in Greece, conveyed by credible informants (that is, Greeks, and preferably elite Greeks who had personal experience of these matters),
⁶⁰
Greek poleis were already well under way in developing their characteristic social and political institutions and achieving an increasing degree of cohesion, based not only on their elites but on a much broader class of independent farmers. These were the men who mattered in the early polis and who therefore manned the assembly and the polis army. In Homer they fight not for prosaic goals such as defending or conquering land—as they did in contemporaneous real life (after all, this is the age of the Messenian Wars and other well-attested wars between neighboring poleis about the control of contested territory)—but they already fight in straight man-to-man combat. They are the ancestors of those whom we see a little later fighting on their land for their land and in those increasingly competitive and ritualized forms that have sometimes been exaggerated but should not be entirely discarded.
⁶¹

This brings me back to my initial thesis about the interactive development of polis, institutions, and political thought. I draw two conclusions—which in turn serve as hypotheses for my continuing research. One is that the crucial role in the early polis of these “citizen” farmer-soldiers was responsible for the communal ethos that pervades the earliest extant epic and elegiac poetry. Clashing with growing elite aspirations and tendencies toward exclusiveness, this communal ethos underlies the earliest attestations of Greek political thinking.
⁶²
The other conclusion is that the Greek poleis around 700 were no longer entirely open communities, ready to absorb any outside influences.
⁶³
They did this in many ways, but as far as communal structures were concerned, they were already set in their ways and, I think, more developed than is usually believed. Hence, based on a number of partial explorations such as that conducted here,
⁶⁴
I begin to think that in the sphere of “the political”—and perhaps only in this sphere—Greek borrowings from the Near East were much more limited than one might expect. Naturally, a much broader investigation will be required to confirm or refute this.

Notes

    
1
. The paper I offered at the conference at Yale University was based largely on one that has now been published (Raaflaub 2008a). Although several parts of that paper await further development, I prefer to offer for public discussion a related paper that was presented at meetings of the European Network for the Study of Ancient Greek History at Oxford University in late March and the Midwestern Consortium of Ancient Historians at the University of Michigan in late April 2009. I thank all participants for valuable criticism and suggestions; in addition, I am grateful to Ryan Balot and Adam Schwartz and to two anonymous referees for helpful comments. This is work in progress. I am aware that more needs to be done to confirm and solidify my results, but what I need most at this point is feedback from knowledgeable colleagues.

    
2
. Raaflaub forthcoming. On “the political,” see Meier 1990: pt. 1.

    
3
. Raaflaub 1997b; see also 1999. On the emergence of the Greek polis, see, e.g., Hall 2007: ch. 4; Osborne 1996: ch. 4, and chs. by Snodgrass and Raaflaub in Hansen 1993.

    
4
. Van Wees 2004: 152. For recent summaries of scholarly debates about the emergence of the hoplite phalanx, see Osborne 1996: 170–85; van Wees 2004: ch. 12; Hall 2007: ch. 7; Singor 2009.

    
5
. Raaflaub 1998; see also Ulf 1990; van Wees 1992; Donlan 1999. Osborne 1996: ch. 5; Osborne 2004; and Shear 2000, among others, offer differing views.

    
6
. See also Paul Cartledge’s important chapter in the present volume.

    
7
. Dreros: ML 2. Sparta’s “Great Rhetra”: Tyrt. 4 West; Plut.
Lyc
. 6; on the general issue of communal awareness and “people’s power” in early Greece, see Raaflaub and Wallace 2007.

    
8
. See, from different approaches, I. Morris 2000: pt. 3; Raaflaub and Wallace 2007.

    
9
. See, recently, Burkert 1992, 2004; S. Morris 1992; West 1997. A more complete bibliography is in Raaflaub 1993: xvii–xix.

  
10
. See esp. Raaflaub 2008b, 2009, in preparation a; see also 2004a, 2004b.

  
11
. Snodgrass 1964b, 1965, 1999 (1967); the update (1999: 134–38) does not record major changes.

  
12
. Wheeler 2007: 193.

  
13
. On Greek Bronze Age military equipment, see Snodgrass 1999: 14–34, 132–34. Dark Age: ibid., ch. 2; 1964: ch. 20. On changes and ruptures: e.g., Snodgrass 1971; Raaflaub 2003: 312–23; Dickinson 2006.

  
14
. For recent work on Assyrian warfare, see Malbran-Labat 1982; Stillman and Tallis 1984; Bahrani 2008; see also Ussishkin 1982; Bleibtreu 1990; Eph’al 1995. Hamblin 2006 covers the period to 1600 BCE. (I thank J. Novotny for some of these references.) On Persian warfare, see Briant 1999: 107: there “exists at this point no comprehensive monograph on the Achaemenid armed forces, their composition, the methods of their recruitment, their financing, their command structure, or their fighting tactics.” Owing to the scarceness of Persian evidence, which forces us to rely far too heavily on Greek sources with their specific agendas and biases, this has not changed (Briant, written communication); see generally Briant 2002.

  
15
. Evidence: Kuhrt 1995: II, 500–505. Greek mercenaries: Bettalli 1995: 43–52; Raaflaub 2004: 206–10 with biblio. See also Luraghi 2006.

  
16
. See Morris 1995 on Near Eastern sources for the Trojan horse; Cook 2004 for Alkinoös’s palace.

  
17
. Homer and agrarian property: Hennig 1980; Donlan 1999: 303–20; cf. id. 1997: esp. 654–61. Hesiod and war: Wade-Gery 1949: 91–92. Farmers and fighters: No direct contemporaneous evidence exists to support this view (nor, for that matter, any other). When we first see such evidence (in Sparta at the time of the Great Rhetra and the emergence of the
homoioi
system, and Athens at the time of Solon’s timocracy: Raaflaub 2006), the hoplites are farmers; I don’t see why their predecessors should have been different. See also Raaflaub 1999: 134–38. Van Wees 2004: chs. 3–4 emphasizes elite hoplites. Polis army: this requires dropping the model of a “hoplite revolution” based on Arist.
Pol
. 1297b16–18 and outdated views of tyrants relying on hoplites and early Greek warfare being predominantly an affair of elite warriors; see n. 54 below.