Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (24 page)

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CHAPTER 4

Setting the Frame Chronologically

ANTHONY SNODGRASS

If there is nowadays a consensus that discussion of the Greek hoplite must start from Homer and the descriptions of fighting in the
Iliad
, then this is a fairly recent development. For most historians and Homerists of little more than a generation ago, Homer stood outside the issue and the
Iliad
’s battles would be mentioned only to be excluded from the discussion. There is an obvious analogy here with a bigger topic, one so closely linked with the hoplite as to be often thought inseparable from it: the rise of the polis. The same shift has occurred here: where there was once widespread agreement with Finley’s view of the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
, that “neither poem has any trace of a
polis
in its classical political sense” (Finley 1956: 39), it is common practice today to scrutinize both texts, the
Odyssey
especially, for features that betray the poet’s familiarity with elements of early polis society. Recent scholarship has detected a number of such elements there and indeed has held that, for the
Iliad
, the hoplite style of fighting is itself one of them.

In the specific case of hoplite warfare, this collective change of heart is, I think, relatively easily accounted for. It began with the appearance of Joachim Latacz’s
Kampfparänese, Kampfdarstellung und Kampfwirklichkeit in der Ilias, bei Kallinos und Tyrtaios
in 1977. I would not go so far as to say that, without Latacz, the old orthodoxy would have continued to prevail, and the Homeric evidence to be set aside; but I would maintain that the momentum and concertedness of this change in opinion derived from the publication of his book and, more especially, to its favorable reception on the part of historians. The prime contention of that book, that mass armies and mass combat play a far more important role in the battles of the
Iliad
than anyone had hitherto been prepared to admit, has won almost unanimous acceptance and, on its own, constitutes a major advance in the debate.

For Latacz, however, it served as the foundation for a series of more far-reaching inferences, which carry his argument far beyond the philological domain and progressively further into the historical one. At this point, radical dissent intervenes. It begins with a mainly philological issue: how far is Latacz justified in arguing that the picture of fighting in the
Iliad
, his
Kampfdarstellung
, is a homogeneous, consistent, unified, and coherent one? One critic who, at an early stage, gave a firmly negative
answer was Latacz’s reviewer in
Gnomon
, Rüdiger Leimbach (Leimbach 1980). In his view, Latacz had quite failed to establish the coherence of detail of the Homeric battle scenes: his analyses tended to illustrate just the opposite qualities, of incoherence and internal incompatibility. For instance, the allegedly regular sequence of an engagement at long range, giving way to a phase of exploits by individual heroes, then to a mass engagement at close quarters, was simply not there in the text. A passage singled out by Latacz to exemplify the first phase of long-range engagement and specifically discussed at the Yale hoplite conference,
Iliad
viii, 60–67, gives an ideal illustration of this. This and other points were later to be taken up by historians and archaeologists, the present writer (Snodgrass 1993) and Hans van Wees (1994) included.

But we remained in a minority. Just as, on the philological side, most of the reviewers had reacted favorably, so most commentators on the historical implications took their lead from the late Kendrick Pritchett (Pritchett 1985), who followed the lead given by Latacz far beyond the point that we have reached so far. A useful roll call of these largely favorable responses has been given by van Wees (1988: 1–2, n. 3; supplemented in 1994: 14, n. 2): as we shall see, they include a number of historians and archaeologists. For Latacz and for many of his converts, not only was there a coherent
Kampfdarstellung
of massed battles, but it was historically a realistic one, rather than some kind of poetic construction; not only was it real, but it was based on a type of phalanx formation familiar from historical times; not only was it a kind of phalanx warfare, but it was the
same
kind of phalanx warfare that we know from later descriptions of the hoplite. This is the
Kampfwirklichkeit
of Latacz’s title: it goes without saying that, at almost every point, its validity depends on the integrity of the
Kampfdarstellung
that we were just now criticizing.

It will be apparent by now that, after the first, indisputable demonstration of the importance of mass armies in the
Iliad
, I question every subsequent stage in this sequence of arguments. The “consistency” of the poet’s battle descriptions seems to me largely imaginary. Even if it were genuine, it does not necessarily follow that the descriptions should be credited with the historical authenticity that Latacz confers on them: they might have been designed simply to fit the plot of the
Iliad
(as, in the main, they do, playing down but not entirely suppressing the effectiveness of the large forces arrayed on each side so as to highlight the deeds of individual warriors). But from this point on, the issues become increasingly historical ones: can the descriptions of mass engagements in the
Iliad
be closely compared, let alone identified, with the evidence that we have for the early historical phases of hoplite phalanx battle?

To assert that they can, Latacz had to venture unusually far outside the purely philological sphere. The fact that he nevertheless convinced historians and archaeologists of high repute on this whole issue, up to and including the final step of identifying the hoplite phalanx in the
Iliad
, must be reckoned a powerful argument for the strength of his case. No doubt I remain in a minority in continuing to find in this mass conversion a source of amazement. I cannot understand how my historical and archaeological colleagues were lulled into overlooking what seem to be glaring contrasts between the two methods of fighting. These contrasts range from the higher conceptual level, in the multiple linkage of the hoplite phalanx with the condition of citizenship, to
the lower levels of organization (the presence
or
absence of pipers) or of mundane accoutrements (the total dichotomy between shields of hide and shields of wood). I can only echo a phrase that we earlier heard from Paul Cartledge, “a world of difference.”

It is true that I have jumped directly to the last step in Latacz’s argument, the identification in Homer of the hoplite phalanx and the consequent denial of any post-Homeric “hoplite reform,” passing over many complex intermediate arguments. It might be asserted that his case could anyway stand without the support of these intervening steps: that is, even if the battle descriptions of the
Iliad
were confused and incoherent, and consequently lacking in all historical verisimilitude, the mere occurrence, even once or twice, of a descriptive passage recognizable as an account of the hoplite phalanx would be enough—enough to show (short of having recourse to the old tactic of denouncing such lines as later interpolations) that the hoplite phalanx was something present in the poet of the
Iliad
’s experience. In some opinions, we do have one or two passages of just this kind, notably in book xiii (130–33, 339–43). We shall return to this issue of single passages later; but in any case, I do not think that it was this line of argument that won over so many distinguished scholars. Rather, it was a feeling of intellectual dissatisfaction (shared by myself) with the established view against which Latacz was rebelling: the view, enshrined in Lorimer’s classic article (1947: 111), that Homeric and hoplite fighting were two utterly different, sharply contrasting phenomena, the latter having fairly abruptly replaced the former in post-Homeric times; and that any Homeric passage suggesting otherwise was to be excised as a later interpolation. Like the denial of any trace of the polis in the Homeric poems, this doctrine had come to seem too absolute, too “pat.”

But next, I wish to move for a moment into a fully archaeological field: that of dedications of actual armor in sanctuaries. Here we have a class of evidence that is robust in itself, and central to the issue of chronology with which we are concerned: indeed, for the early chronology of the hoplite and the phalanx, it constitutes the firmest evidence that we have. From a date in the mid-seventh century BCE, it suddenly became common practice to dedicate, to Zeus at Olympia and to other deities elsewhere, specimens of the bronze armor of the hoplite. None of these items of equipment was altogether new, but never had they appeared in anything resembling these quantities. The highly protective bronze Corinthian helmet becomes a very much more frequent dedication, along with the less common bronze breastplate; more important than either, and more abrupt in the scale of increase in dedications, are the bronze facings and bronze armbands from the round, wooden hoplite shield. The figures in Snodgrass 1980: 105 today stand to be greatly enhanced by new finds and publications, particularly in the additional category of the bronze greave: Kunze 1991. Kunze’s periodization is slightly different, with the phases beginning and ending somewhat later: the marked surge in the dedication of greaves thus becomes clearly visible only from around the 630s BCE, rather than at the mid-seventh century, rising from about thirty-four examples in the “Early Archaic” phase to about eighty in the “High Archaic” (a phase of similar duration, extending perhaps from about 630 to about 560 BCE), dedicated at Olympia or Delphi. But some of the “Early Archaic” specimens—perhaps as many as fourteen—are specifically dated to the third quarter
of the seventh century (Kunze 1991: 14, 20–21) so that the “surge” at the midcentury may have been comparable with those apparent in the other categories of armor.

Each item on this list—hoplite shield, breastplate, Corinthian helmet, cuirass, and greaves—had been seen on the battlefield for a generation or two before circa 650 BCE, and indeed, most of them feature in the battles of the
Iliad
. But when taken together, they comprise the first, and heaviest, standard panoply of the Greek hoplite, and there is good reason to see in this upsurge in dedication a significant step in the development of the hoplite. To explain it as a mere change in votive fashion would be to overlook the exact coincidence in time with a small group of Corinthian vase paintings, which give us our best iconographic evidence of this same, standardized heavy panoply, together with the first and clearest depictions of the phalanx.