Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (12 page)

Hanson suggests what caused the population growth and how this facilitated the development of the new agrarianism. The process started with a breakdown of “age class” systems or the discouragement of early marriage and procreation by the elite clans of the Dark Age. The age class culture, characteristic of warrior societies, ensured the political power of the few Greek aristocrats over their subjects; this delayed for centuries the dramatic rebound from the chaos that followed the collapse of the Mycenaean centers. The modification and erosion of the old “system” led to social experimentation as “military regimentation gave way to other pursuits like agriculture.”
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Hanson credits the agricultural revolution with preventing any large-scale famine in early Greece that might have otherwise accompanied the population increase.

The innovation in land use in mainland Greece preceded the colonization movement of the eighth and seventh centuries. In fact, foreign colonization was not sufficient in and of itself to address the problem of surplus population at home. Local agricultural change at home was necessary in the form of “a more gradual
internal
colonization of land previously unwanted and underdeveloped.”
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The incorporation of “marginal” land (
eschatia
) by middling farmers in response to demographic pressure marked a serious challenge to the existing social order. “In the old Dark-Age social and economic sense, that [cultivation of marginal land] meant less accessibility to manorial centers, and less fertility for native grazing, less suitability for easy ploughing of cereals, but not unsuitability for crops such as vines and trees.” The process initiated private ownership of land for the first time in the West.

“Marginal” land is ubiquitous in many parts of Greece, an ideal, relatively safe springboard for anyone brave enough to embark on a new sort of agricultural strategy of outright private ownership and intensive working of permanent crops. Once private ownership by adventurous farmers was the rule, each Greek rural household sought its own parcel, to improve and pass on. Previously unused and unowned land was thus developed by men on their own, marking the real beginning in the West of individual property holding on any wide scale.
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When the
georgoi
did leave the mainland, the colonists agreed on the new role of agriculture, and “were often not critics, but supporters of agrarianism; not the poor, but members of the lower middle stratum who saw little chance of obtaining a hereditary plot for themselves inside Greece.”
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In addition to private ownership of marginal lands and overseas colonization, Greek farmers applied their new intensive strategies to the estates of wealthier landowners. But the repressive forms of tenancy, where the owner could draw off the surplus of another’s work, compromised agricultural success, which depends on private ownership. On the other hand the gradual transition from pastoralism to intensive farming “liberated” the
georgoi
of the eighth century from the traditional social patterns and military castes. The majority of farmers chose to remain in the mainland of Greece rather than to move overseas in mass. Hanson attributes the agrarian renaissance of the eighth century and later to a combination of three factors: “(1) a quiet revolution in agricultural technique and rural social organization in general, (2) an incorporation of new technologies and crop species, [and] (3) an intensification of labor.”
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Key techniques such as grafting applied to the domesticated olive along with other trees and vines “allowed for a lasting alternative to pastoralism,” which sustained the population increase into the polis period.

Hanson points out why this kind of farming was such an important element for the rising class of smallholders; the liberation of agriculture helped create a new type of human being. “People who choose this kind of agriculture have confidence that they can and will stay put, that they can and will keep the countryside populated, prosperous, and peaceful. They are not just a different sort of farmer, but a different sort of person as well.” Farming bears on the quality of the infantry soldier as well.

In a military sense … there is little doubt that the superiority of Greek citizen infantry, the “planters of trees,” in wars both foreign and domestic derived from the resoluteness, conservatism, independence, and physical courage prerequisite to the intensive farming of trees and vines, the need to protect and to honor the visible inherited vineyards and orchards of past generations.
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How might agriculture shape the character of the smallholder? Hanson details the differences between an intensive farmer of vines and fruit trees in the polis and a Dark Age pastoralist and grower of grain.

The picture that emerges from even a small Greek vineyard is clear: constant decisions, endless searching for the precise but always elusive equilibrium between multifarious choices, the need for constant attention and labor, and reverence for ancestral practice. Much different from cereal or livestock
production, these complexities in viticulture and arboriculture help explain the new intensified Greek agriculture of homestead residences, slave labor, incorporation of rough terrain, and mastery and control of food processing.
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Where did this emerging class stand in relation to other citizens in the polis? “It is impossible accurately to gauge their numbers, possible only to approximate their relative position between a smaller entrenched elite and a slightly larger group below of landless poor, and some less successful subsistence “peasants.”

There is intense dislike on the part of the landed and wealthy elite for these upstart farmers, the
georgoi
who in early Greek literature are predictably dubbed the
kakoi
, the “bad” (in opposition to the
agathoi
, the “good” traditional aristocrats by birth), and second, recognition appears among more enlightened Greeks that the presence of an agrarian class of small farmers (properly called
hoi mesoi
, “the middle ones”) was responsible for both the creation and preservation of the Greek city-state, and that their political agenda was both reasonable and proper…. This “class” is clearly not mercantile or commercial in the modern sense, but rather entirely agrarian, sandwiched between the few wealthy and the most numerous poor.
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Hanson finds strong support for his thesis in Aristotle’s
Politics
.

Aristotle writes of middling farmers in realistic, rather than utopian terms. He implies that agrarians of the middle had been widespread throughout the early
polis
history of Greece…. He … confirms that the “middle ones” were, in fact, those who farmed on their own, and who provided the city-state with the social and political stability that led to the “best” type of government … but possible only when they are present in sufficient numbers to prevent class strife between the very rich and the abject poor…. Aristotle writes that this most stable form of government by small farmers had an ancient pedigree, and was to be associated with the foundation of the
polis
.
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Aristotle discussed the effect the early lawgivers had in shaping their governments to protect the interests of the growing number of independent farmers. They seem to have designed their legislation to protect the land and the economic gains of the farmers from aristocratic backlash.

Philolaus of Corinth (about 730 B.C.?) had supposedly enacted regulations ensuring that the farms at Thebes might remain the same number in perpetuity. The Corinthian Pheidon, “one of the most ancient of the lawgivers,” purportedly argued that the population and the number of plots ought always to remain roughly equal. An even more shadowy figure, Phaleas the Chalcedonian, advanced the concept that all citizens of the polis ought to hold equal amounts of property.
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In addition to the texts of Aristotle and Plato, Hanson sees evidence for property egalitarianism and small farm size in the Greek colonies from the eighth through
the fourth century. “Surely the formal organization of colonists and their creation of equitable plots and a complex social structure presupposes the prior formation of a
polis
, and suggests a preexisting, ongoing agrarian ideology.” The standard size for allotments of land in the colonies was rectangles around fifty
plethra
(about 11 acres). “This practice may suggest that farm plots between forty and sixty
plethra
(8.9 and 13.3 acres), the so-called exemplary hoplite farms we discussed earlier, were being duplicated afresh in early colonies…. Would be
georgoi
were seeking to reproduce—or given this second chance, to perfect or to improve on—an agrarian ideology they had seen at home.”
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There is a pattern in Greek literature of agrarian legislation and practice (about 700–550 BC) that ensured widespread equality in landholding by about 550–400 BC. He stresses above all “the actual conditions of landowning, the size of farms as expressed in the literary and epigraphical record, oratory for the most part, and leases and sales recorded on stone.” Authors in the fifth and fourth centuries most often speak of farms from ten to twenty acres; there were on occasion larger estates between fifty to seventy acres, but holdings over one hundred acres were very rare until the Hellenistic and Roman period. It appears that an enforced code or social ethic of the Greek polis discouraged the accumulation of property. “How else can we explain why the inherited rich, the more gifted
georgoi
, the more successful in commerce and mining, all failed to accumulate vast tracts, failed to transfer their off-farm capital into landed estates—phenomena that were commonplace after the demise of the free and autonomous Greek
polis
.”
¹⁵⁰
The new middling class of farmer-citizen-soldiers became numerous enough to prevent agriculture from reverting back to the fragile palace bureaucracies. Their prosperity and ability to provide for the increased population ensured that the agricultural neglect of the Dark Age clans would not return.

All of Greek history in the
polis
period follows from the successful creation of a new agriculture and the efforts of the many to protect a novel agrarian way of life. The rural system of the
georgoi
created the surplus, capital, and leisure that lay behind the entire Greek cultural renaissance. It was an agrarianism that was highly flexible and decentralized economically, socially egalitarian, and politically keen to avoid the accumulation of power by a nonagricultural elite. No surprise that the later
polis
Greeks envisioned the rise of agrarianism—which had created their city-state—primarily in moral terms.
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The development of hoplite warfare took place in this context of novel agrarianism, which promoted a particular type of moral excellence.

Small and equitable farm size inculcated a number of values in the citizenry and created a shared vision of what a Greek city-state might be. In the early agrarian polis, modest, equal-sized plots ensured that all Greek citizens would have to work with their own hands. All would look at the ensuing (most natural) challenges pragmatically, rarely theoretically. All would acquire capital largely through their own sacrifice and toil. All would rely on their own resolve and bodily strength to reclaim land or ward off invasion. All would be secure in the thought that a whole cadre of like citizens was
presented with about the same challenges, with about the same opportunities to succeed or fail.
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Victor Hanson’s
The Other Greeks
provides the fullest and most vivid account of those who might have comprised the middling class of the orthodox tradition of hoplite warfare. He has developed his picture of the late Dark Age and early polis period through examination of the early Greek lawgivers and the extensive site surveys that have been conducted in Greece since the 1980s. Yet it is from the archaeological sources that Hanson’s thesis has met with some of its strongest criticism.

Revisionism and the Hoplite Orthodoxy

The first sustained challenge to the orthodoxy came with Anthony Snodgrass’s seminal work of the 1960s. He developed the earlier suggestion of Nierhaus
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to indicate that the introduction of hoplite arms was a “long drawn out, piecemeal process”
¹⁵⁴
and that it did not lead to an immediate change in tactics. For Snodgrass the double-grip shield does not imply the phalanx. In a transitional stage, aristocratic soloists took up new items of equipment before the invention of the phalanx. The date of 650 that Snodgrass proposed for the fully developed phalanx refuted the idea that hoplites played a role in the rise to power of the tyrants or in any other revolutionary changes associated with the early Greek polis. These arguments throw light on some of the problematic aspects of Lorimer’s thesis.

Lorimer had contended that the literary evidence confirmed her conclusions based on the archaeology. The
Iliad
depicts prehoplite equipment and tactics. Shields have telamons, and the heroes often carry spears in pairs and cast them at long range. Homeric heroes never throw their shields away but fling them around their back for protection in flight. They wear an open-face helmet and a corselet, which Lorimer identified with the leather jerkin depicted on the Warrior Vase and on other late Mycenaean monuments. She imagined that the Greek warrior’s arms, armor, and fighting style changed little from the collapse of Bronze Age civilization in the twelfth century till the hoplite revolution in the early seventh century.
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