Chapter 7
—Thucydides 1.15
There was no war by land, not at least by which any hegemony was acquired; there were many border contests, but of foreign expeditions designed for conquest there were none among the Hellenes. Indeed, there were no subject city-states under the control of the great city-states; thus these Greek states did not unite as equals for allied expeditions; instead, what fighting there was at this time consisted merely of local fighting between rival neighbors.
—Polybius 13.3.4
The Greeks of the past did not even choose to defeat their adversaries through deceit, thinking instead that there was nothing glorious or even secure in military successes unless one side killed the enemy drawn up in open battle. Therefore, there was an agreement not to employ unseen weapons or missiles against one another, but they decided that only hand-to-hand fighting in massed column was the true arbiter of events. For that very reason, they made public announcements to each other about wars and battles in advance, when they would decide to enter them, and even concerning the places where they were to meet and draw up their lines.
We have examined the codified and predictable nature of Greek agrarian warfare in the polis period, how it enhanced independent farmers and made agricultural territory critical to the outcome of hoplite battle. But during the fifth and especially in the fourth century, the traditional agrarian rules of hoplite warfare were gradually bypassed (see Chapter 8, “Hoplites as Dinosaurs”). The phalanx itself no longer always played the decisive role between warring Greek city-states.
During the fourth-century and subsequent transformation in the conditions of the Greek city-states, many Greek authors belatedly recognized the value of the hoplitic regulations of centuries past. They often pointed out nostalgically that for more than two centuries the early poleis, in accordance with some unwritten “laws of the Greeks,” had been able to restrict most conflicts to a single, though frightful, collision of hoplite heavy infantry.1 These later writers, at least, thought the warfare of an earlier time (the seventh through fifth centuries) had been extremely economical. They (correctly) felt it had been responsible for the general stability of the early Greek polis.
The actual costs of Greek warfare have usually been discussed by scholars only for the fifth and fourth centuries, and largely in association with Athens: either the complex financial arrangements that supported her navy and expeditionary hoplite forces during the Peloponnesian War, or the squabbling over the necessarily reduced funds allotted to her defense during the fourth century.2 Rarely is Panhellenic military outlay reckoned for the period of the early Greek polis (700-480 B.C.). For that era there is little record of credits and debits on the balance sheets of polis treasuries. Nor was there a need for property and produce taxes so crucial for later military expenditure (e.g., Thomsen 136-41). Instead the agrarian monopoly of the Greek city-state was at full force both in war and at peace. It discouraged any type of mobilization that required burdensome levies on its farmers—who, after all, themselves composed the councils of their respective governments.
The acquisitive, positive, income-producing aspects of early Greek warfare—the much-discussed raiding and plundering of cattle, people, slaves, and agricultural produce—have received far more attention than the negative considerations, the collective expense in money, time, and lives incurred by Greek society during wartime from the first appearance of the hoplite until the invasion of Xerxes (700-480 B.C.).3 The scholarly emphasis on plundering, raiding, and piracy has, I think, led to a mistaken impression that Greek warfare between state armies was somehow exclusively an income-producing enterprise (e.g., “in some sense war will be by nature an acquisitive art” [Arist. Pol. 1.1256b23-24) rather than (at best) an income-redistributing—and far more often an income-destroying—phenomenon. Careful examination of military expenditures of the early city-state reveals that the small farmers who arose at the end of the eighth century crafted a warfare whose innate frugality explains in part the growth of the new agrarianism and thus the continued existence of the Greek city-state itself.
Literary, epigraphical, and archaeological evidence concerning Greek warfare before the Persian invasions (490-480/479 B.C.), as we have observed, is unfortunately meager. This explains the silence of modern scholars concerning military expenditures at the beginning of the polis period. A word of caution about the ancient evidence for this chapter is needed: there is, I repeat, no detailed prose account of any hoplite battle in Greece until Marathon (490 B.C.), at the end of the era under review. From references in later literature, lyric and elegiac poetry, vase painting, and archaeological excavation, we can nevertheless infer the earlier shadowy engagements must have been largely similar to their fifth-century successors. For questions of armament, generalship, casualties, and hoplite fighting itself, some literary evidence is legitimately drawn from the later times of the fifth and fourth centuries.
Remember that Herodotus makes the Persian Mardonius (dramatic date 480 B.C.) relate his own familiarity with the peculiarities of hoplite warfare (apparently gained from his entry into northern Greece in 492 B.C.; cf. Hdt. 7.9). Mardonius’s knowledge of Hellenic warfare must imply that the historian and his (later fifth-century Greek) audience were assuming a long tradition of hoplite fighting before the Persian wars. The property classification at Athens for infantry service, and the laws regarding the abandonment of rank in the so-called Solonian legislation, derive from the early sixth century. These statutes imply an early tradition of battle between columns of heavy infantry dating well back to the seventh and sixth centuries (e.g., Plut. Sol. 18.2; Arist. Ath. Pol. 7.3).
In addition, Sparta—as elsewhere in the general study of the social and economic history of the city-states—poses special problems and deserves careful discussion. Yet Spartan hoplites, once they reached the battlefield, curiously were armed and fought (i.e., hoplite panoply, phalanx) almost exactly like other Greeks. Depending on the specific context and level of investigation, her soldiers were at once both unrepresentative of Greek military practice and characteristic of general hoplite infantry fighting.4
Most early city-states of the Greek mainland possessed only a few military ships of any sort. Given the agrarian character of the polis, and the general distrust of farmers for the sea, the majority of Greek farming communities was suspicious of extensive organized navies in the seventh and sixth centuries. We can therefore dismiss the notion that extensive commerce and overseas involvement, not the agrarianism indigenous to Greece herself, sparked the so-called Hellenic renaissance of the eighth century.5
Since fighting on the water was relatively unorganized and naval expenditure was sporadic in most early poleis, capital expenditure allotted to armaments was primarily limited to land warfare. With the relative absence of chariotry, missile troops, large organized cavalry contingents, artillery (e.g., Plut. Mor. 191E), and siege engines, the technological costs of land fighting between 700 and 480 B.C. for most Greeks were essentially focused on the early hoplite panoply. The costly purchase and labor-intensive fabrication of enormous timber and bronze siege-engines and fleets were almost entirely absent in Greece before the Persian Wars (Meiggs 116-37; 154-59).
Classical scholarship has usually believed Greek armor to have been exorbitantly expensive. It has described, I believe wrongly, hoplite fighting as “elitist.” In this view, only the well-to-do of the polis could afford heavy armor. The wealthy forged hoplite battle to exclude and to oppress the landless poor, who were given no say in the defense of their communities. But the initial outlay of bronze was not enormously costly. Individual purchase of arms actually proved an economical investment for the entire untaxed agrarian community: the hoplite panoply allowed a brand of warfare that was unusually cheap in nearly all its manifestations, beginning with the weapons themselves.
In almost all cases the cost of infantry arms was met entirely by the individual farmer himself. Only much later in the fifth and fourth centuries, and perhaps in the case of Sparta (e.g., Cartledge 1977: 27), do state subsidies appear for public ownership of arms and armor—usually under very unusual conditions, such as repair of weapons while on the march, gifts to orphaned offspring, or training arms for young Athenian recruits. Mass state-sponsored and tax-supported fabrication of weapons quite clearly belongs to the late fifth and fourth centuries and later, when Greek city-states and wealthy men devoted huge sums to equip foreign and mercenary soldiers. Public intrusion into the supply of weapons marked the end of traditional Greek agrarianism.6
The small landowners of Greece alone, no doubt for the first time in the West, shouldered the collective expense of military technology. In the first two centuries of the polis period the state essentially contributed nothing toward the production of military equipment for its defense. These self-armed infantrymen were not, as in the Dark-Age past, a few wealthy cavalrymen who fielded their own horses, but hundreds of soldiers who comprised the complete defense of the community. Remember, whatever the outlay of thegeôrgoi for their hoplite armament before the Persian Wars, that expenditure has to be weighed against the virtual absence of state taxes for public armories, ships, and dockyards. Farmers bought their own arms, but no defense budget siphoned off the produce of their farms.
The actual cost of the hoplite panoply before the Persian Wars is a controversial subject. It goes to the heart of the much-debated sociology of the early Greek polis. Much of the evidence for the value of bronze, iron, and wood used in arms is found only in late fifth- or fourth-century inscriptions (e.g., Pritchett 1956: 178, 306-8; Pouilloux 371-79, lines 11-21). Rarely, the cost of arms is mentioned in Attic comedy where the intent (e.g., Ar. Pax 210-64), as in the case of references to farming implements (Pax 1203-5), is probably to exaggerate the price.
In the earliest surviving Athenian decree of the late sixth century, Athenian settlers on the nearby island of Salamis are to provide their own arms up to the value of thirty drachmas (restored reading see Meiggs and Lewis 14; IG I3 1. 8-10)—an amount that would have been rendered largely irrelevant if the actual costs of procurement had greatly exceeded that figure. Conjectures of seventy-five to one hundred drachmas for the panoply of the fifth century and later seem reasonably correct.7 They weaken the traditional emphasis on the steep expense of hoplite weaponry. Most farmers would invest an equal or greater amount in a slave attendant or an ox. The wage of a day laborer in the fifth century was at most around one drachma a day, suggesting that infantry armament then was worth about three months “salary” of the poorest.8
Ownership of the hoplite panoply became simply a device, like similar restrictions on the voting franchise, used by the agrarian community to limit participation in the phalanx to those who were middling farmers. Originally at Athens those were the zeugitai of the early sixth century with an annual income of two to three hundred liquid or dry measures of produce. Perhaps (although there is scarcely any evidence) later in the polis agricultural harvests were converted to net cash holdings of 2,000 drachmas.* Hoplite arms in themselves were only general, not precise, reflections of economic status.
Some residents of the Greek polis who were landless, or who possessed plots too small to grow enough produce to qualify for heavy-infantry service might, nevertheless, theoretically have had the resources to acquire hoplite arms. But barring national emergencies, under the strict agrarian protocols of the early city-state, they would have been discouraged (but probably later not prevented) from fighting in the phalanx proper. Instead they were relegated to the light-armed band of skirmishers, or, in the case of some later maritime poleis, served as rowers on triremes.
It is wrong to suggest that the high cost of infantry armament always sharply limited participation in Greek hoplite warfare. Hoplite-farmers themselves set arbitrary limits on military service tied to their importance as food producers of the polis. During the heyday of the phalanx (i.e., the first two centuries of the polis period), the geôrgoi wanted non-property owners to be excluded from infantry service, Greeks who might have otherwise been able to acquire the necessary accoutrements. It seems unlikely, therefore, that farmers themselves were exhausted financially by the purchase of the required hoplite bronze, iron, and wood. Ownership of arms was denied to the poor, not the middling Greek.
That the hoplite panoply was not unduly expensive when measured against the landed wealth of the hoplite class may be borne out also by the traditional frequency of arms abandonment on the field of battle.* There are also references to thousands of helmets, shields, breastplates, greaves, spears, and swords stockpiled at the Panhellenic sanctuaries. We also hear of the apparent ownership of duplicate sets of arms, while there is occasional later mention of entire armies of non-hoplites outfitted in mass.9 Hoplite arms and armor were always plentiful and accessible in the Greek polis.
Even the original cost of arms and armor—tied to the price of bronze and the fabrication—is not the sole indication of the expense of military weaponry. Far more subtle considerations concerning the use and durability of this equipment need to be taken into account. The following criteria reinforce the idea that the early hoplite-farmer’s outlay was extremely economical.
Hoplite weapons and armor were uniform in design. Despite occasional regional modifications (e.g., the “Boeotian” or “Attic” helmets of the fifth and fourth centuries), most offensive weapons and body armor were nearly identical in shape, size, and function throughout Greece (see Snodgrass 1967: 50-71). This military sameness is, I think, clear evidence of a common agrarian culture. Argives, Corinthians, Spartans, Athenians, Thebans, and the farmers of other city-states used essentially the same equipment in the early polis period. Whatever the protestations in poetry that the enemy’s property “is no good,” whatever the Spartans’ supposed lack of interest in the equipment of “losers,” whatever the philosophical admonitions against stripping other fallen Greeks, every infantryman’s weaponry, friend’s or foe’s, was for the most part seen as identical to one’s own—and therefore quite valuable. That technological uniformity in form and function had important economic ramifications.
Hoplite armament was interchangeable. The equipment of the defeated army could be reemployed—or sold—by the victors, thus reducing financial losses in wars when we consider the network of Greek city-states as a whole. The uniformity of design also ensured a ready market for used arms at nearly any location. At least some percentage of captured arms was always recycled, either through outright adoption by the victorious side, or by sale to hoplites on the open market.10
There was never a weapons race among rival agrarian city-states, each side seeking to discover some ingenious technological—and inevitably transitory—advantage over its adversaries. Although individual modifications and alterations of the standard panoply reflected personal tastes and accumulated combat experience—different crests, emblems, helmets, absence of greaves, incorporation of precious metals and bright colors and the like (e.g., Hanson 1989: 58-59; Pritchett War 3.259-61)—the early Greeks apparently “agreed” to codify weaponry beyond national boundaries. This understanding froze weapons development. It eliminated costly periodic redesign and retooling, and it allowed armorers to concentrate their efforts solely on efficiency in production. Workshops quickly mastered basic patterns and purchased wood, resins, leather, iron, and bronze in bulk.
Often there were real worries expressed that one city-state’s arms fabricators might supply the infantry of another, something only possible if their respective armies were outfitted in similar fashion and if soldiers bought their arms on the open market.11 Under the rules of traditional Greek agrarian warfare, there was little need for craftsmen and designers to incorporate new materials or technologies, to seek new arms markets, or even to worry about competition and profit. To paraphrase Henry Ford, hoplite-farmers everywhere might have any shield they wished, as long as it was big, concave and round. Any other type of weaponry would change the nature of the agrarian phalanx and thus disrupt the formal collision of Greek heavy infantry in column.
The panoply was static in design for nearly two centuries. In the early polis period (700-500 B.C.), although gradual modifications in helmets and body armor did occur (e.g., elimination of thigh and shoulder guards), there was essentially no obsolescence in arms—the traditional inflationary bane of modern military procurement. A hoplite shield used at Olynthus in 348 B.C. would have looked roughly the same as that used by Archilochus three centuries earlier (Snodgrass 1964: 65 n. 110). The hoplite panoply could be produced in roughly the same manner generation after generation. Only around the time of the Persian Wars (490, 480/479 B.C.) did the bronze breastplate and helmet become superseded by lighter and less cumbersome models.
There is no reason to doubt that when the infantry veteran had died or (more rarely) reached the “retirement” age of sixty-two, the panoply was handed down, father to son (e.g., Plut, Mor. 241F17). Perhaps in certain instances a son might have problems fitting into his ancestral breastplate, helmet, and greaves (Snodgrass 1967: 91-93). In addition, the length of the spear and the diameter of the shield apparently depended on the hoplite’s height and arm length. But Greece was largely a homogeneous society and diets were constant generation to generation. Unlike modern American culture, where both the occasional differing races of parents and excellent nutrition, together with medical improvements, can result in offspring of quite different size from their parents, there is reason to believe that many young Greek hoplites could fit into their father’s arms, just as medieval knights did later on. Small adjustments in helmet lining, the shield strap, and spear length surely were not difficult to make. Hoplites wore a tunic beneath their breastplates, and its thickness might be adjusted to correct small intolerances. Imagine some innate flexibility designed into the panoply despite its metallic construction: over the potential forty-year tenure of some hoplites, many would need to adjust their armor to their changing girth. How many veterans of sixty today can fit into the uniforms of their twenties? In actuality a hoplite’s son, not the father himself in his forties, fifties, and sixties, might better match the soldier’s own lost youthful physique.
As I pointed out earlier, the acquisition of hoplite arms per se was not an automatic guarantee of qualification for service in the phalanx of the polis. Infantry service depended on the possession of enough income from agricultural property. If in the early Greekpolisa farmer met the census rubric, he purchased the hoplite panoply. If he could not meet the qualification, he was not allowed to buy or otherwise obtain heavy arms (which were not necessarily beyond his economic reach). There would be no suggestion that a son was trying to bypass the eligibility requirement for phalanx service by taking over the ancestral arms of his father. If a young man’s own worth met the eligibility standards set by the polis, he could simply save the purchase costs for new equipment. Wherever practicable, hoplite arms were inheritable. Obviously, not all hoplites wore their father’s equipment, especially when father and son might serve side by side for years.
In an economic sense, the uniformity of battle weaponry reduced the Greeks’ overall military expenditures: any one set of arms could outlast its original purchaser. Whether inherited by kin or taken by the enemy, the used hoplite panoply could enjoy continued utility and save its new owner cash outlay. Weapons—like farm tools—were passed on from one farmer to another, generation to generation.
Hoplite equipment was extremely durable because of both its metallic construction and the peculiarity of its usage. Bronze greaves, corselets, and helmets could all absorb repeated blows. They could be patched or reworked when damaged. Without moving parts, Greek armament had a “shelf life” of literally centuries. A dramatic example of the panoply’s durability occurred in 379 B.C. when some Theban patriots overthrew the Spartan garrison, occupying their citadel by arming themselves with the old votive arms hanging up in the sanctuary stoas (Plut. Pel. 12; Xen. Hell 5.4.8). For these brave fighters, the random size and the advanced age of the weapons were apparently no obstacles at all.
When there is mention in Greek literature of ruined weapons, it is usually the spear and shield—the two components of the hoplite ensemble made mostly of wood.12 Although both shield and spear were prone to damage and frequently appear splintered on vase paintings, they were also relatively cheap to replace, requiring little, if any, new metalworking (e.g., Hanson 1989: 65-88; Blyth 5-21). Often weapon repair consisted simply of the fabrication of new wood shield cores and spear shafts, and the reuse of the appropriate bronze and iron fittings.
Finally, the nature of hoplite battle can also explain in part the long life of the panoply. Most of the infantrymen were stationed in the middle and rear ranks. These fighters might not necessarily even meet the enemy. Their task was to push on their comrades’ backs, creating forward pressure while preventing retreat.13 Extensive equipment damage, then, was often confined to the first three ranks of the phalanx. They were the men whose spears alone could initially reach the enemy and whose defensive armament was in turn targeted in the initial crash. Modern simulations and calculation of the effectiveness of ancient battle gear suggest that rarely could the spear—or even arrows—do much serious damage to the Greek hoplite shield or breastplate (Gabriel and Metz 58-71). The breastplate’s and helmet’s quarter- to half-inch bronze protective cover virtually ensured that all weapons were turned aside from the flesh. The rarer occasions when body armor and helmet were penetrated probably occurred when the hoplite stumbled, his stationary, prostrate body then targeted by repeated two-handed jabs of butt spike, spear tip, or sword.
There was rarely in hoplite battle a mandatory expenditure of offensive weaponry. With the slinger, bowman, and javelin thrower largely removed from the field of infantry battle, hoplites might incur absolutely no damage to or loss of their offensive equipment—in line with the pragmatic, parsimonious image of agrarian rustics. Unlike the inherent waste of missile warfare, Greek infantry substituted “recyclable” muscular strength to power the spear or sword. Both seldom left their wearers’ hands. Because weaponry was purchased privately, there was inherent self-interest in its upkeep and preservation.
In the early polis period (700-480 B.C.) none of the agrarian combatants received any state pay or even subsistence support, in either cash or provisions (e.g., Arist. Ath. Pol. 27.2, 24; cf. Pritchett War 1.27, 3.29; Michell 361)—a stance wholeheartedly approved by the reactionary Plato in his Laws (cf. Morrow 191-92). In other words, as in the case of hoplite equipment, the Greek city-state contributed essentially no monetary outlay to the cost of warfare. Nor was the farmer obligated to supply his own hoplite arms—relatively inexpensive as they were—as an indirect form of taxation. Rather individual weapons outlay was a necessary means to ensure that there was no real financial obligation imposed from above in the form of property taxes, forced military conscription, or land confiscation. Private panoplies were far more economical, efficient, and practical than tax-supported armories.
In fact, any money paid for hoplite military service before the Persian Wars was confined solely to foreign mercenary service. We hear of a few early adventurous hoplites in pay of distant lords in Asia and Egypt (e.g., Parke 3-14). In the case of Athens—and there is no reason to believe she was atypical—formal wages for hoplite service were probably not introduced until the mid-fifth century (Arist. Ath. Pol. 27.2; cf. Pritchett War 1.3, 7, 11; cf. Jameson 1980: 220-21).
Hoplite amateurism was entirely in line with the agrarian distrust of standing armies and the expense they incurred. Pericles reminded his democratic and imperialistic Athenian audience at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (dramatic date 431 B.C.) that their enemies to the south had no stomach for the costs of war. People like the agrarian Peloponnesian allies of Sparta, who were personally engaged in direct cultivation of the soil, he felt, simply did not have the necessary public capital for fighting. Pericles concludes that “independent farmers (autourgoi) are a type of men who are always more eager to serve in person rather than to pay cash” (Thuc. 1.143.2-3), suggesting that even as late as 431 B.C. formal infantry salaries were a bothersome (and relatively recent?) phenomenon in most Greek city-states.
The fifth- and fourth-century rise of polis fleets represented a dramatic shift from private to public expenditure on arms, from moderate to enormous outlay for defense forces. Nowhere was this redirection in emphasis more notable than at Athens after the Persian Wars: “Hoplite forces were recruited from the more well-to-do citizens who could meet armed at their own expense. On the other hand, the naval defense, which certainly could not be ignored in view of Athens’ geographic position, entailed considerable expenses” (Thomsen 136).
As Pericles tried to make clear when he pointed out the drawbacks of yeoman militias among the city-states of the Peloponnese, someone does pay for military service: if not the polis itself in cash, then the individual hoplite in time lost from farm work. But in the two centuries that saw the rise of hoplite warfare (700—480 B.C.) and the emergence of Greek agrarianism, the time devoted by farmers to campaigning was short, and therefore the collective burden on the “economy” of the city-states minimal.
Hoplite battles were themselves singular and brief. They were also not frequent before the fifth century. Little travel or auxiliary campaigning was required. In peacetime there was rarely weapons practice, drill, or other military training—scant time needed, then, save for actual battle. W. K. Pritchett, for example, has collected the evidence for the length of actual hoplite encounters. In all cases they transpired in an afternoon, in an hour or two at most. Rarely, if ever, were initial conflicts followed by second engagements(War 2.46-51; Hanson 1991: 78-79), a practice that makes perfect sense when we envision hoplites burdened with seventy pounds of equipment under the Mediterranean summer sun.
Much has been written about the frequency of one-day “wars” among the Greek city-states. The idea is widespread that the Athenians were at war two out of every three years in the fifth century (Chamoux 162; de Romilly 1968: 20; Zimmern 354). Yet if we review Greek history before the Persian Wars, there is good reason to believe that major wars between poleis in this murky period were infrequent. In contrast, the later period between 480 and 338 B.C. is an era of near-constant fighting in a variety of theaters. Between 650 and 480 B.C. at Athens there appears nothing like the subsequent lengthy Persian Wars, the Egyptian campaign, various invasions into Boeotia, the Argolid, and the islands, and the “First” and “Second” Peloponnesian Wars.
The Athenians’ incessant bellicosity alone accounted for nearly fifty years of continuous hostility in the fifth century (though much of it—predictably, given its frequency—was on sea or between light-armed troops). Athenian deviance from agrarian military protocol was constantly resented by her reluctant allies, who, like the similar Peloponnesian satellites of Sparta, had no belly for constant campaigning and time away from their plots (Plut. Cim. 11.1-2; Nic. 9; Thuc. 3.15.1, 3.16.1-2). In contrast, throughout early Greece as a whole, outside of the shadowy Lelantine War (post 700 B.C.?), the Argive catastrophe at Hysiae (669 B.C.?), Sparta’s Messenian civil conflicts, the brief Sacred Wars, and the struggles between Elis and Pisa over Olympia, there were not more than a dozen important campaigns in the historical record involving the major Greek city-states in more than two hundred years.
Conflicts of the era were brief day battles between neighbors. They arose over contested border ground. They reflected the agrarian interests of the hoplite-farmers who preferred system to chaos in the resolution of conflict. Hoplites were the same farmers who in peacetime fought with one another constantly over the exact borders of their own individual plots (Thuc. 5.41.2-3; Pl. Leg. 5.745; 842E-843A; Resp. 2.373D-E; Arist. Pol. 7.1330a4-23). Perennial rural “hot spots,” like ancestral property quarrels between farm families themselves, flared up again and again throughout Greek history.14
This large body of evidence must have led G. E. M. de Ste Croix to remark (after careful rejection of the so-called commercial causes of early Greek warfare): “Quarrels about the ownership of land, especially border land between two states, were the principal causes of war between Greek states and were universally recognized as such.”* If there were Greek overseas expeditions before the Persian Wars, they may often have been the sporadic, private campaigns of mercenaries and tyrants, not official and public musters of yeoman farmers. Warring was common enough to cement solidarity among the hoplite agrarian class, but not so frequent as to retard their steady economic and political ascendancy within the polis.
Why should there have been any great mobilization in warfare between contiguous agrarian states? Distance from farm to the battlefield was short: a brief march of a day or two out and back for the column of small landowners (e.g., Ar. Pax 1183). Fighting over the border was one of the most economical aspects of Greek campaigning, certainly reflective of the whole practice of early Greek warfare. Each side often traveled about the same distance to the rough midpoint between their respective city-states in search of a flat plain below the mountains—border disputes being theoretically the shortest distance for all involved. The battle at Delium (424 B.C.), for example, was fought near or right on the borderground between Athens and Thebes. Most city-states, as we have seen, possessed roads that led out to mountain borders and then often continued into foreign territory. It has been argued that these routes were military, rather than commercial, in nature (Ober 1991: 174-79). Because siegecraft and similar tactics of delay were frowned on by the landowning militias of the early city-state, overland networks were not merely designed to facilitate the transport of a polis army, but perhaps to encourage hoplite battle itself.
Wars of this type curtailed, rather than augmented, defense outlay. Often both neighboring city-states in an eerie harmony of sorts finished their roads right up to the approximate mountain boundaries. Either side could easily invade the other’s territory if a dispute arose: any “war” would be brief, decisive, and fought openly between agrarians, essentially eliminating the tactical choices of the invaded, eliminating the need for skirmishers, siege engineers, and mountain garrisons. If identification of the militarily utilitarian nature of these ancient roads is correct (e.g., Ober 1991: 178-79), there is yet another implication that the ideology of the Greek hoplite-farmer transcended formal borders.
Despite the clear chauvinism of the respective city-states, I have argued that farmers in the early agrarian poleis may have had almost as much in common with their counterparts across the mountain as with landless craftsmen or urban traders in their own city-state. Of agrarian fifth-century Thebans and their rural kindred souls across the border in Attica, Max Weber remarks: “Theban ‘democracy’ was based on hoplite yeomanry which achieved the unification of Boeotia and then sought peace just as did the farmers of Attica under their ‘oligarchic leaders’” (1976:216).
The pervasive power of agrarian ideology persevered even into the times of rural transition in the middle and late fourth century. It surely engaged both Plato and Aristotle. These two reactionary thinkers worried that farmers in the countryside might in their own self-interest see no reason to fight their counterparts across the border. They might not be willing to sacrifice their farms and persons in order to save the general population of their own polis. Both philosophers urged citizens of the polis to have dual residence, houses both in town and out on the farms (Arist. Pol. 7.1330A14-23; Pl. Leg. 5.745; cf. Bisinger 31-32). Ties would be cemented between farmers and their urban counterparts. In time of war the landed would not find accommodation with the invaders at the expense of their landless inside the walls. Conservative philosophical concern suggests that in the aftermath of the Periclean strategy of letting invaders into Attica during the Peloponnesian War (431-421 B.C.; 412-404 B.C.), utopian thinkers felt that farmers were growing increasingly frustrated with the radically democratic tendencies of Athens.
Outside of Sparta, hoplites spent little time training for war. Although much has been written about hoplomachia (the hoplite “war-dance”), the military flavor of many athletic events, and the continual calls in utopian literature for more formal battle preparation, the Greeks themselves at least believed for most of the polis period that war really was more a question of courage than of skill.15 That scholars must search for a military component in ritual dance and athletics is, I think, a tacit admission that formal training for Greek hoplite battle per se was essentially absent.
Training, after all, might have taken up more of the farmer’s time than war itself. But Greek hoplites normally devoted not more than a week or two of the summer campaigning season to actual marching and fighting, activities that were predicated on slack periods in the agricultural calendar. The need to work hard on the farm explains why Greek land warfare before the late fifth century seems essentially defensive in nature, why fighting on home ground was important to the morale of the hoplite. Intensive farm labor and close attention to a variety of crops also reveal why hoplite war making was not designed for extensive mobilization, annexation, or outright conquest. Thucydides believed that the original members of the Delian League, even in the exhilaration of their success over the Persians, were nevertheless “reluctant to go on campaign” (1.99.3). Outside of outright battle, most (non-Spartan) hoplites were always at work on their farms rather than drilling on the parade ground.16
This made Plato urge more formal muster and drill among the Greek city-states (Pl. Leg. 8.829 B; cf. Xen. Mem. 3,12.5)—drill that in actuality must have only infrequently taken place in open-air fields and sanctuaries (e.g., IG I3 138; Ar. Pax 353-56; Jameson 1980: 224-25). Throughout later Greek literature there is explicit fascination with the disciplined mercenary band (e.g., Front. Str. 3.12.2; Polyaen. Str. 3.9.35) and the ubiquitous suggestion that these professional, highly trained corps were essentially unknown among hoplite armies of the past (cf. Parke 78-79).
Almost all figures for hoplite battle casualties (unlike modern practice, confined to the dead rather than inclusive of wounded) derive from the fifth and fourth centuries when detailed accounts in the historical record first emerge. Peter Krentz, who collated some seventeen major pitched hoplite battles from Acragas (472 B.C.) to Leuctra (371 B.C.) in the texts of the major Greek historians, found a surprisingly consistent hundred-year pattern: ten to twenty percent (fourteen percent on average) losses to the defeated phalanx, three to ten percent (five percent on average) killed among the hoplites on the winning side (Krentz 1985: 18). Even during the frequent warmaking of the turbulent fifth century, battle fatalities per single hoplite engagement were light and a state’s annual battle dead bearable—as long as these engagements were fairly rare.
Entire encirclement of ancient Greek armies was quite the exception. At Marathon in 490 B.C., the Persians had found themselves cut off and nearly surrounded in enemy territory, a rare phenomenon that explains their extraordinarily high number killed (6,400 of perhaps an original 20,000 men—or roughly thirty-two percent of their original force). In battle exclusively among Greek hoplites there is simply nothing like the total destruction of thousands. We hear of no battlefield death traps such as the Roman holocaust at Cannae (216 B.C.), where 50,000-70,000 (Polyb. 3.107.9-15, 3.117.1-3) of the roughly 80,000 or so in the legions (as high as an eighty-eight percent fatality rate) went down between the Carthaginian pincers at day’s end (at the rate of well over one hundred a minute). Even cursory examination of battle fatalities of the Hellenistic and Roman wars reveals that nearly always forty percent of defeated armies in those times perished (e.g., Gabriel and Metz 83-87), the day’s slaughtered customarily, rather than unusually, ranging in the tens of thousands.
The problem in assessing both the relative and the absolute severity of infantry casualties in Greek hoplite warfare is the change in hoplite practice during the fifth century. After the Persian Wars, when the Greek agrarian city-state was in the midst of enormous transition, faced with novel challenges and opportunities, hoplite battles—both the major collisions and the smaller and less well-known confrontations—were not necessarily rare.
To take a theoretical example: if an infantry force during this era fought one out of every two years (to use a more conservative figure than the famous “two out of three” years at Athens in the fifth century, a young farmer, twenty-one years of age, could potentially be called up twenty times before his sixtieth birthday. If he experienced an equal number of winning and losing battles, there was roughly a ten percent chance he would lose his life in any one encounter. By age forty a hoplite could expect a theoretical certainty of death in battle.17
The casualty figures for Greek hoplite dead are suggestive, but remain only rough estimates. Not all hoplites were called up for every campaign. Minor battles might have required only a few hundred infantrymen out of thousands eligible on the muster lists. The average life expectancy for Greeks in general was probably only between forty and forty-five years anyway (e.g., Gallant 1991: 20).
Understandably, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, both sides—Sparta and her Peloponnesian allies, Athens and her imperial league—looked forward to the fighting; the reason, Thucydides tells us, is that the youth of both alliances “had little,experience” with war (Thuc. 2.81). The historian is correct. From 453 to 433 B.C., outside of a major hoplite battle or two, there had been a twenty-year period of general tranquillity in landed warfare among the city-states (e.g., Gomme Comm. 2.8-9).
It is possible to make a rough estimate of the total fatalities in Krentz’s seventeen major hoplite battles during this hundred-year period (472-371 B.C.). By adding together the dead of each Greek hoplite battle recorded in Krentz’s survey, we obtain a cumulative sum of about 24,000 total Greek fatalities in these major engagements. That is an astonishingly modest number in comparison to Hellenistic and Roman figures! In Hellenistic and Roman times, the total fatalities of a single day’s battle such as Issus (333 B.C.;about 50,000 dead), second Chaironeia (86 B.C.; about 100,000), or Munda (45 B.C.; about 100,000-120,000) might within a few hours exceed the old Greek hoplite total from over three centuries. Just as later (Chapter 9) we will see that once the city-state unraveled, the size of Greek farms grew enormously while the total population in the countryside actually shrank, so in the military sphere, once the agrarian hoplite vanished the number of deadly engagements increased dramatically and the fatality ratios soared.
These numbers of Greek fatalities are considerable when one remembers the much smaller populations of the landed hoplite class in the Greek city-states.* Total infantry dead in these two centuries was actually somewhat higher than Krentz’s figures, since characteristically ancient historians often recorded no losses on the winning side (for example, at the battles of Himera, Locris, Syracuse, Miletus, Ephesus, and Phlius). At other significant encounters (e.g., Tanagra, first Coroneia, Oenophyta), chronicles lacked any precise reckoning of the dead at all, and are therefore absent from Krentz’s survey.
In the case of fifth-century Athens, Barry Strauss (75-76, 80-81; 179-82) computed fatalities that were not exorbitant. He calculated that the 5,470 total hoplite dead of the twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War represented a quarter to a third of her total original infantry strength in 431 B.C. Even this seemingly impressive total represents an average of only 202 hoplites killed per year during the entire war, a figure matched by not much more than a minute’s work in the major Roman and Hellenistic encounters. In comparison with the plague and natural causes, those hoplite dead were not an alarming figure. Given expected rates of replenishment in this period, the between 5,000 and 6,000 infantry losses would not have inevitably reduced hoplite strength per se during the nearly three decades of war. And in the first two centuries of the polis period when hoplite battle was far more infrequent, there are many reasons to believe that battle fatalities for Greek agrarian infantry were even lighter.
The near-uniform adoption until at least 520 B.C. or later of the so-called bell corselet (as opposed to later composite and fabric models), greaves, Corinthian helmet (cf. the later vulnerability of the small, conical headgear, the pilos), and occasional auxiliary armor (thigh, ankle, stomach, and shoulder guards) suggests that earlier Greek hoplites originally were far better protected against attack than their successors—as we see from the vast discrepancy in casualties in the Persian Wars between the Greeks and their lighter-clad Eastern adversaries (e.g., Hdt. 5.49, 97; cf. Snodgrass 1967: 92-94; Anderson 1970: 24). In fact, Greek bronze protection was all but impenetrable from most projectile and hand-weapon attack (e.g., Gabriel and Metz 56). The thickness and extent of the panoply, coupled with the rarity of auxiliary skirmishers and light-armed troops who could wreak havoc in retreat, argue for even a smaller percentage of individual battle fatalities than the ten-percent figure of the later fifth and early fourth centuries. Clearly, farmers of the early polis knew that when they invested in full panoplies of bronze, battle dead were to be few.
Second, early Greek hoplite warfare, as distinguished from its practice in the latter fifth and fourth centuries, was an altogether slower affair. It was waged between lumbering, fully-armored farmers who walked rather than ran together. Herodotus (6.112; cf. Ar.Ach.698) says flatly that Marathon (490 B.C.) was the first occasion (in the then two-hundred-year history of hoplite fighting) where Greek hoplites ran at the enemy! Even if Herodotus’s statement were not strictly accurate, it still reflects a general Greek belief in the fifth century that in the two centuries preceding that battle most agrarian armies met at a much slower pace (Delbrück 72-90; cf. Hanson 1989: 135-170). Other suggestions that before the fifth century the flute played a greater role in hoplite battle (e.g., Anderson 1970: 293 n. 64) also argue for the marching rather than running nature of Greek hoplite armies. That observation is borne out by the greater weight of the early hoplite panoply (protection that incorporated cumbersome thigh and shoulder guards, as well as more plate, rather than composite armor).
In general, velocity, the centuries-old twin of lethality, seems to have been absent from the Greek battlefield before Marathon (490 B.C.), The sheer slowness of encumbered farmers was an integral part of early agrarian warfare. Lumbering rather than sprinting hoplites may explain why in the first two centuries of the polis there were fewer casualties than even in the relatively nonlethal hoplite battles of the fifth and fourth centuries.
Finally, not only were fewer hoplites killed on early Greek battlefields, but also, as we have seen, there were most likely far fewer battles between 650 and 480 B.C., largely because of the absence of hegemonic leagues that so often in Greece after the Persian conflict drew many smaller poleis away from purely agrarian concerns (i.e., local borders) into lengthy, drawn-out wars for spheres of political influence. Although figures for total infantry losses are, of course, unattainable before the Persian Wars, the hoplite battle dead between 640 and 480 B.C. may have been only a fraction of the cumulative fatalities later, in the century-and-a-half era before the battle of Chaironeia (338 B.C.). Even that later 150-year period of battle fatalities (480-338 B.C.) pales in comparison to the Hellenistic and Roman infantry butchery to come. Just as farmer-hoplites during the lifetime of the polis kept the size of farm property largely equitable and small, so too in war were they favored a system that ensured few big armies, few big slaughters.
In the case of Athens, there is good reason to believe she lost more hoplites during the twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) than in the entire two centuries before the Persian invasions. Modern scholars who have surveyed her military activity before the Persian Wars are struck by the relative absence of any real organized military structure, or indeed of any serious wars (e.g., Frost 292). The early scarcity of military activity implies that Athens, before she became the bellicose, maritime giant of the fifth century, was essentially identical to other agrarian city-states in her military practice in the seventh and sixth centuries. That was a time when small groups of farmers spontaneously marched out to settle border disputes simply, through short but decisive pitched battles. Border disputes were resolved, agrarian identity was solidified through group sacrifice, and the number of actual killed was quite small. It may be disturbing for modern historians to acknowledge the inescapable conclusion here: the conservatism of agrarian timocracy did not lend itself to the adventurism and the mass killing spawned later by more radical government. The propensity for greater slaughter in ancient Greece is to be associated with the dynamic rise of landless democracy in general and in fifth-century Athens in particular.
There is a tradition accompanying some of the accounts of Greek battles before the Persian invasion of Xerxes (i.e., 700-480 B.C.) that implies fatalities were incredibly light, or that there was at least an acknowledged concern on both sides to limit casualties. One thinks of the prohibition of missiles loosely associated with the so-called Lelantine War, the early tradition of monomachia or ritualized battle between two chosen fighters, the agreement to settle the Argive-Sparta dispute over Thyreatis borderland through a matched battle of 300 “Champions”, the Spartan notion that they could bring along enough fetters to enslave their Argive adversaries, and the legendary 192 dead at Marathon, the 300 Spartans killed at Thermopylae, and the 159 Greek fatalities during the central engagement at Plataea (479 B.C.)—the latter battle was the greatest assemblage of hoplites in the military history of the Greek polis. Only around 1,000-2,000 Greek hoplite infantry died in pitched encounters inside Greece during the entire Persian Wars.
Even the one military disaster of any magnitude (at Sepeia, 494 B.C.), by its very notoriety in Greek literature for the trickery, sacrilege, and massacre on the part of the Spartans after the battle itself was over (Hdt. 6.19, 6.75.3-83, 7.148.2; cf. Karavites 122-23), is the exception that proves the usual Greek rule of the age to limit the human costs of war. Even in the fifth and fourth centuries when the horizons of Greek warfare were drastically expanded and stand-up encounters between larger armies much more common (e.g., Delium in 424 B.C.; Mantineia in 418/362 B.C., Nemea in 394 B.C., Coroneia in 394 B.C., Leuctra in 371 B.C.), hoplite fatalities were not catastrophic. In none of the battles named above were there ever more than four thousand combined dead. This economy in human expenditure is quite in contrast to the Hellenistic casualty records of the third and second centuries. Then battles and sieges often degenerated into the mass slaughter of tens of thousands in the space of hours.18
Most studies of Greek generalship before Alexander have centered on either preeminent fourth-century commanders such as Agesilaus, Epameinondas, Pelopidas, and Timoleon, or the more notorious leaders of quasi-professional “condottiere,” men like Iphicrates, Chabrias, and Chares. In the fifth century before the Peloponnesian War and the advent of new auxiliary contingents and tactical opportunities, however, most historians recognize that “generals” usually fought in the midst of their troops, without much responsibility or opportunity once battle began.19
Controversy over the standard view of the hoplite general fighting always alongside his men—whether in the front rank or in the center of the phalanx (e.g., Wheeler 1991: 135-154)—is confined to the fifth century and later, reflecting the growing sophistication and complexity of hoplite battle, when an occasional general may have been outside the first initial charge of the opposing front lines (e.g., Plut. Pel. 1.5-2.4). Even at that time, nevertheless, it was standard practice for most battlefield commanders to stand with their men at some point in the battle (see Pritchett Topography 8: 62-63).
During the first two centuries of the polis period those anonymous battle leaders uniformly took an inspirational role. Early Greek “generalship” was inherently amateurish. It was without lengthy tenure. It was bereft of extensive command staff and intrinsicallydangerous. Even the famous commander Epameinondas of Thebes (who later died heroically at the battle of Mantineia [362 B.C.]) served in the ranks as a mere hoplite when his tenure as general was over (e.g., Plut. Mor. 797A-B). As a result, there are subtle, but unmistakable, economic implications in the brief, primitive, and lethal nature of hoplite command, emphasizing the agrarian genesis of hoplite warfare, and more specifically, the small landowners’ desire to prevent a professional officer corps from interrupting their own rural routine.
Simply put, a permanent drone class of military professionals was never subsidized by any of the agrarian city-states. Outside of Sparta, there was essentially no permanent general staff. Even under that military system, generals were given little if any formal training in either strategy or tactics (cf. Lazenby 1985: 24-25). Throughout Greece, there was no array of officers who had to be paid, fed, and housed year round by the citizenry, no cabal that might wrestle away civic control of the war-making arm of the polis,no constant pressure for military intervention from a prepared army organization. Amateurism, like the hoplite’s notion of private weapons and decisive confrontation, was essential to the prominence of Greek yeomanry within the city-state and it was often to be enshrined as a cornerstone in the later Western military tradition.
Nor is there evidence of a Greek salaried officer corps, much less higher officer pay, before the Persian Wars. Given the later military history of the West, the military nonprofessionalism at all levels of Greek war making was agrarian egalitarianism in its more radical manifestation. It was an extraordinary development in its own right, one quite in contrast to Near Eastern and Mycenean palace practice of past centuries. At Athens the board of generals seems not to have existed before 501/500 B.C. (Arist. Ath. Pol 22.2; Rhodes 264-65). Nor was there an extensive and expensive civilian bureaucracy involved in military, financial, and logistical planning for the first two centuries of the polis. In strictly financial terms, “officers”—or more accurately “battle leaders” within the phalanx itself—cost the state absolutely nothing. Between 700 and 480 B.C. in most Greek city-states (quite unlike the centuries-old practice in Asia and Egypt) military professionals and warrior-princes with elaborate and permanent retinues did not exist.
In a more abstract sense, there was also little opportunity for a cult of personality. Because most generals would either die (Hanson 1989: 107-116) or retire after one or two battles without much continuity in command structure, rarely could a single stalwart mind envision and plan a series of conquests or lengthy campaigns. There were no Alexanders or Hannibals in the agrarian Greek poleis. Outside of the political-military activity of a few early tyrants (e.g., FGrH 90 F57.5; 105 F2; 324 F6; cf. Arist. Pol.5.1305a8) and some gifted fourth-century captains (e.g., Epameinondas, Pelopidas, Iphicrates, and Chabrias) there were virtually no sustained military careers. The practice was characteristic of an agrarian society that had always in earlier times been skeptical of kings in battle (e.g., Arist. Ath. Pol.3.3).20
Personal advancement, enrichment, fame, and fortune—the entire engine of military adventurism—and thus any chance for costly military outlay, were precluded by hoplite agrarianism. In both the early and later Greek character there is a strain of open disdain toward generals (Archil. 114; Ar. Ach. 965; Pax 172-75; Xen. Anab. 3.4.46-48; Plut. Mor. 188E). By the fifth century there was an insistence on hoplite activism—even in the Spartan army—in command decisions (Thuc. 5.7.2; 5.65.6). Until Miltiades’ apparently disreputable (but understandable) effort to secure personal credit for the splendid Athenian victory at Marathon (Aeschin. In. Ctes. 3.186; cf. too IG VII 2462 for complaints over the attention given to Epameinondas after the Theban victory at Leuctra), there does not seem to be a single named general associated with any pre-Persian War battle victory. Cleomenes’ win at Sepeia (7.148; Paus. 2.20.8)—consisting of the post facto murder of nearly the entire hoplite class at Argos—was notorious. It gained him infamy, not glory from the incineration of his trapped adversaries.
So hoplite warfare emerged as an agrarian enterprise, one made up of farmers fighting on farmland over disputed borderland. Their battles were not designed for aggression or sustained expeditions. From an exclusively agricultural point of view hoplite warfare was an extremely frugal enterprise. Few, if any, significant wars on land took place. Most smaller disputes were usually between neighboring city-states, whose hoplites killed each other over small tracts of border ground. Those lands, ironically, were not always significant in purely agricultural value, but were important to farmers as symbols of agricultural prestige, beneficial to the growing agrarian chauvinism of the community at large, and reflective of individual agrarians’ own endless haggling with neighboring farmers of their locale.
Greek armies of the pre-Persian war era—if one can even use such a dramatic term as “armies”—were typically small bodies of extremely heavily armed farmers. They met each other at a walk, and then struggled for an hour or so to push their adversaries off the field of battle. Once the system of hoplite warfare took hold in the late eighth and seventh centuries, the traditional social and economic expenditures of fighting, so common earlier in the palace economies of the Near East and in Egypt—property taxes and rents, technology, soldiers’ salaries, extensive fatalities, lost agricultural productivity, lengthy training and preparation, permanent officers and planners, destruction of entire cultures, unity of political and military authorities—were minimal. Indeed, they were often nonexistent throughout a vast area of the Greek-speaking world, a break between Western and Eastern practice that cannot be strongly enough emphasized.
Simple durable weapons were largely codified for nearly two centuries throughout the insular Greek city-states. The extensive and unmatched protective cover of such bronze armor, the deliberate exclusion of missile weaponry, cavalry, skirmishers—all the usual sources of fatal motion and speed on the battlefield—and the accompanying rules that limited fighting in a concrete and moral sense, reduced drastically the number who were killed in any given battle. Like restrictions against land accumulation and political aggrandizement, warfare of the geôrgoi strove to ensure the equilibrium of the agrarian patchwork. So unlike their more sophisticated successors, Greek hoplite landowners of the seventh and sixth centuries were fighters of a day. They were not habitual trained war makers.
There was neither a priestly class of unproductive military professionals nor an otherwise unemployed military intelligentsia. The formal study of tactics as an academic enterprise did not even exist before the late fifth century. Finally, agricultural devastation was a trigger rather than the goal of invasion. Plunder and booty were incidental, not essential, to the mobilized army’s existence, at least until the fourth century. Formal hoplite battle left relatively little imprint on the local civilian environment. I do not intend to minimize the brutality of early battle. One need only to read of the poet Tyrtaeus’s “beating waves of assault,” “the dead man in the dust,” “toe-to-toe and shield against shield,” the hand “holding the bloody groin,” or glance at early Corinthian vase painting to recoil from the mayhem and bloodletting among those in the front ranks. For those few hundreds and occasionally thousands of combatants, battle was an especially horrific experience (cf. Hanson 1989: 152-209).
If such a picture of the economy of agrarian warfare appears too neat, one must examine carefully the erosion of military practices in the ensuing two centuries of the polis period (480-338 B.C.), the so-called Classical Age of Greek history, to understand the deliberate economy of the original hoplite system. To fathom the catastrophe of the Peloponnesian War and its legacy of constant warring in its fifty-year aftermath, contemplate the later Greeks’ elimination, element by element, of the original agrarian protocols. That disastrous chain of events led the late-fifth-century historian Thucydides to remark of the new fighting that war now was “not a matter of heavy weaponry, but of money (ho polemos ouch hoplôn to pleon alla dapanês)” (1,83.2).
Reduce and modify the hoplite panoply. Incorporate costly cavalry, missile troops, artillery, and light-armed skirmishers on a widespread basis. Introduce state pay for military service. Erode the predominance of set land battles and heavy infantry through frequent, lengthy, and often indecisive raids, sieges, and ambushes. Elevate the navy to coequal military status, and transfer the cost of armament from the individual (for his panoply) to the state (for triremes, dockyards, fortification, artillery, and naval crews). Create clear distinctions between soldier and general. Allow battle leaders authority for extended command. All are prescriptions for “a war of money” and its accompanying detritus: extensive civilian and military deaths, neglected farms, steep taxes on the countryside, empty treasuries, the cycle of repeated conquest, enslavement, and revolt.
That cargo belonged to Greece in the late fifth and fourth centuries (see Parke 228; Garlan 1975: 17; Pritchett War 5.505-541). It was relatively absent during the period before the Persian Wars. Even Sparta’s decline in a political and social sense was a direct aftermath of the Peloponnesian War—a conflict that forced her to embark on costly naval and mercenary operations for extended periods outside Laconia, a period that did not allow her to decide wars through a day’s fighting against an agrarian phalanx, and so preserve her peculiar inward-looking social structure.
A few examples of Athenian military costs in the fifth century show the horrific expense involved once farmers lost control and hoplite battle was superseded as the decisive mechanism for deciding entire wars. The Athenian siege at Samos (441 B.C.; Diod. 12. 28; Thuc. 1.17) purportedly required at least 200 talents (1.2 million drachmas, roughly equivalent to 1.2 million man-days of paid labor). The real cost of that campaign may have been ten times that sum (e.g., Kagan 37; cf. Meiggs-Lewis 55). Samos was a pittance, however, compared to the costs of sieges at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War and later.
The two-year encirclement at Potidaea (432-430 B.C.; Thuc. 2.70; cf. Diod. 12.46) drained ten times that earlier outlay, over 2,000 talents (12 million man-days of labor!). The great Athenian debacle on Sicily (415-413 B.C.) cost much more than that figure just to pay the naval and land forces for each year there (cf. Boeckh 395-96). Thucydides remarked that the original armada that left for Syracuse took “many talents” from the city (6.31). Donald Kagan argued that in order for the Athenians to fight the Peloponnesians in the new fashion of total war beginning in 431 B.C., 2,000 talents were needed each year, a figure that would exhaust Athens financially in about six years (Kagan 37-40).
These are monetary figures alone and thus exclude the enormous costs in lost equipment, time, and casualties required in distant sieges and campaigns that often do not show up in the records of state expenditure. Thucydides reminds us that of the more than 40,000 combatants (citizens, foreigners, metics, and slaves) who departed for Sicily “few out of many returned home” (Thuc. 7.87). Compare all these costly examples to a theoretical muster of an agrarian fifth-century phalanx of 5,000 combatants. They would cross the border, fight, and return home, bringing along their own three-day sack of rations and their attendants. Campaigning in this style might expend no more than 30,000 drachmas (5,000 hoplites plus 5,000 attendants for three days at one drachma per day).
Two other factors complicate the idea of an early conscious, Panhellenic attempt to limit the costs of warfare. First, social and religious historians argue for the primacy of ritual and cult, not the less sophisticated, less theoretical notion of agrarian pragmatism, as the real motive forces behind the Greeks’ codified system of battle. Actual fighting in this view was incidental to pre-battle animal sacrifices, displays of youthful masculinity, exhibitions of engraved artwork on breastplates and helmets, expressions of adult male solidarity, and ceremonial boasting through trophies, votives, and dedications, as if war was not over land but a mechanism solely of cultural expression.
But is not this argument grounded in the admission that all such customs and rules merely reinforced the privileged position—that is, the economic status—of the hoplite landed class? How might rites of passage for young adults and other religious practices serve society as a whole when restricted to a segment of the adult male population of farmers? Do farmers seem the type of folk to elevate the style of fighting over the substance of killing? When we see an occasional design on extant Greek armor, remember that this artwork was incidental, not essential, to the protective capacity of the bronze—the real, the only reason for the panoply’s existence.
Unlike later (Hellenistic and Roman) peasantry, Greek hoplites of the city-state were never at the beck and call of a tax-collecting, elite class who favored mobilization of armies for their own selfish squabbles or because of a private desire for loot from overseas expansionism. Even perfunctory analysis of war making in Greece of the Hellenistic and Roman Period shows this difference clearly. After the fourth century the frequency of campaigns increases. Money needed for technology and manpower rises. Time spent away from agriculture is considerable. Disruption in the countryside due to military appropriation of farmland is habitual. Civic and personal indebtedness is commonplace. Taxes become frequent. Capital shifted from local agrarian communities to larger urban bureaucracies grows. Clearly, Greek hoplites of the polis were not peasants traditionally defined as “under the leadership of aristocratic, urban or other classes” who show “submissiveness to political rulers,” and thus become resentful pawns of ambitious warlords.*
This strikingly independent agenda of the original hoplite-landowner is not necessarily made explicit in the rare contemporary sources between 700 and 480 B.C., given the preponderance of pictorial and archaeological evidence and the absence of comprehensive literary accounts before the Persian Wars. Even the few contemporary literary references of the early polis-period—essentially epic and lyric poetry and fragments of philosophy—naturally do not reveal the special economic advantages that accrued to the hoplite class. Instead these accounts predictably stress the general Panhellenic religious, social, and political functions of warfare. They record the outward heroic manifestations that institutionalized and legitimized early hoplite fighting to all, rich and poor, in the Greek world.
Nevertheless, subsequent (and admittedly reactionary) Greeks of the fourth century later decoded the narrower purpose of their landed ancestors’ system. Once agricultural warfare was lost, succeeding embattled and impoverished generations of Greeks usually emphasized quite clearly the real economic and political advantages that had once accrued from the heroic hoplite creed of their fathers.
Thucydides (1.15) in sharp contrast to the strategic practice of his own age (431-404 B.C.), saw that in prior times there were no military confederations, no campaigns of conquest, and no extended wars on land (kata gên de polemos … oudeis). Conflict in the oldpolis essentially had been reduced to brief border disputes. “Nothing,” the distraught orator Demosthenes (9.48) warned his mid-fourth-century audience of complacent Athenians, “has been more revolutionized and improved than the art of war. I know that in the old times,” he continued, “the Spartans, like everyone else, would devote four or five months in the summer to invading and ravaging the enemy’s territory with hoplites and citizen militias, and then would go home. They were so old-fashioned—or good citizens—that they never used money to buy advantage from anyone, but their fighting was fair and open (all’ einai nomimon tina kai prophanê ton polemon).”
Polybius (13.3.2-4) nostalgically emphasized the simplicity of past hoplite procedures—no deceit, no missiles, no surprises, no manipulation of terrain. All that explained to him why their fighting was a far simpler and nobler business than war in his own second-century Greece. The general Greek sentiment about the purity and simplicity—and thus the economy—of original hoplite battle explains the constant irritation in our later sources for anything that allowed “good” hoplites to be killed by artillery or hand-propelled missiles, by anything other than the muscular strength of a like landed class.21
More interesting still, many fourth-century Greek thinkers genuinely worry over the growing costs of non-hoplitic warfare, the capital needed for sieges, raiding, and fortification that were all divorced from agrarian infantry battles (cf. Ober 1985: 87-100). Aristotle in his Politics relates the story of Eubulus, the Bithynian banker who offered a besieging general Autophradates the opportunity to receive cash in lieu of his siege costs. “Eubulus,” Aristotle says, “asked him to figure how much time it would take to besiege Atarneus [on the coast of Asia Minor], and then to calculate how much would be his expense that he would incur for that period. For he said he was willing for a sum somewhat smaller than this simply to evacuate Atarneus at once” (Pol 2.1267a32-36).
In consideration of just that increasing cost of warfare, Xenophon asks in his fourth-century treatise on state expenditure, the Ways and Means, whether war now always made strictly cost-to-benefit sense. “Someone might ask me,” he speculates, “that even if apolisis wronged, should she then remain at peace with the aggressor? No, of course not. But I do say that we should have better luck against an enemy, if we first of all provoke no one by doing wrong ourselves” (Vect. 5.13). Aristotle in his Rhetoric emphasizes the new civic concern over the economic aspects of the ever more complex war making, over Thucydides’ “wars of money.” He says that citizens now discuss in the assembly income and outlay, war and peace, defense of the countryside, and the problem of food supply(Rhet. 1.1359b-1360a)—topics far more complex than mustering the citizenry of farmers to march out in column for a few days, topics now necessary for polis defense, but completely antithetical to the entire agrarian ideology of the city-state.
W. G. Runciman (1990: 355) also focuses on this paradox in the new defense strategy of the fourth century: “Without the financial resources, how could a polis build the fortifications and hire the mercenaries? But until the mercenaries could find some other livelihood than war, how could they be prevented from depleting the resources of an overwhelmingly agricultural community? And unless they could be enlisted in the service of a tyrant capable of establishing a securely legitimated monarchy for which they could furnish the standing army, how could they be prevented from drifting from one paymaster to another, and, as Isocrates complained, assaulting whoever they ran into on the way?”
Second, some scholars argue that the absence of complexity within early Greek warfare was not a deliberate effort to curtail military expenditure. Rather it was merely reflective of the embryonic state of development of the polis when agrarian populations were smaller and without the capital, experience, or knowledge to advance military science and practice. But even if one accepts the now generally suspect view that “archaic” Greek culture and institutions were less sophisticated than what evolved in the later fifth and fourth centuries (or in the earlier bellicose Near East and Egypt), hoplite battle is surely an exception. Weaponry, tactics, and strategy showed little, if any, elaboration for more than four hundred years. So static was the method of fighting that had emerged at the beginning of the eighth century, that the agrarian protocols of the phalanx remained nearly impervious to the other undeniable cultural, political, and economic transformations of the age.
That is why the hoplite phalanx itself functioned relatively unchanged even through the progression of tyranny, oligarchy/timocracy, and democracy—all forms of government under which Greek hoplites fought. Hoplite battles were celebrated in early lyric poetry or late fifth-century tragedy, and hoplite warriors were identifiable both on proto-Corinthian and, two centuries later, red- and black-figure Attic vases. Pitched agrarian battle could involve a few hundred men or many thousands. It adhered to a code of fighting perfect in its conception and single-minded in its appropriate design and purpose. No wonder George Grundy correctly declares: “The hoplite phalanx was of such a nature that any great elaboration of tactical design in its evolution was practically impossible” (Grundy 267).
Major changes in Greek warfare during the fifth century and later, as we will see in Chapter 8, “Hoplites as Dinosaurs,” were not alterations in the formation and application of the hoplite phalanx itself. They were not, as Grundy rightly saw, “great elaboration of tactical design.” Transformation involved incorporation of other forms of fighting that eventually did not change battle very much between phalanxes per se. The phalanx simply became more marginal, more vulnerable to outside attack—and in the end nearly irrelevant. The reactionary nature of hoplite warfare, the insular world of two columns colliding, explains why classical scholars can legitimately describe the environment within a phalanx, its activity on the battlefield, in nearly uniform terms throughout four centuries, even though the larger conduct of Greek warfare itself changed enormously in just that period.
Historians of ancient Greece must reinterpret the role of early hoplite warfare. Far too much emphasis has been devoted to circumstances surrounding the origins of the system—the so-called hoplite reform (which, as we have argued, was not a dramatic reform at all)—without corresponding appreciation of the economic ramifications of that code for two hundred years of Greek history. Do not be carried away by notions of the “primitiveness” of the Greek economy to such an extent as to believe the ancients had no idea of profit and loss, income and outlay. Economically the Greeks may not have acted in a purely capitalistic mode in the modern sense, forswearing business ventures, corporations, and other activities aimed primarily to enrich a few visionaries who sought goods and money above all. But the farmer-citizens of the polis were conscious of how a market worked, of debits, incomes, and expenditures (e.g. Engels 24-27; 131-42; Cohen 11-12).
The early agrarian Greeks’ social and political considerations were grounded in the secure knowledge that their peculiar method of fighting was economically frugal. Hoplite battle was not a mere epiphenomenon of religious and cultural expression, nor a ritual involving unsophisticated fanatics. In a large part it was a conscious mechanism to reduce defense expenditure among the farmers of the emerging Greek poleis. “They also engaged in hostilities,” W. G. Runciman remarks of early Greek city-state formation, “with one another which were sufficiently frequent and serious to encourage a sense of political identity without being so destructive to inhibit the emergence of states” (Runciman 1982: 366; emphasis added).
Hoplite war by its conservation of the lives, property, and capital of the Greeks is a testament to the brilliance and tenacity of the small landowners of Greece. Hoplite protocol seems to me in large part responsible for the stability of the agrarian city-state, and thus for the entire fruition of Greek culture itself. How odd that in the largely unknown valleys of mainland Greece, rural folk, isolated and forgotten by the more turbulent world of the Mediterranean, invented Western warfare as part of the discovery of politics itself. If landed councils were to survive, were not to be swept away by marauding hordes or by the megalomaniac vision of an Eastern lord or Macedonian thug, Greek warfare had to be both ferocious and reasoned, both capable of annihilating foreign challenges and yet calibrated to spare rival city-states. While scholars are taken with the Greek invention of political science, and while I have emphasized thus far the critical role of the agrarian patchwork, neither polis nor countryside was possible without a competent army in service to both. Every bit as important as constitutional government and agrarian egalitarianism was the Greek invention of military protocol, the revolutionary idea that armies were to serve people, not people armies.
*That would be equal to about forty plethra of land (about nine acres), i.e., forty plethra at fifty drachmas perplethron.
*See the poet Archilochus: “So what does it matter? Let the shield go; I can get another one equally good” (Archil. 5; emphasis added; cf. Alc. 54; Hdt. 5.95.1; Ar. Vesp 22).
*de Ste. Croix 1972: 219-220; cf. Frost 293; Rhodes 217. “No regular mobilizations,” Frank Frost soberly surmises of Athenian military practice in the seventh and sixth centuries, “seem to have taken place” (Frost 283).
*E.g., 10,000-20,000 eligible hoplites on the infantry muster rolls at (only) the largest poleis, usually a little less than half of the citizen population; see de Ste. Croix 1981: 283; perhaps only 100-800 eligible for hoplite service at the “average” city-state (Ruschenbusch 1985: 258-263).
*Francis 292-93. For steep taxes collected from the countryside to pay for centralized government, see Alcock 29-31; A.M. Jones 1974: 82-89; cf. Pritchett War 5. 438-504; Day 236-9; Duncan-Jones 122-42.