Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (3 page)

The seminal work of Snodgrass in the 1960s began the first sustained attack on the hoplite orthodoxy, which has continued to the present. He concluded from his study of arms and armor, much of which was unknown to previous scholars, that the adoption of hoplite equipment was a “long drawn out, piecemeal process,” and that the double-grip shield did
not
imply the phalanx. Furthermore, the fully developed phalanx did not appear until after 650 BC—too late to play a role in the Greek tyrants’ rise to power and the other revolutionary changes associated with the emergence of the polis. In fact, the aristocrats filled the first phalanxes, and it was only with prodding that the middling farmers joined them; hoplite
equipment
had been adopted by aristocratic warriors before the later development of hoplite
tactics
. The demands of the mature phalanx with its denser formations forced the elite in time to recruit reluctant commoners to help fill its ranks.

In response to Snodgrass’s thesis of gradual phalanx development, Cartledge proposed some nuances to the sudden-change theory. He emphasized above all the nature of the double-grip shield and its severe limitations for the
un
organized tactics of prehoplite warfare. The shield’s design indicates that the Greeks created it with a new style of fighting in mind, and that a change in tactics toward organized, hand-to-hand fighting had already been taking place. Frontal protection became valued over mobility and protection in the flank and rear. On the other hand, Cartledge finds the visual and literary evidence too insecure to ground an argument. Instead, the whole gamut of economic, social, and political changes during the last half of the eighth and first half of the seventh century explains the broad revolutionary effects that the phalanx had on the polis. Relative overpopulation and land hunger placed a premium on arable land and forced the aristocrats to relinquish their military dominance. Success in
war now depended on fielding the greatest possible number of men for a battle. Yet the number of farmers wealthy enough to equip themselves still represented less than one-half of the state’s citizen population. Between 675 and 650 all the major poleis had adopted the phalanx to secure and to defend the maximum possible amount of land.

There has been a tendency over the last thirty years to try to dismantle just about every aspect of the hoplite orthodoxy through the gradualist position. On the one hand, some gradualists maintain that the hoplite reform came early in the seventh century. But they deny that the hoplite class could have had the confidence and experience necessary to bring about revolutionary political and social change. A great deal of the revisionism, however, has challenged the very idea that any significant reform took place in infantry tactics in the archaic period. Krentz has argued not only that hoplite warfare went through a long period of transition before reaching the classic formation described by Thucydides. He contends that throughout its history hoplite battle involved much looser deployments of troops and emphasized the hand-to-hand combat of individual fighters and small groups in the front rank. Hoplites did not seek to maintain the cohesion of their line, while breaking apart the phalanx of the enemy. The warriors kept much greater spacing between themselves and their neighbors than the traditional narrative imagines. Krentz has also challenged the notion that the two-handled hoplite shield was much less maneuverable than the single-grip model.

In this spirit, an important 1989 paper by Cawkwell explains that the orthodox model for how hoplites fought in the phalanx is far too rigid. Troops may have advanced into battle in tight formation, but in actual combat they would have required more room to fight. The phalanx must have been flexible for hoplites to employ the type of fighting skills the sources such as Xenophon and Plato mention that they developed in training and used in battle. The iconography also indicates open-order fighting and more variety in style and technique than some of the literary sources suggest.

One of the most thoroughgoing critiques of the hoplite orthodoxy has come from van Wees. He argues for a third position among the gradualists and sudden-change theorists. For him the hoplite phalanx had much less cohesion and evolved over a much longer period of time than the two to three generations for which most gradualists allow. There was no great change in tactics from the eighth to the seventh century, and, in as far as Homer can be taken as an historical witness, the fighting in the
Iliad
bears a striking resemblance to the picture one may reconstruct for the early phalanx. Perhaps mass combat, and not massed hoplite warfare per se, undermined the power of the aristocracy and initiated political and social change.

The theses in
The Western Way of War
and
The Other Greeks
reassert the tradition of the grand hoplite narrative. In
The Western Way of War
Hanson provides from the ancient sources the most graphic account available of what the experience of battle might have been like in the phalanx. He finds unconvincing the attempts to prove that the fighting was fluid, and that individual skirmishing took place instead of collective pushing. His argument stresses the cumbersomeness and sheer weight of hoplite equipment, especially the helmet and the shield. Mass infantry fighting in some less rigid form probably existed before the complete adoption of the panoply. But it is inconceivable that men fought in hoplite equipment in
any
formation apart from the
phalanx. The battles were brief and depended on the shock collision of heavy infantry with the aim of breaking apart the enemy phalanx or shoving it off the battlefield. The idea was to limit the killing through a decisive contest, so that the farmer-citizen-soldiers could return to their fields with minimal disruption to their way of life. Conflicts became highly ritualized pitched battles fought over farmland. The main elements included the tight deployment of troops, an accumulation of shields, and the charge across a level field, the crashing together of opposing lines, the push and collapse, and the rout. Hoplite warfare remained virtually unchanged for more than two centuries, from its start until the fifth century.

Two remarkable features set Hanson’s account of the hoplite apart from that of his predecessors. First is the idea that the preference of Western armies for decisive battle began with the archaic Greek phalanx. Second, he identifies intensive farming as the main element that shaped the character and values of the middling group that provided its own arms to fight for the polis. These
georgoi
in turn shaped the ideals, institutions, and culture that gave rise to the polis. Unlike any prior civilization, the culture of the Greek polis combined citizen militias with the rule of law. That involved having a broad middle class of independent small landowners that met in assemblies where the votes of these nonelite determined laws, and foreign and domestic policy. These smallholders gained in status as population growth in the ninth and eighth centuries forced an agricultural revolution. Labor-intensive farming of marginal lands came to replace the Dark Age pastoral economy. This required a growth in private landownership, which motivated
georgoi
to assume the risks involved in cultivating land that was unproductive using traditional farming techniques. These farmers created the ritual of hoplite warfare to decide disputes in a manner that did not contradict their agrarian agenda. The
georgoi
and their agrarian ideology became the driving force behind the hoplite revolution during the early seventh century.

Scholars in the past decade have heavily criticized the hoplite orthodoxy in general and Hanson’s model of it in particular. For example, some gradualists have lowered the date for the introduction of the phalanx to well into the fifth century. They claim that the equipment hoplites wore was much lighter and that the warriors were more mobile than the traditional narrative contends. In addition, revisionists have challenged the idea that opposing phalanxes maintained rigid formations and crashed into one another in the opening stages of battle. They have attempted to refute the notion of collective pushing. Another form of revisionism has used Homer’s
Iliad
to argue that a protophalanx existed in the eighth century, hence lessening the significance of the adoption of hoplite arms and armor in the seventh. According to this thinking, there was no hoplite reform, let alone revolution, to effect changes in the political and social structures of the polis. Van Wees, in his examination of the iconography and the elegies of Tyrtaeus, sees much continuity in the fluid style of the protophalanx and early hoplite warfare. Therefore, the hoplites did not suddenly emerge in the seventh century to support the tyrants and break the backs of the aristocracy. In fact, the warfare and the politics of the Greek state remained very much an elite affair until the fifth century. And when change occurred, the hoplites had little to do with bringing it about. Foxhall has employed survey archaeology, moreover, to deny that
a substantial middle stratum of farmers living on the land even existed as early as the orthodoxy believes. She has suggested that the countryside remained largely devoid of settlement far into the sixth century in most places, while the best lands were farmed from nucleated settlements, with little evidence for intensive agricultural practices or the cultivation of marginal lands.

The idea for the Yale conference was to bring together the leading scholars from both the orthodox and the revisionist’ schools of thought to examine the current state of the field, which is at a crucial turning point. A number of outcomes were possible. First, everyone could have agreed that in fact the traditional hoplite narrative was correct and that there was no need to rewrite the textbooks. Second, the revisionists might have convinced the orthodox that their model had fatal flaws. In that case, we all might have either conceded that we could know little or nothing about the rise of the Greek state and culture, or at least that the early hoplites had nothing to do with it. Or we could have agreed that what we thought we knew was wrong, but an alternative theory could better explain the major movements of the formative period in classical Greece. Third, a great synthesis might have combined key elements of the traditional model with new insights to produce a higher truth. Despite the recognition of much common ground among the participants, none of those things happened at the conference. Instead of working toward a consensus, each side sharpened its position in response to the latest research. The keynote speaker, Paul Cartledge, set up the framework for the debate that took place. Panels were arranged in pairs of scholars to discuss essential aspects of the orthodoxy in light of recent attempts to revise it. In the first panel, Kurt Raaflaub and Gregory Viggiano considered whether or not a hoplite revolution transformed the Greek world in the seventh century. In the second, Peter Krentz and Adam Schwartz presented opposing views about the significance of hoplite arms and weapons and how hoplites fought in archaic Greece. In the third, Anthony Snodgrass responded to current theories on early Greek warfare, and John Hale considered the role of Greek mercenaries in the seventh and sixth centuries. In the fourth panel, Hans van Wees critiqued
The Other Greeks
and argued that an agrarian revolution did occur but centuries later than Hanson envisions. For his part, Victor Davis Hanson explained why the orthodoxy is still orthodox. The conference concluded on the third day with a roundtable discussion, which covered topics debated over the three-day event. The chapters in this volume represent the rewritten drafts of the papers presented at Yale, though they often contain the original spirit in which they were delivered.

Paul Cartledge notes and welcomes the shift in the study of ancient Greek warfare over the past thirty years from the “narrowly technical” toward sociopolitical issues and approaches. The study is no longer an abstract exercise in military history, but a “totalizing history of war and society.” He reveals how his own views on the subject have and have not changed since his first major publication in the field. Cartledge also sets the stage for all the essays that follow by examining several key issues. What were the causally related variables or factors that link the evolution of the hoplite phenomenon to the rise of the polis? Do the notorious source(s) problems prevent us from understanding them? What tipped mass fighting over into phalanx fighting? Was there a
hoplite “ideology"? Did Aristotle get it right when he posited a connection between warfare and political development in Greece? In light of the nature of the sources, Cartledge emphasizes the strength of a theoretical approach to the inextricable link between warfare and politics in the Greek state.

Anthony Snodgrass lays out the chronological framework for the history of hoplite warfare. He discusses the impact the studies of Homeric warfare have had on the orthodoxy since the groundbreaking work of Latacz. Indeed there was a “hoplite reform” despite the contention of many scholars that fighting in the
Iliad
and hoplite fighting are one and the same. He considers the problems posed by the evidence of iconography and archaeology, especially the dedications of actual armor in the sanctuaries at Olympia and Delphi, and the various philological and historical approaches that scholars have applied to the literary sources. Snodgrass also notes the potential significance that Nagy’s evolutionary model for the creation of the Homeric epics has when historians use the poems to understand archaic warfare and its relation to the polis. He reaffirms his gradualist position on the hoplite reform, while he underscores the often overlooked common ground among scholars involved in the debate. The persistence of the hoplite in the Hellenistic period defies any simple reading of the phenomenon.

Most of the paper Kurt Raaflaub gave at Yale on the nature of mass fighting in the
Iliad
has already been published, but we are happy to include in this volume his ideas on early Greek infantry fighting in a Mediterranean context. Raaflaub sees the emergence of hoplite warfare as part of a long interactive process associated with the rise of the polis. The polis, its institutions and political thought, evolved from the eighth to the fifth century along with its military practices. Despite intense interaction with the states of the Near East, the Greeks of the eighth and seventh centuries developed the phalanx independent of Oriental influence. Raaflaub examines Assyrian and Persian armies, arms, and armor as well as formation and tactics to determine that there is no prior model for the equipment and style of Greek infantry. Having no Near Eastern example, the Greeks must have invented the double-grip shield for use in the already existing phalanx for which the hoplite was always intended. Therefore, Raaflaub rejects van Wees’s picture of Homeric and early hoplite fighting as open-order combat by many small and loosely organized bands of warriors. On the other hand, he is a “gradualist” in that he believes that the phalanx developed over too long a period of time and in conjunction with too many other factors to bring about a “revolution” in warfare or society.