Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (38 page)

The prebattle paean served multiple functions. If the men had previously walked some distance, it helped them regain their order, as they found their places and fell into step with the movements of the dance. It helped them to warm up for the fight. It gave them a sense of solidarity, as they joined in doing something familiar, something they had learned to do as young men. And as they chanted and stamped their feet together, they appealed to the god to see them safely through the battle. Performing the paean gave “courage to friends as it rids them of the fear of the enemy” (Aeschylus,
Seven against Thebes
270). As the paean ended, they found themselves walking confidently forward, ready to fight. In his semifictitious
Education of Cyrus
(3.3.58–59), Xenophon has Cyrus the Great do it just right: After sacrificing successfully, he leads his well-trained forces ahead at a quick pace. Before they come into missile range, he starts the paean. When it finishes his men are walking boldly forward, filled with “enthusiasm, ambition, strength, courage, exhortation, self-control, and obedience.” When they step on the first arrows shot by the enemy, they yell and charge.

As hoplites charged, yelling a war-cry such as
eleleu!
or
alala!
they tended to lose their formation (Thucydides 5.70). The Spartans were the exception, for they advanced all the way to the sound of pipes, but Hanson suspects (I think rightly) that Thucydides gives “an idealized picture of even the Spartan army, which often did not follow such a textbook procedure.”
⁴¹
Once they started moving, hoplites “lost the rigid conformity of finely tailored columns.”
⁴²
Obstacles such as ditches, clefts, clumps of trees, ridges and water courses, Polybios says (18.31.5–6), are all sufficient to break up a formation. Men scattered and bunched. By the time they reached the enemy, the line would not have been straight or the files even.

Scholars and reenactors debate how hoplites held their spears when they charged. They began their advance with spears held at the slope on their right shoulders, spearheads and thumbs upward. To judge by Xenophon’s
Anabasis
(6.5.25), they lowered them on command to an underhand thrusting position, thumbs forward. Did they change to an overhand grip (thumbs backward, spearheads forward) before they
reached the enemy? Vases show both underhand and overhand grips. Hanson and Matthew maintain that hoplites delivered their initial blows underhand; reenactors in Melbourne agree.
⁴³
They would interpret men using the overhand grip as throwing javelins. But J. K. Anderson argues that warriors raised their thrusting spears to an overhand position before they reached the enemy; reenactors in London agree with him.
⁴⁴
Anderson believes that the hoplites in the second line on the right on the Chigi vase are shown in the act of raising their spears by flipping them up into the air just enough to grab them again with their thumbs reversed. He comments (and I can confirm) that a little practice with a broom handle will show that changing grips is not all that hard. You have to watch closely to catch Alan Pittman doing it in one of his YouTube demonstration videos, so quickly and smoothly does his hand change position as he raises his arm.
⁴⁵
J. F. Lazenby argues that changing grips would have been more difficult after the fighting started, and this would be particularly true if Matthew is correct that the weights of the spearhead and butt spike mean the spear’s center of gravity would be well toward the butt spike, not in the middle, so that perhaps 2 m of his spear would extend in front of the warrior.
⁴⁶
Lazenby points out that underhand thrusts shown on vases are invariably in duels, while the (admittedly few) vases showing hoplite lines about to engage show raised spears. He therefore inclines to think that hoplites changed to an overhand grip before they charged, while some changed back again after their line broke and they had enough room to change.

The Collision

In his now classic book,
The Face of Battle
(1976), John Keegan claimed that “large masses of soldiers do not smash into each other, either because one gives way at the critical moment, or because the attackers during the advance to combat lose their fainthearts and arrive at the point of contact very much inferior in numbers to the mass they are attacking.”
⁴⁷
Keegan’s denial of shock fits the ancient historians, who regularly speak of armies coming “to hands” or “to spear.” It also fits the slow, methodical Spartan advance, which would not have aided shock.

Though he was inspired by Keegan, Hanson argues that Greek hoplites crashed into each other. He says:

a fair reading of the ancient accounts of hoplite battles suggests that in the case of the Greeks—and perhaps among the Greeks alone—the first charge of men usually smashed right into the enemy line: the key was to achieve an initial shock through collision which literally knocked the enemy back and allowed troops to pour in through the subsequent tears in the line…. Indeed, the narratives of the battles of Mantineia, Delion, Nemea, and Leuktra, not to mention the accounts of earlier (often nameless) conflicts in the Lyric poets, make no sense unless we understand that both sides literally collided together, creating the awful thud of forceful impact at the combined rate of ten miles per hour.
⁴⁸

Hanson actually quotes from only one ancient account, the second part of the battle of Koroneia (not the initial fight), where Agesilaos “made a furious frontal attack on the
Thebans,” according to Xenophon, “and clashing their shields together they pushed, they fought, they killed, they died” (
Hellenika
4.3.19 =
Agesilaos
2.12).

Perhaps sensing that this single passage is inconclusive—Xenophon describes the battle as “like no other fought in my time” (
Hellenika
4.3.16), so it’s unwise to use it as if it were typical—Hanson offers four reasons “why we must assume that ancient Greek battle within its first few seconds was a terrible collision of soldiers on the run.”
⁴⁹
None is compelling.

1. The depth of the phalanx. “The function of those to the rear,” he says, “was literally to push their comrades forward.” This statement assumes what needs to be proved.

2. The size and shape of hoplite shield created a feeling of “absolute protection.” I doubt it. Shields were neither impenetrable nor unbreakable.

3. “The enemy line was not necessarily an absolutely impenetrable wall of shields.” I agree. But why would this increase the likelihood of shock?

4. At this stage men were irrational; “adrenaline and the laws of motion made continued movement forward more likely than a sudden stop.” The stop would not have to be sudden. If Keegan is right that in other times and places infantry lines did not crash into each other, we require good evidence for believing that Greeks were different.

Perhaps Everett Wheeler goes too far when he dismisses the idea of shock on the grounds that many men would have died from the impact.
⁵⁰
I do not doubt that eager hoplites sometimes collided. But I do not think Hanson has made his case for a general collision. As Adrian Goldsworthy points out, “references in our sources to the great noise when battle was joined cannot be used to prove that the two phalanxes literally crashed together.”
⁵¹
Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 film
Troy
gives a realistic impression of the charge. The Greeks break their formation somewhat as they run toward the stationary Trojans, deployed in a tight formation outside their city wall. But the film is less realistic in having all the leading Greeks slam into the Trojan shields. Computer-generated imagery has created an unrealistic uniformity.

The Pushing (
ōthismós
)

In Hanson’s scenario, a brief period of very crowded fighting followed the initial collision, before the battle turned into a shoving match, a sort of inverted tug-of-war. In taking this view, Hanson followed many distinguished scholars.
⁵²
Cartledge, for example, writes that “warfare between massed phalanxes (phalanges) was not a graceful or imaginative affair, but required above all disciplined cohesion and unyielding physical and moral strength … fighting consisted chiefly of a concerted shoving (ôthismos) akin to the tight scrummaging of modern rugby football.” This rugby analogy has proved to be a powerful one.

For all its prominence in modern discussions of Archaic battle—how many other Greek words made it into Donald Kagan’s opening remarks at the 2008 Yale conference?—the word
ōthismós
occurs rarely in the battle narratives of the classical historians: twice in Herodotus (7.225.1, the struggle over Leonidas’ body at
Thermopylae, and 9.62.2, the end of the battle of Plataia), once in Thucydides (4.96, the battle of Delion), and never in Xenophon. The word for the great shoving contest supposed to be the essence of Greek battle, in other words, occurs once in a description of Greek fighting Greek. There it does not stand alone, but is modified by “of shields” or perhaps, by analogy with Herodotus 5.30.4, we should understand “of men with shields.” From these few passages, it is hard to be sure that Thucydides’
ōthismós
of shields is any more literal than Herodotus’
ōthismós
of words (8.78, 9.26).

Years ago, scholars did not take
ōthismós
to mean something like a rugby scrum on steroids. Look at how translators used to render Herodotus. George Rawlinson in 1858–60 was typical: “a fierce struggle” and “a hand-to-hand struggle.”
⁵³
Commentators and lexicographers were no different. In the first American edition of
A Greek-English Lexicon
(1848), Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott gave “a very
hot, close fight
” and “to come to
close quarters
.” In 1908, R. W. Macan wrote that “Hdt. seems to use ὠθισμό for fighting at the closest quarters (without special reference to its etymological sense).”
⁵⁴
As late as 1938, J. E. Powell’s
Lexicon to Herodotus
translated
ōthismós
as “hand-to-hand combat.”
⁵⁵

Nor were nineteenth-century military historians thinking of Greek battles as shoving contests. Delbrück, for instance, wrote that

In such a phalanx two ranks at most can participate in the actual combat, with the second rank stepping into the holes of the first at the moment of contact. The following ranks serve as immediate replacements for the dead and wounded, but they exercise principally a physical and moral pressure. The deeper phalanx will defeat the more shallow one, even if on both sides exactly the same number of combatants actually manage to use their weapons.
⁵⁶

By “physical pressure,” Delbrück does not mean shoving, as he makes clear on the next page. There he says that Greeks did not put unarmored men in the rear ranks because

the realization that they could not really expect to receive any true support from these rear ranks would have seriously weakened the drive, the forward thrust of the foremost ranks, in which, of course, the value of the rearmost ranks normally lies.
⁵⁷

If battles were shoving matches, more men in the rear would have helped, whether armed or unarmed. Delbrück must mean that by their reassuring physical presence the rear ranks supported the front ranks and encouraged their advance.

The earliest use of the rugby analogy that I have found occurs in G. B. Grundy’s
Thucydides and the History of his Age
, originally published in 1911:

Under ordinary circumstances the hoplite force advanced into battle in a compact mass…. When it came into contact with the enemy, it relied in the first instance on shock tactics, that is to say, on the weight put into the first onset and developed in the subsequent thrust. The principle was very much the same as that followed by the forwards in a scrummage at the Rugby game of football.
⁵⁸

Since the forwards are only eight of fifteen players on a rugby team, perhaps Grundy might have had in mind a “scrum” of the first two or three lines, not of eight lines or more. His further explanation of his idea is curious, to say the least. He says:

People who are unacquainted with military history do not understand the importance of mere avoirdupois weight in close fighting. A regiment of big men meeting a regiment of smaller men in a circumscribed space, such as, for example, a village street, will almost certainly drive the latter back…. In the fifth century the appreciation of it [the factor of weight] would seem to have been at least imperfect. It was not till Leuktra that the Greeks really learnt this particular lesson in the military art.
⁵⁹

This passage strikes me as really odd. Greek battles did not take place on village streets, and the Greeks were very well acquainted with their own military history. If weight was literally so important in Archaic and Classical battles, how can it be that the Greeks didn’t appreciate it until the fourth century?

In any case, Johannes Kromayer and Georg Veith used the word
Massendruck
in their 1928 handbook, though they did not amplify what they meant by it.
⁶⁰
They may have meant that the entire front rank or two pushed, or they may have meant that all ranks pushed together. W. J. Woodhouse had the latter in mind in his 1933 book
King Agis III of Sparta and His Campaign in Arkadia in 418 B.C
. This is the first clear statement I have found of what became the dominant view: