Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (46 page)

  
67
. Hdt. 7.218.1–2: ἀνά τε ἔδραμον οἱ Φωκέες καὶ ἐνέδυον τὰ ὅπλα, καὶ αὐτίκα οἱ βάρβαροι παρῆσαν. ὡς δὲ εἶδον ἄνδρας ἐνδύομένους ὅπλα, ἐν θώματι ἐγένοντο (trans. de Sélincourt).

  
68
. Cf. Thuc. 6.69.1; Xen.
Hell
. 4.8.37–39; Plut.
Pel
. 32.3.

  
69
. Wilkins (1993) xxxiii–xxxv.

  
70
. Eur.
Heracl
. 720–26: εἰ δὲ τευχέων φοβῇ βάρος,/νῦν μὲν πορεύου γυμνός,ἐν δὲ τάξεσιν/κόσμῳ πυκάζου τῷδ’· ἐγὼ δ’ οἴσω τέως (trans. Vellacott).

  
71
. Anderson (1970) 13–42.

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CHAPTER 9

Not Patriots, Not Farmers, Not Amateurs: Greek Soldiers of Fortune and the Origins of Hoplite Warfare

JOHN R. HALE

In the eighth and seventh centuries BC, Greek soldiers adopted a new way of making war that has become known as the hoplite tradition. Hoplites were heavily armed infantry who carried large shields or
aspides
—circular, convex, and manipulated with double grips—and who typically confronted their opponents in phalanx formation. The first hoplites appeared on the historical scene in the mid-eighth century BC, and remained an essential part of Greek life throughout the Archaic and Classical periods.

What circumstances gave rise to the invention of hoplite arms and tactics? And who exactly were the first hoplites? To answer those questions, we must identify the precise contexts—chronological, geographical, social, and military—in which Greek hoplites first appeared. Were hoplite innovations triggered by class struggles between farmers and aristocrats?
¹
Or by an arms race among emerging Greek city-states—one that was launched when the men of each polis almost simultaneously took up the new equipment and tactics?
²
Or were the innovations adopted as symbols of social status and class identity?
³
All these possibilities have their adherents. This paper presents an alternative context for the origin of hoplite warfare, and tracks early hoplites into a realm where private enterprise, not public service, was the guiding star.

The mainstream of current scholarly opinion is united in regarding the polis or city-state as the breeding ground of the hoplite phalanx. The combatants are envisioned by some scholars as patriotic citizens
⁴
and sturdy agriculturalists defending their fields, and by others as members of a competitive leisure class, but the social and geographical context is always the polis. In accordance with these prevailing views, a tradition of military amateurism is invoked to account for the seeming simplicity of hoplite tactics.
⁵
Thus the classic and natural opponent of one city-state’s army of hoplites is assumed to be a second army of Greek hoplites, a mirror image of the first.

Hanson links the rise of hoplites to the agrarian sector of Greek society. He outlined his theory in
Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece
(1983) and has worked it out in detail thereafter in a succession of books and articles. In Hanson’s reconstruction, when a pre-Classical Greek landscape of large aristocratic estates gave way to a polis surrounded by small farms, a brand new military situation emerged.

It led to the formal creation of hoplite weaponry and finally face-to-face, near-ritual duels between agrarian phalanxes. In sum, yeomen emerged from the anonymity of the old mass to reinvent the Greek phalanx as the private domain of heavily armed, mutually dependent small farmers. This “invention” of hoplite warfare was not some utopian enterprise, the “construct” of some agrarian conspiracy. Instead imagine its birth far more pragmatically, as the result of one group of agrarians, perhaps first on the island of Euboea or in the Peloponnese at Argos in the late eighth century, reinventing and rearming the “phalanx” and thus finding themselves invincible on the battlefield. Other agricultural communities were also forced to go “hoplite” to defend their property.
⁶

Hans van Wees, though in agreement with Hanson about the centrality of the polis to this issue, locates hoplites in a very different social milieu. In his book
Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities
(2004), van Wees relegates Hanson’s fighting farmers to the category of myth, and presents as the opposing reality a set of leisure-class hoplites, motivated by
pleonexia
(“greed for more”) and the quest for high social and political status.

Despite some sense of respect for the toughness of farmers and shepherds, however, the model hoplite was not the working man whose fitness for war derived from hard labour, but the man of leisure who owed his fitness to dedicated physical and mental training. Those who theorised about the ideal state agreed that soldiers should not cultivate land, or do any productive work, but live off the labour of others and devote themselves to war and politics.
⁷

The central role played by the city-state in these two contrasting visions gains some support from historical, literary, and artistic evidence. Greeks were indeed fighting other Greeks at an early stage in the evolution of hoplite warfare—in the Lelantine War, for example, and in the momentous Spartan and Messenian wars. Nevertheless, I believe that the theaters of war that originally gave rise to the hoplite tradition lay far from the gathering places and plowed fields of the polis, and equally far from anything that can be described as a civic mentality or ideology.

Judging from archaeological discoveries of Greek arms and armor, as well as artistic representations, the heavily armed hoplite began to evolve in the eighth century BC. By about 650 BC, the hoplite had emerged as both the archetypal Greek fighting man and a dominant figure in Mediterranean warfare. Even at that early date, there were already two distinct strands within the hoplite tradition. The strand that monopolizes modern historical discourse is indeed polis-centered and patriotic.

Fair and good [
kalòn
…
agathòn
] the man who falls fighting in the front rank, dying for the fatherland.
⁸

The exhortations of the poet Tyrtaeus (mid-seventh century BC) have been traditionally linked by both ancient and modern historians to one or the other of the Spartan-Messenian Wars that eventually led to the complete subjugation of Messenia.
The other major “patriotic” war of this age was the Lelantine War between the Euboean cities of Chalcis and Eretria. In that shadowy conflict, each city was aided by allies from the Greek mainland or the eastern Aegean.
⁹
One specific interpolis battle may also be assigned to the mid-seventh century: the battle of Hysiae near Argos. This battle is mentioned by Pausanias, and dated by him, using a surprising synchronism with an Olympic victor and an Athenian archon named Peisistratus, to 669 or 668 BC. At Hysiae soldiers from Argos were said to have scored a victory over Spartans.
¹⁰

There were other battlefields where Greek met Greek in the seventh century. A war that broke out between the islanders of Paros and neighboring Naxos during the lifetime of Archilochus (mid-seventh century) may have involved not only a well-attested sea battle but also fighting on land.
¹¹
Several generations earlier at Paros, a late eighth-century mass burial or
polyandrion
of some 150 Parian soldiers may have commemorated the dead from an earlier Naxian war, or from an expedition even farther afield.
¹²

How frequent were classic hoplite battles—those phalanx-to-phalanx shoving matches, held like rituals on open plains between neighboring city-states? Lyric poetry and vase paintings provide our only contemporary evidence, since later Greek historians took only sporadic interest in military affairs before the Persian Wars. Were these combats so common that they became mere background noise, taken for granted by ancient historians and therefore underrepresented in the historical record? Such might be the implication of the eminently quotable description that Herodotus put into the mouth of the Persian commander in chief Mardonius, addressing King Xerxes.