Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (22 page)

The process of polis formation was of course by no means universal, and I have some sympathy with those who wish to emphasize in parallel or opposition the rise of non-polis political entities,
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or those who, more radically, wish the debate to transcend conventional polis-ridden categorizations altogether.
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Nor of course was “hopliticization” any more universal.
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But I hope I am not mistaken in thinking that—as is the case of the Archaic phenomenon of tyranny—what really matters is not so much universality, but significance: that is, what we today think matters historically, as we look back with the privilege of 20/20 hindsight. It is thus because of what I (again, still) see as the inseparable, inextricable connection between warfare and politics, and specifically the rise of poleis in the century between 750 and 650 (though of course not just then), that I have given my contribution its punning, near-anagrammatic title.

In sketching out some aspects of the many contentious issues, I have adopted the well-known Spartan organizational preference for groupings of five:

1. The source problem(s): contemporary as opposed to noncontemporary sources, documentary as opposed to imaginative (or imaginary), literary as against archaeological or documentary.

2. The developmental problem: What tipped massed fighting over into mass, phalanx fighting? Why, and how, did this tactical development occur, and how widespread how soon did it become?

3. Did (any) states need to “go hoplite” for purely utilitarian, functional, military reasons? Or rather was it ideology that drove, or at least severely inflected, the change?

4. But, if so, what was “hoplite” ideology? Were there rules of agonalism? Was it, for example, an ideology that included—or was specially focused upon—an ultimately political notion of equality?

5. Finally, to return to issue 1, above, the source problem(s): Did Aristotle get it at all right—not just in postulating an intimate causal connection between form of warfare and form of polity but in identifying the precise nature of that
connection? Or was he either wildly anachronistic or concerned only with peddling theoretical dogma, or both?

1. Sources

It is quite right to remind us sharply, as Peter Krentz has done (2007b), that we know nothing much for sure about Greek warfare in practice (we know or are told rather more about the theory or ideology) before the fifth century. That is true, after all, of almost all aspects of Archaic, or pre-Classical, Greek history. But it does mean that a great deal is made to hang upon those few scraps of especially contemporary evidence that are deemed to be unambiguous, accurate, and relevant; and, in particular, upon those that are claimed to be probative, whether they are literary or archaeological.
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I shall give two illustrations, one contemporary, one noncontemporary, both Spartan, of the problems of the literary evidence, and a third illustration that combines literary evidence with archaeological (both representational and artifactual). My overall point is to show that we can and should do more than just throw up our hands and retreat to the imagined safety of a “we don’t know anything, or anything much significant, before the fifth century” position.

i. Tyrtaios

Let us assume, for the sake of this argument, that Tyrtaios was indeed Tyrtaios, that is, a genuine Spartan poet of the seventh century BC rather than, say, an Athenian of the fourth, or even a non-Spartan literary fabrication. How, or how best, can his surviving verses be used to throw light on, or even explain, real Spartan military evolutions and developments of his own or an earlier generation (ex hypothesi, we are dealing with roughly the first half of the seventh century)? Two interpretative constraints have to be scrupulously observed—constraints, that is, operating on any interpretation we may wish to advance. First, there are the literary qualities or dimensions of his poems. He belonged to, if not the first, at any rate one of the first generations of post-Homeric, non-Homeric poet-creators, which means that he was, on the one hand, desperately original, but also, on the other hand, that he was just as desperately cabined, cribbed, and corralled by the overwhelming cultural-linguistic legacy of Homeric-style oral epic. Second, his poems, anapaests as well as elegiacs, continued to be sung by Spartans for centuries after his own, putative seventh century; that is, they were preserved and rehearsed through and into military and political circumstances unimaginably different from those of their original creation without that difference being felt as an insuperable obstacle to their positive reception. His verses apparently detailing real tactics cannot and must not therefore be read as if they are merely a poetic form of an early seventh-century Spartan general’s campaign manual.
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ii.

Early Greek “lawgivers” were apparently by no means all equally concerned or preoccupied with military matters, though they must all have taken at least some interest
and devoted some care and attention to the issue of the security, if not the power, of their respective polities. The most famous—or fully documented—of these pioneers were Solon of Athens and Lykurgos of Sparta. The latter, if it’s not too disrespectful to say so, was little more than an urban myth; that he is not so much as mentioned by Tyrtaios is at least suggestive. Yet I judge it to be neither accidental nor coincidental that “Lykurgos,” as represented by our earliest even vaguely reliable historical source Herodotus (1.65), was thought to have had military concerns centrally at the heart of “his” reforms.

Well in advance of the current trend of minimalist downdating of key Archaic phenomena, Moses Finley (1968, 1981) summed up his revisionist view of Archaic Sparta’s development in the phrase “the sixth-century revolution.” By that he meant that by 500 Sparta was, taken overall, the unique political, cultural, social, and economic entity that entered the brightish light of history in the Graeco-Persian wars. But how long before 500 it had assumed that overall profile, and how long before 500 its individual components—the military and so forth—had come into being, the state of the evidence he believed precluded us from stating. This is fair enough—up to a point. Yet, as Finley himself pointed out later in his
Politics in the Ancient World
(Finley 1983), one useful way of characterizing and categorizing the Spartan state entity is to label it a “conquest-state.” In other words, it was not the case merely that the state of Archaic Sparta made conquests, but that it had acquired its very being and identity as a state precisely through such acts of (permanent) conquest and acquisition, both external and (at least as important) internal. Putting Finley and Herodotus together therefore, as it were, one might very well be tempted to claim, on prior theoretical grounds, that for Sparta to have become as it did and to have done what it did by 500 not only must it necessarily have undergone some major structural military transformation but it must have done so relatively early on (whether or not one also wants to claim that the transformation occurred very or relatively swiftly). Just exactly how one describes and construes that major military transformation is of course a separate question. But the theoretical considerations, for me, tend to argue strongly against such notions as four centuries of slow evolution, or a denial of any dramatic politico-military change anywhere in Greece before 500.
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iii.

My third and final illustration of a source problem concerns what I am still firmly minded to claim as the decisive, and possibly literally, hoplitic innovation: the hoplite shield.
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No one, I think, denies that the very large, round, double-handled hoplite-type shield was an innovation, or that the invention can be pinned down quite closely to the years around 700. What I think not all discussants are always willing to acknowledge is just how peculiar—in both senses—this invention was. Two-handled shields can indeed be used effectively in less as well as more massed, phalanx-like formations, but this particular version (regardless of local or individual variations) was designed, purpose-built, to be held only on the left arm, in an unalterably fixed position that severely restricted free movement, so that it had to be used in close association with other shields so held and fixed.

Plato, predictably unorthodox, objected to this enforced dextrosity, to this systematic disadvantaging of the natural southpaw (who might have been able safely to wield a double-handed shield on his right arm in any more open-order style). But that objection came many centuries after an innovation, the impact of which must have been felt most fiercely in the original phase or stage of introduction, or rather imposition. The basic design of the hoplite shield remained unaltered for over three centuries, and later articulate Greeks, anecdotally and otherwise, recognized its absolutely cardinal, central, and definitional function in a variety of ways: by criminalizing “shield throwers” (the very existence of the single word
rhipsaspides
is telling) or by urging ideologically that, whereas one wears other items of defensive equipment for one’s own self-protection, one bears the shield for the sake of the battle line or formation as a whole. If it was an ancient etymological mistake to derive the word
hoplitês
from
hoplon
meaning “shield,” the mistake is itself a revealing one.

2. The Developmental Problem

I have given a hint already as to how I see the tipping point from mass to full-blown phalanx fighting happening operationally. Very briefly, the invention and very widespread adoption for many centuries thereafter of such a peculiar form of double-handled shield implies that it supplied efficiently a functional need: the need, that is to say, for much greater defensive protection and a correspondingly decreased emphasis on offensive maneuverability—just such a need as would have been created by the sort of increasingly mass style of fighting inferred from Homer by Joachim Latacz, an insight further developed by Hans van Wees, Kurt Raaflaub, and others.
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We are of course all now hypersensitive to the difficulty of reading Homer as in any sense “history,” but to identify this trend within the epic as it were against the grain (of the dramatic, ideological, and narratological highlighting of heroic individualism) as Latacz did seems to me a very impressive feat indeed of historical deduction.
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But the inferences to be drawn from that discovery remain as contested as ever.

3. The Follow-My-Leader Problem

A hoplite style of fighting was unarguably quite widely adopted in Greek lands during the seventh and sixth centuries.
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But did all or most or any poleis need to “go hoplite” for similar utilitarian, functional, military reasons to those that favored or required the adoption of the hoplite shield? Or was it rather ideology that drove, or at least gravely inflected, the issue?
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I used myself once to be overimpressed by Herodotus’s wonderful send-up (as I now see it to be) of the absurdity of hoplite warfare in terrain such as that which characterized most of mainland Greece (Hdt. 7.9). That this send-up was placed in the mouth of Mardonius should have been a sufficient clue. He was after all a “barbarian” who had not, actually, managed to defeat the Greek (especially Spartan) hoplites at Plataea, despite ridiculing their mode of fighting. So, yet another
case of Herodotean dramatic irony. On the other hand, the fact does remain that the adoption of a hoplite style of warfare was not the most obvious purely military solution to a strategic-tactical problem. It does therefore remain a strong possibility that a very large dose of ideology might have been involved, if not solely or mainly in the original decision by a state to “go hoplite” then at least in the states’ refusal for so long to diversify within—or out of—the hoplite mode.

4. (A) Hoplite Ideology?

The classically trained historical sociologist W. G. Runciman seems to me to have put his finger on the nub of this issue when he wrote: “it is difficult to see how the persistence of hoplite warfare can be accounted for without reference to the distinctive set of norms, values and beliefs which encouraged and legitimated it” (Runciman 1998: 733). But if so, what exactly was this hoplite ideology? What were the norms, values, and beliefs involved, and were they essentially or only contingently so connected? Were there quasi laws of warfare, or at least informal rules of agonalism, honored not only or mainly in the breach? Was there, for instance, a properly hoplite ideology that included—or was especially focused upon—an ultimately political notion of equality?

Possibly one of the most unguarded formulations of just such a point of view, not unconnected to the author’s nationality perhaps, is the following, by the Japanese scholar Hiroshe Ando (1994: 23): “the system of the hoplite army created new human beings who carried on their shoulders a new polis which was nearing completion.” That formulation is not incompatible with the overall thesis of one of the most challenging of recent general interpretations of Archaic Greek politics, Victor Hanson’s
The Other Greeks
: hoplite warfare, Hanson argues, “cannot be understood apart from the economic, cultural and political agenda of a new group of middling agrarians, whose unique notions of private property, landed timocratic government, free economic practice, and distrust of rich and poor established the foundations of the Greek polis.”
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One might even wish to rescue something of Herodotus’s Mardonios and invoke it in favor of a notion of hoplite agonalism, even perhaps egalitarianism, so long as that is not understood in strictly mathematical terms. At any rate, Peter Hunt (2007: 138) is surely right that “hoplites were the citizen army par excellence.”
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