Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (35 page)

  
39
. Krentz 2007: 74.

  
40
. Hanson 2000: 152–59. See Hanson’s chapter in this volume on the impossibility that opposing hoplite phalanxes never collided.

  
41
. In this volume, Krentz cites John Keegan (1976) to make his point that out of faintheart-edness hoplites would not crash into one another, but this is unconvincing. Scholars have long used the rugby scrum, which Krentz also criticizes in this volume, as an analogy for certain aspects of hoplite battle. In this case, American football is helpful. Football coaches at all levels, even when coaching eight- to twelve-year-old boys, insist that players crash into one another and often judge the success of line play and tackling in part by the sound of the popping together of helmets and shoulderpads when players collide. Special-team play, during which players run the length of the field at top speed and crash into one another, is considered one of the most exciting and important parts of the game. Teams perform drills in practice to develop the skills and toughness necessary for hitting opposing players head-on. Professional football careers in the National Football League are notoriously short (about 3.5 years) due mainly to the violent contact players, especially the huge linemen, who battle in the “trenches” and crash into each other in tight formation, experience.
Sports Illustrated
, a popular American sports magazine, describes a linebacker tackling a running back at full speed (
SI
, September 5, 2011): “There is an unmistakable
crack
—helmets, face masks and upper body pads all colliding, a noise that can’t be heard on Sundays in living rooms or from the distant and soft club seats. But it is the soundtrack of the game.” A player explains what he was taught as a boy in Pop Warner (youth football): “Make sure you hit as hard as you can. Inflict as much pain as possible. Take ‘em out. That’s what got me recruited to Miami from high school—the violence that I tackled with. I guess there were rules but I didn’t really think about them till I got to the pros.” Why would battle-hardened hoplites similarly equipped and fighting for their lands, families and poleis shy away, as a rule, from violent contact that would help break open the enemy’s line? It is more
believable that armies would station their most disciplined and fearless warriors in the front two or three rows, and then place the older but relatively brave men in the back two or three lines to keep the relatively fainthearted hoplites in the middle from fleeing and thus to prevent what Keegan describes from happening. In the
Iliad
4.299–300, for instance, Nestor drives the cowards (
kakoi
) into the middle to make them fight against their will.

  
42
. Thuc. 1.108.1. An objection that Tanagra is a fifth-century battle will not work. If the Spartans had had such a decisive edge over all other Greeks with a close formation between 650 and 500, that would have compelled other poleis to follow suit.

  
43
. Pausanias,
Periegesis
, book 4. The argument being that archaic wars were neither brief nor decisive nor economical.

  
44
. Along these lines, revisionists will often argue that if there is only one or a handful of references in the sources to an idea (e.g., the collision of phalanxes,
synkleisis
in Thucydides, etc.), the point is either false or can be ignored as unproven.

  
45
. Krentz 2007: 79.

  
46
. At the conference, Krentz objected to saying that the revisionist position characterizes hoplites as duelists, but once one abandons the idea of the close formation and warriors seeking cover provided by their neighbors’ shields, the phalanx becomes a series of duels fought in an extended line.

  
47
. See Schwartz in this volume for tactics implied by the hoplite panoply.

  
48
. In this volume, Krentz argues that hoplite armor became progressively lighter until it was ultimately used for close-order fighting in the fifth century, following Marathon.

  
49
. See Hanson’s analogy to people playing touch football with full gear in this volume.

  
50
. Tyrtaeus fr. 11.35–38.

  
51
. Tyrtaeus fr. 11.29–34.

  
52
. Snodgrass 2006: 345.

  
53
. Salmon 1977: 90.

  
54
. On the one hand, I am aware of the precarious nature of using the poetic and often ambiguous testimony of Homer as historical evidence. On the other hand, certain references in the
Iliad
to mass fighting seem clear enough (e.g.,
Iliad
13.130–33) to point to precedents for the later hoplite phalanx.

  
55
. In this volume, Snodgrass discusses the trend of philologists to lower the date for the completion of the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
from the eighth to at least the seventh century. However, even if one assumes that Homer describes Greek warfare close to the way it was actually fought before the development of the phalanx, and accepts the evolutionary model of Nagy that posits a somewhat fluid transmission of an unwritten
Iliad
down to as late as the mid-sixth century, that does not necessarily imply a later phalanx. The traditional nature of Homeric poetry and the desire of the poet to represent a distant and heroic, though intelligible, past, would compel him to describe the fighting style of a generation before the hoplite era.

  
56
. This does not mean that aristocrats did not play a much more prominent role in prephalanx mass warfare. Raaflaub is correct that Homer downplays the decisive role of the
laoi
for poetic effect, but in order for Homeric battle to be serious and meaningful, the
aristeia
and individual battles of the great champions must too have met the expectations of the audience for a measure of realism. That argument works both ways. If Homer was pretending and heroic demonstrations of
arete
were entirely fanciful, scenes that display them would seem ludicrous. Indeed, Herodotus describes the battle of champions between the Argives and Spartans over Thyrea in the middle of the sixth century (Hdt. 1.82).

  
57
. Snodgrass 1965: 115.

  
58
. Snodgrass 2006: 346.

  
59
. 
Iliad
2.200–202.

  
60
. See Raaflaub 1993, 1997, and 1999.

  
61
. Raaflaub 1993: 41–42.

  
62
. 
Iliad
15.494–98.

  
63
. 
Iliad
6.407–65.

  
64
. I agree that Homer deliberately downplays the role of the
laoi
in order to concentrate on heroic combat and that there was probably never an era dominated entirely by soloist fighters; however, a fundamental change occurs with the introduction of hoplite armor and tactics.

  
65
. 
Iliad
9.515–18.

  
66
. 
Iliad
9.115ff. and 19.83ff.

  
67
. Fragment 12.15–42.

  
68
. Note the contrast Pericles makes with the ageless praise for which the Homeric hero strives to win individual immortality, not the immortality of the community.

  
69
. Thuc. 2.43.1–2; 2.46.1.

  
70
. Thuc. 2.40.2.

  
71
. Thuc. 2.41.4: “We shall not need the praise of a Homer.”

  
72
. Hanson 1995: 47–89.

  
73
. Foxhall 1997: 122–29.

  
74
. Foxhall 1997: 123.

  
75
. Foxhall 1997: 127.

  
76
. Foxhall 1997: 131.

  
77
. Forsdyke 2006: 342.

  
78
. Forsdyke 2006: 343 cites Garnsey 1988: 94, “the argument for the prevalence of intensive farming does not depend on farmers residing on their properties rather than in nearby nucleated settlements.” In a list of five methods of intensification Cherry et al. 1991: 331 include only one involving farm residence.

  
79
. Isager and Skydsgaard 1992: 112–13.

  
80
. Forsdyke 2006: 344–45 following Gallant 1982: 122–24.

  
81
. Forsdyke 2006: 345.

  
82
. Forsdyke 2006: 346 observes, “it is striking that on Keos ‘farms’ and expansion into marginal lands arise already in the archaic period while in the Argolid such phenomena appear only in the classical period.”

  
83
. Osborne 2004: 170 points out the limitations of the survey data: “survey itself offers no way in to absolute population levels. Survey data yield figures for inhabitants only when we apply a series of assumptions derived from non-survey, and frequently from non-archaeological, evidence. Survey itself cannot even show that the assumption that ‘family farms’ were on average the residences of five people is justified. The density figures for larger settlements are at best derived from local excavation evidence (via further hypotheses which are not themselves testable on the basis of archaeological material); more normally, they come from cross-cultural data whose comparability is not explored.”

  
84
. It is significant that there is some evidence for marginal lands being farmed in the eighth and seventh centuries, even though the surveys produce a much higher volume of rural sites for the fifth and fourth centuries.

  
85
. This argument has become popular in recent years. But Starr 1977: 123 relates that no more than 400 men were assigned the liturgy of maintaining a trireme in the Peloponnesian War, which must have been less than one percent of the adult male citizen population; 300 citizens had that responsibility in the mid-fourth century. Starr observes, “in earlier centuries and in smaller states the numbers of aristocrats must have been fewer.” It is unlikely that the
aristocracy in Greece at any point from 700 to 300 BC numbered much above 1 or 2 percent, far less than even the lowest estimates for the percentage of those wealthy in land in archaic Greece.

  
86
. Foxhall 1995: 243–44.

  
87
. E.g., Morris 1987: 57–109 attributed the dramatic increase in burials found for the years 780–720, which Snodgrass 1980 interpreted as a massive growth (4%) in the population, in part to short-term changes in Athenian burial customs.

  
88
. Scheidel 2003: 120–40.

  
89
. Snodgrass’s observation of 1993: 32 still applies.

  
90
. Revisionists are especially critical of using any late source to explain what took place in the archaic period. They often reject any source that is not contemporary and question the dating of early sources such as Tyrtaeus. My method is to be critical of all evidence but not to reject writers like Ephorus solely because they are late, if their testimony does not contradict an earlier source and presents a plausible account.

  
91
. Snodgrass 1993: 30–31.

  
92
. Salmon 1977: 92–93.

  
93
. For discussion of Corinth and tyranny in general see Andrewes 1956: 43–53.

  
94
. Nicholas 90 fr. 35.

  
95
. Pausanias 2.24.7.

  
96
. Tyrtaeus fr. 1. 12.

  
97
. Cartledge 2002: 115–17.

  
98
. Cartledge 2001: 16.

  
99
. On Solon’s constitution see Ste. Croix 2005.

100
. Davies 1997: 34.

101
. Raaflaub 2009: 37–56 argues for the uniqueness of early Greek political thought, despite certain “foreign influences” from the Near East and Egypt.

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