Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (9 page)

Since Grundy the emphasis on the weight and awkwardness of the defensive armor had become a key part of the orthodoxy. “In the new hoplite style, defensive armour was much heavier.” The fighter could hold the new double-grip shield more firmly, but could only cover his left side. Moreover, it was difficult to maneuver the shield to protect the right. “This was not necessary while the line stood fast, for a good half of every man’s shield projected to the left of his elbow and covered the next man’s right side. In flight such a shield was no protection at all, merely a burden, and if he ran away the hoplite was apt to throw it down.” The use of weapons distinguishes the hoplite from the Dark Age warrior. “The spear was still the first weapon of offence, but no longer as a missile: instead, it was held firmly for a thrust, the favorite stroke being made with the spear held high and pointed downwards to attack the neck above the edge of the breastplate. If the spear failed, the hoplite took to his sword like the older type of fighter.”
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The description in Andrewes of the main elements of hoplite battle and its contrast with the style of fighting in the heroic age recalls both Grundy and Grote. “Offensively the decisive factor is the weight of the combined charge of several ranks of hoplites with a view to breaking the enemy’s line, and this kind of charge needed practice.” Homer’s depictions of individual duels owe something to the needs of heroic poetry. On the other hand, “real fighting of the pre-hoplite period tended to be like that, with the mass of the troops only lightly armed and the expert fighters attacking one another individually.”
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Following Lorimer, Andrewes dates the revolution to the first quarter of the seventh century based on iconography. The painting of battle scenes on Greek vases does not begin until the late eighth century, and the images are often indeterminate. But the representations of the old style at the end of the eighth century contrast with the depictions of fighting between hoplite warriors on Corinthian and Attic vases before 675, and the series of lead figurines with hoplite armor from Sparta in about 700. The definitive example is the Chigi vase painted around 650: “Protocorinthian artists had mastered the difficult problem of making a picture which represents hoplites in formation … for purposes of dating, the first representations of even single hoplites is decisive, since the nature of hoplite equipment is such that it must from the first have been used in formation and cannot have been adopted piecemeal.”
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Drawing inspiration from Aristotle, he connects the emergence of hoplite warfare with the rise of the middling citizens, broad-based political reforms, and the rise of the early Greek tyrants.

The social and political basis for these two styles of fighting must be entirely different. The earlier, more individual method is the method of a military aristocracy, where the mass of the people is of little account and the brunt of the fighting is borne by a class of privileged experts: the hoplite method needs a broader basis, a greater number of trained fighters accustomed to acting as a team and not to showing off their individual prowess.

Andrewes identifies the hoplites as “a sort of middle class, including the more substantial farmers, for the equipment of Greek armies was not provided by the state, and the hoplites were just that income-group which could afford hoplite armour.” He points out the political effect of the new tactics: “the middle class would start to claim its share of power in the state, breaking into the monopoly held by the aristocrats.
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In the
Politics
, Aristotle made similar observations: the early polis relied for its military strength on cavalry, which only the wealthy class could afford; therefore, the first constitutions after the monarchies were very narrow; but when the polis came to depend on the hoplite army, political power was spread more widely. Andrewes points out that the remarks about cavalry in early Greece cannot be verified but that this in itself does not invalidate what the philosopher says about how the introduction of hoplite tactics affected the early constitutions. Indeed, Andrewes connects the hoplites with tyranny, though Aristotle does not. “The tyrannies begin a generation or so after the introduction of hoplites, and it is hardly possible that there should be no connection between them.”
⁸³
“There is no direct proof that the earliest tyrants, Cypselus
of Corinth and Orthagoras of Sicyon, relied on hoplite support,” but, since Cypselus never needed a bodyguard, he must have been sure of the army.
⁸⁴

Sparta and Solonian Athens provide stronger evidence for the emergence of the hoplite class. At Sparta, membership in the sovereign assembly depended on service in the phalanx. “These soldier-citizens proudly called themselves the ‘Equals’ (
homoioi
), and while they held down a subject population many times their own number, they attempted to preserve a strict equality within their own body.” That the new style of fighting produced an egalitarian ethos is one of the essential features of the hoplite narrative. In the case of Sparta, it enabled the polis to avoid revolution and to attain its renowned stability. “There was no tyranny at Sparta, and one important reason is that they gave the hoplites the vote and insisted on equality between them.” A comparable crisis later arose in Athens.

Early in the sixth century Solon staved off civil war by breaking the absolute political power of the noble families called Eupatridae. He divided the Athenians into four classes with privileges based on farm income instead of birth. The lowest class had minimal powers, which included the right to vote in the assembly and at elections, and to sit in the court of appeal. But Solon restricted eligibility for high office to the two richest classes. “In between comes the third class called
zeugitai
, who were roughly the hoplites, indeed that seems to be the meaning of the name: they were admitted to minor political office.” The hoplites may have brought about the crisis in Athens, but Solon in his moderation did not satisfy their interests. “The hoplites were the politically active element, the group who would have gained most land if there had been a revolution. Solon, as he boasts, contrived to keep the demos [
sc
. the hoplites and no one else] in order. In his constitutional settlement the principle [
sic
] gainers were the rich men outside the circle of the great Eupatrid families. The hoplites got only as much as Solon thought good for them, and it was not nearly as much as they wanted.”
⁸⁵
However, in the case of both Athens and Sparta, the polis had to come to terms with the emergence of the middling farmers to avoid revolution and tyranny.

Andrewes credits hoplites with transferring power from the narrow aristocracies to a much wider class throughout Greece during the age of the tyrannies and the succeeding regimes. “The detailed evidence sometimes confirms and nowhere contradicts the thesis that these were mainly hoplite revolutions, and the
a priori
likelihood is very great that the institution of the hoplite army would entail such a shift of political power.” The reason was simple: other poleis had no choice. “In military development no state can afford to lag behind, and if one city adopted the new arms and tactics the rest must do so in self defence. From now on the defence of the state rested on the hoplites, and with the knowledge of this it is not surprising that they should gradually acquire confidence and begin to demand a share of political power.”
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The hoplite orthodoxy attained its complete form with the thesis of Andrewes. Subsequent scholars have drawn out its implications in various ways, and the theory has strongly influenced the manner in which many textbooks present the rise of the polis. W. G. Forrest’s 1966
The Emergence of Greek Democracy, 800–400 BC
is one of the earliest and most prominent examples.
⁸⁷
Forrest uses the hoplite orthodoxy to explain the breakdown of the aristocratic Greek state of 800 BC and the attainments of
the polis, namely, the absolute acceptance of laws, including constitutions, by citizens with equal rights and equal duties to administer and maintain those laws.

The Western Way of War

Two of Victor Davis Hanson’s books,
The Western Way of War
and
The Other Greeks
, have made perhaps the largest and most controversial contributions to the hoplite grand narrative in the past thirty years. In
The Western Way of War
, Hanson discusses the changes that occurred in Greek warfare after the Dark Age.
⁸⁸
The era of mounted fighters who dismounted from either a chariot (i.e., in Homer) or a horse to throw javelins came to a close in the eighth century with the introduction of the heavily armored infantryman. No longer did warfare consist of aristocrats fighting duels with their social equals. Victory in battle now depended more and more on the common soldier who was armed with his own panoply and fought head-on with a round double-grip shield and thrusting spear in the tight formation that became the classical phalanx. In this way, Hanson’s account belongs to the long tradition of the hoplite orthodoxy. In part, his conclusions about the nature of hoplite battle reassert the orthodoxy contrary to recent scholarship. “I should confess that recent attempts to prove some idea of widespread fluidity in the phalanx, to envision individual skirmishing rather than collective pushing, make no sense at all; the image is not based, it seems to me, on a fair reading of the ancient evidence.”
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Similarly to Grundy and Adcock, Hanson calls Greek hoplite warfare “decisive engagement as shock battle and frontal assault.”
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Grundy had pointed out the necessity for citizen militias to confront invaders outside the walls of the acropolis to protect their precious crops in the alluvial plains. Adcock suggested that in early hoplite battles the Greeks were fighting for possession of the battlefield, the farmland. In a 1983 work, Hanson argued that the amount of damage an army could do to the crops, vines, and fruit-bearing trees of an enemy polis was limited.
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Therefore, despite reports in the ancient historians of invaders “laying waste” the fields of their enemy, Hanson countered, “the rationale of Greek battle between heavy infantry of the classical period cannot be that it was preventative to agricultural catastrophe but, rather, we must consider that it arose as a provocation or reaction to the mere
threat
of farm attack.”
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Since actual long-term damage to agriculture was minimal, when the enemy entered a city-state’s farms, “infantrymen marched out not to save their livelihoods nor even their ancestral homes, but rather for an
idea
: that no enemy march uncontested through the plains of Greece, that, in Themistocles’ words, ‘no man become inferior to, or give way, before another.’ ”
⁹³
This provides the background for a hoplite battle. “Usually a quick response was considered necessary, in the form of heavily armed and armored farmers filing into a suitable small plain—the usual peacetime workplace of all involved—where brief but brutal battle resulted either in concessions granted to the army of invasion, or humiliating, forced retreat back home for the defeated.”

Like earlier scholars, Hanson argues that the fundamental differences between massed infantry combat and the style of fighting that existed prior to it are in part
linked with the rise of the polis. But Hanson goes further. The Greek city-states formed “the first consensual governments in the history of civilization that fielded soldiers who were independent and free property owners—militiamen, family farmers, and voters all in one.” These facts help explain why the Greeks wanted to limit warfare to single, brief, shock encounters, as well as why they developed an ethos that such face-to-face killing at close range in “pure” hoplite battles was more “fair” and “noble” than other forms of combat.

Not only did such men find it in their own economic and political interests to fight decisively—they had no wish to be absent from their farms on long campaigns and no desire to tax or spend to hire others to do so—but also spiritually such fighting reaffirmed the free farmers’ preeminence in Hellenic culture at large. In Greek art, literature, and popular culture only the free landowning citizen—the hoplite—was willing and able to endure the spear carnage of phalanx warfare, and thus alone deserving of the honors and prestige of his polis at large.
⁹⁴

The remarkable integration of civic and military duties within the polis accounts for the success of the farmer-citizen-soldier model. “In most cases, men were arranged within the phalanx right next to lifelong friends or family members, and fought not only for the safety of their community and farmland but also for the respect of the men at their front, rear, and side.” These small landholders and craftsmen might be called up for military service any summer after their eighteenth birthday until they turned sixty.
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“We can be sure that the greater danger to any landholding infantryman was painful death on the battlefield, not slow starvation brought on through loss of his farm.”
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The Western Way of War
sets the mass confrontations of the Greeks apart from those of any previous ancient civilization.

Egyptians, Hittites, Persians, or tribal forces from central and northern Europe were not by Greek standards heavily armed and armored. The bow, the javelin, and the sling were usually the preeminent offensive weapons of such forces. Horsemen and chariots were often the decisive contingents that ensured victory or defeat. Even those footsoldiers who charged each other did so in small groups and often through uncoordinated attacks. None were free citizens, who could vote—much less buy, own, or pass on private property. Herodotus felt that no other armies fought in the “absurd” way of the Greeks—heavily armored militiamen crashing together on flat plains during the long days of summer, each side after the initial collision seeking quite literally to push the other off the battlefield through a combination of spear thrusting and the shove of bodies.
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