Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (25 page)

It is important to realize that this “mature” phase of heavily armed hoplites, fighting in a phalanx, had an end as well as a beginning. Something over a century later, in the final generation of the sixth century BCE, there is a similar conjunction of archaeological (a falloff in dedications) and iconographic evidence, but this time demonstrating that armor was becoming lighter. Perhaps in the cause of increased mobility, the bronze cuirass began to be discarded in favor of lighter materials and the Corinthian helmet to be made of thinner metal, or replaced by less protective forms (though the greave evidently lived on). This lightened form of the panoply was to prevail permanently: the hoplite familiar from the Classical written sources was thus a different animal from his ancestor of the period between circa 650 and 525 BCE.

But this if anything increases the significance of that earlier phase: it is perhaps the most prolonged, stable, securely attested, and well-dated episode in Greek warfare. It is also the period of the widespread overseas exploits of the Greek hoplite (John Hale, this volume), in what might be called his “export model”; and, as a direct consequence, the period during which certain non-Greek peoples, most famously the Etruscans, first paid the Greek hoplite the compliment of adopting his equipment and imitating his formations. It is not the beginning of the hoplite’s story, but it provides a fundamental benchmark against which we should judge both earlier and later Greek warfare—including the warfare of the
Iliad
.

Each of the approaches to these problems that has been mentioned—the philological, the historical, and, less often, the iconographical—has its characteristic strengths and weaknesses, which in turn may have a chronological application; the weaknesses are often apparent at the point of junction with, or transition to, a different field of study. To take first an example of the philological approach: every discussion of the battle tactics of the
Iliad
, by comparison with those of the historical hoplite, must take account of the fact that the word
phalanx
occurs repeatedly in the poem, though almost always in the plural: I recall my own unease, many years ago, in seeking either to explain away this fact, or alternatively to use it as an argument against the then established orthodoxy. For the philologist, it is natural to attach greater weight to a terminological factor of this kind and, if pressed too far, this tendency becomes a weakness. The fact is that a given Greek word could, and often did, change its meaning through time: Peter Krentz (this volume) considered the interesting case of the verb
ôtheo
, which (like
phalanx
) makes frequent appearances in the battle scenes of
the
Iliad
, but is also a basic feature in descriptions of Classical hoplite fighting. Even within a single period, Greek terminology is notorious for its failure to use the same word to denote a given thing in anything like a one-to-one relation: rather, it seems to revel in richness and variety of vocabulary. The Greek nomenclature of pot shapes, or of weapons, would provide clear examples. All of this means that too close a reliance on the terminology of literary descriptions can become a weakness of the philological approach: the mere presence of a word like
phalanx
(or
phalanges
) may mean little on its own. I am not suggesting that Latacz himself is vulnerable on this account, but I do suspect that this factor has played a part in persuading others.

But the historical approach has its weaknesses too. In this context, there is one tendency that I have found as prominent as it is unfortunate: the detachment from, or disregard for, the most recent shifts of opinion in philological scholarship. Historians and archaeologists are, I think, by now generally aware of the movement (already of some thirty years’ standing) on the part of philologists and others toward lowering the date of the completion of the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
, in essentially the form in which we have them, from the later eighth century BCE to the earlier seventh: indeed, some of them have themselves contributed to it. Its effect on the whole issue of the relation between hoplite fighting and the battles of the
Iliad
is potentially quite a profound one.

What I have missed altogether, however, is any reference to a more recent, and even more far-reaching, movement of opinion. I refer to the “evolutionary model” for the Homeric texts, which in its fully fledged form, first pioneered in the 1990s by Gregory Nagy, has today made such a rapid advance as to have reached “almost the status of orthodoxy” among the younger generation of American philologists, according to one of their number who does not himself accept it (Reece 2005: 52). The doctrine is conveniently summarized in a succinct, two-page outline that Nagy appended at the end of his paper in the volume
New Light on a Dark Age
(Nagy 1997: 206–7). According to this model, there were “five ages of Homer,” each showing progressively less flexibility and greater rigidity:

1. the most fluid period, with no written texts, extending from the second millennium to the later part of the eighth century BC

2. a more formative or “Panhellenic” period, still with no written texts, from the later eighth to the mid-sixth century BC

3. a definitive period, originating in the Athens of the Peisistratids, with potential transcripts being taken down at any of several points from the mid-sixth to the later fourth century BC

4. a standardizing period, perhaps with texts that were not mere transcripts, from the later fourth to the mid-second century BC

5. a most rigid period, with texts as “scripture,” from the mid-second century BC onward.

All this, but especially the description of the first two “ages,” poses a direct and obvious threat to any theory of consistent and coherent Homeric battle tactics, belonging to a single period. The most important feature for us is perhaps the continued absence of written texts down to the mid-sixth century and the fact that even
the second stage is still merely “more formative,” not definitive. Yet in one respect, by bringing the first “age” to a close in the later eighth century rather than the seventh, this model restores some of its significance to a long-established, but now increasingly disputed, landmark: an important quality, namely, Panhellenic status, differentiates the second “age” from the first. At the same time, the model would undermine the recent fashion for detecting the latest diagnostic features in the Homeric
Realien
and using them to lower the date of the main composition of the epics from the eighth century to some point within the seventh, and so setting up a comprehensive
terminus post quem
for their consolidation into essentially the form that we know. Instead, the whole concept of “consolidation” becomes premature for this stage, and any such features may simply be assigned to a further stage in the development of the epics.

We may wish to reject the entire evolutionary model, but I do not think we can silently ignore its existence. On the positive side, the model opens the door to a variety of potential solutions to the problems that we have been discussing. An example might be the occurrence in the
Iliad
of single passages with distinctively hoplite overtones, which we were discussing earlier. Under the “evolutionary model,” it is no longer necessary to stigmatize such lines as “interpolations,” if the whole received text was still potentially exposed to the influence of the age of the hoplite: on the contrary, it may now be their extreme rarity that occasions surprise.

The ramifications of the evolutionary model of course extend very much more widely. New explanations may emerge, whether for long-standing textual debating points such as the description of the shield of Achilles in
Iliad
xviii, with its surprisingly advanced development, both in the society portrayed and implicitly in the techniques of artistic execution; or for notorious iconographic problems such as that posed by the “Euphorbos plate,” showing the fight to secure the body and arms of Euphorbos, with Menelaos apparently prevailing against Hektor in a way that not merely differs from, but flatly contradicts the narrative of
Iliad
xvii, 1–113. In these as in other cases, the main effect of the model may appear to be that of increasing the range of the uncertainties—not necessarily a bad thing.

The iconographical approach, in general, is perhaps the one whose weaknesses are most apparent to us. I content myself with quoting a couple of phrases from the paper published earlier by Adam Schwartz (Schwartz 2002: 54): “any attempt towards interpretation is bedeviled by the sheer amount of ambiguity inherent in such early iconography. There is no external criterion of control to iconography.” One might contest the last comment by saying that actual finds of objects, corresponding to those shown in the images, constitute a partial external control. But in general these comments are truer of the iconographical approach than of either the philological or the historical one.

None of these three approaches can in fact progress very far on its own, without recourse to the other two. Above all, this must not degenerate into a game of stone/scissors/paper, in which the “stone” of the textual evidence competes with the “scissors” of history and the “paper” of iconography. Our difficulty is that few of us can muster the skills necessary to judge authoritatively in more than one of these categories, let alone all three. We have instead to assess the reliability of the conclusions
reached by colleagues in other disciplines; and the essence of my argument so far has been that we have sometimes fallen short in such assessments.

Yet my conclusion, in the light of the contributions to this volume intended to represent the full range of divergent views, and of the conference at Yale from which the volume sprang, is an optimistic one. I recall something said by Donald Kagan in the first session at Yale. He referred to the “search for self-differentiation” that once preoccupied the epic poets, but which today instead affects research—in that scholars tend to accentuate, rather than play down, the differences between their own views and those of colleagues. I agree: I think that the degree of consensus present in the current study of hoplites is greater than has often been acknowledged by the participants in that study. I would include myself, and this present article, in that judgment: it is more important that I share in the fundamental consensus, founded on Latacz’s work, that mass armies are the decisive force in the warfare of the
Iliad
, than that I reject every one of the later inferences that he bases on that insight.

Some of the apparent disagreements have turned out to be derived from simple misunderstanding. Thus, Hans van Wees did
not
deny the presence of mass combat in the
Iliad
, but that of
massed
combat, a different thing (van Wees 1994: 15, n.7); and Kurt Raaflaub (this volume) does
not
support Latacz’s identification of the close formations described in the
Iliad
with the hoplite phalanx. It is helpful to have these matters clarified, but what I argue is that there is a deeper level of convergence between ostensibly competing views.

I do not wish to overpress this point. But one man’s “hoplite revolution” may not differ all that much from what is merely a significant advance in the course of another man’s “evolution of the hoplite.” Nowadays, in fact, nearly everyone seems to accept some kind of gradualist account of the onset of the Greek hoplite, though we differ in the degree of gradualism that we favor, and in the chronological settings to which we extend it. Thus the nascent phalanx of the
Iliad
, even on Latacz’s own account, has some further developments to undergo before reaching the form recognizable from historical accounts; while, for Hans van Wees, these further developments had still not run their full course by the end of the seventh century BCE. A combination of these two views would extend the evolution of the hoplite over a century or more.

Against this trend toward gradualism, however, one substantial obstacle has remained: the adoption of the two-handled arrangement for the hoplite shield, that single, once-for-all advance, apparently widely and rapidly accepted. It is absolutely certain that this invention was in place by the early decades of the seventh century, and very likely that it had already happened in the late eighth. But was it desirable, or even practicable, to combine this new piece of equipment with any battle formation other than the fully fledged, close-order phalanx, whose members were uniformly armed with it?

Here a genuine conflict of views persists. Paul Cartledge (now joined by Greg Viggiano at this conference) has been prominent among those who champion the inseparability of shield and formation; Victor Hanson has brought home to everyone the features of weight and concavity that distinguish the hoplite shield from just any two-handled form; while Hans van Wees has been tireless in the search for other
contexts of use for the two-handled shield. For now, I would only plead for flexibility in our interpretations. Is it not possible, even likely, that the developed form of the hoplite shield—heavy, wooden, concave, partly bronze-faced—did not appear immediately upon the invention of the double handles? Could it have been precisely this final form that introduced and characterized the slightly later phase of the “standardized heavy panoply” that I identified earlier? Certainly the decorated bronze arm armband, the most diagnostic surviving feature of the developed hoplite shield, begins to appear among the dedications only from this time. In that case, the earlier round, two-handled shields, though undoubtedly real and of similar dimensions, could have been made of different, lighter materials, and so perhaps been usable in a wider range of battle formations.

I note, too, how often those involved in recent discussion of hoplites have seen themselves as seeking compromises between different views, and I am happy to join their number. My paper has concentrated heavily on the beginning and the early phases of the age of the hoplite, to the detriment of the far better documented Classical period, let alone anything later. So let me end with a pointer in the direction of something that is very seldom discussed, no doubt because it is heavily deficient in written documentation and almost entirely lacking in iconography: the final disappearance of the hoplite.