Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (47 page)

From what I hear, the Greeks are pugnacious enough, and start fights on the spur of the moment without sense or judgement to justify them. When they declare war on each other, they go off together to the smoothest and levellest bit of ground they can find, and have their battle on it—with the result that even the victors never get off without heavy losses, and as for the losers—well, they’re wiped out.
¹³

Although the “dramatic date” of this passage in its narrative context is 480 BC, the date of composition may be as late as the 420s, with the author either satirizing or deploring (or both) the situation of his own time. Herodotus presents hoplite battles as commonplace yet ceremonial, and also as being extremely costly in human lives. Hanson, although a proponent of ritualized hoplite battles, argues that in reality the early Greeks who served as hoplites had to devote most of their time to farming: hence wars and battles were few. “Hoplite battles were themselves singular and brief. They were also not frequent before the fifth century.”
¹⁴
By Hanson’s own tally of hoplite warfare in the seventh and sixth centuries, “there were not more than a dozen important campaigns in the historical record involving the major Greek city-states in more than two hundred years.”
¹⁵

This observation fits well with Hornblower’s claim that in Greek literature and art “the prominence of war is disproportionate to its frequency and significance in practice.”
¹⁶
Yet such sporadic warfare would seem unlikely to stimulate or sustain any cultural tradition, especially a highly specialized military tradition. If the hoplite
tradition was
not
fostered through regular combat between Greek city-states, then we must look elsewhere for the conflicts that offered long-term and consistent training in the arts of war. Just such conflicts existed outside the Greek homeland, in the wider Mediterranean world.

Away from the polis, a more extensive and detailed historical record bears witness to the second strand of early hoplite warfare: campaigns undertaken by Greek soldiers of fortune. These men fought not on the fields of Greece but overseas, as pirates, raiders, mercenaries, bodyguards, land-grabbers, and generals for hire. Archilochus of Paros presents their philosophy, which is utterly antithetical both to the “good death” advocated by Tyrtaeus and to the ritualized combat described by Herodotus.

Some Thracian is waving the shield I reluctantly left by a bush, a flawless piece. So what? I saved myself. Forget the shield. I will get another, no worse.
¹⁷

The Greek soldier of fortune of the Archaic age, like his better-known successors of the fourth century, ventured abroad in search of gain and glory. A drinking song asserts the view of the man who fights for himself, not for his city.

I have great wealth: a spear, a sword, and the fine leather shield which protects one’s skin. For with this I plough, with this I harvest, with this I trample the sweet wine from the vines, with this I am called master of serfs. Those who dare not hold a spear, a sword, or the fine leather shield which protects one’s skin, all cower at my knee and prostrate themselves, calling me ‘Master’ and ‘Great King’.
¹⁸
(Athenaeus 695f–696a, Page)

The mysterious “Hybrias the Cretan,” to whom these verses are attributed, is known only from the quotation of this skolion in Athenaeus’
Deipnosophistae
. Archilochus of Paros, however, was a real seventh-century Greek who, by his own account, served both the God of War and the Muses.
¹⁹
Archilochus enjoyed drinking the same Ismaric wine that Homer’s Odysseus had prized as booty from a shore raid in Thrace. When Odysseus’ company of Ithacan soldiers took Ismaric wine from the Kikones, Odysseus was concerned to ensure an equal division of the loot.
²⁰
Archilochus sees the matter from the entrepreneur’s point of view.

In my spear is my kneaded barley bread, in my spear is Ismaric wine, and I drink it leaning on my spear.
²¹

For early Greek soldiers like Archilochus, warfare became at times a career. These men were professional soldiers, not amateurs. They sought the good things in life not through a display of arms as status symbols, and still less through agricultural labor, but through wielding their weapons successfully on one battlefield after another.

The evidence for this branch of Greek military activity has been summarized by van Wees in two sections of his book
Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities
. He has given these sections the evocative titles “An Army of Wanderers: Mercenaries, Exiles, Adventurers” and “Epikouroi: Mercenaries and Other Outsiders.”
²²
Their unimportance in his overall scheme of Greek warfare, however, is indicated by a simple page count: 10 pages are devoted to these fighters out of a main text of 240.

Instead of considering that freebooters like Archilochus may have been a primary influence in the evolution of Greek warfare, van Wees ties their activities back to his central focus: the civic tradition. “The abundance of men, citizens and itinerants, who were prepared—indeed keen—to fight for personal prestige and wealth reinforced the willingness of Greek cities to wage war for the honour and profit of the community.”
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He concludes by contrasting these “outsiders” to the Greek “ideal of the citizen-soldier.”
²⁴
Yet as we shall see, these soldiers of fortune did in fact lead the kind of highly specialized and professionalized military life, with continuous months and years devoted to the pursuit of war, that Hanson, van Wees, Hornblower, and many other modern scholars routinely deny to the citizen-soldiers of the classical Greek polis. It is time to consider the possibility that hoplite arms and tactics evolved outside the realm of the polis, and not within it.

The Crucible: Eastern Mediterranean Warfare in the Eighth Century BC

In his article “Traders, Pirates, Warriors: The Proto-History of Greek Mercenary Soldiers in the Eastern Mediterranean,”
²⁵
Nino Luraghi presents evidence to show that Ionian Greek soldiers were fighting as mercenaries for the kings of Assyria as early as 732 BC. In that year the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III captured Damascus in Syria, and his soldiers plundered the city. Several bronzes that appear to be loot from the royal treasury of Damascus have turned up in excavations at three sanctuaries of the Ionian Greeks: those of Athena at Miletus in Asia Minor, of Hera at Samos in the Aegean, and of Apollo at Eretria on Euboea. These heirloom bronzes consist of elaborate frontlets and blinkers from the headgear of chariot horses. Inscriptions on the pieces themselves identify their previous owner as King Hazael of Damascus.
²⁶

Stratigraphic contexts at the Greek sanctuaries assign this cluster of finds to the eighth century, thus supporting a direct link to the Assyrian campaign. Luraghi concludes that these Near Eastern bronzes were dedicated by soldiers from three different parts of Greece who took part in the sack of Damascus, and who made gifts to their gods for bringing them home not only alive but rich with oriental booty.
²⁷
If the men from Eretria and Samos and Miletus who collected royal loot from Damascus were prehoplite soldiers, then their presence in the Assyrian army provides a context for the subsequent invention of hoplite arms and tactics. If, on the other hand, these Greeks already fought as hoplites, then we might regard their heavy armament and disciplined close-order formation as the features that made them desirable mercenaries in the eyes of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser.

Snodgrass has observed, “The very large round shield of sheet bronze carried by Assyrian infantrymen, though it had only a single central hand-grip, must have influenced the evolution of the Greek type.”
²⁸
If Luraghi is right that Ionians fought in Tiglath-pileser’s army in 732 BC, then the campaigns that involved the conquest of Damascus would provide a specific context for Snodgrass’s theoretical interactions between Greek and Assyrian soldiers.

There was another aspect of eighth-century conditions in the Near East, however, that provides a background for the appearance of Greek soldiers of fortune at
Damascus. Viking-like, the Ionians were at this time venturing overseas in their long ships not only to serve as mercenaries (as the Vikings did in a later age at Byzantium) but even earlier as piratical raiders. Ionian attacks on coastal cities in the Levant between 738 and 732 BC are repeatedly documented in royal Assyrian correspondence. Let us consider the record of these seaborne attackers.

Several years before the capture of Damascus, a royal Assyrian official named Qurdi-Ashur-lamur learned from a mounted messenger that seafaring men “from the land of Iauna” (i.e.. Ionia) had come ashore on the coast of the Levant and attacked a number of cities.
²⁹
Qurdi-Ashur-lamur marshaled his forces and set off to confront the invaders. When the Ionians saw the Assyrian troops approaching, they retreated to their ships (empty-handed, the official assured Tiglath-pileser, his king) and then vanished into the open sea. The threat of these armed seaborne Greeks was serious enough to warrant building new fortifications and shifting more Assyrian troops to the coastal area.

The Ionians persisted. During the reign of Sargon II in 715 BC, the royal annals recorded that the king—a usurper who had seized the kingship after a career as a general—assembled a fleet of ships on the Syrian coast and personally led a counterattack against the Ionians at sea. According to the texts, Sargon intended to stop both their deadly raids on Tyre and Cilicia and also their disruptions of commerce. He succeeded. The annals repeat many variations of Sargon’s subsequent boast: “I caught like fishes the Ionians who live in the midst of the sea of the sunset.”
³⁰
This poetical phrase suggests that the troublesome raiders were known to be islanders from the Aegean. They may in fact have been Ionians from as far off as Samos and Euboea. The ethnic term “Iauna” or “Iavan” eventually became the generic name for Hellenes throughout the Near East.

King Sargon’s son and successor Sennacherib defeated a Greek army in a land battle in Cilicia, probably in 696 BC. Two years later Sennacherib is said to have repelled an Ionian fleet in an engagement off the Cilician coast. The royal annals for the year 694 BC record that Ionian seafarers had been captured by the king and subsequently pressed into service in the Assyrian army.
³¹
These Greek warriors then continued their military careers under new management, far from home. Did this transformation of raiders into mercenaries repeat a pattern already established in the reign of Tiglath-pileser, four decades earlier? In any case, such Near Eastern adventures foreshadow the exploits of Greek soldiers of fortune in Egypt, which we will consider shortly.

No surviving Greek historical source preserves any record of these early encounters between Ionians and Assyrians. It may be, however, that the traditional narrative material in the
Iliad
was reshaped by Homer to reflect the contemporary epic of Greek fleets voyaging eastward to assault walled towns beyond the sea. Some scholars have in fact suggested that horse-shaped Assyrian siege towers of the eighth century directly inspired the “Trojan Horse” of Homeric tradition.
³²
In any case, the archaeological discoveries and Assyrian records prove the reality of—and also provide solid dates for—these early military contacts. The subsequent history of the Greeks shows their importance. As Luraghi concludes,

If the arguments presented in this paper are accepted, the history of Greek mercenaries begins considerably earlier than is usually thought. Its roots
would lie in the activities of pirates-traders from Euboea, the Cycladic islands, and Asia Minor, who seem to have started their business in the Levant in the third quarter of the 8th century. They were the ancestors of the Greek mercenaries who fought for almost every single Near Eastern kingdom from the mid-seventh century to the age of Alexander the Great.
³³

The final century of the Greek mercenary tradition looms large in the historical record, thanks to the career and writings of Xenophon. Mercenary armies of the fourth century BC have been closely examined in books by H. W. Parke
³⁴
and Matthew Trundle.
³⁵
The existence of these later Greeks who fought for personal gain has been regarded as an unfortunate outcome of the Peloponnesian War, a degeneration and debasement of the original patriotic, polis-centered tradition of hoplite warfare. Study of the eighth century evidence, however, shows that Xenophon and his companions were in fact reverting to type. Mercenary service and raiding expeditions were part of the environment in which Greek hoplites evolved. Was this type of warfare directly linked to the appearance of hoplite arms and tactics?

The young fighting man of Euboea or Samos or Miletus whose cry was “Eastward, ho!” would follow the path of the rising sun to the margins of mighty empires. There he experienced a kind of warfare very different from the ritualized hoplite battle attested elsewhere in our sources. His company issued not from the walls of his home city, but from oared ships beached on an alien and hostile coast. The situations he faced while wading ashore or proving his worth to foreign kings shaped his approach to war. His arms and fighting methods were designed to score victories, not against others of his own kind, but against non-Greek chariots, horsemen, and lightly armed troops, or in assaults on walled towns. As for agricultural pursuits, our young soldier of fortune took up arms not to protect a farm that he worked himself but, I would suggest, to escape from the routine drudgery of farmwork altogether.