Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (64 page)

Van Wees, H. 2009. “The economy.” In K. A Raaflaub and H. van Wees (eds.) 2009, 444–67.

Van Wees, H. 2011a. “Demetrius and Draco: Athens’ property classes and population in and before 317 BC.”
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, 69–110. Graz.

Van Wees, H. Forthcoming a.
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CHAPTER 12

The Hoplite Narrative

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Why Don’t We Know More about Hoplites?

There are few controversies in Greek history as spirited as those over the origins and nature of hoplite battle. The dilemma arises because we have few prose accounts of set battles before Marathon (490 BC). Consequently, it is far easier to take exception to a particular element of a general reconstruction than it is to risk offering a likely comprehensive scenario of the nature of the hoplite phalanx from meager evidence.

Surviving battle descriptions in later historians are fragmentary, and dependent largely on a prior oral tradition. Battle references to hoplites and/or mass fighting in Homer’s epics and the subsequent lyric poets remain subject to raging controversy. Poetical interpretations often require the sensitivity of a literary critic to distinguish realistic portrayal from expressions that are metaphorical, or predicated on the formulaic, metrical, and vocabulary rules of poetic expression. The net result is we know almost no details about either the strategy or the tactics involved in early battles from the eighth to early fifth centuries. The Lelantine Plain, the wars for Messenia, the battle of Hysiai, the so-called Battle of Champions, Sepeia, and a host of other engagements are now mostly mere names.
¹

Representation on vases and in stone often reflects the conventions of artistic genres. It is, after all, nearly impossible to portray a phalanx in its proper three-dimensional perspective in ceramic painting or even on temple friezes. Pots and sculpture are hard to date. The subject matter is far more often mythological in theme than historical.

Physical remains of arms and armor are invaluable sources of evidence. But after some 2,500 years, artifacts are often poorly preserved, especially those with leather and wood components. Their original weights and sizes remain inexact; and it is sometimes difficult to determine whether surviving specimens in dedicatory and ceremonial circumstances were typical or exceptional. Often given the scarcity of evidence, discussion of hoplite warfare is compressed over three centuries, inasmuch as we do know to what degree arms and tactics were roughly similar or at wide variance in the decades between,
say, 700 and 350 BC. And when ancient military analysts talk in the abstract about the weapons, tactics, and problems of the phalanx, they usually do so in reference to the Macedonian-inspired formations of the late Hellenistic period—as the extant Roman-era works of tacticians such as Arrian, Asclepiodotus, and Onasander attest.
²

Moreover, the nature of hoplite battle involves not merely a question of source materials and military history, but is deeply embedded in the central controversies of the rise of the polis itself: who were hoplites, and did they reflect or cause (or even, were they largely irrelevant to) the major social and economic changes of Greek history? Did hoplites and phalanxes prove central to the security of the small Greek city-states? Or, given the beauty of hoplite arms and the romance of phalanxes, has the later Western tradition exaggerated their importance, and forgotten the invaluable role of Greek horsemen, archers, and lightly armed troops? In short, major economic, political, social, and cultural interpretations of Greek history hinge on how we interpret often narrow controversies of hoplite fighting.
³

The Emergence of a Grand Narrative

Despite scholarly disagreements about hoplites, there has emerged over the last two centuries of classical scholarship what I would call the “grand hoplite narrative.” This general consensus, with occasional qualifications, has found its way into most histories of Greece and runs along something like the following lines.
⁴

Sometime in the late eighth century BC elements of the hoplite panoply began appearing in plenitude in Greece—prominently perhaps in the Peloponnese, but within decades throughout much of the Greek-speaking world. The concave round wooden shield, heavy bronze breastplate, greaves, and crested helmet, along with a thrusting spear with butt spike and ancillary sword, reflected a preference for fighting en masse in the phalanx. While the ensemble was often worn piecemeal and developed slowly, and while initially all sorts of differently armed warriors fought alongside hoplites, such heavy, cumbersome arms and armor eventually proved not only best suited for phalanx warfare but also disadvantageous for purely soloist fighters. The so-called hoplite panoply either reflected a desire to improve existing mass formations or, by the exceptional characteristics of such arms, began to prompt many of the novel tactics of phalanx warfare itself.
⁵

By the mid-seventh-century BC at least, many Greek city-states fielded small armies of hoplite phalanxes that perhaps brought a stature to infantry warfare not enjoyed by either the wealthier and less numerous horsemen—or the more numerous and less wealthy lightly armed soldiers. Accordingly, the Greeks felt there were certain desirable conventions to hoplite battle, concerning its conduct and duration, that tended to mitigate the destructive nature of frequent warring among small city-states—even as they allowed that on occasion such moral protocols of heavy infantry combat were ignored or abbreviated in the heat of battle, or over the course of longer wars simply superseded by other strategies and tactics.
⁶

Early hoplite battle, then, was conducted by infantrymen in cumbersome armor. Hoplites massed in columns several shields deep and collided with their opponents in some sort of shock battle, and perhaps after the fifth century, when equipment grew somewhat lighter, often at a trot or double-time. While there was chaotic and often vicious individual spear fighting along the front ranks, armies ideally tried to use their superior mass, solidarity, and cohesion to break apart the ranks of their opponents.

The round, double-gripped shield could provide its wearer only partial protection. Each hoplite found the right half of his body—especially his spear arm and shoulder—protected by the shield of the hoplite to his right. In some sense, the entire battle line was composed of fighters who simultaneously were both providing partial protection to, and receiving it from, their fellow hoplites at their sides. The greater depth of a phalanx was felt to provide commensurate increased—and desirable—thrust, even at the cost of taking more spearmen out of the initial collision and fighting in the killing zone. Accordingly, a hoplite ethos emerged stressing group solidarity and the need, as far as possible, to stay in one’s assigned rank, as the cumbersome panoply made solo fighting riskier to both self and comrade—and skirmishing clearly negated the advantages of heavy armor, the large shield, and long spear. Phalanxes, accordingly, were calibrated by the depth of “shields” rather than of “spears”—again a reflection of the emphasis on collective protective solidarity rather than individual battle prowess.

In the battle zones at the front of the two armies, spears often were broken, while the middle and rear ranks soon sought to force and push the frontline hoplites on through the enemy’s lines of shields. Elements of the phalanx usually advanced as a unit or collapsed together, often along tribal or regional contingents. Pursuit of the defeated was limited by both the weight of the panoply and the apparent reluctance to define victory by absolute annihilation of the enemy rather than the collapse of enemy advance and solidarity. Acknowledgment of the verdict of the battle was reinforced through a variety of rituals.
⁷

The Greek islands, the horse-raising plains in Thessaly and Macedon, and tribal frontiers such as the mountainous regions of western Greece were, in terms of geography alone, less conducive to battle by hoplite phalanxes. But elsewhere on the small plains of the mainland the rise of hoplites is often associated with the simultaneous fruition of the Greek polis, especially the prominence of a broadening property-owning class, positioned somewhere in between the landless poor and the mounted wealthy.
⁸

The prominence of hoplites in classical literature and art reflected both their utility on the battlefield—and a certain growing chauvinism of the middling warrior-citizen. There was certainly something visually arresting about the hoplite protective ensemble, from horsehair crest down to bronze greaves and even toe guards, enhanced when thousands of such armed warriors were arrayed in serried ranks—at least as we can tell from ancient literary descriptions and surviving vase paintings. And while the obvious combat limitations of heavily armed phalanxes were apparent to the Greeks as early as the Persian War, and all too real by the Peloponnesian War, city-states continued to invest in hoplite armies and often sought to defend or attack other city-states through decisive engagements, as the prominent hoplite battles of the fourth century attest.

Apart from reasons of military conservatism, and the general reverence for the autonomous property-owning heavy infantrymen, hoplite battle of some sort persisted for centuries from Archaic to Hellenistic times, quite apart from the social, political, and economical landscape of its origins. Few forms of warfare, after all, could concentrate so many fighters in such a small space to fight in such a decisive and public manner.
⁹

The general notion that Greek warfare was both frequent and yet not genocidal; that there was ideally a preference for decisive infantry battle rather than extended skirmishing and inconclusive raiding; and that the Greeks accepted war as inevitable and a tragic element of the human experience was predicated at least in part on the ethos of hoplite fighting that usually offered clear-cut results, involved many of the voting citizenry, and did not result in a degree of casualties that would have ruined the city-state.

Currently, however, much of the above traditional hoplite narrative has been questioned. In what follows, rather than concentrate in depth on the myriad of individual controversies that have arisen recently, I briefly summarize some of the more contentious points of dispute, and hope to show that the traditional narrative best reflects our existing evidence as well as offering the most logical hypothesis about the nature of hoplite battle.
¹⁰

Rich, Poor, Middle-Class—or Mixed Up—Hoplites?

Some critics have suggested that the notion of classical Greek hoplites as a distinct middling class—known in our sources often as
hoi mesoi
—is mostly a myth. Hoplite warfare, then, was supposedly instead mostly the domain of the upper classes that alone could afford armor; and fighting in mass formation is no reflection of an emergence of a new sort of Greek citizen.
¹¹

Yet the fact that the later Greeks themselves did not always recognize such a middle group in modernist terms as a clearly conceptualized “class”—or that the qualifications of
mesoi
at times were loose and fluid—does not negate its existence. Sometimes the argument for and against the presence of middling hoplites hinges on interpretation of Aristotle’s famous description in his
Politics
about the rise of the city-state and its connection with its hoplite citizenry (4.1297b16–24):

Indeed the earliest form of government among the Greeks after monarchy was composed of those who actually fought. In the beginning that meant cavalry, since without cohesive arrangement (
aneu suntaxeôs
), heavy armament (
to hoplitikon
) is useless; and experience and tactical knowledge of such hoplite systems (
tôn toioutôn empeiriai kai taxies
) did not exist in ancient times, and so power again lay with mounted horsemen. But once the poleis grew and those with hoplite armor became stronger (
tôn en tois hoplois ischusantôn
), more people shared in government (
pleious meteichon tês politeias
).

Note here Aristotle’s impression that the city-states were at first dominated by horsemen, since hoplites were in small numbers and did not fully employ the tactics of the phalanx (“cohesive arrangement”). But as population grew, and once heavy equipment and those who used it found their optimum expression on the battlefield, then government reacted accordingly to incorporate this new group (“more people”) of citizen-soldiers.

Aristotle’s sociology elsewhere in the
Politics
about classes is not systematic or even consistent. He often is imprecise (as are we moderns who naturally prefer a simplistic rich/poor political dichotomy in casual political discourse even as we privilege the all-American “middle class”) about the rich, poor, and middle classes. Nevertheless, Aristotle is also often unambiguous elsewhere in the
Politics
when talking about the relationships of hoplites to those who farm and own property (e.g., 4.1291a31–33), a common enough connection that echoes throughout Greek literature in diverse authors, in both implicit references and constant metaphors and similes.
¹²