Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (36 page)

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CHAPTER 7

HOPLITE HELL: HOW HOPLITES FOUGHT

PETER KRENTZ

If W. Kendrick Pritchett built the stage set for our understanding of Greek warfare and Anthony Snodgrass provided the costumes, Victor Davis Hanson made the actors come alive. Hanson’s gritty
Western Way of War
, in particular, has had an enormous impact on popular understanding of how Greeks fought, from Steven Pressfield’s
Gates of Fire
(1998)—in which Pressfield created an
othismós
drill that he called, memorably, “tree-fucking”—to Zack Snyder’s movie
300
(2007), in which the Spartans fight with the underhanded grip favored by Hanson. So any discussion of how hoplites fought (or what one of my friends, after reading
The Western Way of War
, called “hoplite hell”) must now start with Hanson’s interpretation.

Hanson writes forcefully and shows an excellent eye for vivid details. Using an impressive variety of scattered pieces of evidence, he builds a thick description of a hoplite battle. In his words, cobbled together from different parts of the book:
¹

for at least the two centuries between 700 and 500 B.C., and perhaps for much of the early fifth century B.C. as well, hoplite infantry battle determined the very nature of Greek warfare, and became the means to settle disputes—instantaneously, economically, and ethically…. Unfortunately, nearly all of the conflicts of the seventh and sixth centuries remain unrecorded. At this time hoplite battle remained a “pure,” static, unchanging match between men in the heaviest of armor, void of support from auxiliary cavalry, missile throwers, or archers…. [M]ost wars involved only an hour or more of pitched battle…. The actual battle environment for men who served in the phalanx was nearly identical wherever and whenever they fought…. [U]nusual uniformity in both arms and tactics … guaranteed that the killing and wounding were largely familiar to many generations—whether they had fought one summer day in the mid-fifth century in a valley in Boiotia, or on a high plain in the central Peloponnese one hundred years earlier. For men aged twenty through sixty—the uninitiated and veteran alike—the charge, the collision of spears, the pushing, trampling, wounding, panic, confusion, even the pile of
the battlefield dead, were all similar events to be experienced one awful, fatal time, or perennially until a man could fight no more.

Perhaps the only sentence here that I would not quarrel with makes the point that we have very limited literary evidence for Archaic warfare. As for the rest, hoplite battles did not decide wars instantaneously. Archaic wars sometimes dragged on and on. Think of the Messenian Wars, the Lelantine War, Sparta’s struggle with Tegea, or Athens’ conflicts with Megara and Aigina. Nor were these wars particularly ethical. The idea that Archaic Greeks fought fairly, following distinctive Greek laws of war, is a mirage based on later Greek claims about the good old days.
²
But my job is to discuss the nature of hoplite fighting. Let me first summarize, fairly briefly, my views on two aspects of Archaic warfare that will inform what follows. I will begin with the weight of hoplite equipment and the nature of the Archaic phalanx, or rather, the Archaic phalanges or ranks. Then I will focus on three debated aspects of a battle: the charge, the collision, and the pushing.

“The Burden of Hoplite Arms and Armor”

In
The Western Way of War
, Hanson devotes a chapter to “the burden of hoplite arms and armor,” in which he reports that modern estimates range from 50 to 70 lbs.
³
The higher figure is the most common estimate. Hanson mentions 70 lbs at least four times in
The Other Greeks
.

This estimate goes back to W. Rüstow and H. Köchly’s
Geschichte des griechischen Kriegswesens von der ältesten Zeit bis auf Pyrrhos
(1852).
⁴
Rüstow and Köchly estimated weights for each piece of equipment, calculating that a fully equipped hoplite carried 72 lbs or—since they were using German lbs (one German lb = 0.5 kg)—36 kg. Hans Delbrück picked up and popularized the Rüstow-Köchly total.
⁵
In Delbrück’s day, European soldiers carried 28–31 kg, so perhaps it is not surprising that he believed Greeks managed 36. Many scholars since have followed his lead.
⁶

I have discussed the equipment item by item in two other publications and do not want to repeat myself needlessly here.
⁷
Drawing on studies of surviving pieces of Greek equipment, especially from the German excavations at Olympia, and on the reconstructions made by reenactment groups in Britain and Australia, I conclude that Hanson’s picture of lumbering hoplites must be moderated. A realistic estimate is that a hoplite equipped with a helmet, cuirass, shin guards, shield, spear, and sword carried a total weight of 18–22 kg in the seventh century. By the time of the Persian Wars, helmets and shin guards had gotten thinner, and leather-and-linen corselets had largely replaced bronze-plate cuirasses, which were never ubiquitous. The total weight dropped to 14–21 kg. If a man did without shin guards and relied on his shield for chest protection, he could have carried only 9 kg.
⁸

Let me say a bit more about the shield, which a hoplite called an
aspis
, since it has played a significant role in the debate about the origins of the Greek phalanx. This
aspis
, with its central bronze armband (
porpax
) and leather handgrip at the right edge, was made of wood. It could be faced with a thin sheet of bronze, but movies such as
300
give a misleading impression when the actors use metal shields. Wood did the work. And the three shields that have survived with enough wood to be identified were poplar, willow, and poplar or willow—precisely the woods recommended by the Roman naturalist Pliny for shields (
Natural History
16.209). These rather soft woods tend to dent rather than split. Because their density is so much lower than the density of oak or even pine, a shield made of willow or poplar will weigh roughly half as much as one made of oak and two-thirds to three-quarters as much as one made of pine.

Reconstructors have shown just how light a
porpax aspis
could be. P. H. Blyth’s reconstruction of the best-preserved example, a fifth-century poplar specimen now in the Museo Gregoriano Etrusco, weighs 6.2 kg. This shield, which is on the low end of the range in diameter (0.82 m), had a bronze facing on the exterior that weighed 3 kg. The same shield, unfaced, would weigh only 3.2 kg. Craig Sitch of Manning Imperial in Australia makes several versions: one of poplar, 0.84 m in diameter, weighs 4.3 kg, and another of radiata pine, 0.85 m in diameter, weighs 6.5–7 kg (samples vary). The Hoplite Association in London produces shields made of lime (similar in density to pine) and pine, 0.93 m in diameter, that weigh 6.4 kg. In poplar or willow, these shields would weigh about a third less. Sitch’s heaviest version, 0.91 m in diameter, faced with brass and lined with leather, weighs 9 kg. Most shields, however, were
not
faced with bronze.
⁹

In short, while hoplite shields could weigh 7–9 kg, many weighed only half as much.

Did all hoplites carry this
porpax
shield? No. Greek writers applied the term “hoplite” to Egyptians carrying shields that reached to their feet and to Macedonians who used a much smaller shield.
¹⁰
Did all Greek hoplites carry this
porpax
shield? Perhaps yes, but there is good iconographic evidence for a significantly different variation, the oblong “Boeotian” shield found in Archaic vase painting and on coins, in addition to the famous figurine from Dodona, now in Berlin. A Boeotian shield appears to have two cut-out arcs, one on each longer side, with the handgrip on a shorter side. Scholars have usually dismissed the Boeotian shield as an unrealistic heroic marker, adapted from Mycenaean figure-of-eight shields and out of place in a hoplite phalanx. But we have to guard against letting assumptions about how hoplites fought prejudge what equipment they used. A number of scholars have followed John Boardman in arguing that the art reflects reality.
¹¹
Handling a Boeotian shield would have differed from handling a round
aspis
, because no one would want to hold a Boeotian shield with the arm bent at a 90-degree angle, positioning the cutouts to expose the throat and groin. But a warrior could rotate the shield quickly by moving his left hand counterclockwise 180 degrees, lessening the likelihood of dislocating his arm. One anonymous reenactor has posted a YouTube video showing how the Boeotian shield could work.
¹²
He reminds me of one of the stories told about Sophanes, son of Eutychides from Dekeleia, who distinguished himself at the battle of Plataea. It was said that he “had an anchor as an emblem on his shield, which never ceased moving and was always in swift motion” (Herodotus 9.74.2).

No Boeotian shields have been found, but if they were made of organic materials, perhaps by stretching hides over a wooden frame, they would have disintegrated long before now. The drinking song of Hybrias the Cretan, usually dated to the late Archaic
period, demonstrates that a leather shield could be a source of pride (Athenaios
Deipnosophistai
695f–696a). To judge by vase paintings, the Boeotian shield remained an attractive option for a minority of fighters throughout the Archaic period. It would have looked impressive as the warrior twirled it about, and it would have been more comfortable to walk or run with it slung on one’s back, positioned with the cutouts at elbow height so one’s elbows would not constantly bump the shield. Its continued use has important implications for the nature of the Archaic phalanx.

The Nature of the Phalanx

From a strictly literary point of view, the hoplite phalanx did not exist until the fourth century, when Xenophon refers to “the phalanx of hoplites” (
Anabasis
6.5.27).
¹³
The word “phalanx” apparently derives from a root meaning “log.” Neither Herodotus nor Thucydides uses it in a military context, and with a single exception, the Archaic poets use it only in the plural, phalanges, with one exception in the
Iliad
.
¹⁴
The word “hoplite,” which derives from
hopla
(military equipment), first occurs in the fifth century as an adjective in poetry; it becomes common as a noun in the second half of the century, first in Herodotus, then in Thucydides, Aristophanes, Euripides, and inscriptions.
¹⁵
When discussing Archaic warfare, we might do well to avoid the expression “hoplite phalanx” and refer simply to phalanges or ranks, without prejudicing the issue of who fought in them.