Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (31 page)

In his
Politics
, Aristotle, provides a model for how the constitutions of the Greek polis evolved.
¹¹
Following the early kingships, the earliest form of constitution among the Greeks was made up of those who fought. The first constitutions consisted of the cavalry, the horse-owning aristocrats, who dominated the battlefield. However, once the heavy infantry learned the art of proper formation (
syntaxis
), the hoplites were able to break the aristocrats’ monopoly of political power. The early Greeks, Aristotle says, called the hoplite constitution democracy. In a later passage,
¹²
he remarks that the rowers made the democracy of Athens stronger, having been the cause of the victory off Salamis during the Persian Wars and thus the cause of the city’s hegemony due to its sea power. Scholars have criticized this scheme.
¹³
For instance, except for a few areas, such as Thessaly and Macedonia, cavalry never played a preeminent role in Greek warfare. Yet Aristotle still presents a compelling thesis for how the political institutions of the polis did develop. The orthodox view of historians, moreover, has maintained for a long time that the rise of the polis owed much to the emergence of a middle class of farmer-citizen-soldiers, wealthy enough to provide their own hoplite panoply to fight in defense of their state. The hoplites have often been linked to the early Greek tyrants as well. A brief review of the traditional model for how the early polis developed can help throw light on recent attempts to overthrow it.

The polis emerged in the eighth century after the long Dark Age, which followed the chaos that attended the collapse of Mycenaean society. The centuries of low population density and of depressed economic conditions gave way to demographic and geographic expansion and to renewed long-distance trade. The details are obscure, but Thucydides gives a plausible account of the rise of the polis after the period of the migrations ended and the conditions in Greece settled down. He says that the early constitutions were hereditary monarchies with limitations placed on the powers of the kings.
¹⁴
There was no great land war fought during this period. Warfare involved simple border conflicts between neighboring poleis over contested land. The Lelantine War fought between Chalcis and Eretria in which “all the rest of Hellas took sides in alliance with the one side or the other” was the first significant land battle to take place among the Greeks.
¹⁵
By this time, around 700, most scholars believe that hereditary monarchies of some sort had yielded to aristocracies of birth in most poleis. The traditional view is that the nature of Greek warfare changed dramatically shortly thereafter.

Above all other factors, the introduction of the hoplite shield in the late eighth century had a revolutionary
¹⁶
effect. Use of the shield makes sense only in the context
of a phalanx in which a warrior in the massed formation seeks coverage for his vulnerable right-hand side behind the shield of the neighbor on his right (Thuc. 5.71). The hoplite shield underscores the technical differences between Dark Age and classical warfare. Dark Age warriors seem to have worn their shields suspended from their necks by a leather strap and to have thrown their spears as javelins. The hoplite shield, on the other hand, is held in place by a double armband while the warrior uses his spear like a pike. Hoplites fought in close formation and thrust their spears instead of throwing them. Thus the open-order battles in which champions were preeminent must have given way to more cohesive formations of heavy infantry with the introduction of the double-grip shield. This transition in tactics led to radical social and political changes in the Greek world. As the defense of the state came to depend more and more on ever-greater numbers of nonaristocrats who fought in the phalanx, side by side with the aristocrats, the hoplites succeeded in their demands for political power. In many states, a charismatic leader exploited the masses’ discontent with their aristocratic peers to champion the cause of the hoplites and establish himself as tyrant.

The model outlined above has been challenged from a number of viewpoints. Perhaps the most influential approach has been to argue that the phalanx did not come about through sudden change with the introduction of the hoplite shield.
¹⁷
Snodgrass further maintained that the double-grip shield does not necessarily imply phalanx tactics, and that the two innovations did not occur at the same time. In his view, the phalanx did not achieve its full development until about 650. Since the phalanx as described in the classical sources did not first take shape until after the date for the earliest tyrants, there was no self-conscious hoplite class to back the tyrants and to push for political reform. In addition, the prohibitive expense of the panoply meant that few individuals outside the narrow class of aristocrats could afford to arm themselves as hoplites. These aristocrats continued to fight as soloists, and it was only over a period of half a century or more that they gradually recruited nonaristocrats to join their ranks in the phalanx. Therefore, the “gradualist” position contends that there was a military reform in the seventh century but no accompanying political revolution.

Scholars have based the next major change in their understanding of the phalanx on the new readings of the battle scenes in Homer. They claim that in the
Iliad
mass armies, and not heroic champions, are the decisive element in battle.
¹⁸
The mass forces are not only decisive but also engage in hand-to-hand combat and close-order formations that are nearly the same as those of the classical phalanx. Latacz argued that, since the Homeric phalanx likely resembles what must have taken place in historical battles of the same period, there is no need to posit a hoplite “revolution” or even a “reform” for the seventh century. The reform must have come earlier or not at all. From this some have concluded that in Homer “the pitched battle was the decisive element.”
¹⁹
Pritchett has remarked, “The general impression created by the poems is one of hoplites fighting in formation.” Indeed, Raaflaub has combined the idea of piecemeal adoption of the hoplite panoply with the arguments for mass fighting in Homer. He proposes a long evolution of fighting in early Greece that involves
perfection
and
formalization
of tactics rather than the introduction of phalanx warfare. He asserts, “The evidence of Homeric and early Greek warfare leaves no space for a ‘hoplite
revolution.’ ”
²⁰
Raaflaub suggests that mass fighting gradually “evolved along with the formation of the polis.”
²¹
Since mass fighting had been developing since the start of the polis, the phalanx did not incorporate a new class of citizens who for the first time fought on equal terms with the aristocrats. For Raaflaub, the integration of the polis, which took place under the leadership of the aristocrats, resulted from the “collective will of the entire citizen body” and served the needs of the entire community.
²²

Some historians have gone much further in rejecting the idea of a seventh-century military reform. Van Wees, for example, accepts the thesis that hoplite warfare is widely represented in the
Iliad
and has advanced a new theory about how warriors used the double-grip shield, the
aspis
. He argues that hoplites fought in a stance resembling that of fencers, with their left shoulder facing the enemy, rather than the position of a wrestler, with their chest to the foe. In this case, the
aspis
covers both flanks of the warrior, so there is no need for him to seek the shelter of a neighbor’s shield for the protection of a vulnerable right-hand side.
²³
Therefore, he contends that hoplites did not need to maintain a tightly ordered line but could fight in a much looser and less cohesive formation or could even have fought independent of the phalanx. The consequences of the new readings of Homer and van Wees’s thesis go beyond just a revision of tactics. For example, in a recent textbook discussing the Greek polis Osborne remarks that warfare in massed ranks replaced warfare of individual champions in the eighth century and that this was both prior to the invention of the double-grip shield and well before the appearance of the first tyrants in the Greek tradition. Osborne also accepts van Wees’s ideas on how hoplite warriors used their shield. He concludes that “as a key to the development of tyranny, the invention of the hoplite shield needs to be laid aside: it probably happened too early, and it probably made very little difference to the nature of warfare.”
²⁴
These trends have begun to affect how some scholars write authoritative descriptions of archaic hoplite battle, as follows.

The standard hoplite battle formation, the phalanx, developed gradually over the centuries. In classical times the phalanx was a densely packed arrangement, typically eight ranks deep, optimized for mass shock combat. While Herodotus sometimes anachronistically portrays hoplites fighting in classical fashion, the Archaic phalanx was in reality looser and less structured. Armies did form up in close-ordered lines, but contingents were able to advance or withdraw on their own initiative (5.75, 5.113, and 9.62). Battles could proceed in seesaw fashion, with troops repeatedly charging and falling back (7.225, 9.21, and 9.74). Archers and other light troops occasionally fought mixed in with hoplites (9.22, 9.29–30).
²⁵

On the contrary, I shall argue that the testimony of Homer does not mean that the innovations in hoplite arms brought about no revolutionary change in warfare, and that van Wees’s ingenious interpretations of the iconographical evidence are no cause to throw out the orthodoxy regarding tactics. I shall then maintain that the date of the phalanx does in fact coincide with the introduction of the double-grip shield. This earlier date, moreover, is crucial for understanding the revolution that occurred in the poleis in the political and social institutions of at least several of the major Greek states.
These changes transformed Greek values and culture in general and helped create the egalitarian ethos and rule of law that shaped the polis. None of the recent advances in archaeology or the new readings of the literary sources for the period has refuted the traditional grand hoplite narrative.

I begin with a critique of van Wees’s view on how hoplites fought,
²⁶
especially their use of the
aspis
. In a recent article, Schwartz analyzes van Wees’s theory.
²⁷
He rejects the view that hoplite warriors were fit for single combat. The hoplite was always meant to fight in a phalanx. Schwartz also disputes the idea that the hoplite phalanx did not evolve until the time of the Persian Wars. To begin with, the hoplite panoply, including the bronze breastplate, the bronze “Corinthian-style” helmet, the iron-tipped ashen spear, the iron sword, the bronze greaves, and, of course, the large shield (the
aspis
or
hoplon
), remained essentially unchanged throughout the archaic and classical periods. The shield itself maintained the same circular shape, the concavity of its inner surface, its wooden core, the bronze band on its rim, and the double-grip system. Examination of the equipment shows that it could only have been made for one style of fighting. The size and weight of the shield made it unwieldy.
²⁸
The double-grip system of the central arm band—the
porpax
—and the gripping handle—the
antilabe
—enabled the hoplite to support the approximately 7.5 kg weight of the shield at two points instead of the one afforded by the single-grip shield. In addition, this meant that the bearer could wield the shield with the left arm only, as opposed to the warrior who could shift a single-grip shield from one hand to the other to relieve its weight. On the other hand, the concavity of the shield allowed the hoplite to rest the lip of the shield on his shoulder. Carrying the shield in this inclining position, with the lower rim jutting out in front of the warrior, has the added advantage of enlarging the zone of protection and serves to make spear thrusts glance off the shield. Schwartz points out
²⁹
that this is in fact the only
possible
way to handle the
aspis
.

However, without the carrying strap (the
telamon
) of previous shields, and owing to the sheer size of the shield, the bearer could not sling the
aspis
around his back, which limited his protection when the hoplite turned to flight. This fact, along with its weight and awkward concavity, made the
aspis
particularly unwieldy, and made the warrior himself far less mobile than previous fighters. Yet van Wees insists that “the shield … at most tended to slow down movement on the battlefield: it did not in itself impose a static form of combat,” and that the loss of maneuverability that the
aspis
entailed “should not be exaggerated,” since no type of shield can be brought very far to the right “without badly impeding the use of weapons.”
³⁰
However, as Schwartz maintains, it is nearly impossible to deflect a blow or thrust with a shield in one hand and strike with a weapon in the other hand
simultaneously
. The required technique is to deflect an incoming blow first, say to the defender’s right side, and then, only
after
that, to go on the offensive. By this time, the warrior will have transferred his shield to its usual position to the front and slightly to the left, so he can strike with greater force. What van Wees’s description misses is that in fast-paced fighting the lighter, single-grip shield is of greater value because the bearer can deflect incoming blows better by more swiftly transferring the shield’s center to the point of attack and back again, “in short, by using his shield
actively
in the fighting, truly
wielding
it.” In addition, since
a fighter can hold the single-grip shield at full arm’s length, which decreases the opponent’s angles of attack, the shield surface need not be quite so large. The single-grip shield also allows great freedom of movement. For example, even when the bearer reaches across to his own right side, a mere turn of the wrist enables him to rotate the shield to maximize the angle of deflection.