Chapter 6
—Alcaeus (28a)
Not finely roofed houses Nor the stones of well-built walls Nor even canals or dockyards Make the polis, but rather men of the type Able to meet the job at hand.
There is a long tradition in the West that good infantry, indeed the best infantry, was always made up of the men who worked the countryside. The theme is ubiquitous in Greek literature (e.g., Xen. Oec. 5.4-5, 6.6-7, 9-10; [Arist.] Oec. 12. 1343b2-6). It is echoed constantly by later Roman authors who looked fondly on the Greek exemplar. “Our own ancestors,” wrote Varro (Rust. 3.1.4), “with good reason sent their citizens from town back to the countryside, for during peacetime they were fed by the rustic Romans and in war defended by them.” Vegetius could remark as late as the fourth century A.D.: “I do not believe that there has ever been any question that the rural folk are the best equipped for military service” (1.3; cf. Pliny HN 18.26). In modern times, sociologies of battle in this country have usually argued that our best ground fighters have risen out of the conservative rural territory of the American South and Midwest, where tradition, family values, and acceptance of discipline remain strong.
Yet the original purpose of agrarian infantry in the West was not to storm cities, not to gain advantage over foreign troops, not to protect the Greek polis from outside challengers—although agriculturalists were to do exactly that superbly time and again—but rather to fight each other, farmer against farmer, and thereby to protect their property and their community. In the process they helped to establish agrarian control of the political life of their respective city-states. Much has been written about the tactics and strategy of Greek infantry during the lifetime of the polis. Journal articles continue to seek out unappreciated maneuver and articulation on the part of hoplite phalanxes in set battles of the fifth and fourth centuries, forgotten Cannae-like tactics at Marathon (490B.C.), or unnoticed reserves and a revolutionary en echelon advance more than a century later at the battle of Leuctra (371 B.C.).
In the end, however, the search to find a military revolution in hoplite battles of the fourth century is more often futile. True, there were rudimentary set-moves of phalanxes by this time, especially at Sparta and Thebes. However, except for strengthening the wings or increasing the depth of a phalanx, a formidable simplicity persists throughout the warfare of the polis that continues to baffle and frustrate even the most ingenious military historian. The relative absence of many specialized contingents, the seemingly unintelligent deployment of existing cavalry, the general avoidance of missile troops and siegecraft, the reluctance to integrate light and heavy infantry before the fifth century, all at times drive the armchair strategist of Greek warfare in desperation to hasten to the military drama of Philip and Alexander, and therein to study the richer complexities of Macedonian battle.1
This amateurism of the hoplite phalanx, this abject absence of military science itself until the fourth century (which makes Greek hoplite warfare of the city-state less interesting to the professional battle scholar) , ensures that the warring of Greek poleis is all the more fascinating for our own purposes. Those are to investigate this most curious subordination of warfare to a larger agricultural agenda. Greek fighting of the polis should never be discussed outside the context of farming.
In the last analysis, like the rise of small farming itself, the collision of hoplite phalanxes is a human story of muscular strength, physical endurance, and resolute nerve—the Thebans wrestling at Leuctra (e.g., Plut. Mor. 639), the Spartans biting and clawing at Thermopylae (Hdt. 7.225.3), the great bodily pushing at Coroneia (e.g., Xen. Hell. 43.19). Greek warfare before the fifth century is not a tale of evolving technology or of intellectual brilliance. The hoplite battlefield was simply the agrarian polis transferred in mass to a place of killing and death, an agricultural community that had frozen technological development and tactical experimentation for over two centuries.
Of course, Greek infantrymen appear as graceful warriors on fifthcentury red-figure and black-figure vases, and as formidable professionals on monumental sculpture of Panhellenic temples and treasuries (see Anderson 1970: pis. 3, 6, 9, 15). Hoplite warfare can even be termed “glorious” by the lyric and elegiac poets (“men perish by war, cowards by disease,” Anth. Pal. 7.234, 7.233; Tyrt. 12.13: “the noblest virtue”). Is there not also an undeniable sophistication to hoplite weaponry, as the double-gripped shield and double-pointed spear attest (e.g., Hanson 1991b: 67-74)?
But clashes between massed columns of armored amateurs were more an unglamorous saga of small farming men—burial remains tell us that the soldiers averaged around five feet six inches in height and about 140-150 pounds. The combatants were stout agrarians of all ages, killers of an afternoon whose prime objective—whose only directive in the beginning—was to battle other farmers over disputed ground. No wonder these agrarians called their hoplite fighting “threshing it out” (Tyrt. 19.16). No wonder Homer compared two opposing masses of armed men to “two lines of reapers, who facing each other, drive their course all down the field of wheat or of barley” (Il. 18.68-69; and cf. 19.221-26).
Through the appropriation of polis fighting, Greek agriculturalists emerged in the first two centuries of the polis to assume a monopoly over the life of the city-state. These yeomen were not men mounted on horses, above the filth and brutality of infantry fighting on feet, knees, and belly. They were not hired thugs, psychotics, or crazed beserkers (e.g., Lazenby 1991: 107-8), the red-eyed deviants that modern societies wheel out in time of crises, only to closet when the dust settles, “but rather men of the type able to meet the job at hand” (Alcaeus 28a), who produced the food, made the laws, and fought the wars of the Greek city-state.
As we have seen in the last chapter, a code of social, political, and ethical thought was necessary to embody the gains of new agriculturalists, and to express exactly what the Greek farmers were. That agrarian vision of the geôrgoi, once discussed, debated, and articulated was expressed ideologically in legislation and geographically in a patchwork of farms upon the landscape—and then ultimately preserved militarily from reactionary challenge, from within and without individual citystates. Reform through legal, political, or ethical recourse is rarely entirely peaceful. Lasting agrarian change must be ensured by force and by threat of force—and thus ultimately by possession of arms.
We must therefore investigate how it was that the Greek farmer found himself as a hoplite in control of the battlefield, in the seventh through fifth centuries, and thereby was able to protect and promote his novel ideas of agrarian government and property egalitarianism. The process begins with the creation of new weapons. They were tools entirely antithetical to the previous equestrian and aristocratic supremacy of Dark-Age clans, appurtenances also superior to the missile weaponry and inferior body protection of the poorly equipped Greek foot soldiers of the pre-polis era.
The basic components of classical Greek infantry armament that appeared at the end of the eighth century—bronze helmet, body armor, greaves, round shield, and thrusting spear—were in fact known in some form or other to the earlier and mostly elite Mycenean and Dark Age Greeks, and also to alien Eastern and European peoples well before the appearance of the polis (e.g., Snodgrass 1964b: 37-68, 72-90; 1967: 59-60; 197 Ib: 33-50). Yet between 725 and 675 B.C.—an era roughly contemporaneous with Laertes’ farm and the world of Hesiod—there was an evolution and modification of these earlier weapon designs into a far more codified, heavier collection of bronze and iron arms and armor: (1)a double-grip, concave, round shield; (2) a “Corinthian” helmet that covered nearly the entire face and head; (3) a “bell” corselet of solid bronze; (4) pliable, laceless greaves for the knees and shins (“protection against spear and stone” [Aesch. Sept. 676]); (5) a spear with both an iron head and a sharp bronze spike at its butt; (6) short secondary sword, should the spear shatter. This distinctive ensemble, labeled by modern scholars the “hoplite panoply,” was the more or less exclusive armament of the farmers of Greece for the next two hundred years of the polis period (i.e., 700—500B.C.). Even thereafter, with modification and transfermation in the fifth and fourth centuries it was tied inextricably to the agrarian populace of Greece.
The problem for our purposes is to chart the cause and effect of the new arms (which are first attested in Greece between the late eighth and middle seventh centuries archaeologically, iconographically, and in the literature of contemporary lyric and elegiac poetry), not merely in a military sense, but in a social and political context as well. Quite simply, does the rather sudden appearance of these new hoplite arms, and the subsequent fighting in massed array explain how the new farmer class seized control of Greek political life? Do these innovations in arms tell us how geôrgoi took land or influence away from entrenched landowners? Or, in contrast, is this so-called hoplite reform in armament not the catalyst for agrarian change and the rise of a new breed of agrarian, but merely a reflection of the successful property owners’ emerging muscle, of their desire to fabricate new equipment and arms to protect their novel way of rural life?
Or do hoplite equipment and the phalanx have no relationship at all with farmers and the rise of agrarianism? Do they illustrate instead the evolving military tastes of traditional aristocratic landowners, the landed barons who, through some hundred years of social and economic assimilation, slowly incorporated other less fortunate men into their ranks? If that third premise were to be true, there would be no need for the present chapter in this book. These questions—endlessly debated by classical scholars throughout this century—are important because they represent sharply alternative views of early Greek history, and thus contradictory notions of the relationship between early Greek agriculture and the emergence of the Greek city-state.
To some historians, it was not new farming strategies, as I have argued repeatedly in this study, but rather brute force that brought agrarian change, as if military power could exist in a vacuum quite apart from economic prominence, as if a panoply could somehow guarantee farming success. To other scholars, there is absolutely no connection at all between agrarian change at the beginning of the polis period and the rise of new military practice, as if fundamental and concomitant changes in military practice and farming—the two most important duties of a Greek—had no connection with each other or the rise of the polis itself.
I believe in a much different scenario: the prior transformation in agricultural practice (as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3) resulted first in successful economic challenges to traditional aristocratic interests. Then this material evolution of the countryside—from pastoralism and aristocratic control of cereal estates to a network of agrarian city-states surrounded by small farms—gathered force as successful independent farmers framed a new social ethos and political ideology (seen in Chapters 4 and 5). That momentum made possible, even demanded new methods of waging wars over entirely new objectives. It led to the formal creation of hoplite weaponry and finally face-to-face, near-ritual duels between agrarian phalanxes.
In sum, yeomen emerged from the anonymity of the old mass to reinvent the Greek phalanx as the private domain of heavily armed, mutually dependent small farmers. This “invention” of hoplite warfare was not some utopian enterprise, the “construct” of some agrarian conspiracy. Instead imagine its birth far more pragmatically, as the result of one group of agrarians, perhaps first on the island of Euboea or in the Peloponnese at Argos in the late eighth century, reinventing and rearming the “phalanx” and thus finding themselves invincible on the battlefield. Other agricultural communities were also forced to go “hoplite” to defend their property. Soon the entire conglomeration of agrarian poleis learned that only a phalanx of armored farmers in careful files could save the honor and property of their respective city-states, once agrarians over the border invaded their territory. The military efficiency of hoplite rectangles and the growing economic and political clout of small parcel owners worked hand in hand to ensure agrarian control of thepolis.
Currently, the more influential scholarly hypothesis of the social and political environment of early Greek hoplites correctly stresses that the introduction of “hoplite” equipment was a half-century or longer process (i.e., about 725-675 B.C.). Helmets, breastplates, and double-gripped shields gradually began to appear on proto-Corinthian pottery of that period, in private burials, and as votive offerings at the Panhellenic sanctuaries.*
Greek hoplite equipment was more likely fabricated before, and quite apart from, the tactics of the phalanx. The birth of the Greek phalanx of the polis—the formation to which this heavy equipment was ideally suited—in this view, should not necessarily be either simultaneous with, or even necessarily dependent on, hoplite arms and armor. No intrinsic connection need exist between new hoplite weapons and phalanx tactics, separated as they were by many decades.
To support this (nonagrarian) interpretation of early Greek military history, it is pointed out that archaeological finds prove the presence of many items of hoplite equipment—helmets, greaves, shield bosses, spear-heads and -butts—in the last quarter of the eighth century, but there is no corresponding pictorial evidence on vases or references in literature to true phalanxes until much later, perhaps not even until 650 B.C. Seventh- and sixth-century Greek vase painting and poetry are the only media in which early phalanxes might appear. Contemporary burials and surface finds cannot shed light on tactical formation. Panoramic temple friezes were rare, and historical writing was simply nonexistent in the seventh century.
How does this theory of initial separation between panoply and phalanx fit into our matrix of agricultural change and the rise of the polis? How would the idea apply to the notion of radically new strategies of farming at the end of the eighth century, to the world of Hesiod described in Chapter 3? In this scholarly interpretation, neither weapons nor tactics suddenly changed the status quo of the population in the Greek city-states. New weapons and tactics are not the property of any novel “class.” Novel shields, helmets, and breastplates instead reflect throughout the seventh century the continuing influence of traditional propertied and mounted aristocrats. These horse-riding elites gradually incorporate the less well-off farmers to walk alongside themselves to battle. Only slowly are farmers to be equipped with protection and weapons akin to their horse-owning superiors. Military transformation, then, is incremental. It is without radical social repercussions (e.g., Greenhalgh 151-55). Tactics and technology are not inseparably related in the early military history of the Greeks.
Others have espoused a so-called sudden change to the Greek phalanx idea, the dramatic and exciting notion of an abrupt social transformation brought on by force of new arms and tactics throughout most of Greece. This theory takes nearly the opposite view from the “gradualists.”* These social historians concentrate on the peculiar shape, the great size, and the considerable weight of the three-foot, double-gripped, concave shield. In their eyes, this new hoplite protective device is tantamount to one of the great revolutionary breakthroughs in Greek history. It is an innovation quite capable of tactical determinism in its own right: “The change was relatively sudden and due imprimis to the widespread adoption of what became regarded as the hoplite accouterment par excellence, the shield with porpax. [arm-band] and antilabe [hand-grip]” (Cartledge 1977: 20). Its adoption, along with other items of the hoplite panoply, around 700 B.C. could only have signaled an abrupt transformation in Greek infantry fighting itself, since such equipment could be used only in massed formation: any solo fighter with heavy bronze body armor and clumsy shield would be a lumbering, easy target.
According to this school of technological dynamism, new hoplite equipment literally demanded the new tactics of the phalanx (but cf. Cartledge 1977: 20-21). The employment of new arms and formations in turn allowed a new group of Greek revolutionaries (controversy rages about their precise status) militarily to seize control of municipal life, to take over, in other words, the nascent Greek polis. This way of thinking, this advocacy of the so-called hoplite reform, gives primacy to force of arms. It oddly does not seem to allow for either the preexisting military expertise of mass fighting or prior agricultural success of its wearers.
To summarize the two schools: the former group of skeptical historians sees gradual changes in Greek battle weaponry (725-675 B.C.), a much later phalanx that follows only around 650 B.C. or after, and no accompanying social revolution caused by either novel weapons or tactics. There was, in these gradualists’ opinion, instead a slow evolution of inclusion in early Greece. More and more citizens of the polis could afford armor and were thus invited into the phalanx. Perhaps they were even recruited by aristocrats or the very wealthy—men who alone would have had the initial wealth to fabricate arms, who had themselves first devised the phalanx tactics, purportedly seeing at first few social, political, or economic implications or upheavals through massing in column. Agriculture is rarely discussed in this scenario. The impression left is that hoplite fighting had little to do with the rise of Greek yeomanry.
The latter determinist hypothesis argues precisely the opposite. These scholars envision a brilliant breakthrough in technology and tactics. Discovery of the hoplite panoply very quickly in or near 700 B.C. mandated revolutionary phalanx tactics. Both the new hoplite equipment and its proper use in the phalanx are indicative of an undeniable military surge forward. It is the first push of a potent, new landowning class.
There is a problem with both theories which directly affects our interest in the origins of Greek agrarianism. Both schools of scholarly thought postulate that new battle tactics, whether at 700 or 650 B.C., followed the adoption of novel equipment. Shield, breastplate, helmet, and spear came first. Fighting in mass followed. Both schools argue in bipolar terms. They either accept or reject a military revolution of the have-nots against the haves. Both schools would not necessarily see hoplite equipment as a reflection of the preexistence of a new agrarianism, already well on its way in the era of Laertes and Hesiod around 700 B.C.
Chronology—difficult to ascertain when our sources are so meager—is crucial to both hypotheses, although in diametrically opposed ways. Both groups of scholars see new hoplite equipment first, novel phalanx tactics second. They disagree, I think, only on the interval in, and the relationship between, the emergence of the hoplite panoply and the creation of the Greek phalanx.
But on examination there simply is not enough proof in the few contemporary literary and artistic genres available at the time to determine whether the phalanx though unrecorded (or even undetected by us moderns) did not exist earlier (i.e., before or about 675B.C.). Just because painted vases of the early seventh century do not show the unmistakable presence of opposing Greek phalanxes does not preclude prior fighting in mass. Early pro to-Corinthian vase painters may not have had the technical capacity to show such intricate designs, or their painted images of one or two warriors ostensibly dueling may be in fact simply phalanx conventions: the contemporary audience, unlike us historians today, may have known that such representational imagery really stood for massed phalanx warfare.
More important still, there are numerous references in Homer’s Iliad (i.e., about 700 B.C.) to mass fighting of infantry. Recently, many scholars have suggested that these passages are historical and thus must reflect phalanx tactics of some type before the complete adoption of the hoplite panoply. That is, Homer, by at least around 725-700 B.C., knew phalanxes to be common military formations in the Greek world, even before their later characteristic hoplite weapons came firmly on the scene.*
Most likely a less rigid style of massed attack had already been present in the eighth century. Earlier mass tactics could have existed apart from formal hoplite equipment. John Salmon in another context puts it more eloquently: “The phalanx was not yet known in its later form; but early phalanx warfare might well have taken a slightly different form without being different in nature. A phalanx has two essential features: its cohesion and its relatively large size; both can be achieved without following the later canonical pattern closely.” Later in Greek and Persian history armies mass in column, and they fight as “hoplites” without what is usually termed the hoplite panoply, without “the canonical pattern.” It is easy to imagine that earlier Greeks of all classes in the late Dark Ages fought in mass with a variety of weaponry and armament, perhaps led on by mounted barons who might themselves seek out and then joust with one another.2
If an early Greek phalanx did not require hoplite technology, was the inverse true? Could a man equipped solely with the seventy-pound bronze panoply of the hoplite fight in any formation? Could a man in heavy armor battle in small groups or alone outside the phalanx in all sorts of terrain? Consider carefully the particular elements of the hoplite panoply, especially the concave wooden shield. Seventy pounds of arms and armor were difficult to wear and somewhat expensive to fabricate. They were also disadvantageous for fluid fighting and individual combat. The image of a metal-encased pikeman scrambling alone over rocks, darting across a plain in groups of twos and threes, or perched on a massive charger is unconvincing.
Why would mounted duelists or light-armed skirmishers, men who, in this view, never fought in mass, suddenly pay for the novel hoplite designs—weapons that were no better (and often a great deal worse) for their looser method of fighting than their current lighter and less expensive brands? Why would Greeks fabricate weapons disadvantageous to existing methods of combat, weapons whose ideal use was as yet unknown? Aristotle at any rate saw that the hoplite panoply had improved existing battle formation and was not viable outside mass tactics: “With’ out cohesive arrangement (aneu suntaxeôs) heavy armament is useless (achrêston to hoplitikon)” (Pol. 4.1297b20-21). Hoplite weaponry must have been designed precisely for “cohesive arrangement.”
The Greek hoplite panoply that emerged at the end of the eighth century offered new advantages to phalanx warfare alone. New weaponry must be seen as a specific invention—an agrarian invention—aimed at improving the preexisting conditions of massed warfare. Heavy bronze arms are evidence of a technical response to a precise military need. That need was to fight more efficiently in mass as infantry—as Greeks and other peoples had done for centuries. Farmers, as all other Greeks, had fought in a phalanx of sorts, but as their numbers and wealth grew, they soon reequipped and redefined it. In the process Greek warfare itself was reinvented in agrarian terms.
Later the hoplite panoply was nearly always connected with massed tactics. The reverse—phalanxes or rather mass conglomerations of infantry always composed of hoplite-equipped warriors—was not true. Tactics more often create, rather than merely respond to, weaponry.* Is it realistic to suppose that the Greeks created their peculiar hoplite weapons without knowing how to use them in their proper tactical context? Wiser it is to believe that the experienced mass fighters of early Greece simply sought out better tools.
Of the general group of massed infantrymen, by 700 B.C. it was the growing number of geôrgoi who now began to have the technology, capital, and desire to acquire improved weaponry. This reshaping of mass attack into ordered phalanx assault was a momentous change. Like farm residence, grafting, the rise of viticulture and arboriculture, and slave labor, it was every bit as important, I think, as the contemporary intellectual ferment of the late eighth and seventh centuries, when the rise of natural inquiry and the creation of philosophy and poetic genres began.
The diversion of bronze from use in aristocratic cauldrons to hoplite armor is a reflection of this across-the-board reordering of Greek values. Metals in Greece were no longer to be used by only the wealthy for decorative and ceremonial utensils. They became the wider property of the agrarian community to protect farmers as they headed into battle.* In some sense, the entire existence of individual expression and philosophical speculation in the newly literate polis depended on the ranks of its bronze-clad yeomen.
Consider further that the hoplite’s curious “butt spike,” the reverse point at the end of his spear, as well as the dramatic concavity of his shield, offered few advantages to men who fought alone or skirmished in small groups. But those two strange pieces of equipment do reflect the needs of men in the middle and rear of a mass formation,. They might now serve phalanx-fighters who often had never engaged the enemy first-hand themselves. These agrarians, who were behind the initial fighting ranks, needed a point on the butt end of their upright spears to slam into the wounded or dazed enemies at their feet, as they trampled over them in their push forward.
The newly created deep concavity of the shield also served the mass of farmers. It allowed these middle and rear hoplites to rest their shieldcarrying arms by allowing the shoulder to be tucked under the rim, relieving from the arm sixteen or twenty pounds of weight. As farmers “hung” their concave shields on their shoulders, and pushed into the men ahead, their arms were rested until their turn in the fighting at the front came up. Only then were the fighters required to thrust and parry with both their shields and spears.
Similarly, the hoplite’s “backplate”—the rear portion of the bronze cuirass—and the heavy Corinthian helmet (which had no orifices for hearing and nearly curtailed vision) must be seen also as technological improvements to the existing manner of fighting in a confined mass. Many soldiers would not often have confronted the enemy head on, but rather pushed blindly into the backs and sides of comrades ahead. Spear butt, concave shield, and backplate do not protect men in isolation or even men at the head of a column. Instead they are designed for the great majority of fighters in the middle of a phalanx, who push on the backs of comrades ahead, who walk over fallen enemies at their feet, who must maintain the great weight of their shields when no enemy is at their face—those fighters who want something better than their existing arms and armament. The revolution in equipment had in mind not merely the fighters at the front, but the far greater number of men in the middle and rear of the column as well.
This sequence of military development—traditional loosely organized mass fighting made more effective by the introduction of specifically designed weaponry—suggests that the farmers in the ranks were by the end of the eighth century emerging as a group distinct from the landless and the elite, striving to change the dynamics of infantry warfare. Geôrgoi now were codifying by trial and error, gradually regularizing the battle crashes of the past into more formalized affairs between organized and armed phalanxes of exclusively agricultural heavy infantry. As the numbers, social prestige, and economic security of the middling farmers grew, rich and poor Greeks gradually were pushed off to the sides and rear of the phalanx, to the physical and ideological margins of the battlefield. Codified weaponry of the agrarians helped, along with protocol and custom, to crystallize the rather chaotic mass (and mess) of the past.
Envision earlier Dark-Age warfare as a conglomeration of fighters, armed with spears, javelins, swords, various types of shields, and mostly fabric or composite body armor. Clans would fight generally in massed, but unorganized, attacks. Armament might vary by locale, reflecting the tastes and relative wealth of the particular region. Horses were at a premium (Arist. Pol. 4.1289b33-41), and used either to fight with other mounted elites, to lead the loosely defined pack into battle, or to charge into and pursue the throng of pikeless, unarmored serfs.
Is there any reason to believe that the impoverished Greeks—those without any farmland at all—would have the organization or capital to forge hoplite weaponry, and would then arrange themselves into revolutionary bodies of phalanxes, formations designed to battle on and over farmland they did not own? If the have-nots had set the military agenda of the city-states, we would expect mountain skirmishing and missile volleys to have been characteristic of Greek warfare as a whole. Mountain passes, I think, would have been closed, not open to the passage of agrarian infantry of the city-state. The lightly clad guerrillas of other contemporary cultures would have struck terror into adversaries, not peculiar farm folk covered in bronze, who were so distinctive and preeminent in song and art.
Through the four hundred years of the polis period, the poor never achieved military parity with their social betters. They were in many maritime poleis traditionally reduced to rowing in the fleet. In the more numerous landlocked communities without navies, they skirmished as “the naked” or “the light” (gumnoi, psiloi) before and after battle when the heavy infantry was not in the killing zone. Only at Athens after the Persian wars did the possession of an oar, rather than a panoply, bring some prestige. That suggests that among most agrarian poleis (and at Athens herself until the fifth century) hoplite warfare was never in the interest of the landless, who had little armor and used “slavish” weapons like the javelin, sling, and bow (e.g. Xen. Cyr. 7.4.15).
At the other extreme, was the creation of the hoplite panoply simply a manifestation of traditional aristocratic control? Was it a sign of the continuing power of Dark-Age estate holders who began to wear the new equipment on their horses, and who sought better protection in their private duels and jousts or who served as a privileged mounted hoplite corps at the head of poorer followers (e.g., Snodgrass 1965: 114-15; cf. Salmon 1977: 94-95)? The panoply does not appear to be designed for horsemen. It seems more fitting for infantry in close array, often in great numbers. These heavily protected phalanxes were intrinsically anti-cavalry. They were invulnerable to charges of horsemen. Greek horses lacked the size, power, and armor to crash against a wall of spears. Their aristocratic riders were without stirrups, protruding lances, and the rigorous training of later medieval knights.
Mounted hoplites taxiing to the battlefield only to dismount and join the ranks of similarly clad infantry has the taste of the ceremonial, if not the ridiculous. If an historical occurrence (cf. Detienne 1968: 119-21; d’Agostino 80-82), it was surely only a transitional phase as aristocrats quickly were denied control of phalanx battle altogether (e.g., Arist. Pol. 4.1297bl8-24). We hear in Greek literature of no new heavy cavalry, of no revolutionary mounted, armored aristocratic class in the late eighth or early seventh century who could as cataphracts now tear through the ranks of the unarmored peasantry. The marginalized nature of Greek cavalry suggests that the panoply was originally designed and used for quite different infantry purposes. Early aristocrats (mounted or not) who wore such equipment were at best a transitory phenomenon.
Later on the hoplite class (zeugitai) was apparently separated from horsemen (hippeis and pentakosiomedimnoi) on census rubrics (e.g., Arist. Ath. Pol. 73-5; Plut. Sol. 18.1-2; Poll. On. 8.129-32). At Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War hoplites joined the poor and clubbed and stabbed to death the wealthy (Thuc. 4.47). At Athens hoplites were never ideologically akin to the wealthy. Even when authors wish to lump the two groups together in antithesis to the landless who were off the hoplite register (e.g., Thuc. 6.43.1), the rich and farmers are spoken of as distinct, rather than identical (e.g., [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1.2; 2.14; cf. Xen. Hell. 2.3.48). By the late fifth and fourth centuries there are even complaints that hoplites were not at all rich and were greatly put out by the need to go on campaign (e.g., Dem. 24.11; 21.83; Lys. 16.14). In colonization schemes the wealthy were expressly excluded, the polis emphasizing that hoplites and landless thêtes alike needed the exclusive opportunity to win new land (e.g., IG I3 46.43-46).
In a strictly military sense, did not the introduction of heavy bronze weaponry by massed infantry seal the fate of horses and consequently the aristocratic horse owner? Land was now permanently to be devoted to the intensified growing of grain, trees, and vines, not left open for mono-cropped cereals or grazing. A diminution of the importance of horses in the city-states is seen clearly in the fifth century, when the wealthy cavalry were more horse prancers before and after the hoplite crash than real chargers. Throughout Greek history, cavalry service was considered unwelcome “elitism.” Like bowmen on the other end of the social scale (Horn. Il. 2.385-87; Thuc. 4.40), horsemen were often ridiculed and pilloried in Greek literature (e.g., Lys. 16.13, 14.14; cf. Starr 1977: 135-36), as either the pretentious or the timid who chose not to serve with the “mass” (to plethos). Even at Sparta, Xenophon, himself a pony man, claims that only the “weakest in strength and the least eager for glory (hoi tois sômasin adunatôtatoi kai êkista philotimoi)”mounted horses (Hell. 6.4.11). To reassure his hoplites when faced with foreign mounted adversaries, he could scoff that “no one has ever lost his life in battle from the bite or kick of a horse, but it is men who do whatever is done in battle” (Xen. An.3.2.18). At the end of the fifth century, when Xenophon’s Greek mercenary hoplite army in Asia was in dire need of cavalry protection, a veteran of the Ten Thousand could ridicule, rather than envy or admire, his mounted commander (An. 3.4.47-48).
That dismissive view of cavalry was why the wealthy aristocratic Mantitheos at the battle at the Haliartos River (395 B.C.) chose to face danger as a hoplite, rather than serve “in safety” as a horseman (tois men hippeuousin asphaleian einai; Lys. 16.13). In the revolutionary times of late fifthcentury Athens, it is interesting that hoplite landowners, for all their supposed conservative sympathy with reactionary and wealthy aristocrats, never joined attacks against the democracy for long.* Athenian elite right-wing revolutionaries were usually cavalrymen (Xen. Hell 2.4.2-7, 2.4.24-27, 2.4.31-32; 3.1.4; Arist. Ath. Pol. 38.2), who often expelled hoplites from their small farms (e.g., Xen. Hell. 2.4.1). The mounted warriors ubiquitous on Greek vases of the sixth century (Greenhalgh 84-145) were adopters, not originators of the hoplite panoply.
Praise for mounted troops in Greek literature usually springs from envy of their wealth and their exalted economic status as horse raisers, not from any perceived value to the polis of their military contribution—which, despite recent scholarly revisionism, was normally relatively marginal. The Greek polis was one of the few societies in the long history of Western civilization where horsemen, and the entire accompanying elite culture of horse raising, were deliberately relegated to minor roles in formal infantry warfare, once more reflecting the Dark-Age demise of the livestock monopoly and the rise of a more productive farming majority.
This chauvinism of the earlier hoplite is not to say that later on when Greek armies were confronted by foreign challenges, or ventured overseas in difficult terrain, cavalry and archers were not vital to the preservation of infantry. Should the protective mechanism of agrarian protocol be left behind in Greece, real support against nonagrarian hillmen, skirmishers, slingers, and archers was needed for the vulnerable phalanx. My point is not to deny that horsemen and missile troops—through their mobility, speed, rates of fire, and power—enhanced infantry, but simply to assert that in Greece proper, until the Peloponnesian War, landed infantrymen developed a “system” that deliberately made missiles and mounted warriors incidental to success in battle. The system reflect’ ed contemporary social, economic, and political aspects of agrarianism.3
Later, as Greek hoplites and mercenaries ventured into Asia Minor, Italy, and the East beyond the protection and protocols of the old agrarian poleis, horsemen and archers became essential (and reflected the reemergence of a powerful and wealthy elite, a growing underclass, and the corresponding decline of an agrarian middle). But these subsequent developments only highlight just how unusual were the circumstances in Greece during the few centuries of agrarian infantry dominance. Then the occasion, terrain, status, armament, and tactics of interstate warfare followed a prescribed agenda. It is no accident that cavalry and skirmishers, slingers, and archers—valuable military assets entirely antithetical to yeoman infantry—came either from the two extremes of polissociety or from outside the Greek city-state altogether.
As Aristotle in retrospect saw (Pol. 4.1297b16-24, 28), at the beginning of the polis the decline of both skirmishers and cavalry left the mesoi, the middling landowners, as both the wearers and beneficiaries of hoplite armor: “And indeed the earliest form of government among the Greeks after monarchy was composed of those who actually fought. In the beginning that meant cavalry, since without cohesive arrangement, heavy armament is useless; and experience and tactical knowledge of these hoplitic systems did not exist in ancient times, and so power again lay with mounted horsemen. But once the poleis grew and those with hoplite armor became stronger, more people shared in government.”
Aristotle depicts a sequence where wearers of hoplite armor refine (rather than invent) the mass (already on the scene, but “without cohesive arrangement” and void of hoplitic “experience and knowledge”). Infantrymen use their armor and tactics to enhance (not to establish ex nihilo) their rising status within the polis (cf. Salmon 1977: 95). In the later Greek history of the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries, the fighters of the phalanx were always associated with the landed class of small farmers (e.g., [Arist] Oec.1.1343b2-7). There is no reason to suppose that conditions were different at the very inception of such weaponry at the end of the eighth century.
So the “hoplite reform” was not quite a reform in a tactical sense. Call it instead a “hoplite reflection” or even a “hoplite acceleration”—military transformation as illustrative of ongoing changes in the economy of the Greek world. Strictly speaking, the appearance of standardized weaponry at the end of the eighth century was not a grab for agrarian power, but a shield to protect that power. It was the technology, not the tactics per se, that was new. Dark-Age soldiers had fought loosely in mass formation for many years in ancient Greece, in most cases under the direction of aristocratic leaders and clansmen. Gradually the spread of diversified, intensified farming created a shared ideology of new landowners, men in the ranks who no doubt had begun to accumulate capital from their farming success. With the same ingenuity by which they devised new approaches to traditional land use, the planters of trees and vines began to fabricate bronze weaponry to improve their performance in the traditional mêlée of Greek battle.
At first hoplite armies would have been relatively small and made up of the more successful yeomen. As agrarianism spread (“once the poleis grew and the wearers of heavy armor became stronger” [Arist. Pol. 4.1297b23-24]), the tactics and strategy of Greek mass warfare itself—as Aristotle also saw—were transformed, not always by deliberate attempts to attack the wealthy aristocrats, but rather more often by success that made the wealthy somewhat irrelevant in the polis. Hoplite martial prowess made both the wealthy with horses and the poor with missile weapons odd men out in the newly reformulated “mass.” That body was to follow agricultural rules and protocols, which were now to ensure the growing control of an agrarian middle (Arist. Pol. 4.1297b24-25), the city-state’s “constitution of hoplites” (Nilsson 246-47). Although neither horsemen nor archers could ever stop a Greek phalanx, their presence in considerable number in combined operations could still complicate and sidetrack the quick resolution of a purely infantry collision. No wonder they were to be discouraged whenever possible in formal wars between Greek agrarian infantry.
For the first time in the history of the West, shock fighting took on social and economic implications. One group of particular combatants in their new armor soon dominated the battlefield. The reconstituted “hoplite phalanx” was thus the old Dark-Age wine in new agrarian flasks. In the period innovative agricultural strategies were gaining momentum—tree and vine grafting, homestead residence, slave labor, diversified crops, incorporation of marginal land, on-the-farm storage and processing—farmers also sought to consolidate, reaffirm, and accelerate their efforts at agrarian government through a radical remaking of traditional Greek mass warfare. Infantrymen, for one of the few times in the annals of military history, were absolute architects of their society’s military doctrine.
They applied their grid mentality of property holding to the old pack of Greek fighters, creating neat files and columns (i.e. Aristotle’s “cohesive formation” [suntaxis], “experience” [empeiria], and “tactical knowledge” [taxis tôn toioutôn]). There was to be a new phalanx, with all the farmers absolutely equidistant from one another, completely dependent on the shields of others, and identically armed. A checkerboard of near identical farmers there was to be in the countryside, on the battlefield, and in the council hall. From that agrarian phalanx evolved an entire protective mechanism of rules and practices that ensured the importance of geêrgoi in the nascent community for nearly three centuries. In short: “The Greek polis in its characteristic form is not imaginable without the hoplite army” (Nilsson 245).
Although at some city-states tyrants at the head of a phalanx could bring about a dramatic end to old aristocracies, as we have seen in Chapter 3, more often they simply were not needed. Farmers themselves, through their own agricultural expertise and agrarian ideology, had ensured their economic, political, and military superiority. The transformation to broad-based timocracy and agrarian democracy was far more frequently accomplished without the aid of a strongman.
The hoplite appropriation of the old motley phalanx guaranteed that for at least the next three centuries Greek farmers would not be summarily mustered for extensive campaigns of aggressive despots. They would not face forced conscriptions. They would not pay property taxes on their land for the construction of military engines and mass armories. They would not allow military technology to siphon off agrarian capital. They would not provide percentages of their harvests to support an extensive caste of professional generals, standing armies, or military dynasties.
Some have argued against this agrarian genesis of hoplite battle. The doyen of Greek military archaeology, A. M. Snodgrass (1965: 114-15), once felt that farmers “would have no vested interest in war; on the contrary, it would be a double menace to their property, possibly leading to its devastation and certainly requiring their own absence from it.” But the point was not a choice to have war or not have it. The dilemma is to determine who is to control, who is to decide, who is to wage the inevitable organized killing—a phenomenon not parenthetical, but, as the Greeks knew during the lifetime of the polis, innate to human society (e.g., Pl. Leg. 1.626A; Heracl. fr. 53; Anon. fr. 846 Kock).
Almost any other form of conflict was more inimical to farmers’ interests than hoplite battle. “Should we not reject any suggestion,” Yvon Garlan writes, “that a mode of combat is nothing but a fortuitous combination of autonomous, heterogeneous forces, technical, economic, social, and political?” (Garlan 1975: 125). War must be legislated (as history teaches us) if destruction of property and person is to be curtailed, held within “reasonable” limits so the culture can survive. If not the farmers of ancient Greece, who then should determine when, where, and how agrarian men were to fight, to kill, and to die? The wide-open Hellenistic age of great navies, mercenaries, artillery, siegecraft, heavy cavalry, missile troops, and light-armed professionals—the period when hoplite monopoly of warfare was broken and far more nonfarmers perished—did not enhance the status of independent and small food producers, but rather eroded it.
For one of a very few times in history, during the Greek polis period military conscription was not a club that the wealthy used to beat down the rural populace in order to further their own interests in private squabbles or overseas extravaganzas. Hoplite armies served no master but themselves. That notion of citizen control over the military and private control of arms is—along with decisive battle, constitutional government, private land ownership, and notions of egalitarianism—yet another important legacy of Greek agrarianism of the polis.
No wonder Aristotle in his Politics equated hoplite militias with the very success of the city-state: “a polis that sends out great numbers of base men (banausoi), but few hoplites (hoplitai) is incapable of being great (megalê). For a great polis is not the same thing as one with a large population” (Pol. 7.1326a23-25). Aristotle, who best of all ancient thinkers understood the equation between yeomanry, constitutional government, and hoplite warfare, felt the agricultural class was the best population, and, once armed, it alone made the polis “great.” No wonder, “originally only the heavy-armed hoplite was the true citizen soldier” (Ehrenberg 1951: 300).
“Throughout Greek history,” Paul Guiraud writes, “the relationships between peoples frequently depended on the status of territory and the requirements of the agricultural class” (Guiraud 615). But agrarian control over politics and warfare came at a price: farmers, after all, who for their own militarily sound reasons had excluded others from the battlefield, must themselves then take on the sole risks of killing and dying. After the creation of the hoplite panoply, for nearly two and a half centuries (700-480 B.C.)hoplite battlewas Greek warfare. Small farmers altered all organized killing between city-states in their own image and thus protected their creation of Greek agrarianism.
I am not suggesting that hoplite warfare was absolutely predetermined in some unspoken Panhellenic fashion, that it grew out of mutual and near-conspiratorial efforts of farmers in all Greek poleis to form consciously a private agricultural monopoly that excluded the marginalized (e.g., foreigners, slaves, women, and the poor)—although the result of agrarian battle was to do precisely that. Armies are formed to fight. They are not models. They are designed to conquer their foes. And so they reflect first of all the particular interests and skills of their own citizenry. Imagine, then, a more haphazard hoplite genesis: a few early Greek agrarian city-states fielding superior troops of newly armed hoplite infantry as part of an effort to gobble up some borderland of their neighbors. Because no other tactical formation, no other military armament, no other method of group muster could withstand a hoplite phalanx—given the terrain and the existing social and economic realities of an ascending Greek agrarianism—all other Greekpoleis were forced either to adopt hoplite warfare (i.e., rearm and reorder their mass attacks) or to submit to terms if they were to protect the integrity of their hard-won patchwork.
This military reality cemented the economic and political dominion of small farmers as hoplite battle became Greek warfare. Hoplite phalanxes spread because they were unstoppable on the battlefield, and tactical manipulation, ambush, and surprise were—and are—difficult enterprises. But the composition of the ranks and the choice of the killing field was determined by an underlying agrarian mentality, which in the beginning was prerequisite for cohesive heavy infantry.
There are no real detailed Greek prose accounts of hoplite battle in the two centuries before the battle of Marathon (490 B.C.). Fighting in Homer and in early lyric and elegy can appear ambiguous and difficult to place in a precise chronology and locale (although recent scholarship is more confident about the presence of massed fighting of phalanxes in these sources). The extant remains of early bronze panoplies, however, are numerous. The later Greeks themselves also believed that phalanx warfare had a long tradition before the fifth century; and anecdotal accounts of apparent hoplite battles of the seventh and sixth centuries abound in Greek literature. It is incorrect, then, to believe that land warfare before the fifth century is obscure and inaccessible to generalization.
Nearly all Greek landowners were heavy infantrymen, or hoplites; most hoplites of the early phalanx were in turn landowners. The agrarian nature of hoplite warfare is a fact assumed throughout Greek literature. “It is often the case,” Aristotle could still say at the end of the fourth century, when mercenary armies were on the rise and the census rubrics of the old agrarian polis were often neglected, “that the same men are to be both hoplites and farmers (hopliteuein kai geôrgein symbainei tois autois pollakis)” (Pol.4.1291a31-33; cf. 4.1297b15-28). Both he and Plato seem to treat as either Utopian or outside the culture of the Greek polis (i.e., at Sparta, Crete, Thessaly) the strange idea that those who actually work the soil themselves and those who fight should bedifferentgroups.4
Most revealingly, at the very beginning of the Greek polis, the hero Odysseus knows well the normative synergism between fighting and farming (e.g., Hom. Od. 18.366-86). Naturally, then, he must reject that ethic when he lies that he is from Crete, an area of the Greek world that never completely adopted city-state culture (Hom. Od. 14.216-29). The late fourth-century Athenian ephebes, young warriors who took up the shield and spear to patrol the countryside, still swore to protect “the wheat, the barley, the vines, the olives, and the figs” (Tod 2. 204). Xenophon felt there was always an intrinsic historical relationship between farming and the cohesion of the phalanx: “Farming teaches one how to help others. For in fighting one’s enemies, just as in working the soil, it is necessary to have the assistance of other people” (Xen. Oec. 5.14). He adds that because farmers are in top shape, mentally as well as physically, once attacked they should go on the offensive as well—ravaging the similar farmlands of their oppressors (Oec.5.13), Here Xenophon makes the direct connection between their wartime gear (hopla) and their peacetime farming implements (geôrgika organa). They are the private tools the agrarian uses to work and to protect his property. Just as the hoplite commander exhorts his infantry, so too, Xenophon says, the farmer directs the slaves who work beside him (Oec. 5.16).
On the other hand, craftsmen and nonagrarians reputedly made poor soldiers (e.g., Xen. Oec. 4.3). In Euripides’ lost play Antiope, the tough rural Zethos is made to rebuke his more refined, musician brother Amphion for his ignorance of farming and fighting. “You wouldn’t know what to do with a shield,” he says in disgust to his nonfarming sibling (fr. 185 Nauck). His implication is that only those who farm really know how to fight. At some agrarian regimes craftsmen were shut out of political and military life entirely (Arist. Pol. 3.1278a25-26; 6.1321a29-33). Later I shall suggest that the eventual inclusion of these nonfarmers in the phalanx was symptomatic of the decline of the agrarian polis itself.
In Aristophanes’ Peace, the craftsmen sell the geôrgoi swords, spears, and shields as well as pitchforks and agricultural implements; they needed both (Pax 545-53). The farmers thank the goddess Peace, who has taken away their “helmet-crests and Gorgon-emblemed shields,” allowing them instead to go back to their farms with “spades and mattocks” (560-65). When the comic poet later wishes to ridicule the utter uselessness of hoplite weaponry during peacetime, Aristophanes conjures up agricultural metaphors: spears as vine-poles and trumpets as weight-scales for figs (Pax 1245-65), the traditional “swords to ploughshares” metaphors of agrarian infantry.
Understandably much of the battle parlance of the Greek phalanx—“horns” of “yoked” men who “threshed it out”—came from agriculture or rural life, not urban experience (Tyrt. 19.16; cf. Pritchett War 2.190; Whitehead 1981: 282-86, and Colum. Rust. Praef.1.13-15). Indeed, “phalanx” itself, denoting the ranks of heavy infantry in battle order, probably derived from the Greek word for “beam” or “log,” a logical assumption if most of its fighters lived in the country. In an anonymous comic fragment there is the natural military image of a “division of farmers” (hê tôn geôrgôn taxis; Anon fr. 382.2 Kock). And men who went out to work the fields could most naturally be compared to an army on the move (Plut. Mor. 175A).
It was this unique symbiosis between agriculture and warfare that explains why Greek authors often commented on the productive potential of farmland not in terms of soil, arability, or mere size, but simply by the number of hoplite infantry a region might theoretically support (e.g. Arist. Pol. 1270a17-32; Plut. Mor. 413F-414A; cf. FGrH 115 fr. 225; Dem. 23.199). In Greek eyes, the land alone produced infantry.*
For nearly three centuries of the polis period (700-400 B.C.) the two ideas of heavy infantry and land ownership were in the majority of Greek city-states inseparable, tied inextricably in a material, logistical, geographical, tactical, strategic, and ethical sense to the lifeblood of the polis. Seldom at this time do we hear that phalanxes are to protect the walls or the houses of a polis. Never do we read that craftsmen, potters, and shoemakers make the most effective fighters or that the best armies simply derive from the most populous city-states.
Just as in Chapter 4 we saw the pragmatic challenges confronting the intensive farmer at peace, we must now look at how these same farmers preserved their culture on the battlefield, how they reconstituted Greek warfare, and so learn just how steep was the price of their agrarianism. The field of the geôrgos was a far different place than the interior of a phalanx. But that military formation reveals the same characteristics of the new agrarian mentality, the same patience, the same self- and group-reliance, the same muscular strength and steely nerve shown by the planters of trees and vines. If in peace the Greek polis was an agrotopia for like-minded equals, in war it became a thanatopia of similarly armed hoplites massed in column.
Materially, the hoplite panoply, as we have seen, was crudely simple. Each farmer supplied from the wealth of his small farm his own breastplate, helmet, spear, shield, greaves, and short sword, some seventy pounds of wood, bronze and iron—half his own body weight, load enough to exhaust a man, even a hardworking man, in less than an hour. The ensemble probably cost 100 drachmas, about the price of an agricultural slave. Imagine slave and panoply as the two essential military possessions of every Greek geôrgos.In Greek literature and from the evidence of extant panoplies, three elements ring true about the equipment: that it was unwieldy, even damaging to its wearer; that its use ostensibly required little practice or professional skill; and that it offered superior protection.
Xenophon’s Socrates is made to say of the breastplate, “a wonderful invention,” but then he learns from Pistias the armorer that it is very difficult to achieve “a good fit,” one whose weight is to be properly distributed over “the collar-bone, shoulder-blades, shoulders, chest, back and belly” (Mem. 3.10.9-14). The shield had to fit the arm length and body size of the wearer (e.g., Xen. Mem. 3.10.12). There are plenty of occasions in Greek literature where it simply flies off the arm of the hoplite, given its awkward size and cumbersome weight (Hanson 1989: 65-71). “Large shields,” the Greeks knew, “made infantry slow to move” (Diod. 15.44).
Both the importance of the shield (e.g., Plut. Mor. 220A) and its absurd size and shape made it the general trademark of hoplite warfare itself. The word “hoplite” was derived from hoplon, another name for aspis, the round, concave shield. The depth of the phalanx was calibrated not by “men” or “spears” or “swords,” but almost always as “shields” in depth (e.g., Xen. Hell. 6.4.12). No wonder the distinguishing mark of heavy infantry was a shield (Pl. Leg. 6.756A), which additionally suggests, as we will see, that the mentality of the hoplite was largely defensive, not offensive.
Bronze armor, without recourse to ventilation under the Mediterranean sun, without orifices for hearing, without interior padding to cushion the shock of deadly blows to the head, was designed solely to allow the hoplite to reach his opponent and deliver death or mayhem to the man at his face, all within the space of a few minutes. Hoplite armament was simply agrarian pragmatism—like the leather protection of old Laertes—in its most lethal manifestation. Offensive weaponry—the spear mostly—required little expertise (“There was little chance,” Xenophon’s Cyrus dryly remarked, “of missing a blow” [Cyr. 2.1.16-18]). Polybius seems to agree when he points out in his famous comparison between the Roman legion and the later Macedonian phalanx that each legionary had to face ten spearpoints protruding from the ranks (18.30.3). The problem for the killing apparatus of the phalanx was always too much supply (of the competing spear thrusts) for the limited demand (of front-rank targets).
Despite the frequent breakage of the spear and cracking of the wooden shield, most of the hoplite’s equipment was durable and reliable in combat. There was little room inside the phalanx to employ anything like the battle-ax, halberd, or long sword.* Armored farmers were simply “pole-men,” whose muscle rather than technique was key. All motion in the phalanx was frontal, not lateral. This preference for the spears—clumsy and nearly useless for the soloist, but for synchronized companions an invincible wall—is significant: the spear’s use for the Greek, as for the Swiss, implies military cohesion; cohesion reflects social unity, and unity an individual like-interest. The hand-held lance, not the bow, not the horse, not the sling, was until the appearance of mass-produced firearms a lasting trademark of yeoman infantry: if Greek farmers could achieve the unity and cohesion of massed columns, on the battlefield they inevitably found unmatched power in their wall of razor-sharp poles.
For nearly all of the farmer’s life, his defensive and offensive weaponry was of little utilitarian value on his plot. It was essentially worthless for hunting. The panoply was absurdly inappropriate against the trespasser or nighttime renegade. Unlike the frontiersman’s flintlock, the hoplite’s breastplate and spear nearly always collected soot over the hearth, seeing little or no peacetime action (Ar. Ach. 279). Aristophanes says that in periods of peace, the great round shield could just as well serve as a lid for the farmer’s well (fr. 295 Kock). Less kindly, he joked that the breastplate doubled as a chamber pot, helmets as medicine boxes, spears as vine-poles, and trumpets as scales (Pax 1228, 1249, 1254, 1261).
But once donned in the hour of battle, the hated panoply was well worth its cost, for it often saved the life of the farmer. Even if the shield was penetrated, the two to ten millimeters of the hoplite’s bronze breastplate ensured safety from nearly any projectile (Gabriel and Metz 58-71; Hanson 1989: 70-71), ensuring that, unless a man lost his arm, leg, face, or head he could get in close to wreak havoc and push back his foe.
A chief drawback to the panoply’s use was simply carrying the monstrosity into battle, for the ensemble equaled nearly half a man’s weight (see Hanson 1991b: 78 n.1), and was awkward—bothersome in shape and design, not easily transported unless worn, not worn easily for more than a few hours without exhaustion. No wonder Euripides remarks that “the hoplite is a slave to his equipment” (Eur. HF 188). At the battle of Nemea (394 B.C.), where nearly fifty thousand hoplites may have collided (cf. Lazenby 1985: 128-29, 136), imagine that nearly eighteen hundred tons of bronze weaponry were needed just to allow the fighting to proceed, the tools of the killing trade themselves a monumental problem in logistics.
The infantryman brought along his slave to carry his weapons—easy for one accustomed to the backbreaking job of digging around vines—until nearly the last second before his charge. Servile labor in Greece thus was not merely a sign of intensive agriculture, but an indication of “intensive” battle as well. Incidentally, those scholars who deny the presence of slave labor on the small farms of ancient Greece, claiming that agriculture could not keep servants continuously employed, often overlook their essential presence on the Greek battlefield. They are obliged to find ample reference in Greek literature that hoplite attendants, if not slaves, were hired workers or male underaged kin.
One could argue that without slave attendants to carry the hoplite’s cumbersome panoply, war between phalanxes would never have taken place, farmers would have not reached the battlefield, and the whole agrarian element in Greek warfare would never have originated. To the Greeks it was a sign of a radical change in war making, of growing distance from landed militias, when any army carried its own provisions and arms. Philip’s mobile professionals in the Macedonian phalanx, who marched with reduced armor and without individual attendants (e.g., Front. Str. 4.1.6; Polyaen. Str. 4.2.10), presented an unusual—and terrifying—challenge to parochial defenders of the polis.
The advantages and the drawbacks of the hoplite panoply can only be understood as a reflection of the peculiar ideology of its wearer—an ideology at its inception almost exclusively agrarian (see Hanson 1991: 3-11). Hoplite weaponry’s great size and weight reflected the notion that infantry battle was to be decisive—that is, short and brutal for all involved. This idea is in perfect harmony with the farmer’s general disgust for inaction and nuance, for protracted quarreling and continual haggling, for a view of the natural world largely shaded gray, not black and white. For the agrarian pragmatist, it was better to use his own hands to kill face-to-face, without guile, without delay.
Interruption of the hoplite’s summertime harvests was thus deliberately brief. Like his farm’s prosperity, success in war now depended largely on his own muscular strength and unshakable nerve, not on time wasted away from crops in mastering the bow or sling, not on following protocols devised by others—i.e., the more wealthy without empathy for agrarian ideology. Xenophon in his Oeconomicus argues that the artisans who master a craft and live inside the polis are more cowardly folk than the farmer. In times of war they would simply vote to stay inside the walls and not risk any danger at all (Oec. 6.6-8).
To impatient militiamen nothing was as crucial as the short campaign. Take a man away from his land for years on end—as the later Roman experience shows (e.g., Wolf 66-67)—and the entire agrarian structure of the community crumbles. Others left behind with much different views about landowning fill the political void. Changes occur in the economical management of absentee plots, while the professionalized army increasingly shows itself bent on overseas conquest, a notion entirely antithetical to an amateur agrarian militia. The weight and difficulty of the panoply did serve the interests of farmers. Physically, hoplite armor sharply limited the ambit of war and the type of man who could endure such a burden. It is no surprise that in the new war making of the fourth century and later Hellenistic era, the panoply was severely reduced, as both space and time, terrain and recruitment, expanded enormously beyond the realm of agriculture. Battle, like the size of agricultural property, became much larger—and more lethal to the old idea of apolis.
Although the cost of hoplite weapons has often been exaggerated, their composition and construction in the first two and a half centuries of the polis did reflect an expense beyond the means of the slinger, stone thrower, javelin carrier, archer, or light-armed skirmisher, men who likewise needed extensive training and time to master the accurate delivery of airborne projectiles. Even if poorer men might acquire heavy weaponry, they were usually bereft of slave-attendants, and thus would be exhausted carrying their own provisions and panoply, struggling to keep up with their agricultural betters. The possession of burdensome weapons, and the accompanying invulnerability of men so equipped in mass, surely were signs of a larger hoplite snobbery as well. The landless and the less affluent Greeks could not afford heavy armor. They could not engage as meaningful combatants, and could thus have less say—as Aristotle saw (Pol. 4.1297b23; Ath. Pol. 4.2-4)—in the management of the polis itself.
Greek battle gear was simply the wartime reflection of a yeoman’s plot. Both were beyond the reach of the poor, both nearly uniform-sized possessions of a larger matrix of kindred agrarians, both requiring backbreaking toil ill-suited to nonfarmers. If the countryside was to be a patchwork of roughly similar farms worked by leather-clad yeomen, the phalanx was an analogous grid of identically bronze-clothed fighters. Whether a farmer looked over at his neighbor’s plot, or over at the man next to him in battle, or over at the agriculturalist seated next to him in the assembly, the unique egalitarianism of the agrarian polis was continually reemphasized and enhanced.
There was, as we have seen at the beginning of the city-state, also a growing disinclination for cavalry. Horses—ponies or nags is a more appropriate description, given their small size—required too much upkeep for all but the richest (e.g., Davies 1971: xxv-xxvi). The encroachment of farms made the grazing space around most Greek poleis precious. In any case, yeomen preferred more economical slaves and oxen for their own agricultural work. Rich mounted warriors could do little anyway against the raised pikes of armored infantry ranks. At Plataea (479 B.C.) not many more than three hundred Athenian hoplites for a while stood off repeated attacks of thousands of Persian cavalry (Hdt. 9.21-23) who, despite their ferocity and numerical superiority, could neither easily bowl them over nor break into their sea of spear tips. The absence of large breeds of war-horses, stirrups, and plentiful grazing land—the usual assets of the later terrifying knight—all allowed the Greek agrarian hoplite to enforce his own brand of chauvinism. For that price of military and political exclusivity, small farmers of all ages everywhere were willing to acquire strange weapons, to form ranks side-by-side, to endure a bitter but brief killing spree, to spend an afternoon entombed nearly insensate in bronze, battered by brief but furious storms of enemy iron.
The key to this ideology of the yeoman hoplite was, like his clear title to his own plot, his private ownership of these peculiar arms (e.g., IG I3 1.9-11). Not only were military exclusivity and social prestige ensured for “those providing their own arms (hoi kektêmenoi ta hopla)” (e.g., Arist. Pol. 3.1279b4-5; cf. 7.1329b37-38), but more important, until the fifth century, the state normally did not stockpile shields, spears, and panoplies or create armories. That absence of an early polis hoard of weaponry meant campaigning was under the control of agrarian councils (e.g., IG I3 105.34-35). They alone had the physical mechanisms to fight. The rise of public ownership of arms and armor in the fourth century and later—equipment far more varied, expensive, and sophisticated than the near obsolete seventy-pound panoply—along with the growth of skirmishers and mercenaries, was entirely anti-agrarian. It contributed in no small measure to the decline of the hoplitic code—and thus of the agricultural polis itself. Before the fourth century, owners of their own panoply are synonymous with owners of farmland, synonymous with the citizenry itself.
Classical scholars have occasionally branded the hoplite ideology as “elitist.” They are correct if they mean exclusive. They are far off the mark if (as I suspect) they mean an engine of privilege. “Elitist” in that sense rings false for mesoi farmers, yeomen who did their own work, who sought constitutional, rather than hereditary, government, who had no love for the aristocratic horse breeders above them, and who were not at all members of that leisured and liturgical class.
Military historians, I think, should be wary of intruding the old dichotomous class struggle—poor/rich, mass/elite, exploited/exploiter, powerless/powerful—into the sociology of Greek polis warfare. Why not brand hoplite warfare for what it really was: the military reflection of the origin of European agrarianism, the genesis of a broad-based and entirely novel yeomanry, one neither wealthy or poor, in its pure form the private property of geôrgoz, mesoi, autourgoi, and zeugitai—all various names for the agrarian middle?
Logistically, it was critical that the farmer-hoplite fight in person, briefly and decisively on the battlefield, free from obstacles and encumbrances (cf. Ober 1991: 173-79). That way he would neither squander his year’s produce nor surrender control over the conduct of war to a professional corps of besiegers, artillery officers, wagon masters, field engineers, and other support staff The elevation of nonfighters could have destroyed the amateurism of Greek battle (Anderson 1970: 44-53; Hanson 1983: 74-75), because they are inevitably organized by, and feel loyalty to, the few wealthy men on top. Costly distant campaigning, drawn-out sieges, and elaborate fortifications were frowned upon until the tragedy of the Peloponnesian War; they are remarkably absent from Greek fighting before the late fifth century.
The entire idea of a walled polis was one many Greeks were never entirely comfortable with (Arist. Pol. 7.1330b33-1331a19; Pl. Leg. 6.778D-779B; Plut. Mor. 190A; 210E27; 212E; 215D; 221F6). Military architecture shifted the Greek mind from pitched battle on and over farmland into the complex world of elaborate fortification, military professionalism, and accompanying high taxes. Extension and elaboration of war making were in the agrarian hoplite’s mind the unpalatable preference of men who wished to fight year-round. They sought to decide battle through technology, machinery, and sheer numbers rather than with nerve and bodily power, to venture on some extended anabasis in search of glory and gold, to kill rather than to farm, to stay abroad rather than to return to thepolis of their birth, to import food from overseas rather than to grow it at home.
Thucydides’ Pericles summed up well the parsimony of agrarian ideology: “Yeomen farmers (autourgoi) are a class of men that are always more willing to serve in person than with money; confident that they will survive battle, they are not at all convinced that their own money will not prematurely run out” (Thuc. 1.141.5). Sensitive to this reluctance of farmers to muster for distant expeditions, over half a century later Demosthenes tried to persuade the Athenians to march out to prevent the Macedonian conquest of Olynthus. He was still forced to acknowledge in the twilight of Greek agrarianism that “if you yourselves were forced to serve abroad for thirty days, and you took from our countryside the supplies needed for the campaign, I suppose that the farmers (tous geôrgountas) among you would lose more than you spent on the entire previous war” (1.27). Hoplite warfare was delimited by the harvest requirements of its armies of farmers, restricted usually to the late spring or summer, just after grain reaping, but before grape and olive picking, when the countryside was dry, and passes free of mud and snow (e.g., Dem. 9.48-50; Hanson 1983: 30-35; 43-44, 137-51).
Nor was there either a real science of siegecraft, poliorcetics (literally “polis-works”), the traditional nightmare of the logistician, in Greece before the fifth century, or artillery before the fourth. Unlike the engineer, the artillery technician, the paid mercenary, or the rower in the fleet, each Greek infantryman brought his own rations—usually a mere three days’ supply (Plut. Mor. 349A; Ar. Ach. 197; Pax 312; Vesp 243; cf. Pritchett War 1.32-44)—carried by his own transport, the slave from his small farm. A small flock of sheep or goats usually followed the army, not so much for meat rations while on the campaign, but rather for the knife across the jugular for intermittent sacrifice and augury (e.g., Paus. 9.13.4-5; e.g., Jameson 1991: 198-99). We see here agrarian individualism at the core of early Greek warfare: private slave, private arms, private food. All ensured farmers’ control over the apparatus of war making and made the appropriation of monies from the countryside unnecessary.
Paths through the mountains of Greece were rarely garrisoned (Ober 1991: 174-75). For enemy farmers or hired poor to guard them would require time and extensive provisions (and was not really militarily feasible), and so defeat the purpose of decisive battle. Conflict would be prolonged into a series of random hit-and-run skirmishes: indistinguishable, unheroic, and unheralded killing in the high crags far from home. A bronzed hoplite would be shamed into lumbering by himself over rocks and gullies to dodge missiles and arrows from his more nimble social inferiors. No wonder that occasional guarding of passes in the fifth century (see de Ste Croix 1972: 106-47, 192-94; Hanson 1983: 74-85), with good hoplite infantry slaughtered in the trees and hills by their social subordinates, brought a rare burst of emotion from the otherwise somber Thucydides. Of the Athenian hoplites who were butchered in the mountains of Aetolia during the Peloponnesian War, he wrote: “They were many and all in the prime of life, the best men(beltistoi andres) that the city of Athens lost in the war” (Thuc. 3.98.4): brave men forced into the wrong place at the wrong time.
In contrast, the hoplites’ ideal battlefield was easily accessible right across the border: a day’s march out, a day’s fighting, and a day’s trek home. It has been suggested that Greek city-states sometimes reciprocally made roads—many of them still observable—that led right up to their borders to facilitate movement of phalanxes between territories. This network was not foolishness. Communities of small farmers strived to ensure that disputes could take place, not avoided, and hence be settled quickly and decisively by pitched battles (Ober 1991: 179; cf. Vanderpool 237-40). In sum, during the great age of the hoplite from the seventh to the mid-fifth century, if a man was not killed or wounded, war was terribile dictu cheap: it cost him scant time, money, or produce.
Nowhere can this agrarian ideology of Greek warfare be better illustrated than in the arena of hoplite battle, the “smoothest and fairest plain” (Hdt. 7.9.2) where sides squared off. All conflicts were on evacuated and often harvested flatland. Usually this meant level or undulating cereal ground (e.g., Thuc. 4.93-96), rather than on the uplands of olives and vines or dense scrub (but. cf. Xen. Hell. 4.2.19). The farmland of Greece was the only place where cumbersome formations of heavily armed and slow-moving infantry could maneuver with any degree of success. Any deployment on broken ground, on small hillsides, in dense vegetation, was phalanx suicide and so recognized by every hoplite (Xen. An. 4.8.0; 4.2.12; Thuc. 3.98.2; 4.29ff; cf. Plut. Flamin. 8.2-4). Once the respective phalanxes had lumbered into position, terrain was never much of a concern. By mutual agreement, hills, gullies, ravines, forests, and swamps were to be avoided (e.g., Polyb. 18.31.11). Like the landless poor and other assorted missile troops who often appeared suddenly in such places, these natural “obstacles” (in both a physical and psychological sense) could only prolong the conflict and defeat the purpose of the tried hoplite ritual (Ober 1991: 173-188).
The historic physical limitations to battle—terrain, weather, provisions, and distance—were, for one of the few times in Western warfare, deliberately made secondary considerations. The concern for hills, temperature, precipitation, and food belong to the military cosmos of the fourth century and later, when these extraneous factors appear ubiquitously in the historical record and military manuals.
Most disputes from the eighth to fifth centuries were fought over marginal land on the border between poleis, another indication that the stakes involved in the killing were agrarian, not urban.5 The boundaries between poleis, though usually mountainous, undulating, and only vaguely demarcated, were nevertheless felt to be sacred to the entire population of the city-state. Poor farming land was valuable more for its psychological than its agricultural importance. Perhaps that concern with ownership of the land explains the simile in Homer’s Iliad comparing opposing armies to two men in dispute over a farm boundary, with rulers in their hands (Hom. Il. 12.421-24). Much has been written about plunder and booty in early Greek warfare, but it is hard to see much real profit in a hoplite army’s acquisition of a neighbor’s scrub land on the border.
For another city-state to encroach on frontier ground or, worse yet, to expropriate this public no-man’s-land, was an affront to the entire community, men who as individual growers had carefully refrained from incorporating disputed land onto their own plots (Pl.Resp. 2.373D-E). That ground was left unfarmed as a buffer zone reassured the local agrarian community that their own plots were safe from hostile intrusion.*
The few peaceful resolutions of disputes over ground (“There is an accord,” wrote Aelian [NA 5.9], “between the people of Rhegium and Locris that each has access and can farm the land of the other”) are the exceptions that prove the rule: Greek border areas were the fuses that ignited most hoplite wars. The Spartan commander Lysander purportedly replied to the convincing argument of an Argive delegation over their disputed border: “He who is the master of the sword talks best about the boundaries of land” (Plut.Mor.190E3). For the Spartans the state’s borders were understood simply “as far the spear can reach” (Plut. Mor. 210E28). No wonder the Spartan Polydorus purportedly remarked that he had battled the Argives over their common border, and not besieged theirpolisproper, “because I came to take territory (chôran) not to capture a city” (Plut. Mor. 231E3).
The main fight between phalanxes was normally down below on good flatland, in the interior territory of one of the belligerents. The same battlefields must have been visited and revisited generation after generation, inasmuch as only a few plains in Greece serve as strategic nexuses between the major city-states. How else can we explain the repeated hoplite engagements in the same Argive, Corinthian, and Mantineian plains? Consider the striking proximity of battle sites in the “dry plain of Boeotia” (Aesch. Pers.806)—a veritable Spartan, Athenian, and Theban slaughterhouse—over a two-hundred-year period. There, only a few miles separate the battlefields of Plataea (479 B.C.), Tanagra (458 B.C.), Oinophyta (457 B.C.), Delium (424 B.C.), Haliartos (395 B.C.), Coroneia (first: 447 B.C. /second: 394 B.C.), Tegyra (377 B.C.), Leuctra (371 B.C.), and Chaironeia (338 B.C). Epameinondas, the fourth-century Theban general, labeled that plain “the dancing-floor of war” (Plut. Mor. 193E18). But for the farmers who would kill in Boeotia, not dance, “blood alley” would have been a more appropriate name. For the Athenians butchered there at Chaironeia by Philip II in 338 B.C., their mortuary epigram simply called the well-trodden killing fields “famed”: “Time, the all-surveying deity of all kinds of affairs for mortals / Be a messenger to all men of our sufferings / How striving to save the sacred land of Greece, / We died on the famed plains of Boeotia” (e.g., IG II2 5266; Anth. Pal. 7.245).
The whole point of early Greek agrarian warfare, as I have said, was to save the lives and property of its farmers, to curb defense “expenditure,” and all the while to satisfy the human need for brutal bloodletting, reducing battle in Pindar’s words (fr. 15) to “a thing of fear.” Therefrom all strategic and tactical thinking was derived: deliberate agrarian attempts to find an elusive equilibrium between brief, but real wars, and a prosperous, lengthy “peace” between Greek poleis. That critical balance—the mean at the heart of agrarian life—alone must explain the often misinterpreted remark of the Cretan lawgiver in Plato’s Laws (1.626A; cf. Anon. fr. 846 Kock). “Peace,” he said, “is merely a name; in truth an undeclared war always exists by nature (kata phusin) between every Greek city-state.” But until the Peloponnesian War, Plato’s “undeclared war” (polemon akêruktos) was distinguished only by an occasional hoplite battle, which for most small landholders meant an afternoon of hard fighting and thus peace enough for the city-state to prosper.
“Strategy” is Greek for generalship. In reality for the invading army it amounted to little more than collecting and deploying the various contingents of the alliance, choosing the route and time of the invasion, and, if need be, organizing a provocative, rather than destructive, attack on the cropland and farmhouses of the invaded agriculturalists. Xenophon said it consisted mainly of the right way to march out in formation, the proper manner to post sentries, and the best approach in crossing passes (Oec. 20.6-11). The Spartan king Archidamos on the eve of the first great invasion of the Peloponnesian War (431 B.C.) initially refrained from attacking Athenian farms, hoping that the enemy, in the cherished tradition of hoplite warfare, would be provoked into marching out in column. “The reason why Archidamos stayed in formation at Acharnae during this invasion,” Thucydides writes, “rather than descending into the Athenian plain, was said to be for the following reason. He expected that the Athenians might possibly be tempted by the great numbers of their young and the unexampled efficiency of service to come out for battle and try to stop the ravaging of their farms” (Thuc. 2.20.1-2).
Provoked agrarians could occasionally choose to ride it out safely behind the town’s walls (the art of siegecraft was still in its infancy). Wisely (but less courageously) they might allow a brief, and usually benign, ravaging of their farms (e.g., Xen. Hell. 4.4.16; 6.5.15-20). Besides marching out to battle heroically in the plains or, less commonly, eschewing pitched battle altogether and retreating to endure a siege behind strong walls, there was also a third, less reputable choice: abject capitulation. That was the position of the cowardly but prudent viticulturalists of Akanthos in northern Greece, farmers who simply folded and thereby let the invading Spartans inside their walls, rather than risk loss of access to their upcoming vintage (Thuc. 4.84.1-2; 4.88.1-2; and cf. Hdt. 5.34.1; 6.101.2; 6.109.1).
More often, as even the fifth-century Athenians’ opposition to the evacuation policy of Pericles revealed (e.g., “It seemed likely that the three thousand infantry of the deme of Acharnae would refuse to submit to the ravaging of their farms, and would force the rest of the Athenians to march out for pitched battle” [Thuc. 2.20.]), hoplite farmers wished to battle. Except for the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War, most Greek city-states before the fourth century chose to face the invader (e.g., Thuc. 5.64.5-65.2). Immediately, the decision was made to muster all the able-bodied landowners, to preserve their pride and the sanctity of ancestral plots, to march out in the close columns of the phalanx, and to meet the trespassers in a single pitched battle.
“Agriculture,” the Aristotelian Oeconomica says, “inures men to exposure and toil, and gives them the strength to face the perils of war; for the property of farmers alone lies outside the walls of the city” ([Oec. ] 1.1343b5-7). Xenophon, in a note of agrarian Darwinism, also stresses the inherent link between free agriculture and hoplite bravery: “The land stimulates farmer to fight for his country since nature raises the crops out in the open for the strongest to take” (Oec. 5. 7). Usually the assembly of property owners (i.e., the “strongest,” the hoplites themselves) determined the response of the polis. For much of the life of the Greek city-state until the Peloponnesian War, there was never a separation in political and military representation. There was no ominous gulf between those who say “fight” and those who really do fight, the phenomenon that has undermined Western societies from the agrarian crises of the third to first centuries B.C. at Rome to the American tragedy in Vietnam.
Agricultural damage—the specter that drew out the phalanx—was limited by the natural toughness and ubiquity of the vine and olive, rough terrain, the difficulty of catching moisture-laden grain at its combustible stage, the inherent simplicity and resiliency of labor-intensive, but capital-scarce farms and, last, the very incongruity of clumsy hoplite infantrymen or vulnerable skirmishers taking on the role of day laborers hacking at vines and trees (see Hanson 1983: 37-63).
Completely absent from the mind of the seventh- and sixth-century hoplite “strategic” planner (besides the notion itself of a “planner”) was any intention of genocide, of scorched-earth retreat, of mass conquest and expropriation, of terrorism, or of indiscriminate murder and hostage taking. All that belonged either to ancient legend of the pre-polis era or to Greece during the later fifth and fourth centuries B.C.—when the agrarian protocols eroded and those on the margins of traditional yeomanry sought to end the old ideology of the polis.
Nor, aside from the unusual Spartan subjugation of Messenia, was there much consideration of permanent occupation or mass enslavement. Cleomenes of Sparta was considered mad for his ghastly incineration of his trapped Argive adversaries at Sepeia (494B.C.;Hdt. 6.80-85; 7.148). Herodotus’s peculiar and ironical description of the “battle of the fetters” (550 B.C.), when the Spartans brought along chains to shackle their Tegean opponents (unsuccessfully, as it turned out), suggests that enslavement of neighboring defeated Greeks was the exception, not the rule during the seventh and sixth centuries (Hdt. 1.66). Early aberrations in the hoplitic code, not surprisingly, are often associated with Sparta, whose atypical professional military was always in danger of going beyond the pale of accepted agrarian practice.
Wide-scale massacre and sale of conquered peoples inside Greece became commonplace only in the later fifth century during the nightmare of the Peloponnesian War, when the landed monopoly of Greek warfare eroded for good. Examine the staggering numbers of enslaved listed in W. K. Pritchett’s monumental The Greek State at War, Part V (Pritchett War 5.505-41) to see just how different the fourth through second centuries were from the practice of the earlier polis. While our surviving literary sources differ, it still seems to me reminiscent of the killing and savagery of the nineteenth century giving way to the horrific extermination of the twentieth. Treatises such as the Cavalry Commander of Xenophon or Aeneas Tacticus’s Defense of Fortified Positions—strange “how-to” manuals for the non-hoplite—were thus naturally suited to fourth-century military practice. They reflect an evolving contemporary military ideology for a more complex, nonagrarian-thinking polis; the old hoplite monopoly of the fifth century had been shown to be largely irrelevant during the Peloponnesian War, and was only sporadically resurrected in its aftermath.
“Tactics,” as the historian Xenophon says, were “only a small part of generalship” (Mem. 3.1.6). To infantrymen of the polis period they seemed nearly as one-dimensional as strategy. Tactics addressed only the basic “problem” of Greek battle of the city-state: the collection of all the combatants as quickly as possible into a confined space. “An ordered army,” Xenophon wrote, “is the finest thing to see for friends and the most terrifying thing for enemies…. For when armies march in order, though there be tens of thousands of them, they all march calmly as if they were one man; the empty spaces are always filled by those who are coming up from behind” (Oec. 8.6-7). Xenophon adds: “Without formation, an army is a confused mass, easy pickings for enemies, for friends a disgusting sight, utterly useless (achrêstotaton)” (Oec. 8.4.).
Plato wished that in his utopia Greek armies could at least practice mustering and march out one day a month (Leg. 8.829B). In a formal sense, Greek tactics of the polis also consisted of not much more than determining the proper, although elusive, ratio between breadth and depth of the phalanx (usually stacked eight shields deep, but no greater it seems than fifty), and the placement, always somewhat political, of the particular allied troops on the proper wings of the army. Drawing up the phalanx was considered the “acme of the art of war” (Plut. Phil. 14.5).
Occasionally, the stronger, better fighters needed to be identified and placed at the front and rear to stop any stampede from either direction, and to urge on the weaker farmers in the center (e.g., Xen. Mem. 3.1.7-11). Ambushes and deception were considered “trickery” outside the realm of early polis warfare. Often there was more simply a moral, rather than legal, restraint on ruse: anything but stand-up gallantry went against the entire Greek heroic code. During the warfare of the polis, there were none of “the charts and diagrams for the illustration of tactical doctrine” so common in Hellenistic times (Plut. Phil. 4.5).
To the modern military mind, very little was left to chance in hoplite battle. Most often it was simply a case of winning the fray with your strong right wing—“horns,” as the agrarian infantrymen called them—before suspect and less reliable allied militias on the left collapsed—sometimes, as in the case of the so-called tear-less battle (Plut. Ages. 33.3), before even meeting the enemy. Most rudimentary tactics that did emerge were simple, rather than complex, variations of head-on assaults in column (e.g., Xen. Lac Pol.11.5-10; Cyr. 2.2.6-10). Given the absence of reserve troops, specialized units, the surprise attack, the night engagement, and the concealed ambush, there was no desire until the fourth century for elaborate pre-battle tactical planning or even real battlefield command. An Alexander, Napoleon, Patton, or Rommel might have sent cavalry to punch holes in the enemy phalanx, javelin throwers and archers to hammer at his wings, followed by light infantry feints, encircling columns, and surprise attacks in the rear, all preliminaries to the main assault held in reserve, awaiting the opportune moment of enemy weakness. But to the polis Greeks before the Peloponnesian War, these generals would have been a distasteful bunch, tinkerers and manipulators afraid, at first sight of the enemy mass, to grab the shield and run with their men to death.
So the chateau general, the bloated grandee, and the armchair know-it-all, as we understand them, were virtually nonexistent. Archilochus (fr.114), the seventh-century, anti-aristocratic lyric poet, spoke for all when he said that his battle leader must be only “short and bandy-legged, firm set on his feet, full of heart and courage.” He ridiculed—as agrarians always do those in ostentatious positions of authority—any who would have pretensions about command, the wartime counterpart to Hesiod’s “bride-swallowing barons.”6
The sense in Greek literature before the fourth century is that the “general” himself is not much more than a hoplite, a battlefield leader who fights along with his men. He is neither a wealthy land baron nor a professional graduate of years of tactical and strategic training. Elevation of the strategos above his followers was somehow seen by the polis Greeks as nonegalitarian and—given the absence of real tactical and strategic choice—silly as well. There seems to have been an entire absence of overall battlefield control in early hoplite warfare. Often individual contingents formed up the ranks as they pleased, with little regard for the repercussions on their own allied columns on their left and right (e.g., Thuc. 4.93; and cf. Xen. Hell. 4.2.13; Thuc. 5.68).
I know of no sculpture, no artwork before the fourth century glorifying a general as the “man on a horse.” The rural chorus in a lost play, the Demes, by the comic playwright Eupolis, complains bitterly about the farmer-hoplites who voted in the losing generals at the battle of Mantineia (418 B.C.) : “I pray that whoever picked men like that to hold the office, may neither his flocks or fields ever bear fruit” (fr. 110B, 11-12 Edmonds). There was a notion—one no doubt often quite true—that even at the end of the fifth century the general was a farmer, not much different from his men. Common in the literature of war is a chaotic scene where agrarians openly challenge authority, berate their generals, and offer unsolicited advice before, during, and after battle. Xenophon complained that hoplites were among the most insubordinate (apeithestatous pantôn) of all troops (Mem. 3.5.19).
This image of a “soldier’s general” has been challenged by scholars who argue it was—and has been throughout Western battle practice—but one of many “masks” of command. But no evidence exists to show that before the Peloponnesian War Greek hoplite generals wore many other masks. Rarely was a general mounted, isolated to the rear, or free of the fighting itself. Debate over the battle activity of hoplite “commanders” is academic quibbling: whether the “general” fights and dies exposed in the front rank, or is surrounded by more seasoned contingents stationed a few ranks behind the initial collision. In Plato’s Ion, Socrates shows that Ion’s claims of mastering all of Greek tactics from intimate acquaintance with Homer are fatuous. But in his classic refutation, Socrates never suggests that the “science” of generalship is any more complex that it had been centuries in the past.7
Dionysodorus complains in Xenophon’s Memorabilia that some at Athens felt one could simply assume command without any military experience at all—suggesting through his invective that this was often precisely the case for much of the life of the polis(Mem.3.1.2-7). Socrates is therefore made to say that “to be eager for victory (philonikos)” rather than to have made formal study is crucial in generalship (Xen. Mem. 3.43). Theoretically, the seer who accompanied the army may have had as much authority in directing the time and occasion of battle as the general himself, for if the sacrifice “revealed” unfavorable omens, the battle might be delayed, and in rare instances postponed altogether.*
Strategy, tactics, and generalship were not merely rudimentary. They were deliberately made nonessential in war between two opposing phalanxes, inasmuch as they were all antithetical to farmers’ interests. Greek agrarian warfare, as it was originally conceived, was not so much atactical or astrategic, as it was anti-tactical, anti-strategic. It was not primitive but sophisticated when one appreciates its underlying conventions.
Farmers during the polis period were not to be fodder for aristocratic careerism. They were not to be sent abroad to fight wars for which they had no desire, much less political or economic interests. They were not to be bled white paying taxes for professional armies. They were not to incorporate landless and alien skirmishers and mercenaries merely to achieve military diversity and flexibility. Instead, for one of the few occasions in the history of the West, rural folk, independent and autonomous citizens of more than a thousand Greek communities, set their own military agenda, and would not be conscripted from their farms to serve the big men of the city.
Once hoplite battle commenced, killing was equally economical. Columns of bronze’clad infantry, as Xenophon himself witnessed at Coroneia (Hell. 4.3.19), “collided, pushed, fought, killed, and died,” seeking always to collapse the opposing phalanx before exhaustion set in—usually within an hour under the summer Mediterranean sun. Pushing with the shield (the ôthismos) while stabbing with the spear required little weapon training or skill. Success instead came from a steady nerve in the face of what Sophocles called the “storm of the spear” (doros en cheimôni)” (Ant. 670), what Aeschylus, veteran of Marathon, knew as “the air made insane by the shaking of the spear (doritinaktos aithêr epimainetai)” (Sept. 155).
The tragedians’ images make perfect sense when we remember that the jostling and bobbing spears of the first three ranks of the phalanx (hence the metaphor of the porcupine’s rising quills [e.g., Plut. Arist. 18.2]) all could impale the oncoming adversary. Often on Greek vases (e.g., Ducrey 49, 240) the gaping wounds on a fallen soldier suggest that at least a few fighters ended up as pincushions of sorts, soft meat thrown against dozens of sharp skewers.
When I speak of “pushing” in Greek battle, I mean just that. It is not some metaphorical expression to connote movement of men forward, but actual leaning into the man ahead, applying real pressure with the shield to his shoulder, side, and back. Similarly, references in Greek literature attest to “hand-to-hand” and “shield-to-shield” combat. These phrases suggest literal not symbolic brawling and wrestling (Thuc. 4.96.2; Tyrt. 11.31-34; Diod. 12.70.3; 15.39.1; 15.87.1; cf. Hanson 1989:154-56; 171-84). Perhaps when offensive weapons failed or pressure simply made their use problematic, agrarians resorted to their hands and teeth, and again the farmer’s strength and endurance were critical. Is it any surprise, then, that Thebes, the agrarian polis par excellence, favored attack with massed columns of sixteen, twenty-five, and fifty shields deep, secure in the thought that their tough yeoman could break through any wider enemy formation column before being outflanked or caught in the rear?
In the mind of every farmer there was an overriding desire not to play the coward before lifelong friends and family posted at his side, his “compatriot farmers.” “A strong arm can bear the spear thrust no better than a weak one,” Euripides says, “it’s a man’s courage and nature that make him what he is” (Eur. Elect. 389-90). An ideology of agrarian solidarity was reflected in both the massed nature of the columns—brother, father, son all together (e.g., “Every living thing fights better in the presence of offspring” [Pl.Resp.5.467B])—and the interdependence spawned by hoplite technology, something impossible using the tactics of the long line or hit-and-run skirmishing. Greek literature reflects precisely that idea: men carried their shields “for the sake of the entire line” (Plut. Mor.220A; Thuc. 5.71; and especially Plut. Pel. 1.5). Aristotle concluded that militias of amateur farmers were far more courageous than hired mercenaries: “Infantrymen of the polis think it is a disgraceful thing to run away, and they choose death over safety through flight. On the other hand, professional soldiers, who rely from the outset on superior strength, flee as soon as they find out they are outnumbered, fearing death more than dishonor” (Arist. Eth. Nic. 3.1116b16-23).
Ideally, all farmers who threw down their shields and ran away were punished, since the first duty of a hoplite “was to protect rather than inflict injury on the enemy” (Plut. Pel. 1.5; cf. Anth. Pal. 7.230). Euripides laments that the hoplite “is slave to his weapons since he might die if the man to his right proved a coward” (HF 185). “Farming,” Xenophon says of agrarian militia, “educates one to help others. In fighting (ienai tous polemious), just as in the working of the soil (tês gês ergasia), it is necessary to have the assistance of other people” (Oec. 5.14). Given the shared agrarian ideology of the geôrgoi, their adherence to uniform and egalitarian notions of property holding (e.g., “The ideal of timocracy is government by the mass of citizens, and within the property qualification all are equal” [Arist. Eth. Nic. 8.1160b18-20]), it is hard to envision for long armed farmers of this brand as small groups of mounted knights. Nor would Greek agrarians be comfortable as isolated contingents of professional garrison troops, or as a long solitary line of bowmen and slingers, much less as mercenary killers. It is far more understandable that each plot in the countryside around the polis was mirrored by a slot in the phalanx.
For that task of lining up together in massed rank for a single, decisive battle, even the old (e.g., Andocides’ “the aged men arming for battle”) and occasionally the unfit could still offer service. Dispense entirely with the idea that the ranks of the phalanx were composed of elegant youths of the type so often portrayed on Athenian red- and black-figured vases. At the end of the fifth century they seem almost effeminate in their slenderness. That is aristocratic idealization, akin to Plato’s glorification of hoplite infantry, rather than a ground-level snapshot of the men who went to war.8
It is sometimes popular in the age of “gender studies” for scholars to insist that the sleekness and artwork of the Greek panoply are reflections of male rituals reflecting sexual ambivalency, more akin to the search for masculine identity or even fashion than simple killing. But a few ornate and tasteful Greek breastplates in the museums or references in literature to occasionally decorated panoplies (Xen. Mem. 3.10.14) should not mislead us—any more than the stylish gray uniforms and plumes of Confederate officers who led their grizzled troops to mass butchery and dismemberment. Aeschylus emphasizes that even the young “man-boy” Parthenopaios, the down-cheeked warrior, who might have appeared nonthreatening, was “not at all maidenish like his name”(parthenos means maiden or young girl). Instead, he attacked Thebes as a “savage with a terrible eye” (Sept. 536-37), with “a cannibal sphinx on his shield” (541). Earlier in the same play, Seven Against Thebes, Aeschylus has Eteokles say, “I am not afraid of whatever a man wears. Images don’t inflict wounds. Crests and bells can’t bite without a spear” (Sept. 397-99).
So despite soldiers’ interest in a neat appearance (e.g., Xen. An. 3.2.7; Hdt. 7.208; Thuc. 6.31), hoplite battle entailed real killing, where spears, not images, “bit.” It was an ugly thing. Grubby-looking farmers were of all ages. They were men who, like Aristophanes’ old “gray-haired” Acharnian hoplites, may have looked gnarled and aged, and complained of stiff limbs (Ach. 210-20), may have been near blind and fat (Plut. Mor. 192C3; 235F62), but whose backs and legs were used to the rigor of constant farm chores: “all old men, close-grained and stubborn, made of ilex and maple wood” (Ach. 180-82; cf. Hanson 1989: 89-95).
From personal experience, I have learned that farmers and farm laborers in their fifties and sixties—often with paunches and arthritic joints—possess an uncanny strength. That power belies their appearance, and certainly is unmatched by the young urban jogger or novice iron-pumper. So accustomed are we (like urban Greek artists) to associate youth and beauty with physical excellence, so confident are we in relying on the gadgetry of the fitness industry to achieve a muscular physique (like the aristocrats at thepolisgymnasia), that at first glance this assertion that real power can lie hidden within a sorry agrarian frame, in “the horny handed farmer” (Val. Max. 7.5.2), seems ludicrous. But the bodily strength and combative skill of the potbellied cultivator might not be entirely physical. Perhaps his power derives too out of the experience of repetitive labor and the discipline—physical, mental, spiritual—needed daily to endure hostile weather and constantly boring but nevertheless dangerous tasks of agricultural solitude?
How else can I explain why when I was in my late twenties, friends visiting from the city, expert runners, bicyclists, and weight lifters all, often tired after pruning a row of vines, or a large plum tree, becoming winded, bored, and indignant? They—all around my own age—were left far behind by seasoned men in their fifties without sculpted muscles, ugly men of alcohol and tobacco, who could not jog a mile without collapse. Inexplicably there seems to be muscle after all in a farmer’s ungainly belly and back, ugly muscle though it may be, every bit as strong as elegant muscle.
Xenophon contrasted the agrarian physique with the “ruined bodies and enervated souls” of the urban craftsmen, who could never match the farmer-hoplite in bodily strength or nerve. How could they, when none toiled in the fields or risked their livelihood out beyond the walls (cf. Oec. 6.5-10)? Elsewhere, he says: “Farming keeps the body in shape for the infantryman (geôrgia … pezê sphodron to sôma parechei)” (Oec. 5.5). Herodotus tells the story of Cleobis and Biton, who, when oxen were not to be found, yoked themselves like animals to a wagon and drew their mother five miles into Argos. Not surprisingly, he tells us they had been farming in the fields (Hdt. 1.31).
A set of pre- and post-battle rituals reemphasized the static, artificial nature of phalanx warfare. Usually battle took place after a midday meal, when hoplites relaxed, drank, gamed, or slept. Then, rested and fed, both sides squared off on a small plain and proceeded to eye one another for minutes on end. Meanwhile, the “general,” ancient historians claim, strutted down the line delivering his customary harangue. Given the many instances where battle seems to interrupt his speech midsentence, we can imagine how boring and stereotyped the address was to the armored men waiting in the sun primed to fight. How thousands confined in armor (without earholes) and arrayed in the open (skeptical farmers all) could hear the single voice of their commander, we are never told.
A seer appeared. He usually offered up a preliminary sacrifice of one of the animals. If battle seemed “wise,” he confirmed the “favorable” signs. Xenophon saw the inevitable link between agriculture and phalanxes, the similarity between the uncertainty of farming and the risks of fighting: “The gods are lords of the operations in farming no less than they are of warlike actions. Those who are at war try to win over the gods before fighting, and consulting them by means of sacrifices and auguries as to what they should or should not do. In regard to farming, do you suppose that it is any less necessary to propitiate the gods?” (Oec. 5.19-20). Both phalanxes then walked to within bow-shot, often screaming the war cry “eleleleu,” “alala,” or other queer sounds so familiar to country folk acquainted with animal noises.9
These rituals must not conjure up an image of choreographed columns artfully colliding (“a walking tour ending up in a combat” [Adcock 82]). Just because an occasional poet termed fighting “glorious” is no reason to assume that it was anything other than what Pindar called “a thing of fear” (fr. 15), “a graceless and unimaginative affair in which weight of numbers counted for as much as, if not more than, skill in the manipulation of spear and sword” (Cartledge 1987: 44). The sculpted frieze on the Siphnian treasury at Delphi shows clearly enough the tumble and melee when heavy infantrymen collided (e.g., Hurwit 297-98). On other stone reliefs and in ceramic portrayal, stumbling, tripping, and the smashing of prostrate hoplite bodies seem commonplace (e.g., Ducrey 48, 212, 244-45, 255 258). The phalanx was above all a terrifying example of pure military efficacy, a formation unstoppable and unassailable in confining ground, one never conquered through direct assault, one to be defeated only by finesse, ruse, and the manipulation of terrain—and then only after its agrarian fighting components had vanished.
In minutes armed men crashed together, running “the stadium dash” of about two hundred yards between the two phalanxes (Plut. Mor. 846E; Hanson 1989: 138-51), striving to battle one another on top of farmland. The Spartans alone adhered to the older hoplite protocol of walking, not running, into the enemy spears. For the defenders it was often the same soil they and their neighbors had worked a few days before. For the invaders, the farmhouses, orchards, vineyards, and stone field walls were largely identical to their own plots back home. Blinded by the dust and their own cumbersome helmets, farmers stabbed away with their spears, pushed on ahead with their shields, and, failing that, grabbed, kicked, and bit, desperately hoping to make some inroad into the enemy phalanx, usually having little idea whom they had killed or wounded.
Remember that Tyrtaeus, the seventh-century war poet, called the killing “threshing it out” (19.16). To men accustomed to the brutal farm work of converting wheat and barley to flour and gruel, killing in bronze armor was not a singularly demanding task. Xenophon made the same agricultural connection and once compared the pile of dead hoplites to “heaps of wheat” (Hell. 4.4. 12; cf. Aesch. Pers. 818). Aeschylus likewise envisioned the huge hoplite shield as a large threshing-floor (Aesch. Sept. 489), a flat surface where bodies, like grain, were to be smashed.
Visually, acoustically, aromatically, and physically hoplite battle was a nightmare of an hour’s blurred images, glimpses through small slits in bronze helmets of maimed limbs, trampled bodies, whirling spear-tips and sword blades, shouts, shrieks (Arrian’s “impediments in the air” [Tact. 27]), and sobbing, where the stink of sweat and excrement was intensified by the claustrophobic environment of pressed flesh and hot bronze armor (Hanson 1989: 135-218; Lazenby 1991: 91-102). The poet who portrayed the bloodsucking Fates gnashing their white fangs, whirling above the slaughter ([Hes.] Scut. 248-57), no doubt drew on the recollection of all veterans of hoplite slaughter.
Few agrarians were killed outright in battle. Fewer noncombatants were ever in danger. But those unfortunate farmers who went down, did so in gruesome fashion. Exposed limbs, groin, neck, and face were ripped apart by spear-tips. Bones and flesh were stomped by hundreds of heavy feet. For all the kindred agrarian ideology of the various city-states, in hoplite battle itself there was never any quarter given in the phalanx, never any hesitation to stab and cut stunned adversaries. Bloodletting, the art of tearing apart flesh and breaking bone, was no strange sight to farmers who butchered their own meat and hunted game.
There is nothing but disdain in Greek literature for the rare “tremblers,” “shield-casters,” and “spear-tossers.”* These were runaways and simple fainthearts, agrarian turncoats all. Theophrastus’s archetype coward is one who smears the blood of another on himself(Char. 25.4-6). Eupolis’s lost fifth-century comedy, The Shirkers, portrayed the evaders as lacking sex altogether, cowards neither men nor women (fr. 31 Kock). Plato imagined in his Laws that the best conceivable punishment for those who flung down their shields, who sought a shameful retreat rather than a glorious death buried beneath their pursuers, would be to have them somehow changed from men into women. More realistically he suggested a fine of one thousand drachmas (Pl. Leg. 12.944B-945A), a sum equal to about half a typical hoplite’s total worth. At Sparta, infantry runaways (and the definition of “runaways” was not very forbearing) were simply stripped of citizenship and drummed out of the community of warriors (cf. Plut. Mor. 191C10).
Very soon (cf. Pritchett War 4.46-51) the conflict was over as one group of farmers collapsed. Sometimes they were gradually worn down from the front rank backward, more often broken suddenly in a terrified scramble at the rear under the pressure of the accumulated shields of the adversary. Both pursuit and slaughter—the only real opportunity for class warfare in the first two centuries of the agrarian polis as both wealthy horsemen and landless poor could now slay with ease isolated hoplite farmers straggling home in dejection and confusion—usually ceased at the nearby foothills. The rare protracted retreat at Delium (424 B.C.), when the Boeotian conquerors at twilight rode down and hunted out panicked Athenians for miles was thus a particularly infamous—and ominous—episode in the history of Greek warfare. Numbers of distinguished and elderly Athenian hoplites were uncharacteristically chased, caught, or killed outright.*
Plato, no doubt thinking of the gallant behavior of Socrates at the Athenian debacle at Delium, wrote in his Laws that one of the worst things a citizen might do was to act with cowardice in retreat (Leg. 12.944C-D). The runaway, Plato says, gains through his flight “a disgraceful life rather than a blessed death by gallantry.” Much more often, nearby rough terrain, the absence of a true cavalry, and an unspoken dislike of spearing fellow Greeks in the back kept the losers’ fatalities well below fifteen percent. “It is a shameful sight,” Tyrtaeus (11.17-20) writes of the tragic scene of hoplites impaled from the rear and scattered over the battlefield, “when a dead man lies in the dust, driven through from behind by the stroke of an enemy spear.” The runaway, like the man who lost his ancestral estate, had shamed his family and community, and so lost his spot in the grid whose conservation was critical to the life of the community.
Nearly always both groups of farmers accepted the verdict of battle and felt no need to prolong the bloodletting: “It was not a Greek custom to murder those who had already yielded in battle” (Plut. Mor. 228F30). At Sparta discipline was so firm that hoplites in the midst of battle could cease their slaughter immediately upon hearing the call to cease fighting (Plut. Mor. 236E71). Post-bellum disputes over rotting corpses and the erection of trophies (e.g., Thuc. 4.97-101) were characteristic of the Peloponnesian War and later, when the protocols of decisive battle and agrarian warfare were unwinding. But in the mind of the early farmer-hoplite of the eighth to fifth century, what would be the point of further disputation, when all landowners had carefully followed the rules, when none had recourse to any “extenuating circumstances” other than their own failure of bodily strength or nerve? For a farmer who had no one other than himself to blame for a paltry crop, military defeat was naturally explicable solely through self-censure.
Once the citizen body of these agrarian governments had been repulsed on the field of battle, who in the polis could second-guess the military efficacy of its yeoman members? Hoplite defeat, like a bad harvest, logically spelled the collective failure of the entire agrarian infrastructure of the particular city-state. Sometimes battle failure understandably led to wide-ranging political settlements (cf. Hackett 78-79), far out of proportion to the actual expenditure and depletion of human lives (for the most part agrarian) and accumulated capital. Aristotle saw infantry defeats as a major cause of subsequent changes in government (e.g., Pol. 5.1302b29-1303a20). Fifth-century challenges to, and revivals of, agrarian oligarchy in Boeotia usually followed the outcome of dramatic hoplite battles (e.g., Thuc. 1.108, 113). The inability of Athenian yeomen to check the onslaught of Xerxes helped to give ascendancy to the “trireme crowd” for the next 150 years. After all, farmers had taken the defense of the polis into their own hands, and thus were to live with the prestige of victory, the ignominy of defeat, or, worse, the exposure of inadequacy.
An immediate truce was thus customary. Real depression could ensue when hoplites learned of their losses in dead and wounded. The farmers’ wagons doubled as hearses and ambulances traversing the battlefield loaded up the dead and incapacitated. We only occasionally hear of the sun-baked and bloated corpse. There was even the more bizarre, though utilitarian (in the agrarian sense), idea that rotting human cadavers could increase soil fertility. Most often the dead farmers, though stomped and speared by foot and iron, were stripped, identified, and sent back for burial.10
We scarcely know of head-hunting, scalping, or even mutilation during the formal warfare of the polis. It was a startling enough contrast that sunburned farmers who grew food for their fellow citizens were now doing their best to extinguish, not nourish, human life. Under normal circumstances corpses were cremated and their bones sent home. On some rarer occasions they were interred in mass right on the battlefield (see Pritchett War 4.94-100)—unless the ever ubiquitous, ever busy farmer ploughed too much of the flat killing ground (so perhaps the epigram: “The ploughman’s iron has rolled me out of my tomb” [Ant. Pal. 7.175-56]).
Both armies of agrarians, victorious and conquered alike, returned to their small farms and friends. Most captives in Greek warfare derived from the fall of cities, not from defeated hoplite armies (Connor 15). Victors erected a battlefield trophy and collected the defeated’s spoils for thanks offerings or profit by sale (Pritchett War 2.246-75; Lonis 129-43). The permanent stone monuments that dotted the countryside, the garish display of loot at the Panhellenic sanctuaries, were not mere reflections of the frequency of agrarian warfare, but instead real tokens of hoplite ubiquity that presented themselves at nearly every place and occasion (cf. Hdt. 1.34; Ar. Ach. 279; Pl. Leg. 887D-E; Arist. Ath. Pol. 42.3). These commemorations were, in other words, both advertisements for, and reflections of, hoplite agrarianism (e.g. Jackson 232-42). They were signs of the moral superiority of citizen yeomenry, who mustered willingly—unlike their nonagrarian contemporaries in Lydia and Persia (e.g., Hdt. 1.76-77)—to preserve their own farms and homes.
Even in maritime states like Athens, the commemorative apparatus of the polis was all hoplite. Battle dead—at sea, in passes, on horses—were memorialized largely in hoplite terminology and imagery (cf. Loraux 161-64, 91-92). Hoplite iconography was all-encompassing. Just as infantry battle had been preluded by viewing hoplite statues and votives at Panhellenic sanctuaries, then sanctioned on the spot by peripatetic seers, so it was officially ended by a formal exchange of the dead, and solemnized by trophies and dedications—all a clear message to the entire community of hoplite omnipresence and agrarian exclusivity.
This is the picture of formal Greek warfare between free landed infantry of the city-states that arose at the beginning of the seventh century. It was a system of fighting among independent farmers seen nowhere else in that Mediterranean age. Its ethos is typified best by Tellus the Athenian, whom Solon claimed to be happiest of all men, since after producing sons and grandsons, he died gallantly on the battlefield during a successful border war against Eleusis (Hdt. 1.30).
Greek hoplite battle between phalanxes before the Peloponnesian War was predictable in time, place, sequence, and aftermath of infantry fighting. This prompts us to ponder just how one particular Greek hoplite phalanx in a climate of utter violence actually defeated its adversary. Can some general trend be detected to explain the outcome of a typical hoplite battle? Perhaps no more than in European warfare of a later age, but to my knowledge such a query has never even been raised, much less answered, about hoplite fighting. The question goes right to the heart of Greek warfare in general. Like the hoplite protocols themselves, the etiology of victory may once again illustrate the agrarian foundations of the entire practice, cementing the notion that the primary concern of Greek combatants of the early polis was agriculture.
Was victory between Greek phalanxes achieved through one army’s preponderance of muscular strength? Steadfast nerve? Maneuver and articulation? Strategic and logistic superiority? Supremacy of numbers? Blind luck? Advantage in weaponry and military technology? Since there are accounts from historical sources in various degrees of detail of some twenty or so major hoplite battles between 650 and 338 B.C.—the period roughly contemporaneous with the life of the free Greek city-state—the question is perhaps resolvable. But it remains partially shrouded in an agrarian morality that transcends questions of simple military efficacy.
Because there was no real military science in the great age of hoplite battle, there is no need to discuss Greek warfare in anything like traditional military terms. “Breakouts,” “articulation,” “maneuver,” “preparedness,” “mobilization,” and “assets” are all terms, I believe, that do not belong in the world of hoplite battle. Its conflict knew no “theaters,” “fronts,” “reserves,” or “salients.” These are modern concepts that have few equivalents in the Greek military mind (much less in the ancient Greek vocabulary; cf. Hanson 1991: 8-11).
Even in a simple contest of brute force, was there superior skill, size, or strength among the farmers of any one particular hoplite army? Herodotus believed the Greek successes at Marathon (490 B.C.) and Plataea (479 B.C.) against the Persians were in part a result of their superior training and armament (Hdt. 9.62.4, 9.63.2; cf. 5.97.1, 7.211.2; Diod. 11.7.3; but cf. Lazenby 1993: 256-261). Even if true, Herodotus’s logic cannot be directly applied to the wars of phalanxes, fought, after all, almost exclusively between fellow landed Greeks, homogeneous infantrymen of the poleis who worked on similar farms, who were armed identically, and battled almost entirely alike, who observed religiously the formal regulations of Greek military practice.
That uniformity may explain why even later military analysts of the Hellenistic and Roman periods seem confused about how and why a Greek phalanx engineered the defeat of its particular adversary. The first-century A.D. tactician Aelian (Tact. Pruef. 146) drawing on sources going back at least to Polybius (second century B.C.), and perhaps incorporating a tradition rooted in phalanx warfare of the early polis, could only list (without qualification) a gamut of possible explanations. Aelian’s puzzlement might suggest that few Greeks themselves knew which factor in a phalanx battle was the most influential in eventual success.
All battles are decided either because of the strength of forces in infantry or cavalry; or because of the superiority of forces in tens of thousands or thousands; or because of the morale of the men; or because of the physical strength of men; or because of training,or because of the skill of the tactical deployment, or because of terrain, or because of the suitability of the occasion [emphasis added].
On occasion, the farmers of Hesiod’s Boeotia were known to be especially physical, excelling in combative sports; their conditioning reflected their general reputation in antiquity as doughty rustics and the widely held acknowledgment that size and strength were important in hoplite battle (e.g., Aen. Tact. 1.3-5; Andrewes 1981: 1-3). Pericles in his disparagement of Boeotians compared them to oak trees (Arist. Rhet. 3.1406b). In general, the Greeks felt that athletic prowess and skill in wrestling enhanced hoplite combativeness (e.g., Pl. Leg. 7.830C-831B.; Lach. 182; Athen. 629B-C; Lucian Anach. 24, 28; and see Pritchett War 2.208-45). Plato could envision fighting as “the avoidance of blows and missiles by swerving, ducking, jumping, and crouching” (e.g.,Leg.7.815A), although fluid motion was perhaps not typical of men wearing seventy pounds of armor, who struggled simply to remain standing while stabbing and pushing in the crowd. Commanding physicality is the effect Aristophanes is creating when he brings onstage a no-nonsense farmer from Boeotia in his Acharnians (Ach. 860-910).
Plutarch (a native of Boeotian Chaironeia not far from Thebes) went further. He explicitly correlated Boeotian ferocity and muscular power to military prowess: “The Spartans at Leuctra,” he says, “were overpowered by our men, who were experts in wrestling.” Elsewhere he notes that the Thebans had little patience with the unfit (Plut. Mor. 639E). Diodorus apparently drew on the same lost source as Plutarch (most likely the fourth-century B.C. historian Ephorus), for he points out on several occasions that it was the Thebans’ bodily strength that wore down their Spartan counterparts (Diod. 12.70.3; 15.39.1; 15.87.1; cf. Xen. An. 3.1.23). Was the well-known national characteristic of Theban armies to stack their phalanxes especially deep (e.g., Thuc. 4. 93.4; Xen. Hell.4.2.13, 18; 6.4.12) designed to capitalize on the accumulated thrusting power of unusually strong men, to break down shallower lines through the group strength of hardy farmers?
Is it no accident that the Theban reputation for individual strength is usually found in a fourth-century context, implying that the conservative, landlocked armies of Boeotia were still composed almost exclusively of farmers, although in other poleis there had been a steady erosion in the exclusive farmer/infantryman equation and thus a general decline in the fighting corps of the polis? At Athens, the incorporation of the unfit, nonagrarian, and privileged into the ranks was a source of constant complaint for philosophers and comic poets. They felt mongrelization of the phalanx had eroded hoplite prowess (e.g. Pl. Resp. 8.556D-E; Xen. Mem. 3.5.15; Ar. Ran. 1087-96).
Nevertheless, outside of Leuctra—a battle that has baffled modern commentators (cf. Hanson 1988: 190-92)—we have no tradition that Boeotian physical strength is to be associated with their particular battle successes (at Tanagra [458 B.C.], first Coroneia [447B.C.],and Delium [424 B.C.]). At Leuctra (371 B.C.) most scholars usually discount Plutarch’s explanation of muscle. They cite instead a variety of other causes (e.g., cavalry tactics, an oblique attack, and massed column on the left wing). None of them have anything to do with the bodily strength of the victorious Thebans and their allies.
But the Thebans and their confederates were not always victorious in battle. Armies from Boeotia apparently lost to the Athenians at the shadowy battle of Oinophyta (457 B.C.). They were fought to a standstill by the Spartans both at the second battle of Coroneia (394 B.C.) and at second Mantineia (362 B.C.)—not to mention their disgraceful and failed efforts to aid the Persians at the battle of Plataea (479 B.C.), where they were, in fact, repulsed on the left wing by the Athenians.
Nor elsewhere in narrative battle accounts involving Spartans, Corinthians, Argives, Athenians, and others is the superior strength of particular hoplites distinguishable, much less determinant. The impression in our literary sources until the fourth century is that most hoplite armies were uniformly composed of farmers, roughly indistinguishable in body size, strength, and equipment. Their similarities explain in part the alarming hoplite propensity on both sides for simple misdirection and misidentification in battle (cf. Hanson 1989: 185-193).
For explanations of continued hoplite success one must look predictably enough to the Spartans, the sole professional soldiers of the eighth to fourth centuries, the “craftsmen and technicians of military science” (Plut. Pel. 23.4; cf. Xen. Mem. 3.9.2). Supported by an entire population of individual servants or helots, they alone were free to engage in constant drilling, group messes, and a life devoted to the barracks. Through such extensive training, they produced uniquely skilled fighters, like those found in no other national army. “Not by caring for our fields,” Plutarch tells us the antiagrarian warriors bragged, “but rather by caring for ourselves did we acquire those fields” (Mor. 214A72).
Spartan success was derived not merely from their experience in handling the spear and sword. Plato in his Laches reminds us that there was little real value in set moves or hoplomachia in phalanx warfare. He suggests instead that the simplicity of crowded hoplite crashes left no room—or need—for formal weapon techniques (192E-194A). Other anecdotal literary evidence seems to confirm the idea that there was not much to be gained by extensive individual training with spear and shield (see Anderson 1991: 28-32).
Many ancient sources (e.g., Thuc. 5.66-71) do speak of Spartan excellence at marching and drill, at group movement under the terrifying conditions of massed combat. They suggest that the one army of professionals in Greece, of nonfarmers, alone held battlefield superiority, the true “artisans of war and servants of Ares” (Plut. Comp. Lyc. et Num. 2.6). Spartan hoplites seem to have brought a real zest to the muster, singing as they lumbered out to the battlefield (e.g., Dio. Chrys. 2.59). In phalanx battle much must have rested on just this ability to march in deliberate set order, without allowing fatal gaps to appear between hoplites, without flinching at the moment of collision, something difficult for most agrarian amateurs, who between campaigns rarely practiced forming up with their tribesmen and neighbors. The Spartans alone by the fifth century still anachronistically walked across no-man’s land slowly to the music of pipes, in John Milton’s words, “to the sounds of flutes and soft recorders” (cf. Adcock 8), forfeiting entirely the advantage of momentum at impact, which a running charge might add (e.g., Thuc. 5.70; Plut. Lyc. 22.2-3).
The Spartans’ deliberate walk must have had a chilling effect on their adversaries. The unfortunate Athenian general Cleon ran away at Amphipolis (422 B.C.) once he saw the distinctive shields of the approaching Spartans. No wonder, Plutarch says, their onslaught—highlighted by long hair and crimson cloaks—was always “at once awesome and terrifying” (e.g., Eupolis 359 Kock; cf. Plut. Pel. 17.6; Xen. Hell. 4.4.10). Such well-trained killers were they, that even in the most desperate circumstances, Spartan hoplites were able to stay calm and keep good order (e.g., Xen. Lac. Pol. 11.7). That is why Herodotus makes the renegade Spartan king Demaratus say to the Persian king that “as individual fighters they are as good as any in the world, but when they fight in a group they are thebest in the world” (Hdt. 7.104.4). The passage emphasizes that group drill and training at Sparta were perhaps more important than individual skill and bodily strength.
Yet even the Spartans, the most successful of all Greek infantry, the sole army of professional nonfarmers, were not invincible. Scholars who repeat the legend of Spartan invincibility forget just how often their phalanxes were beaten back at their own game of infantry battle (much more often than in the case of the Thebans). They lost decisively at the battles of Hysiae (669 B.C.), Tegea (560 B.C.), Haliartos (395 B.C.), Tegyra (377 B.C.), Lechaion (390 B.C.), and Leuctra (371 B.C.). Spartan hoplites came away less than triumphant also at Coroneia (394 B.C.) and second Mantineia (362 B.C.). Herodotus says that in early campaigns during the sixth century against their immediate neighbors, the Tegeans, “they met with nothing but defeat” (Hdt. 1.67). It is not exactly true to suggest that their skill in hoplite drill and unit cohesion were absolutely critical, that Spartan expertise and discipline routinely defeated all comers (e.g., Plut. Mor. 241B4-5).
Other factors must have at times mitigated their advantage in drill and discipline. Pericles was not completely exaggerating when he reminded his Athenian audience during the first year of the Peloponnesian War: “And if with relaxation rather than work, and with natural, rather than enforced, courage we nevertheless are willing to hazard dangers, that is only to our advantage, since we do not have to toil needlessly in advance of the hardships to come and yet still face our struggles with just as much daring as those who are always in a state of preparation for them” (Thuc. 2,39.4; emphasis added).
If drill did not always guarantee battlefield supremacy, then what does explain the Spartans’ own occasional setbacks against purely agrarian militias? More important, since we are investigating universal causes for the success or failure of hoplite armies, what accounts for the outcome of the many battles between the other Greeks, instances where Spartan professionals were not present (for we hear that no other Greek polis until the late fifth and fourth centuries followed their lead and instituted drill on any wide scale)? Although the degree of hoplite training is still controversial among classical scholars, no evidence has been adduced to show that phalanxes before the late fifth century were routinely mustered to engage in lengthy marches and mock battles, as later mercenary forces were.
The key to success in warfare of the agrarian city-state cannot be found in traditional military exegesis (i.e., strategy, tactics, and logistics). Nor is victory always attributable to superior strength, skill, or battle experience on the part of the infantrymen of any particular polis. Is triumph a question simply of superior force, of greater numbers of hoplites assembled at any given battle?
Here too problems arise. The location of hoplite battle (small plains surrounded by rough terrain) and the absence of second and third stages of fighting, gave little opportunity for the application of preponderant infantry forces—reserves, second armies, combined contingents, feints, and ambushes. Because only the first three ranks could reach the enemy at any given time, and because it is not at all clear that even unusually deep phalanxes always caused a proportionate increase in thrusting power (e.g., PritchettWar 1.134-43; Hanson 1988: 193-207), the sheer numbers of bodies present at a hoplite battle—either in toto or concentrated at a given point—may have been only of secondary importance.
In any case, most opposing Greek phalanxes were roughly the same size. Even on those rare occasions when one side outnumbered its adversary, victory was not automatically achieved. There are examples of outnumbered hoplite armies defeating their opponents decisively. The victorious Thebans at Leuctra (about 6,000-7,000 men) may have numbered many thousands less than their Peloponnesian counterparts (i.e., 10,000-11,000; cf. Anderson 1970: 196-98). In other engagements such as Delium (424 B.C.:7, Boeotian hoplites and 10,000-12,000 auxiliary troops vs. 7, Athenian hoplites and an unknown number of auxiliaries [Thuc. 4.93.3-4.94]), and Nemea (394 B.C.: 23,000-25, Peloponnesians vs. 24,000-26, Athenians, Argives, and Boeotians [e.g., Xen. Hell.4.2.9-11; Diod. 14. 83.1]), it is uncanny just how evenly matched both sides actually were. At the battle of second Coroneia (394 B.C.), Xenophon (Ages. 2.7-9) says precisely that. The Thebans and Spartans, he believed, were about paired (i.e. about 20,000 men each; cf. Anderson 1970: 310 n.18).
This rough numerical parity at hoplite battles gives credibility to the traditional idea that the Greeks were quite fearful of the hegemony of any one polis, constantly changing allegiances and trading sides throughout the fifth and fourth centuries. All were efforts, reflecting the agrarians’ similar ideological discomfort with the accumulation of farm plots, to prevent the overwhelming numerical preponderance of force on any one side. The egalitarianism of the agrarian grid was superimposed by the citizenry onto the larger interrelationships between the city-states themselves.
Was victory in hoplite battle, then, determined by the rule of the inexplicable, of chance and blind luck? The Spartans under Leonidas suffered betrayal at Thermopylae (480 B.C.), and were fatally attacked from the rear through no fault of their own (Hdt. 7.212-14). Otherwise, they might have held off the invasion of Xerxes for days on end. At Leuctra (371 B.C.) some pre-battle drinking and the unfortunate collision of cavalry and infantry (Hanson 1989: 126-31; Anderson 1970: 213-15) apparently doomed the Spartan rightward advance—a tactic so very successful against Theban troops more than twenty years earlier at Nemea (394 B.C.)—at the outset. That unfortunate confusion explains in part their shocking defeat at the hands of Epameinondas and his Thebans. Leuctra was a battle where, according to the Spartan apologist Xenophon, “everything turned out wrong for the Spartans” (Hell. 6.4.8-15; cf. Hanson 1988: 205-7).
Plain bad luck may account for the Athenians’ fate at Delium (424 B.C.), where all imaginable catastrophes took place (Thuc. 4. 94-96), After mistakenly fighting their own troops, the Athenians compounded their failure—this time fatally—by wrongly surmising that a few enemy cavalry sorties on the horizon signaled an entirely new enemy force, “the sudden appearance of them starting a panic in the already victorious wing of the Athenians.” On the edge of victory, but quickly bewildered and terrified, the Athenians fled the battlefield altogether. “The intelligent Athenian hoplites,” Sir Frank Adcock summarized of Delium, “had put two and two together and made it five” (Adcock 85).
Nevertheless, “luck,” confusion, and misdirection in themselves cannot explain most hoplite victories (e.g., Hanson 1989: 185-93). More often in hoplite battle, there is truth to the dictum of von Moltke that “luck in the long run is given only to the efficient.” This is especially true among the ancient Greeks, where the sheer uniformity in numbers, armament, tactics, terrain, and command eliminated the unplanned and unexpected from most “normal” hoplite battles.
The only other common factor that can adequately account for Greek hoplite success or failure is nerve (cf. Pl. Lach. 193D). Here, I think, lies the real secret of Greek warfare of the polis. In the last analysis, battle was for the farmer a war of the spirit, as was his effort to conquer nature, to reclaim land, and to draw a living from the earth (e.g., Xen. Cyr. 3.3.19; cf. 2.3.11). The desire to push ahead, facing the “storm of spear,” not to flinch, not to leave one’s assigned place in the file or line, are, of course, frequently described in Greek literature. They are the ancients’ desiderata of survival within the phalanx.
Under close examination, these are the same emotions, the same skills so explicitly outlined by Hesiod in his outline for agrarian success: hard work, honor of community, willingness to sacrifice and face the unexpected danger, concern for past social and religious custom and tradition.*
Here one wonders how, and under what precise conditions, that superior, victory-giving morale—itself an offshoot of the solidarity of the farm-owning classes of the polis—was achieved by any one particular agrarian city-state? The hoplite armies of thepolisalmost all lacked real uniforms, medals, rank, military advancement, cash bonuses, and other traditional forms of group and individual combat rewards and punishments. The few prizes for valor that appear in Greek literature were given to the strong and reliable who upheld the line, not to the Homeric few who waded out in front of their comrades (Pritchett War 2.276-90). Only in non-polis societies—Scythia, Persia, Thrace, Carthage, Iberia, and Macedonia—do we hear of state decorations for military valor and special recognition for killing individual opponents (e.g., Arist. Pol. 7.1324b.10-24).
I have argued in The Western Way of War that both alcohol and the presence of the hoplite “general” in the front ranks were strong combat incentives, and that an even more important part of morale was regimental élan (Hanson 1989: 117-25). Most hoplite armies were arranged in formation by tribal and family affiliations. This form of muster guaranteed that farmers fought in a manifestly public way, given the close order of the phalanx, with lifelong friends and family at their side, and men like themselves in the front and rear. Fellow soldiers, Plato says, come together as they observe each other in actual battle (Pl. Resp. 8.556D-E).
The farmer in battle was no different from the man back on his land: fearful, proud, determined that his orchard and vineyard be as well kept and productive as his neighbor’s, he carried into the phalanx a strong ideology of individual chauvinism mixed with group concern. Sociologies of battle tell us that in the final seconds before combat, men choose to face down the enemy rather than to run, not out of some abstract notion of God or country, but instead from the fear of playing the coward in front of their own small group, of “not wanting to let One’s mates down’” (Lazenby 1991: 107; Hanson 1989: 123-25).
But the esprit de corps of this unique regimental system of the Greeks (akin to the tactician Aelian’s “suitability of the occasion” and “morale of the men” quoted earlier) explains only the generic success of hoplite armies—why almost all Greek phalanxes of thepolis period charged together, rather than disintegrated in panic at the outset. The flight before the battle even begins (e.g., Thuc. 5.10.8; Xen. Hell. 4.3.17, 4.8.38, 7.1.31; Eur. Bacch. 303-4), although well known in Greek military history, is the exception, not the rule. What accounts for the superior morale of any one agrarian army at any one time? Under what conditions did one network of family and friends, one body of ancient Greek agrarian neighbors, push their similarly armed and identically arranged adversaries off the field of battle?
The answer, I think, is tied directly to the agricultural basis of the city-state, detected in the agrarian ideology of the combatants themselves. More precisely, the key to success of these citizen militias often depended on where the battle took place, whether hoplite-farmers came out of their walls on the defensive to protect their own cultivated ground at their feet, or battled as invaders on the flatlands of another. Even though most fighting began over borderlands, rarely did the actual killing occur there in the highland passes and plateaus. More often one army went down into the immediate interior of another polis, where the prerequisite level surfaces for phalanxes were found. Except for an occasional fight on neutral ground, on most hoplite battlefields at least one contingent of the army felt at home.
Athenians, Thebans, and others (even Spartan farm overlords) in most of the major engagements over a two-hundred-year period were vastly different—that is, inferior—soldiers once they left the borders of their territory, once they lost their “home field” advantage, as it were, and marched into the countryside of the enemy. Even in the fourth century, when Greek hoplite battle was often being replaced by more frequent raiding and skirmishing, and when the ranks of the phalanx proper were not always composed exclusively of farmers, the traditions of agrarian identification with the homeland still permeated the military forces of the entire polis. Logistically, strategically, psychologically, and spiritually the hoplite phalanx of the Greek city-state was not well suited for lengthy invasion or continual aggression.
The Thebans, until the Panhellenic defeat at Chaironeia against Philip and his Macedonians (338 B.C.), lost few of the numerous major hoplite battles that were fought within the confines of their native Boeotia. The horrendous struggle at second Coroneia (394B.C.),although an especially violent confrontation with the Spartans, a few miles from Thebes herself, was essentially a toss-up; neither phalanx achieved a clear-cut victory (Xen. Hell. 4.3.22-23; Plut. Ages. 18). Apparently, the Thebans were defeated in their own territory by the Athenians only at Oinophyta (457 B.C.), a little-known affair largely left unrecorded in our literary sources (Thuc. 1.108.2). Some citizens were also repelled earlier as traitors alongside the Persians at Plataea (479 B.C.).
Contrast these rare losses with their unrivaled record of successes against a series of Athenian invading armies at Tanagra (457 B.C.; Thuc. 1.108.1), first Coroneia (447 B.C.; Thuc. 1.113), and Delium (424 B.C.; Thuc. 4.96-97), and against the Spartans at Haliartos (395 B.C.; Xen. Hell. 3.5.22-4; Plut. Lys. 28-29), Tegyra (375 B.C.; Plut. Pel. 16.1, 17.3-4), and Leuctra (371 B.C.; Xen. Hell. 6.4.16-26). All these Boeotian victorious battles were fought within walking distance of Thebes.
The Spartans were never defeated in their native Laconia during the eighth through fifth centuries. Until Epameinondas’ invasion of 370 B.C. their countryside was thus epitomized as “unplundered” (e.g., Plut. Ages. 31.1-2). Although Spartan hoplites often had dramatic success abroad, it is notable that their only real defeats, at Hysiae (699 B.C.), Tegea (560 B.C.), Thermopylae (480 B.C.), Haliartos (395 B.C.), Lechaion (390 B.C.), Tegyra (375 B.C.), and Leuctra (371 B.C.), were all in battles fought away from the vale of Laconia.11
The Athenians, it is true, put their faith in their navy by the fifth century, and were quite successful both in purely naval actions and in a number of amphibious assaults and small-scale raids. But in major infantry conflicts of hoplite phalanxes, they too had little luck beyond their borders. Athenian defeats at Tanagra (457 B.C.), first Coroneia (447 B.C.), Delium (424 B.C.), Amphipolis (422 B.C.), Mantineia (418 B.C.), Assinarus River (413 B.C.; Thuc. 7.84-86), and Nemea River (394 B.C.) contrast markedly with a few surprising foreign victories.* Perhaps the Athenians, in their failure to march out against the Spartans during the five invasions of the Peloponnesian War (i.e., 431-425 B.C.) deliberately ignored the tradition of Marathon—the only major land battle of the polis-period fought on Attic soil. In that battle their hoplite infantrymen fought superbly and victoriously on their home ground against overwhelming odds.
There are occasional exceptions to this tendency for a decisive advantage to go to the defending phalanx of agrarians. Obviously the success of the invaded polis over the aggressors was not guaranteed in every fight, as is clear from the battles of Oinophyta and second Coroneia. Those were occasions where the Thebans were not able to defeat invading armies decisively.
Some Greek encounters were also fought on neutral ground belonging to a third polis (e.g., Amphipolis [422 B.C.]). In other, rarer instances it was simply difficult to determine which side had actually won. At second Coroneia (394 B.C.) and at second Mantineia (362B.C.), the invading Spartans (394 B.C.) and invading Thebans (362 B.C.) both gave a good account of themselves, but ultimately failed to rout the defending enemy decisively from the battlefield. After second Mantineia the historian Xenophon in the last lines of hisHellenica remarks of the battle’s inconclusiveness that “there was even more uncertainty and confusion in Greece after than before the battle “(Hell. 7.5.27). Both Spartans and Thebans not surprisingly erected victory trophies (Xen. Hell. 7.5.26).
It is instructive, in this regard, to examine both the battles of Leuctra (371 B.C.) and second Mantineia (362 B.C.). The combatants—Spartans and Boeotians—were identical. The tactics at both engagements were about the same. There is no evidence that preponderance of numbers affected either engagement. What is clear is that both aggressors failed to win the respective battles outright. The Spartan invaders failed at Leuctra, the Theban nine years later at Mantineia. Does this not suggest that both Thebans and Spartans were more effective hoplites when they fought on their own ground, in sight of their native polis (see Hanson 1988:204-7)?
Because in the fifth and fourth centuries many Greek hoplite armies were increasingly composed of a wide variety of allied contingents, and because the ranks were no longer exclusively composed of farmers, the entire notion of locale itself was often problematic. Battles such as those fought at Mantineia (418 B.C.; 362 B.C.) took place on ground that could be seen as both home and foreign turf to different groups of hoplites in the same army. In 418 B.C. the Mantineians allied themselves with the Athenians and the local Argives against their neighbors, the Tegeans, and the rest of the nearby Peloponnesian allies. The Athenians were thus relatively distant foreigners fighting alongside the native Mantineians to ward off Peloponnesian invaders—who themselves were near neighbors.
All the same, during the three-hundred-year history of hoplite warfare, in the great majority of significant and recorded land battles, there is an undeniable pattern that defending hoplite infantry usually repelled the invaders. This tendency reflects, I think, their stubborn Greek agrarianism in defense of their homes. Out of some twenty-one major pitched Greek battles, in at least sixteen there was a clear-cut decision involving hoplites battling to protect their home ground against an army of invaders. In the other five engagements, the outcome was ambiguous, the battle was on neutral ground, or the presence of several allies clouded the definition of native territory.
If one focuses on the decisive sixteen conflicts between attackers and defenders, in twelve of these battles the defensive hoplites were victorious, a seventy-five percent frequency.12 The reason for the success of defensive troops—in a world of infantry battle that typically saw no fortifications, dug-in installations, or augmentation by civilian troops and scouts—may be more than the intrinsic military advantages that accrue to the defense.
Hoplite battlefields were usually uniform courts of killing. Flat, treeless, and without hidden and unknown obstacles such as gullies and ravines (for an exception, see Thucydides’ remarks on the peculiar significance of watercourses and hills at Delium [Thuc. 4.96]), these were places where the defenders’ superior knowledge of terrain did not necessarily give them the advantage once the invaders had arrived in the small plains of the invaded. Polybius remarked that this rare ground was the only suitable stage for hoplite battles, adding that “it is almost impossible or, at any rate very rare, to find an area of countryside of say about two or three miles, or more, that contains no obstacles” (18.31.3-5).
Nor did a “home field” offer much advantage in logistics. Until the Peloponnesian War, few Greek armies planned lengthy expeditions. Once hoplites arrived in foreign territory they usually left within a few days. The army relied almost exclusively on the rations each man brought along, occasionally rifling an abandoned farmhouse or stealing any ripe grain left unharvested.
Finally, in the great age of hoplite warfare, local civilian guerrillas posed little threat. Almost all fights took place openly in the countryside. From the land outside the city proper slaves, the poor, women, children, and the aged either were evacuated to mountainous or foreign ground, or were housed behind the walls of the polis (Hanson 1983: 87-101). The image of house-to-house fighting where civilian noncombatants throw roof tiles and box in the bewildered enemy stragglers on twisting streets belongs to the Peloponnesian War and after (e.g., Plut. Mor. 228E). Even then such urban guerrilla fighting was always the exception—as the rare, nightmarish struggles inside Plataea (429 B.C.), Olympia (364 B.C.), and Argos (272 B.C.) attest (Thuc. 2.4; Xen. Hell. 7.4.28-33; Plut. Pyr. 34.1-3).
The superiority of Greek infantrymen fighting on home ground is explicable primarily as a spiritual advantage. Most farmers today cannot leave their farms even for a much-needed few days of vacation. Anytime my grandfather, who was born, lived, and died on the same farm, left his acreage, he was nearly overcome with unhappiness and worry The brightest moments of his rare one- to three-day excursions were the last miles home. Only then was he sure he had made it back. Only then did he miraculously snap out of his despair.
All farmers struggle with that agrarian anchor. They call home after a few miles on the road, afraid things have irrevocably changed in the minutes since their departure, convinced that (often spectacular) sights elsewhere are never as moving as those on the (often dreary) home place. So a chorus of Theban natives sings of their nondescript but native plains: “If you give up to the enemy this deep soil of ours, what land on earth would you ever find better?” (Aesch. Sept. 303-5).
No wonder the tactics, strategy, and even the technology of hoplite warfare of the polis were inherently protective (cf. Plut. Pel. 1.5). Large shields, heavy breastplates and helmets, and spears of moderate size reflected these values—precisely the opposite mentality of pike-wielding, lightly protected, and aggressive Macedonian phalangites, rootless men often with no farm of their own, who predictably added ten feet to the hoplite’s spear but reduced the shield’s area by two-thirds.
Polis warfare was an integral system never designed for absolute conquest, perhaps not even intended for serious invasion. Troops, apparently small farmers all before the mid-fifth century, were superb infantrymen when they fought for their families and on their home ground. They were less reliable when they saw themselves far from their polis as invaders—that is, as crop destroyers, farm-trodders, agrarian killers of their social counterparts. Xenophon feels it necessary to remind his reading audience (who apparently would feel otherwise) that in wartime farmers should not merely be defensive, but instead should go on the offensive against someone else’s farm (Oec. 5.13). Again, it was left to Macedon to transform the phalanx—introducing light armor, long pikes, diminution of baggage carriers, integration of crack heavy cavalry and light-armed troops—from a defensive to an offensive force. That was only possible, I believe, because those troops—barons, serfs, laborers, mercenaries, and thugs—were not middling agrarians from autonomous poleis.
Hoplite-farmers, as the spread of their standardized equipment and protocols throughout the Greek poleis attest, shared a vague “agrarian consciousness,” a common enough notion of agricultural chauvinism. In wartime, the native ground could even be personified as one with its hoplites: “the soil,” Aeschylus writes, “grieves for the men it loved” (stenei pedon philandron) (Aesch. Sept. 901-2). In his Persians, he makes the ghost of King Darius says of the Greeks that “the land itself fights on their behalf” (aute gar hê gê xumachos keinois pelei)” (Pers. 792; cf. 796-97).
This rural identification with native farmland made most men hardly sympathetic to the notion of neglecting their own crops (e.g., Thuc. 3.15.2; cf. 1.141.3,5: 1.142.7), in order to march out and destroy the property and lives of those who labored much like themselves. The tendency arose in the first two and a half centuries of the polis for short campaigns and the absence of any lasting damage to the agricultural infrastructure of their adversaries (Hanson 1983: 145-51).
Even as late as the fifth-century battle at Delium (424 B.C.), the Theban general Pagondas only with difficulty prompted his Boeotian confederate army to march a few thousand yards beyond their border into Attica, He believed that it was necessary to punish a retreating Athenian army of invasion, which had just days earlier affronted the sovereignty of Boeotia by occupying her temple to Apollo at Delium. Even though the ensuing battle was clearly to be defensive, fought to keep aggressive armies out of his native Boeotia, Pagondas was still faced with a dilemma: the retreating Athenian invaders were now no longer invaders, but technically right on or across the poorly demarcated and undulating Boeotian-Attic frontier. To protect their own land, the Boeotians might have to go a very short distance beyond the limits of their native ground to provoke a fight.
This possibility clearly bothered both Pagondas and his men. Boeotian discomfort is good evidence that Greek hoplite troops had much greater spiritual confidence when they were fighting inside their own frontier. Thucydides makes Pagondas address the problem head-on in a pre-battle harangue to his hoplites: “Boeotians, the idea that we should not fight the Athenians, unless we square off within Boeotia itself, is a concept that should never have been entertained by us generals. It was to hurt Boeotia that the Athenians crossed the frontier and constructed fortifications in our own country” (Thuc. 4.92.1).
His Athenian counterpart, the general Hippocrates, was similarly aware of the traditional association between hoplite phalanxes and agrarian conservatism. He worried about the morale of his own invading army, even though it was probably no longer composed exclusively of farmers. Knowing that his Athenian hoplites had first ventured into Boeotia to harm enemy territory (and were therefore the aggressors of this particular campaign), he was also aware that his army had now made its way safely near or back over the ill-defined border. The trick was somehow to explain to his Athenian phalanx that a prior offensive intent was now transformed into “defense”: “You must not think that we are going out of our way to run a risk in the country of another. The battie will take place in their territory, but in fact it will be for our own” (Thuc. 4.95.2). Perhaps the invading Athenians in the ranks who had just stepped over the border into Boeotia did not believe Hippocrates’ sophistry that they were in Attica fighting for their homes. In any case, within a few minutes they were defeated decisively inside Boeotia.
Whether the two opposing generals—given the problems of acoustics—actually gave these speeches in 424 B.C. is also not clear. But two ideas do emerge from Thucydides’ narrative: (1) the historian at least believed that location was crucial to the morale of the respective armies; and (2) whatever the actual relationship of the battlefield to the official border between the two Greek poleis, the nature of the campaign made it clear that both sides—victorious Boeotians and defeated Athenians—knew the Athenians were in truth the invaders. Elsewhere, Athenian hoplites on most other extended campaigns outside Attica, in Aetolia (426 B.C.), at Amphipolis (422 B.C.), and over the two years in Sicily (415-412 B.C.), were lackluster (e.g., Thuc. 3.94-98, 5.6-11, 7.11-88). If there were any bright spots among Athens’ expeditionary forces, they usually involved mercenaries and light-armed troops, typically during the fourth century when the two were synonymous.
As in so many other spheres, the later years of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) saw a revolutionary departure from past infantry practice. The introduction of sieges, mercenaries, night attacks, ambushes, and hit-and-run raids involved a host of different combatants, men of every class and status who had no common agreement of what war should be. But even after the Peloponnesian War (which we will see was the great turning point in the history of Greek warfare), traditional hoplite battles were not forgotten. Although no longer the absolute rule in Greek warfare, landed infantry and the collision of ground troops of the old school continued to provide a decisive outcome in many campaigns. We still hear of many brutal stand-up encounters in the fourth century. To the extent that the reactionary belligerents chose to send phalanxes of small farmers into battle, anachronistically or not, the old thinking still applied. Most hoplite collisions, as two centuries before, usually continued to turn out favorably for the invaded, less so for the aggressor.
As Aristotle puts it of war between the Greek city-states: “It is fitting to engage in military pursuits (tôn polemikôn askêsis) not in order to enslave those who are not deserving of slavery, but first of all so that men themselves might not be enslaved by others”(Pol.7.1333b39-41). Plutarch says about the same thing. In Greek battle “not to suffer harm” rather than “inflicting injury” was the first concern of the soldier, of the general, and of the officials of the polis itself (Pel. 1.5). Ancient authors attest that the phalanx was a terrifying formation, but it was a body of men whose chief interest was to protect and defend, not to attack and slaughter.
Agriculture emerges as the underlying basis, the entire foundation of Greek warfare during the life of the polis. Hoplite armies, after all, were more than militarily efficacious. They arose in the late eighth and seventh centuries in order to ensure the existence of the small plots of a growing class of agrarians, to cement the ideology of the early polis itself. Excluding both the rich and the poor, phalanxes of farmers created a system in which their own mutual interests might transcend polis boundaries. When natural disputes arose over poorly defined borderlands, farmers agreed to decide the matter themselves—but usually in a manner that would ensure to all parties a battle both brief and decisive. In this way, the protocols of early hoplite conflict never endangered agrarian primacy in the respective Greek city-states, but rather enhanced it.
For much of the early polis period a hoplite farmer of Attica had nearly as much in common with his Boeotian counterpart across the border as he did with either the Athenian aristocrat or the landless laborer. That sense of agrarian solidarity forms the dramatic context of Aristophanes’ play the Acharnians, a comedy produced during the Peloponnesian War (425 B.C.), in which an Attic farmer makes private peace treaties with fellow agrarians of other city-states in open opposition to official Athenian policy. It is argued in the play that the farmers of Attica have greater affinity with “foreign” rustics than they do with their “kindred” inside the walls of Athens (Ar. Ach. 859-957).
Only with agrarianism in mind can we explain why both the wealthy and the poor were insignificant in battle, why farmland was often attacked yet rarely damaged, why plains, not passes were the loci of killing, why heavy armor was worn in the scorching heat of the Mediterranean sun, why shields were big but spears relatively short, why battle was brutal yet rarely catastrophic in terms of casualties, lost time, and monetary expenditure. Although invasion of the flatland of an enemy was usually needed to settle ownership of contested borderland—itself often inferior ground—most paradoxically of all, even here a natural check on belligerency was present. Most armies of small farmers usually proved less enthusiastic, and less capable fighters once they left their own familiar ground and assumed a role at odds with the entire defensive and protective ideology of agrarianism.
Hoplite armies—by challenges to local sovereignty, through the instigation of gifted and ambitious political leaders, in anger at religious affront, from desire for additional land, in answer to aggrieved allies—could often go way beyond the border. But in doing so farmers inevitably lost the moral high ground—and this was recognized in diminished spirit on the battlefield.
*“In this stage there was as yet no crystalized formation or form of tactics; indeed, there was no standardized panoply, either of armour or of offensive weapons” (Snodgrass 1965: 113). For a rejection of social and political change connected with a dramatic hoplite reform, see Snodgrass 1965: 110-116; Snodgrass 1991:18-20; and cf Snodgrass 1980: 103-4; Greenhalgh 7 1-74; 15 1-55.
*Social and economic changes brought on by changes in tactics: Cartledge 1977: 20; Lorimer 76-138; Detienne 1968: 140; Nilsson 240-41, 248.
*See Latacz 46-49; Pritchett War 4.30; Delbrück 1975; but cf. van Wees 1986: 286. On difficulties in realistic artistic portrayal of phalanxes, see Cartledge 1977: 21; Pritchett War 4.41; Salmon 1977: 91; cf. d’Agostino 68-70; Ahlberg 49-51.
*See Hanson 1991: 74-77. For the use of the panoply with massed attack, see Plut. Phil. 9; Flamin. 8; Paus. 8.50; Xen. Mem. 3.9.2; Diod. 23.2.1; cf Arist. Pol. 4.1297b20-25; Eur. Herac. Fur. 185ff.
*See Snodgrass 1980: 105-6. The diversion of bronze toward weaponry marked “a technical development of new arms and armour which could not be arrested or ignored” (Holladay 1982: 99).
*See Markle 15859; de Ste. croix 1981: 292; A. J. Holladay 1982: 103. Of fifth-century Athens, Anthony Andrewes observes: “The noticeable social gulf here was rather between the middle class and the really rich, roughly the division between hoplites and the cavalry” (1971: 232)—a sentiment anticipated by Aristotle in his Politics (4.1289b3540), who remarked that “it is not an easy thing to raise horses unless one is rich”
*When Plato complains in his Republic about the lack of military training among the armies of the Greek city-states, he first of all centers his criticism on the traditional amateur status of yeomanry: “Is it so easy” he sarcastically asks, “that one who is working the soil can at the same time also be a soldier?” (P1. Resp. 2.374C).
*For shield breakage, see Hanson 1989: 65-88; and for broken spears, cf. the numerous examples on the C-painter (e.g., Hackett 75). On the absence of ax and halbert in the phalanx, see Anderson 1991: 25.
*The protection of the plains,” writes Robin Osborne, “demanded the protection of the borders; training the citizen soldier involved stressing the importance of the marginal land at the edge. Because borders figured so prominently in the life of the citizen, disputes about borderlands were not simply disputes about the defense of the territory, but about the defense of the whole citizen body” (1987: cf 149; 1992b: 380).
*See Pritchett War 1.109-115; 3.47-153; for actual instances, see Jameson 1991: 219-21. Plato claimed by law the soothsayer was subordinate to the general, which reflects the normal influence the seer had on the troops (Pl. Lach. 199A.)
*Plut. Ages. 30.2-4; Mor. 193E18; Lac. Pol. 9.4-5; Ameipsas fr. 17 Kock; Hdt. 7.231; Hanson 1989: 64. In Attic comedy and occasionally in oratory flight in battle is a stock charge, not much different from allegations of passive homosexuality.
*The disastrous retreat lived on as an especially nightmarish event in the collective memory of the Athenians; cf. Thuc. 4.96; Diod. 12. 70.4-6; cf. Pl. Ap. 28E; Lach. 181A; Symp. 221A; Plut. Alc. 7.6; Mor. 581.
*E.g., Hes. Op. 303-19; 342-44; 397-401; 410-14; 495-500; 707-14; 722-24; 822-28. “Ultimately,” the British expert of Spartan military practice John Lazenby has remarked, “the single most important factor in a hoplite battle was undoubtedly what Napoleon thought, many centuries later, counted for three-quarters in war: morale. “Lazenby 1991: 104; cf. Lazenby 1993: 258-61; cf. Hanson 1989: 117-25; 219-26.
*Such as Oinophyta (457 B.C.), Sphacteria (426 B.C; Thuc. 4.6-15), perhaps not properly a hoplite battle, and first Sicily (415 B.C.; Thuc. 6.70).