Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (13 page)

On the contrary, Nierhaus had proposed the theory of the piecemeal and gradual adoption of hoplite equipment, which was still far from complete at the end of the seventh century.
¹⁵⁶
The process began with the introduction of the round shield in the eighth century, which he identified with the hoplite shield. He reasoned that, since artistic representations of the plate corselet were rare in the first half of the seventh century and limited in the second half, its adoption was slow and tentative. Lorimer dismissed his hypothesis as a priori improbable owing to the inseparable link she posited between hoplite equipment and the phalanx and its tactics. She pointed out that he overlooked the Corinthian helmet, greaves, and spear in his thesis; for example, the helmet is already present with the plate corselet on the Perachora aryballos, which was unknown to Nierhaus. In addition, the greaves appear on the Hymettus amphora, while both vases show the exclusive use of the single spear. The aim of adopting the single heavy thrusting spear and the
porpax
shield in place of the pair of light throwing
spears and the single-grip shield was to supersede the long-range fighting of the Geometric period; greaves added protection and completed the panoply intended for hand-to-hand fighting by troops with uniform equipment arranged in an unbreakable line. “These items form a natural and logical combination, and they all appear on one of our earliest monuments, the Perachora aryballos.” “If they [the Carians] invented the
porpax
shield,” she proposes, “[they] must also have invented the cohesive tactics of which it was to be the instrument.”
¹⁵⁷

But in light of the finds of the panoply at Argos in 1953 and of the armor at Dendra in 1960, Snodgrass could argue for the “piecemeal” adoption of hoplite arms with far greater force than Nierhaus. The eighth-century Argos discovery made it impossible to maintain that a metal corselet was specific to hoplite tactics, which were unknown to Geometric art. The Dendra metal corselet and greaves from the Bronze Age gave even more striking proof that protecting the body with bronze armor was not exclusive to the archaic period. In fact, most of the essential items of the “hoplite panoply” were known to Mycenaean Greece, including the metallic helmet and the single thrusting spear.
¹⁵⁸
The plate corselet, for example, traces its ancestry back to the type of corselet used seven hundred years earlier at Dendra. But Snodgrass traces the origin of the technique for producing the bronze corselet found at Argos to central Europe before it returned to the Aegean in the eighth century through trade and colonization in the West.
¹⁵⁹
Elite Geometric fighters used the bronze body armor with neither a Corinthian helmet nor a double-grip shield. His ideas have inspired all subsequent attempts to revise the hoplite orthodoxy.

The originality of the ‘hoplite panoply’ has been disproved by the emergence of Bronze Age precedents for many of its parts, and its homogeneity dispelled by the differences in origin and chronology between them. The fact that Mycenaean soldiers, to whom hoplite warfare was most decidedly unknown, fought with metal helmets, corslets, greaves, and ankle-guards, suggests that their similarly-equipped successors were not so armed with new and specific tactics in mind. The sole point of difference is the porpax-shield, and its tactical significance, hitherto rather taken for granted, needs re-examination. Further, the Argos discovery, in addition to all its other valuable testimony, also gives a hint that ‘hoplite’ armour was first known as the possession of the few.

The existence of hoplite armor and weapons by no means implies the phalanx. “The essential components of the hoplite’s armament (the greave excepted), are thus all known to the Aegean world before 700, and their association together is first portrayed about 25 years later; while another full generation elapses before we have any archaeological evidence for the adoption of ‘hoplite’ tactics.”
¹⁶⁰

Snodgrass not only challenged ideas about the origins of the phalanx; he made several other important arguments against the notion of hoplites playing a revolutionary part in the rise of the polis. First, the initial adoption of new arms starting in the mid-eighth century emboldened the aristocratic warrior to fight at closer range. He would close with his sword after throwing two or three javelins, or substitute his javelins for a single, heavy thrusting spear as his main weapon. Yet these changes in
fighting style required neither greater manpower nor the close-packed formation of a phalanx. Second, the qualification of wealth, namely, the ability for the individual soldier to provide his own panoply, is the basis for a hoplite army. In an agricultural society such as archaic Greece, the recruits must have come from the farmers who were substantial landholders. He suggests that the farmers concerned about the devastation of their property and their absence from it had no vested interest in war. In fact, there would have been “no enthusiastic rush to arms on the part of the more substantial property owners, the future ‘hoplite class.’
¹⁶¹
Even if the bait of political power had been held out from the first—which is perhaps improbable—this would hardly be enough to launch a voluntary movement which ran so entirely against historical precedent.”
¹⁶²
Third, the aristocracy remained as a traditional warrior class after the introduction of hoplite
equipment
; it was only after the sharp increase in the number of soldiers required by the adoption of hoplite
tactics
that the new class could affect their military supremacy. Fourth, Snodgrass sees in Etruria and Rome examples of societies that can adopt hoplite tactics without immediate and far-reaching social and political consequences. He presents his view in the following.

The Greek hoplite entered history as an individual warrior, probably in most cases an aristocrat. The adoption of the phalanx meant that he was joined by men, for the most part substantial land-owners, who had come not to seek a way to political power nor by any wish of their own, but because they were compelled to. These men, however stout-hearted as warriors, are not likely to have become, all at once, a revolutionary force in politics, even in Greece. The political rights which they came to possess could have been acquired gradually and peacefully,
ton en tois hoplois ischusanton mallon
, as Aristotle says. They must have had political leaders, but I doubt whether we can number the early tyrants among them. Hoplites, in short, were an instrument before they became a force.
¹⁶³

In sum, Snodgrass’s treatment of the development of Greek arms suggests that the traditional picture of the early history of Greek warfare is too simplified. The evidence does not support the idea of Lorimer that in about 700 BC some genius, in one of the great military reforms of history, imposed order on the loose, disorganized skirmishing of the Dark Age. In the light of the precedents for bronze armor, Snodgrass views the military developments of the seventh century as a continuation of what went before, not a radical break, and denies any military or political impulse to equip massed heavy infantry. Warriors adopted greaves, for example, in the era of long-range warfare as a barrier against missiles, and that had nothing to do with massed infantry tactics. The double-grip shield existed in the late eighth century, yet the first plausible portrayal of the phalanx does not occur until the Berlin aryballos. This does not indicate that artists were unable to paint the phalanx earlier, but that the classical formation did not exist at the time of the first panoplies, which were worn by the few.
¹⁶⁴
In the case of the
porpax
shield and the metal corselet, the two items were alternative pieces of equipment, not necessarily meant to be worn together. Corinthian art of the mid-seventh century bears witness only to the initial stage of the adoption of the true hoplite phalanx; the poleis
with a large enough body of wealthy citizens completed the process, which ended when the heavily armed foot soldier discarded the throwing spear as his equipment became more and more standardized. “Finally, at a date unknown but possibly not much before the fifth century, the Greeks coined a word to define the final status that the heavy infantryman had reached—hoplitēs. We, too, should be hesitant in our application of the term to the earlier stages of Greek armament.”
¹⁶⁵

Since the 1965 article of Snodgrass, several schools of thought have established themselves, with two emerging as especially critical. First, it has been held that use of the broad hoplite shield marked only a single stage in an evolutionary process that culminated in about 650 BC, the date of the first known artistic representations of the classical phalanx. Second, scholars have argued that the classical hoplite phalanx took shape rather suddenly with the introduction of hoplite armor, between 725 and 700 BC. In his 1977 article Cartledge proposed some nuances to the “sudden change” theory:

Briefly, the change was relatively sudden and due
imprimis
to the widespread adoption of what became regarded as the hoplite accoutrement
par excellence
, the shield with
porpax
and
antilabe
. This was not, however, a case of brute determinism (as it is presented by Lorimer;
cf
. Detienne 132 n. 68). For, to borrow the careful phraseology of Greenhalgh (71), the new shield was ‘not impossibly ill-adapted to the unorganised warfare of the javelin era’. But Greenhalgh, although he does at least make the points that it
was
ill-adapted and that pre-hoplite warfare was
un
organised, does not go far enough. As an invention for use in pre-hoplite warfare the hoplite shield would not merely have been barely (if at all) superior to its single-handled predecessors but also in certain circumstances positively and dangerously inferior. For what the invention of
porpax
and
antilabe
tells us is that concern for protection in the front was outweighing the need for manoeuvrability and for protection in the flank and rear—in other words, that a change in tactics in the direction of organized, hand-to-hand fighting was
already
in progress.
¹⁶⁶

Cartledge stresses the fact that the Greeks
invented
the double-grip shield: “why should it not have been invented with the phalanx in mind rather than the other way around?”
¹⁶⁷
He has less trust in the often insecure visual and literary evidence; instead, he looks to the “whole gamut of economic, social and political conditions in this ‘Age of Revolution’ ” (c. 750–650) to explain how the development of the hoplite shield was soon followed by hoplites operating in phalanx formation; this took place “somewhere in the first quarter of the seventh century, the precise date varying naturally from state to state.” No one polis was responsible for the entire process, and by 650 all of the more important states had gone hoplite. Cartledge details the dominant trends. Relative overpopulation in Greece resulted in colonization abroad and in a shift from pasturage to arable farming. Land hunger also had military implications:

Warfare became more frequent as each political community sought to secure for itself the maximum amount of land compatible with its convenient
utilisation and defence: throughout Greek antiquity the ownership of land was the most important single cause of interstate wars. Secondly, the shift from stock-raising to arable farming determined thereafter the general pattern of warfare on land, for the basic objectives everywhere in this game of ‘agricultural poker’ (Snodgrass 1967, 62) became the menacing, temporary possession or destruction of the enemy’s crops and the protection of one’s own.
¹⁶⁸

The idea of the polis has significance as a community of equal citizens and for the consequent decline of monarchy. The upheavals of the “Age of Revolution” led to the rise of a solid peasantry of substantial farmers with the psychological independence to challenge the injustice of the “bribe-swallowing” aristocrats. In this scenario, the aristocrats were the “reluctant hoplites” forced by the new circumstances to invite the “wealthy and well equipped commoners” to join them in the phalanx, whose success depended on fielding the greatest possible numbers on a given occasion.

Indeed, it had the makings of a brilliant compromise. The relevant commoners were enabled at a stroke to defend not only their own property but also the
polis
of which they were citizens. At the same time the devolution of military responsibility did not obviously imperil the aristocratic structure of society. Rather, it could have reasonably been hoped that phalanx-warfare would defuse the potentially explosive contradiction between aristocratic
arete
and
polis
-equalitarianism. For although membership of the phalanx was open in principle to all who could provide their own
hopla
, and although sheer numbers were an advantage in the hoplite style of fighting, rarely was as much as one half of a state’s citizen-body able to turn out as hoplites in practice.
¹⁶⁹

The advent of hoplite warfare not only destroyed the monopoly of political suzerainty of the aristocrats; it excluded militarily “the poor peasantry and ‘wearers of skins’ in the country, … the shopkeepers, petty traders, handicraftsmen and casual labourers in the town…. The hoplite ‘reform’ brought on a change in conceptions of bravery, but hoplite ideology retained the indelible stamp of its aristocratic origins.”
¹⁷⁰