Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (34 page)

Chalkis had played the leading role in Greek warfare in the eighth century until Argos, which probably invented the hoplite shield, developed the phalanx, I would argue. The earliest figure to succeed in hoplite warfare on a large scale may well have been Pheidon of Argos, the first Greek tyrant for whom there is any evidence. I agree with Salmon’s dating of Pheidon’s reign to about 675.
⁹²
Being the first to make use of a hoplite phalanx would help explain the tradition of Pheidon’s remarkable success in conquering new territory. He would have exploited the novel phalanx to diminish the power of the aristocrats and to defeat his neighbors, Corinth and Sparta in particular. At the height of his powers, Pheidon probably defeated the Spartans at Hysiae in 669.

Shortly thereafter, Cypselus used his position as polemarch to overthrow the Bacchiads in about 655 and to establish himself as tyrant of Corinth. Cypselus rose to power when the Bacchiad aristocrats, who were no longer able to maintain their great success of the eighth century, faced popular discontent with their rule.
⁹³
It is a natural inference that Cypselus either made use of the hoplites or at least had their tacit support. The revolution in the government brought about by Cypselus would have
drawn on both the new class of men who had prospered from Corinth’s expansion of commerce, which had made men outside the Bacchiad class wealthy, and, of course, the hoplites. The tyrant would have included in his council and minor magistrates the hoplites on whom Cypselus could rely in Corinth’s resistance to Pheidon of Argos. Pheidon is said to have been killed in a civil disturbance in Corinth
⁹⁴
that occurred in the middle of the century, the same time as Cypselus’ revolution. Despite the violence and oppression of the Cypselids, and the fact that oligarchy returned after the fall of the tyranny, Corinth was never subject again to the domination of the Bacchiads or any other single clan.

The external example of tyranny on the Isthmus of Corinth and popular demand for a redistribution of the state land helped bring about the hoplite revolution at Sparta. The date for the political solution formulated in the Great Rhetra must follow the defeat suffered at the hands of Argos at Hysiae in 669
⁹⁵
and the subsequent helot revolt that resulted in the Second Messenian War. A combination of factors contributed to this development, especially the unequal distribution of land that followed the Spartan victory in the First Messenian War. To avoid the civil strife that had destroyed the aristocracies in other states, such as Corinth, the Spartan ruling class decided to base the state on a citizen body of
homoioi
, “equals” or “similars.” The military reform detailed in the
rhetra
transformed the old-style army organized by the three Dorian tribes of kinship
⁹⁶
into one based on the five territorial units, the
obai
. This new Spartan government was the first hoplite constitution in Greece. It was established when it became clear to the
demos
that the aristocrats could no longer preserve the state following the heavy defeat at Hysiae and the long drawn-out war with the helots. The rights of citizens were linked both to possession of an allotment of state-owned land, a
kleros
, worked by helots, and to membership in the all-hoplite citizen army and the elite class of
homoioi
.
⁹⁷

After the hoplite phalanx had already been adopted by many major Greek states such as Argos, Corinth, and Sparta, the revolution in Athens came about relatively late, at the end of the seventh century. Despite the synoecism of Attica in the eighth century, Athens did not become a unified polis until the time of Peisistratus (e.g., warfare between Athens and Eleusis, as separate political entities, into the seventh century). In contrast to Sparta, Athens could also depend on “internal colonization” of relatively spacious Attica to deal with the land-hunger problem plaguing many Greek states. In 632 the Olympic victor Cylon apparently failed to gather enough support from the hoplites in his attempt to become tyrant of Athens. However, the laws of Draco in 621 were insufficient to resolve the feuding among the aristocrats.

When Solon was made sole archon to deal with the debt crisis in 594, he addressed the infighting among the aristocrats that had been going on since at least the time of Cylon. The census groups he created not only broke the political monopoly of the aristocrats, the Eupatrids, on the high magistracies but also essentially divided political power according to military function. The
hippeis
(i.e., the cavalrymen) and the
zeugitai
(the “yoke men,” i.e., the hoplites) secured the greatest benefit.
⁹⁸

Solon probably established the Council of Four Hundred to serve as a counterweight to the traditional aristocratic council. The Council (
boulē
) provided an
opportunity for the
zeugitai
to serve in the government. Except for the right to attend the assembly and to sit in the Heliaia, the
thetes
played little role in the new constitution. However, Solon needed to incorporate the
zeugitai
in the Athenian state if he wished to stave off the tyranny, which had overtaken many Greek states in the seventh century. Since the assembly met relatively few times a year, the power of the council would not have been great, but significant enough to hope to satisfy the drive toward broader participation. The powers of council and assembly were enhanced when Solon established regular meetings of the assembly.
⁹⁹

The idea of a hoplite revolution goes a long way in explaining both the changes in the political and social institutions of the archaic polis and the rise of the early Greek tyrants. In general, a scheme for how the hoplite “revolution” took place at different times in different places shows the strength of Aristotle’s model. Arguments that do away with the revolutionary character of hoplite warfare fail fully to account for the rise of the polis and its subsequent history. The Mycenaean palace system was similar to the monarchies of the ancient Near East. Many scholars, moreover, propose continuity between the Late Bronze Age and the Dark Age of Greece. However, the polis was unlike any political system prior to it in history. For example, there were no Near Eastern models for Greek assemblies,
¹⁰⁰
which developed out of the assemblies of fighting men found in Homer. The assemblies rose in importance and power with the emergence of the hoplites. At the same time, a self-conscious aristocratic class came into existence and defined itself in opposition to the middling farmers and merchants. How did the Greek polis develop?
¹⁰¹
A grand narrative involving the hoplite phalanx helps explain the rise of this unique phenomenon, and nothing put forward in opposition has refuted the theory. At best, individual points have been contested, but no combination of the “revisionist” arguments adds up to a coherent theory that even begins to replace the orthodox model. There is simply no reason to retreat to the position that we cannot know.

Notes

I want to thank Paul Cartledge and Donald Kagan for offering many helpful comments and suggestions for this paper. The translations of the Greek are my own.

    
1
. Ehrenberg 1937.

    
2
. Ehrenberg 1969: 60.

    
3
. Berve 1951, 1:176.

    
4
. Berve, “Fürstliche Herren der Zeit der Perserkriege,”
Die Antike
12 (1936): 1ff., and his book
Miltiades
, 1937.

    
5
. Ehrenberg 1937: 158–59.

    
6
. E.g., see van Wees in this volume. Gawantka (1985: 26, 28, n. 43) attacks the use by modern scholars of the ancient Greek word “polis” as an abstraction, a Weberian “ideal type.” Morris, on the other hand, argues for an eighth-century polis, but denies any connection with hoplites: “there is absolutely no reason to associate a ‘hoplite class’ with either the rise of the polis or the rise of the tyrants” (1987: 200).

    
7
. Ehrenberg 1937: 148, n 2.

    
8
. Ehrenberg 1937: 156.

    
9
. For Morris (1996: 40), “
To meson
was not a class but an ideological construct.” He suggests (2009: 76–79) that “the elitist vision … formed in opposition to middling ideologies in the same period, and the variability of the late-eighth-century archaeological record reflects the use of material culture to express competing visions of the good society” and “there are hints in the texts that the conflicts of the eighth century were sometimes settled by violence, but the main arena of debate was probably cultural.”

  
10
. Ehrenberg 1937: 157.

  
11
. 
Politics
1297b 16–28.

  
12
. 
Politics
1304a 22–24.

  
13
. Raaflaub 1999: 129.

  
14
. Thuc. 1.13.

  
15
. Thuc. 1.15.

  
16
. By the term “revolution” I am referring to the fundamental change that I argue took place in the social and political structure of the polis with the introduction of the hoplite phalanx. This change had more dramatic consequences for the development of the early polis than the military “reform” for which Snodgrass has argued (see below).

  
17
. Snodgrass 1965. See “The Hoplite Debate” chapter in this volume.

  
18
. Latacz 1977.

  
19
. Pritchett 1985: 33.

  
20
. Raaflaub 1999: 140.

  
21
. Raaflaub 1993: 80.

  
22
. Raaflaub 1992: 80–81.

  
23
. See van Wees’s chapter in this volume.

  
24
. Osborne 2004: 64–65. However, in the second edition of
Greece in the Making, 1200–479
(2009: 164–65), Osborne states, “From around 675 BC vases provide good evidence for the use of the hoplite shield…. such a shield was far less manoeuvrable … as they [soldiers] advanced at a run the shield offered protection only to the left-hand side of the body…. the invention of the hoplite shield makes no sense except in the context of hand-to-hand fighting. The hoplite shield offers clear military advantages only in combination with heavy body-armour or in a very close-packed line, where each soldier (except the man at the right-hand end!) could protect his right side behind the shield of his right-hand neighbor during the advance. Paintings on pots show pipers in association with marching soldiers as early as they show use of the hoplite shield: once one was in very close-packed ranks with interlocking shields keeping in step became important. Inventing and adopting a shield can only have seemed a good idea when fighting in massed ranks was already familiar. Having a heavier and more securely held shield, which forced warriors to pack tightly together for maximum protection and covered the gaps between warriors, then became militarily desirable.”

  
25
. J.W.I. Lee, “Hoplite Warfare in Herodotus,” appendix N in
The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories
, ed. Robert B. Strassler, 799 (first Anchor Books edition, June 2009). I do not find convincing that these citations in Herodotus necessarily support this description of hoplite battle.

  
26
. Van Wees 2000.

  
27
. Schwartz 2002.

  
28
. Even if Krentz’s revised estimates for the weight of the shield and hoplite panoply are correct (see his chapter in this volume), the point remains unchanged: hoplites were fighting in armor that was much heavier and bulkier than anything they wore prior to the innovations in arms. Snodgrass points out that the arms were heavier when first introduced during the eighth
and seventh centuries than in the fifth century, when the revisionists acknowledge that the close-order formation of the phalanx was in place. Krentz himself argues that hoplite armor became lighter over time until it may have been as light as 10 kg less at the time he claims the close-order fighting first came into use during the Persian Wars. Schwartz points out that the hoplites themselves were considerably lighter than originally estimated as well, which would offset some of the possible downward adjustments in weight of armor.

  
29
. Schwartz 2002: 35, and in this volume.

  
30
. Van Wees 2000: 127.

  
31
. Snodgrass 1964: 35, 68.

  
32
. Thuc. 5.71.

  
33
. Greenhalgh 1973: 72.

  
34
. Krentz 2007: 72 uses V. D. Hanson’s
Western Way of War
(2000) as an example.

  
35
. Krentz 2007: 72. In this volume, Kurt Raaflaub argues that, though Near Eastern equipment may have served as a starting point, the Greek shield and hoplite arms in general are unique and unlike anything the ancient world had produced.

  
36
. Krentz 2007: 72 cites van Wees 2004b: 168–69 to support his assertions.

  
37
. Krentz 2007: 72–73 suggests that “as close as possible” might mean much more than three feet for Thucydides, but this is unlikely. Three feet is a fair estimate of the distance soldiers would need to stand apart for the passage to make sense. Why propose a much greater distance that explains nothing and only makes one of the most direct extant references to close-order fighting unnecessarily confusing and obscure? At the Yale conference, Krentz said that three feet or something close to it was a possibility for the distance between hoplites.

  
38
. 
Iliad
16.259–67.