Part Three
—C.Mossé 1969: 49
The essential basis for the ancient city was, we have seen, a community of small farmers who were free and who owned their own land. Although the historical evolution of the Greek cities and of Rome soon changed this original social structure, nevertheless the citizen soldier who owned his land remained the social ideal for antiquity
Chapter 8
—Robin Osborne 1987: 164
In a process of gradual separation warfare became divorced from the farmland and from the farmer, and the Greek city lost its essential identity.
Greek “warfare” was not the same thing as Greek “battle.” Infantry battle between phalanxes still continued throughout the slow decline of the free city-state well into the middle and later fourth century, as the famous murderous encounters at Coroneia (394B.C.),Nemea (394 B.C.), Leuctra (371 B.C.), Mantineia (362 B.C.), and Chaeroneia (338 B.C.) attest. Those battles, fought magnificently with largely agrarian infantry and seemingly oblivious to the military revolutions of the times, were in themselves not much different from hoplite fighting of the seventh century. The arrangement of spearmen in columnar formation was commonplace even during the subsequent Macedonian period in Greece, as the engagements between heavy pike-bearing phalangites at several later clashes confirm (e.g., Sellasia [222 B.C.], Cynoscephelae [197 B.C.], Pydna [168 B.C.].
Technically, the charge of a phalanx, whether armed with the traditional hoplite panoply or, in the third through second centuries, modified tactically and equipped with the Macedonian sarissa (the fourteen-to-twenty-foot pike) and lighter body armor, remained an option for Greek military commanders well into Roman times. The sheer power of that massed formation is what impressed the Roman general Aemilius Paulus at the fight at Pydna: “He considered the formidable appearance of their front [the Macedonian phalanx], bristling with arms, and was taken with fear and alarm: nothing he had ever seen before was its equal. Much later he often used to recall that sight and his own reaction to it” (Plut. Aem. 19.3). On occasion later Roman legions themselves abandoned their accustomed grace and fluidity, their cohorts coalescing both horizontally and vertically to achieve the greater force of attack in column. The legacy of phalanxes remains with us in the West today, seen in our preference to fight it out quickly, brutally, and, at all costs decisively, a military spirit that arose originally in the Greek countryside.*
“Warfare” is usually a much more inclusive term than “battle.” It not only suggests the myriad rules, regulations, and practices that surround conflict, but, far more important, “hoplite warfare” denotes the supremacy, the exclusivity, of infantry battle between small farmers as the only real means of resolving conflict between the Greek city-states of the early polis period. For the insular world of the hoplite to make any sense, for his polis to remain agrarian, his peculiar showdown between rows of armored farmers could not be simply a theater of operations. It had to be the theater of most military conflict. Battle, as in the seventh and sixth centuries, had to remain the equivalent of war.
Anything less would call into question the premise of the closed system of agrarian monopoly: land-based timocracy, agricultural self-sufficiency, egalitarianism in property holding—a system that had remained absolutely unquestioned for more than two centuries (700-490 B.C.). In its pristine state, hoplite fighting of these two centuries might properly be labeled the “first stage” in the evolution of Greek polis warmaking. But soon after the Persian wars (490, 480/479 B.C.) the elements of agrarian and hoplite supremacy began to erode throughout Greece. The reason is easy to see: the unique conditions of relative historical isolation that had marked the peculiar birth of the city-state came abruptly to an end.
Hoplite Warfare. The Second Stage (490-431 B.C.)
Until the fifth century, the parochialism of hoplite agrarianism was rarely questioned by the Greeks or anyone else. As we have seen in the last two chapters, the conventions of the seventh and sixth centuries ensured that war between the Greek city-states was decided by a day’s battle between farmers, and only by a battle between farmers. Hoplite fighting was a brutal necessity to cement agrarian control of the Greek polis, its military frugality crucial to rural tranquillity and prosperity and paying real dividends to Greek civilization at large. The first real challenge to this military culture came with the Persian invasions of 490 and 480 B.C. Until then, Greece had been left largely alone from foreign belligerency. Before the fifth century, hoplites were more likely to be found overseas than foreign troops to be present inside Greece. Greek heavy infantry who had not become successful landowners during the early evolution of the city-state were often prized as mercenaries abroad in both Asia and Egypt, where their unusually heavy armament, shock tactics, and reputed nerve could provide foreign despots with small elite contingents.
The battle of Marathon (490 B.C.) was the first ominous warning of the vulnerability of agrarian infantry. The dramatic Athenian victory ended a startling period of Greek isolation, when her city-states knew little about the military and political challenges beyond their borders. Miraculously, for more than two centuries (700-490 B.C.) the farmers of Greece had been left alone to devise their own curious notions of war and warrior, in an unreal parochialism that belied the potential turmoil of the eastern and southern Mediterranean.
Ostensibly, the Marathon revealed the supremacy of landed troops, the difference between men who were armored and those who were not, between men who were shock fighters and those who had no belly for the collision of flesh and bronze. It was the hoplite army of Athens, not her light-armed troops (essentially nonexistent at the time), not her horsemen nor her rudimentary navy, that defeated Darius I at Marathon. Heavy infantry it was also (not cavalry, not javelin throwers) who had lumbered after the Persians and hacked away at them even as they sought escape in their ships. Heavy hoplite infantry had killed nearly 6,400 of the invaders, all at a loss of a mere 192 men. Until then, Herodotus says, the Greeks had been afraid even to look upon Persian soldiery; “until then to hear the very name of the Medes had brought terror to the Greeks” (6.112). Understandably the Spartan late arrivals after the battle sought permission from the victorious Athenians to march out onto the battlefield of Marathon simply to gaze on the rotting eastern corpses. After that experience, few Greeks feared to fight, much less to look upon, Asian infantry.*
Marathon confirmed the earlier success of Greek hoplite adventurers abroad and set a pattern that was unaltered for the next two centuries: any time Greek hoplites faced foreign adversaries in a head-on collision on flatland, the enemy was found wanting, creating a growing sense of infantry superiority among Greek military observers (cf. Xen. Hell. 7.1.38). Do not, however, be misled by the heroism of the Greek victory, nor by the ebullient accounts in Herodotus and Aeschylus that Marathon was proof of the martial invincibility of two centuries of Greek military tradition.* Days before Marathon the Persians had successfully besieged the Greek polis of Eretria (490 B.C.) on the island of Euboea opposite Attica (Hdt. 6.101), bringing to bear a multifarious force of siege engineers, marines, light-armed troops, cavalry, and missile throwers. The hoplite infantry of Eretria, descendants of a gallant martial ethos dating back two centuries to the great battle on the nearby Lelantine Plain (about 700 B.C.), chose to stay inside their city, rather than fight outside against this new type of war (“they had no intention,” Herodotus notes, “of marching out and offering battle”).
Only the Persians’ unwise deployment of troops on the coast of Marathon—their cavalry seems to have played no decisive role—and their loss of nerve in an amphibious landing near Athens herself ensured defeat. Furthermore, no Greek allied hoplites, except the brave Plataeans, came to Athens’ aid. No community of Greek farmers thought it necessary to fight overwhelming odds when their own lives and property were not in immediate danger. Was Marathon not proof that agrarianism had created common values and ideologies, identical armor and tactics, but no real federal spirit that went beyond the parochial squabbles of hoplite amateurism? The Ionian revolt of Greek cities on the western coast of Asia Minor (499-494 B.C.) had garnered little infantry support from the agrarian city-states of mainland Greeks, despite constant pleas for assistance.
In the peculiar mind of the hoplite-farmers in most Greek city-states, to die for a few acres on their own border made far more sense than to perish far away in a crusade to keep “Greece” free. The Milesian Aristagoras, complaining of agrarian parochialism, pointed out to the Spartans that they, the neighboring Argives, and the Arcadians battled only over “strips of land.” These Peloponnesian city-states were simply not aware of, or interested in, more important fighting over “gold and silver” across the sea alongside Aristagoras’s Ionian Greeks against the Persian overlords.*
The victory at Marathon was proof of sorts that hoplite battle in its purest form was not intended for wartime alliances or for the extension of force beyond one’s immediate borders. Agrarianism was a very reactionary ideology that grew out of an exclusive need to protect an insular farming community, one that won battles like Marathon through “sheer guts and chance” (Lazenby 1993: 80). But when thrust into the challenges of the greater Mediterranean, “guts and chance” could just as often turn into appeasement.
The peculiar tactical choices of the Persians to fight on a small, flat plain, not the inherent and undeniable superiority of Greek heavy infantry, explain in some part Marathon’s outcome: “failed mostly by his own fault” later Greeks conceded of the Persian defeat (Thuc. 1.69.5). The battle gave warning that in the future there were to be real tactical and demographic limitations to the Greeks’ exclusive reliance on hoplites, and thus—in the new context of the Mediterranean world itself—real limitations to the entire notion ofpolis agrarianism.1
Other challenges were not addressed by the blinkered ideology of hoplite battle. Heroic though it was, the victory at Marathon was not proof that the entire Greek agrarian way of war could continue to function uninterrupted and unquestioned, once Hellenic city-states became interactive in the complexity of politics and wars to their east, south, and west. The technology of the phalanx was designed perfectly for the brief moment of fighting on flatland, in an abbreviated campaign of a few days, between tough farming men who shared the same idea that all killing should start and cease with the presence or absence of heavy infantry. Greek hoplite armies, despite the Athenians’ superior courage at Marathon, were vulnerable in multitudinous ways to outside attack by any opponents who found their rules of killing patently absurd. These hoplite regulations applied to no one except the small farmers of the Greek-speaking world.2
Greek armies, as we have seen in the last two chapters, at this time had no real logistical support. They had no mechanism for subsistence beyond a few days other than sporadic foraging and organized plundering. Without naval coordination, without talented and professional officers, without the incorporation of specialized contingents, there was little chance that Greek hoplites in the first two decades of the fifth century could prevent determined outside aggression. How, without supporting contingents, could they take the offensive on difficult ground or against continual hit-and-run assaults of well-led, integrated mounted and missile troops? Hoplite weaponry was largely useless at sea, a liability on rough terrain. What had appeared in hoplite warfare to be economic and frugal (seeChapter 7), in this quite different and brutal context of simple military efficacy became backward and unsophisticated.
But to shift hoplite warfare away from agriculture, away from its intrinsic parsimony, to meet novel challenges abroad, to turn the undeniable Greek genius loose in devising military technology and innovation, was tantamount to transforming the foundations of the Greek citystates, calling into question the social and political monopoly of the small landowner himself. (There was not even formal Greek military science written before Xenophon [about 400-360 B.C.], although the genre, predictably, soon was to be extremely popular in the Hellenistic age.) Any revolution in Hellenic war was an admission that the Greeks were ready to open their system up and thereby to sacrifice their splendid form of military isolation, their relatively humane hoplite institutions—all in exchange for greater wealth and political power overseas. Understandably, paid killers and mercenaries like Xenophorís ten thousand, not mobilized polis militias, devised ways to use hoplites in Asia.
That dilemma was brought into even sharper focus ten years after the initial Asian probe at Marathon. The Persian onslaught (480-479 B.C.) under Xerxes, son of Darius I, was altogether different from the prior incursion—and more important, dissimilar toeveryGreek battle of the past two centuries in a strategic, tactical, and logistical sense. The Persian army was prodigious. It was no amphibious corps of a few thousand adventurers. An entire city of sorts methodically gobbled up Greek territory as it inched its way south. Even discounting Herodotus’s vastly inflated figures, the enemy must have descended into Greece well over 100,000 strong.3
Their intent, as the veteran Aeschylus reminds us in his play the Persians, was not to inflict a tactical defeat on the battlefield as past hoplite armies had done. The Easterners aimed at no less than the total enslavement and subjection of a race (“They threaten to yoke in servitude Hellas” [Aesch. Pers. 49-50]), an idea either for or against which no Greek phalanx—except the Spartans in Messenia—had ever yet battled. To prepare for and to fight total wars—as the Spartans had also learned in Messenia—had dire consequences for the agrarian ideology of the polis.
The Persian invaders quite naturally scorned “the laws of the Greeks.” In their eyes polis borders were abstractions and local sovereignty irrelevant. They incorporated ambush, bribery, and deceit, recruiting mercenaries and other Greeks into their service. Persian forces marched into Greece in a multiplicity of guises. They had heavy infantry of course, but also equally powerful naval, cavalry, and missile contingents. The new message of warfare inside Greece was clear. When pressed, some Greek farmers would ally themselves with barbarians against other Greeks. Even the patriotic Greek defense was “limited to a minority of states” and “a fragile affair,” composed of “under forty states” whose “loyalty was not constant” (Lazenby 1993:253).
Nor would hoplites any longer be a sufficient protective force for the poleis. Numbers, sailors, tactics, fortification, evacuation, strategy, trickery, and subterfuge were all needed against these new enemies—and needed quickly. Almost overnight they entered the mainstream practice of Greek warfare. Any landed conservative in the city-states still calling for a single hoplite conflict of the old style, for yet another Marathon to bowl over inferior infantry of the East, was not merely misguided but nearly lunatic.
As the Athenians would prove through their evacuation of Attica itself, the hallowed ground of agriculture (and hence by logical extension farmers themselves) could in theory become irrelevant to the survival of the polis—an entity that was to be reformulated for a time in many minds not as the land, but rather solely as the people. The objective for the Greek defenders was to annihilate rather than simply defeat the enemy on land and sea by any means possible that kept population—not land, not temples, nor even agrarian pride—intact.
The centuries-old notion of Greek agrarianism, I believe, never quite recovered from the invasion of Xerxes. Herodotus’s famous observation in his history (written about 430 B.C.) that the Persians had thought Hellenic warfare “absurd” (9.7.2) may in part reflect the Greeks’ notion of Herodotus’s own time: the exclusivity of the hoplite, in their eyes, was already being seen as a glorious, but antiquated, institution.
“New” men arose like Themistocles of Athens and the even more unsavory Spartan commander Pausanias,* These generals understood—even preferred—the Persian concept of total war. In that sense, they were more Eastern than Greek. The legacy of these captains is not the heroic last stand of the Three Hundred at Thermopylae. Nor was their reputation derived from the stunning infantry victory a year later at Plataea (which was fought by the Greeks only after the Athenians, Quisling-like, threatened to make a separate peace [e.g., Hdt. 9.6]).
Their contributions were the wholesale evacuation of the Athenians from their city. They were part of the naval triumph at Salamis by landless Athenian sailors, and the subsequent pursuit by the more adventurous Greeks of the defeated Persians by land and sea. All these developments—for the farmers of Greece disturbing trends cloaked in the general ebullience of national victories—marked the first real departure from and hence challenge to hoplite warfare. Greek naval mobilization was, after all, a dramatic shift from private to public armament, from inexpensive mustering to capital-intensive production.
Plato, the would-be protector of conservative agrarian values, understood that. Over a hundred years later in the fourth century, in a review of past polis history, the philosopher saw the importance of Salamis (480 B.C.). But he advanced the feeble argument in hisLaws that the land victories at Marathon (490 B.C.) and Plataea (479 B.C.) had really saved Greece. The victorious sea-battles were not merely less significant, in his view, but actually “had made the Greeks worse as a people.” To Plato, the deleterious social ramifications of an ascending landless navy who welcomed constant service outweighed simple military efficacy (Leg. 4.707C-E). In his Gorgias, Socrates does not think the Athenian leaders of the post-Persian Wars, those who built the walls, docks, and shipyards, were even worthy of the name of “statesmen.” They had, after all, made the citizens “worse” (Pl. Gorg. 515C-519A). Hoplite battle, as an element of agrarianism itself, had a strong ethical element. It was a means to preserve the culture of the polisand maintain the morality of its citizens. Unlike sea battles, a single collision between phalanxes improved the character of the city-state’s populace. It was a way “to make the Greeks better” (beltious tous Hellênas poiesai; Pl. Leg. 4.707C).
The landless dêmos, Aristotle also thought, “being responsible for the naval victory during the Persian invasion, became taken with itself and chose worthless demagogues whenever the more respectable opposed their policy” (Arist. Pol. 2. 1274a13-16). Understandably, Plato, Aristotle, and later right-wing thinkers saw Salamis as a turning point. The victory there, in some sense an unfortunate “accident” (sumptômma), marked not merely the rise of Athenian naval power, but a critical change of direction in theentire culture of the Greek city-state. In this philosophical view, victory at sea could only give prestige to the landless rowers, and thus power to radical democracy, not to a property-based oligarchy or timocracy.* People who are paid to fight prefer to fight, regardless of the effects of constant warring on their community.
The price of those victories, as Plato knew by the fourth century, had been the slow erosion of the old code of the hoplite. Ascendancy followed for the landless who were bound to inject their own nonagrarian values into the social and political fabric of the Greekpolis—something that could eventually nullify the pristine equation of small farmer/infantryman/lawmaker of the city-state. Even earlier, Aeschylus had clung to the myth of hoplite superiority when he wrote that Greece’s was a victory of “the Dorian spear” over the Asian bow—as if the heroic stand and assault of the Spartan hoplites at the battle of Plataea (479 B.C.), not the seamanship of his own democratic compatriots, was proof of the superiority of the Greek landed infantry (Pers. 816; cf. Pers. 85-86; 147-49; 238-45). But both Aeschylus and Plato later realized that the status of hoplites—and all that went with it—was not enhanced during the Persian Wars, despite their spectacular success at Marathon and Plataea.
Polis political ferment about the Greek victory over Persia is seen in the fabricated saga that hoplites had actually played a “decisive” role during the sea battle of Salamis, by spearing drowned Persian sailors (Fornara 51-54). Aristotle even thought that if navies were necessary for the survival of the polis, there must be found some mechanism to avoid enfranchising the landless, the so-called sailor crowd (ho nautikos ochlos). In his view, they did not deserve citizenship. Triremes could just as well be manned by agrarians in their off season (Pol. 7.1327b8-16).
Even at the two pitched hoplite battles of the Persian Wars—Marathon (490 B.C.) and Plataea (479 B.C.)—despite the enormous disparities in casualties, the margin of Greek victory was slim, and the verdict for a time in doubt. It is forgotten just how hard-pressed the Greeks were at Plataea, a battle where the Persian use of cavalry, manipulation of terrain, inclusion of Boeotian Greeks, and incorporation of archers and fortified positions confused and stymied the defending Greek infantry for days. The reluctance of Greek hoplites to abide strictly by their old protocols in the face of such an enormous and variegated force illustrated the newfound poverty of their old agrarian ritual. The initial and wise Spartan reluctance to face the various Persian masses on unfavorable ground prompted their commander Mardonius to poke fun at the Greeks’ abandonment of their old way of deciding wars. In a mock challenge of sorts, he called the bluff of the Spartan contingent at Plataea:
Lacedaemonians, you are said to be bravest of men by those who live in these parts, drawing praise because you never run away from battle, nor leave your rank, but instead stay put until you die in your places or you destroy your enemies. But there is not one bit of truth in all this. Before the battle has even begun, before the two sides have met in the hand-to- hand, we have seen you running away and pulling up from your deployments, as you try to have the Athenians make the first trial against us, while you yourselves fight against our slaves. In no way is all this the work of brave men. And so instead we have been deceived in our appraisal of you. For according to general report, we expected that you would send a herald to us, proposing that you would fight us Persians one-to-one. And we for our part were ready to do just that, but now we have surmised you are doing no such thing. Indeed, you are instead cowering in fear before us. Now, since you do not offer up any challenge, a challenge we shall offer to you. Since you are reported to be the bravest of your people, why do not we fight one another in equal number, you on behalf of the Greeks, we for the barbarians? And if it seems wise also that others should join in on the fighting, let them do just that after we are through. But if it should seem better that we two alone should decide the entire issue, let us then fight it out; whichever side should win, these men will win the battle for all of the respective armies.*
No wonder one of the old die-hard Spartan regiment commanders, Amompharetos, later refused to budge when ordered to make a tactical withdrawal by Pausanias to more favorable ground. Like many other Greek hoplites, he must have wished to take the Persian Mardonius up on his demeaning dare of ritual battle. The Spartans’ (primitive enough) adoption of an articulation of forces, tactical feints, and rearrangement of troops were all blasphemous to the creed that men in bronze should draw up, charge, and fight until one side collapsed, nothing more, nothing less.4
The final victory over Persia at Mycale (479 B.C.) on the coast of Asia Minor reveals a similar challenge to hoplite dominance. While neighboring Greek hoplites in Ionia had played a role in the battle’s outcome, troops from the Greek mainland and the islands had to be transported there by sea. To reach the battlefield, marines and amphibious troops were dependent not merely on their armor-carrying agrarian slaves, but also on the free poor who powered the triremes of the polis. That combined naval-infantry operation at Mycale set the example for the Greeks in the Aegean for nearly 150 years.
In the aftermath of the Persian invasion and defeat (479 B.C.), there was, as is so common after any great social and cultural upheaval, a conscious and deliberate reactionary return to normality. We hear of a series of fifthcentury “wars” among Greek city-states decided in the old agrarian way by single traditional standoffs between willing city-states at Dipaea (471 B.C.), Tanagra and Oinophyta (457 B.C.), and first Coroneia (447 B.C.).
But stones were thrown into the private hoplite pond by the Persian experience. The multifarious lessons of the invasion of Xerxes rippled out in a variety of unpredictable manifestations—all eventually lethal to the hoplite agrarian code. The Persian Wars marked the most significant event in Greek history. Not only was foreign tyranny repelled in 480/479 B.C., but just as important, the military and agrarian protocols of the city-states were shown to be wanting, and from then on were irrevocably altered. In short, just as the second World War ended the isolation and parochialism of American society, so too the Persian Wars drew Greece into the maelstrom of the Mediterranean and in the process overturned the accepted norms inside the polis itself.
Finally, these military challenges of the age did not reflect prior or even concurrent social instability within the Greek polis. Before 490 B.C. farming chauvinism and agrarian government were normative ideologies, and navies organized of the politically estranged were rare. The Persian invasions were not consequences of prior assaults on the cosmos of the agrarian poleis, but rather were catalysts of change.
From this point on, a cyclical pattern—military novelty, conservative reaction, then greater change—prevails in the Greek city-states, reflecting the new ambiguous cause-and-effect relationship between Greek warfare and social transformation: at periods in the fifth century martial challenges question traditional Greek social and political values; at other times, preexisting tensions within the polis become manifest only on the battlefield.
Hoplite Warfare. The Third Stage (431-404 B.C.)
The two victorious city-states of the Persian Wars, Athens and Sparta, had both learned of the attractions of hegemony. As would-be Persian dynasts, they were beginning informally between 480 and 460 B.C. to align the other Greek poleis into two opposing armed leagues. The reactionary Spartan idea that polis culture really meant a utopia of friendly unwalled communities,* all deliberately vulnerable to the march of a hoplite phalanx (hers being, of course, preeminent) was never in the mid- and later fifth century taken too seriously outside the Peloponnese. Despite her excellence in infantry, Sparta was never a shining example of Greek agrarianism. She was, after all, a somewhat deviant polis; the equation between free food-producer, lawmaker, and hoplite had been retarded through the presence of various castes of indentured servants and a general repugnance for farm work on the part of her elite paramilitary Spartiate warriors.
The bipolarity caused by the rift between Athens and Sparta in itself need not have been injurious to the fragility of this Greek way of war. After all, constant tension between matched powers can promote a conservative, even reactionary stability all around. Unfortunately for the agrarian culture of the old Greek polis, however, Athens and Sparta were both atypical—and powerful—city-states (a fact which in itself suggests greater economic and military power might ensue if mainstream agrarianism wassubverted!).The two were communities unlike Argos, Thebes, or even Corinth and Syracuse, and unlike the hundreds of smaller, less-known agricultural poleis. In their radically different views of society, both Sparta on the right of the agrarian norm and Athens to the left did ironically share at least one notion: free agriculture, the polis of small independent landowners, and traditional agrarianism itself were no longer to be necessary for the military, social, political, or even economic life of Greek communities. Both city-states realized that full-time farmers in a phalanx were a hindrance to the projection of offensive power, which had suddenly become attractive in the Mediterranean vacuum created by the retrenchment of Persia.
The numerous subjects of the growing Athenian maritime empire, an inheritance from the Persians, were in one sense like the indentured helot servants at Sparta. Both Athenian and Spartan underlings ensured that their respective masters could fight year-round if need be, without worries over lost time on the farm or the requirement—physical, spatial, spiritual—to enshrine agriculture, and the preservation of those who farmed, at the center of conflict. There was a tradition at Athens that some twenty thousand of her citizens gained an off-farm livelihood from the defense of the empire, capital acquisition that was directly or indirectly involved in military expenditure.5
Equally injurious to the hoplite monopoly, both Athens and Sparta in the years after the Persian Wars possessed no mechanism for ending their growing rivalry decisively and quickly. Neither side—Athens less than Sparta—would adhere to the old hoplite constraints, which defined war making as single pitched battles. Like their ancestors at the battle of Salamis, the Athenians of the mid-fifth century had the constant option, and the inclination, to withdraw from the challenge of pitched land battle in order to put their confidence in their fleet, and to transform her hoplites into a completely new type of soldier. The arch-conservative of the fourth century, Plato, complained of this new practice in his Laws. He disliked intensely the idea that hoplite marines had become accustomed to jumping on shore and then running back at full speed to their ships: “And they see no shame in not dying gallantly in rank when the enemies attack” (Pl. Leg. 4.706B-C).
Like their own infantry predecessors at Thermopylae and Plataea, the Spartans unimaginatively thought they could wait until an adversary inevitably chose to face their own feared professional hoplites. Triremes did not pose much threat to landlocked Laconia and her environs in the Peloponnese, and the Spartans had others to work their ground back home should a new war call for campaigning beyond a few days’ march. Sparta’s chief worry in the new strategy of hegemonic warfare was to convince her traditional agrarian allies throughout the Peloponnese to leave their farms to march alongside her in a grand invasion to the north.
Both cultures could prevent losing a war. But neither Athens nor Sparta knew how to win such a novel conflict quickly and decisively. The progression and escalation of their fighting took it at each step, in each year of their twenty-seven-year ordeal, further and further from the old agrarian ideal of war as a single infantry encounter. At war’s end, Sparta had fashioned a competent navy, and Athens had developed effective seaborne infantry forces.
As each polis sought to increase its navies and its non-hoplite land forces, heavy infantry in phalanxes became more and more marginal. The phalanx was always incidental, never essential, to ultimate victory. At Athens the decline of traditional hoplite infantry was acknowledged by historians and became a favorite topic of late fifth-century and early fourth-century conservatives,6 Aristophanes railed against the youth of his day who could not even hold their shields chest-high, and Andocides remarked that now old men were forced to fight, while young men made speeches (Ar. Nub. 987-90; Andoc. Alcib. 22). It is no surprise that in Aristophanes’ Frogs (about 405 B.C.) the old veteran of Marathon Aeschylus is made to long for the Athenian hoplites of the early fifth century, “six-foot noble men” who “breathed spears and white-erested helmets,” so unlike the “runaways, market-loungers, scum, and trouble-makers” of the poet’s own day (Ran. 1014-16).
The great sea-battles of the Peloponnesian War were often fought between ships manned not merely with the poor, but also powered by mercenary, resident alien, and frequently slave rowers. This shift posed the embarrassing challenge to the hierarchy of anypoliswith a substantial navy: if sea-power, not hoplite infantry, was now critical for victory, if the disenfranchised or less prestigious rowers were to be crucial for the salvation of the polis, why should hoplites enjoy greater political privilege and social esteem ?7
Almost all the major battles of the twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War were fought either at sea or close to the shore, and required traditional land powers, such as Thebes and Sparta, to build navies themselves—with all the accompanying social repercussions in their respective city-states, with all the problems of raising capital and levying taxes for public armament and extensive crews. Mindful of that erosion in the hoplite ethos, Argos once proposed to Sparta in the middle of their long conflict (418 B.C.) that both sides might resolve their dispute over the borderland of the Thyreatis by an old-style formal pitched battle, with pursuit of the defeated not being allowed into the interior of either country. But the Spartans initially considered the notion “silly” (môria). The proposal was never adhered to by either side (Thuc. 5.41).
If Argos and Sparta—conservative military regimes par excellence—could not turn the clock back on Greek warfare, no other poleis had much chance. Sparta by the end of the Peloponnesian War was plundering, raiding, and using non-hoplite troops as frequently as any other Greeks. The great majority of her rowers were either slaves or hired mercenaries.
Even the projection of military power on land during the Peloponnesian War was often just as antithetical to the exclusivity of hoplite battle. Expeditions composed not only of heavy infantry, but also of light-armed skirmishers, javelin men, and archers were sent far from the old killing grounds of the past. These mongrel forces were deployed in the most unlikely of places: the rigorous terrain of Aetolia, the wooden brush of Pylos and Sphacteria, the siegeworks at Plataea, and on the islands of Lesbos, Melos, Sicily, and elsewhere. In these environments hoplite phalanxes, drawn up and fighting strictly in the old style, were almost useless. In the Peloponnesian War alone there were at least nine major occasions for the use of siege engines, and even more frequent expensive and lengthy circumvallations of fortified cities and citadels. Since both Sparta and Athens deemed it worthwhile to fight on novel and unusual fronts, the acquisition of light-armed skirmishers, mercenaries, sailors, and besiegers were all necessary.8 Save for a few isolated small battles (e.g., Solygeia, first Syracuse [Thuc. 4-42; 6.69-70]), hoplites held center stage only at the dramatic encounters at Delium (424 B.C. [Thuc. 4.89-101]) and Mantineia (418 B.C. [5.68-74]).
Both antagonists of the Peloponnesian War also possessed men for the times, a generation of especially gifted, enterprising, and original thinkers, eager to put into practice their unusual theories that grew out of the Persian experience. Here I do not mean the imaginative Themistocles, Cimon, and Pausanias, veterans themselves of the Persian wars, or even Pericles, the strategic successor to Themistocles. I refer to a host of less well-known, but far more capable second- and third-generation military minds, who saw martial opportunity not merely on the periphery of infantry battle, but rather altogether outside the traditional amateurism of hoplite practice. These were captains like Brasidas of Sparta, who in the company of hardened veterans and enfranchised helots organized real strategic campaigns up and down the Greek peninsula. Demosthenes of Athens mastered the art of the light-armed skirmisher and mountain guerrilla. Gyllipus, Lysander, and succeeding Spartan naval commanders integrated both sea and land troops, and employed slaves and mercenaries in a series of campaigns far beyond the borders of Laconia. Finally, Alcibiades, student of Socrates, saw that the new war involved few of the old ideas worth fighting for, least of all the preservation of the insular (and boring) world of the Greek agriculturalists, who had held together the fabric of the Greek city-state for so long.9
The hoplite remained the martial ideal. But from 431 B.C. on, most fighting was increasingly far less heroic, fought more at sea, around city walls, and in rough terrain than on “the smoothest and fairest plain.” In his speech to the Athenian assembly on the eve of the disastrous expedition to Sicily, Alcibiades reminded the audience that throughout the Peloponnesian War Greek city-states had usually lied about the size of their hoplite forces—in reality they always had turned out smaller than they had boasted (Thuc. 6.17.5-6). The phalanx was something every polis bragged about, but sailors, mercenaries, and skirmishers were now more likely to see action.
The brightest minds in the Greek poleis welcomed, rather than resisted, the military revolution that destroyed the older hoplite proviso, a revolution that was necessary to wage war on a Mediterranean scale. This willingness to take up the challenge of overseas campaigning makes perfect human sense. For in the old world of amateur farmer-hoplite, there had been no place for military ingenuity and preeminence, no outlet for talent on the confined battlefield of a few acres. Command had brought no commensurate social status or opportunity for wealth. Is it surprising that under the changing conditions of the late fifth and fourth centuries these generals of (mostly poorer) light-armed troops were themselves from the wealthier classes? Like the landless men they led from the opposite end of the social scale, the upper echelon had little vested interest in maintaining the exclusivity of hoplite battle and the middling farmers who fought with it.
Somehow, for more than two centuries, the farmers of ancient Greece, in their inherent dislike and distrust of command structure and military hierarchy, had foreseen that the genius of the gifted when misapplied to the battlefield could result only in glory for a few, death for many, and expense for all. The orator Demosthenes pointed out the failings of generals in his own era during the mid and late fourth century when the military mean, like its agrarian twin, was on the wane. Athenian commanders were now to be put on trial numerous times for graft and sedition, “but not one of them,” Demosthenes complained, “dares risk death in battle against the enemy. No, not even once.” He nostalgically concludes: “Generals should die fighting the enemy (apothanein machomenon tois polemiois)” (Dem. 4.47). Generals now, like large estate owners, had other agendas outside the blinkered world of the farmer-hoplite.
Hoplite Warfare. Its Fourth and Last Stage (404-338 B.C.)
In the aftermath of Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War (404 B.C.), there was, as after the Persian Wars, a reactionary revival of the age of pitched battle. In the early fourth century farmers, after all, still constituted the bulk of most Greek city-states’ citizen population. Phalanxes were always terrifying military spectacles. In the post-war exhaustion, disputes over border territory and local hegemony reappeared as part of the military landscape of the polis. Perhaps the internecine slaughter of the Peloponnesian War was seen by many Greeks as the tragic consequence of deviance from hoplite battle.
But, as with the hoplite battles of the post-Persian War era nearly a century earlier, the second return in the first half of the fourth century to military conservatism of landed infantry was also largely illusory. True enough, major hoplite battles such as Nemea (394B.C.), second Coroneia (394 B.C.), Leuctra (371 B.C.) and Mantineia (362 B.C.) were classic, stand-up affairs—all predictably involving the red-cloaked Spartan mossbacks. The literary descriptions of these antiquated encounters within the pages of Xenophon, Plutarch, and Diodorus provide our standard accounts of what the older, unrecorded contests of the previous three centuries must have been like. As isolated events in themselves, these hoplite battles must have been largely unchanged from their original form.
But during the fourth century as a whole, hoplite clashes were the exception, not the rule, of Greek military conflict. Fighting on land became far more expansive, as tedious as it was inconclusive. Even in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, even in the general disgust at the slaughter that the “new” warfare had brought, hoplite decay nevertheless accelerated! The more the fourth century Greeks fought and killed savagely, barbarically and without honor for things other than farmland, in places other than on farms, with men other than farmers, the more untenable the primacy of farmers became!*
Entrepreneur warriors of the fourth century fought and even lived abroad.* They plundered to pay their mercenary troops, and employed without distinction heavy and light infantry, missile men, marines, and naval contingents as the particular occasion demanded. Their more random and frequent slaughters lacked the formality and solemnity of the old hoplite clashes. These engagements also gave little opportunity or need for public commemoration or the Panhellenic dedication of votives. What was there worth commemorating? After all, under the prior dominant military ethos, on-again, off-again fights in a complexity of environments were hardly honorable or worthy of remembrance. The javelin wound through the brush, the anonymous arrow taken on the rampart, the rock to the face at the bottom of a canyon were not at all like the hoplite’s sea of spears, farmers head-to-head, friend and family at the side, flat, clear ground beneath the feet. But the incessant skirmishing and plundering did offer some opportunities for cash and the accumulation of both personal power and prestige.
Between Mantineia (362 B.C.) and Chaironeia (338 B.C.) there was apparently no major hoplite encounter in Greece. The twenty-four-year hiatus was marked by unending light-armed skirmishing, trickery, mercenaries, sieges, fighting at sea, civil insurrection, and simple capitulation. After the establishment of the Athenian ephobia in the later fourth century—the formal training of Athenian youth for guard duty and rural patrols—each youth was to said to have sworn that he would protect the wheat, barley, vines, olives, and fig trees of Attica. That declaration of agrarian fealty would not have been necessary under the old hoplite code. Then all citizens took for granted that the defense of the polis was simply the defense of farmland.10
The introduction of special training and service for Athenian youth in the fourth century was ironic. The more reluctant Athens became to send out in pitched battles an agrarian hoplite infantry (who required essentially no training), the more it devoted scarce resources to drill and march its young patrollers. The statesman Phocion’s complaints about Athenian reticence in opposing Philip reflected the financial complexity of Greek warfare, once its agrarian core of doughty farmers was lost. He advised that the Athenians could make war on the Macedonians only when “I know that young men are ready to do their military service, when rich men are ready to pay their taxes, and when orators are ready to avoid embezzling public funds” (Plut. Phoc. 23). As we will see in the next chapter, Athens was deliberately attempting to mold her hoplite forces to a role more in tune with democratic thinking, more flexible in meeting diverse foreign challenges—that is, away from a traditional agrarian mission to fight pitched battles on and over farmland among like communities. But, as we will also learn, to alter the military tradition of the polis often encouraged avoidance of military service, comprehensive taxation, and the prominence of capital in military planning. Change the military arm of the city-state to meet new challenges, and the entire ideological framework of the polis fell apart.
Notice that hoplite battle—rare as it was becoming in the latter fourth century—essentially changed little over some four centuries: no formation, foreign or domestic, could yet withstand the direct onslaught of a phalanx. As we have seen, the heavily armed Greek infantryman on the field of Leuctra in 371, once he squared off in the phalanx against a similarly arranged adversary, would have felt at home—strategy, tactics, and spirit—among the ranks of his ancestors at the battle of Hysiae (669 B.C.). The evolution in Greek warfare on land from the fifth century onward was largely a result of incorporation and adoption of other more specialized forms of fighting and a consequence of an enormous increase in military manpower. Even conservative Xenophon’s fourth-century ideal was not just a rectangular box of brave farmers, but a composite army where “hoplites, cavalry, peltasts, bowmen, and slingers march in complete harmony to the orders of their leaders” (Xen. Oec. 8.6; cf. Plut. Mor. 440B).
The mechanics of hoplite battle, perfect in form and spirit at birth for its stated objective, changed little. They were simply bypassed. Ultimately the agrarian phalanx was made irrelevant, as the mission of Greek soldiers was transformed from fighting over contested borderland to all-out war with foreign invaders, would-be conquerors, plunderers, and pirates over cities, booty, tribute, taxes, and spheres of economic and political influence. In this regard, the Greek agrarian militiaman was increasingly shown wanting in two important ways: (1) the style of fighting in the phalanx was now too one-dimensional, and required augmentation and support from a variety of other forces who were not always citizens of the city-state; (2) for the sheer numbers that were required on the various fronts in the constant fighting of the fourth century, the supply of small farmers in the Greek poleis was simply not enough to meet the demand.* Of this new compartmentalization and specialization in Greek warfare, Xenophon could observe that the fourth-century Spartan phalanx was still preeminent among any foolish enough to meet it in pitched battle with hoplite spear and shield. But he conceded that even the Spartans would now have little success against Scythian bowmen or skilled Thracian targeteers (Mem. 3.9.2-3).
Another closely connected sign of the revolutionary military upheaval in the fourth century—one with fundamental ramifications for the autonomy of free and agrarian citizen militias—was the steady decline of private ownership and individual control of battle weaponry. As the hoplite’s farm no longer guaranteed social, economic, and political superiority, so too his panoply lost its exalted status. The rise of the mercenary movement and the decline of yeoman phalanxes led to mass arming of paid infantry armies by the state. Sometimes we hear of confiscation of private citizen arms, the creation of vast armories, or the wholesale on-the-spot outfitting of entire armies. Possession of a agricultural plot no longer gave the farmer either the sole economic ability to buy the panoply or the social privilege to do so. As early as the late fifth century Hermocrates at Syracuse had advised that his Sicilian polis equip those who were without hoplite gear (paraskeuasôsi to hoplitikon hois te hopla mê estin; Thuc. 6.72.4), as if this largess were now to be expected. The fourth and third centuries saw only increases in this trend, as the phalanx took on a professional, nonagrarian character.11
Hoplite phalanxes pristine to the outside observer, on the inside by the fourth century were experiencing an insidious incorporation of noncitizens and mercenaries into their ranks (cf. Parke 46-48). This hybridization might explain the reluctance of infantry in the fourth century to march out over borderland to determine an entire war. Farmers probably continued to make up the majority of fighters in the phalanx, but, given the demands on manpower, others were there as well, at democratic Athens most particularly. Athenian diversity apparently reflected the growing irrelevance of the old farm-based census rubrics and revealed the de facto divorce between social and military status, the increasing unimportance of land ownership as the key to the city’s defense. No development was more lethal to the notion of the city-state than the end to the yeoman/infantryman equation.
Isocrates believed that it was easier in the fourth century to gather an army of outsiders than it was to muster a force from the polis proper (cf. 8.41ff)—an indication that there were many Greeks who fit not at all into the old agrarian hoplite rubric. Those who did were increasingly either unable or unwilling to shoulder alone the defense of the city-state. Xenophon, in his Ways and Means (about 355 B.C.), urged that resident aliens no longer be used for Athenian hoplite service. Harkening back to Athens’ glorious infantry past, he advised: “The polis would benefit if the citizens served with one another in the army rather than with others such as Lydians, Phrygians, Syrians, and barbarians of all types—of whom a significant portion of the resident alien population consists. Besides the advantage of not using these people for military service, it would also in its own right be a fitting thing if Athenians should believe it better to fight their battle themselves rather than relying on the help of foreigners” (Vect. 2.3). In fact, at Athens in the late fifth and fourth centuries, resident aliens and foreigners took an increasingly important role in the city’s land (and naval) defense—even though they usually did not own land and did not enjoy full citizenship rights.* In his Hiero, Xenophon even advised putting mercenaries at the front of the phalanx (10.6). Both their training and their expendability made them the most likely candidates to face the greatest dangers. In the new polis, the safer middle and rear ranks, not the cutting edge, were the preferred spots for scarcer citizen soldiers.
There is also evidence that land ownership, membership in the so-called zeugitai class at Athens—even as early as 440-430 B.C.—was no longer any guarantee that one fought as a hoplite. Why else would defense taxes at Athens be assessed on a man’s military occupation—cavalry, hoplite, archer—rather than on his more formal census classification (pentakosiomedimnoi, hippeis, zeugitai, thêtes)? Why else would troops at Athens on the eve of the Peloponnesian War be described solely in military rather than economic rubrics?
How else could someone as urbanized and reputedly poor as Socrates have fought as a hoplite at the battles of Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis? Similarly, in the comic playwright Aristophanes’ Peace, the Attic geôrgoi complain that they are singled out for the most frequent hoplite duty, while their urban counterparts manipulate the muster rolls, and so serve less. Aristophanes adds that the city folk are largely “shield tossers”—yet another probable indication that by this time the Athenian hoplite phalanx was composed of both landed and nonlanded (Ar. Pax ll81-90).12
This conversion from an agrarian to cash qualification to no qualification at all must have been nearly ubiquitous by the fourth century when the phalanx became even more composite. Then the orator Demosthenes warned his Athenian audience in his First Olynthiac that an expedition abroad for thirty days would especially hurt “those of you who are farmers.” He was in fact probably acknowledging that not all in the hoplite ranks were so employed (1.27). Plato also complained about the absence of formalized hoplite training, arguing that it was illogical to expect a farmer or cobbler simply to pick up a shield and become a soldier that day (Resp. 2.374D). He, at least, must have felt that farmers and tradesmen had been doing precisely that for years as hoplites. Aristotle in his Politics acknowledged that because of the inflation and the increasing monetization of the polis economy, the old property qualifications had to be continually readjusted (5.1308a35-40). His concern suggests that, even for political and social purposes, stratification of the citizenry by wealth was becoming increasingly complex.
In some cases by the late fifth and fourth centuries, when men were needed quickly, even these nonagrarian cash standards for Athenian hoplite service were either unenforced or not uniformly applied. That may be why we hear of hoplite infantry armed and outfitted either publicly by Athens and other poleis or by wealthy private citizens. There was also the notion on certain occasions in the ever-growing complexity of the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath, that one’s social status or economic condition didnotalways determine one’s role on the battlefield. Plato remarked of the wide variance in social and economic background in the ranks: “Very often a tough, sunburnt poor man (penês) is stationed in battle (paratachtheis en machê) along side a shade-reared wealthy man (plousiô)” (Resp.8.556D). The egalitarian ranks of the old agrarian phalanx were rapidly vanishing as centuries of tradition and stability were abandoned.
Fluidity and imprecision in recruitment may be further reflected in a variety of circumstances. There were occasional calls to “make the thêtes into hoplites” (Antiphon fr. B6). Various references appear to me tics and foreigners who served in the Athenian army as hoplites with heavy armor. The reverse also occurred, those above thetic (landless) status being used as rowers on ships. There was an apparent absence of class distinction for entry into the Athenian ephebia, where all citizens became “hoplites” of sorts by the public gift of the shield and spear. Slaves were mustered on both land and sea. Wealthy knights (hippeis) served on foot as hoplites and even as light-armed troops and rowers at sea. Specialized and better trained contingents (epilektoi), not mustered militias, were a commander’s first choice of troops.13
In theory, at late fifth-century Athens, census rubrics and economic status still determined political and military service. In practice, ambiguity and improvisation were the norms. Athenian heavy infantry was by the late fifth and fourth centuries no longer necessarily a social institution per se. More often the phalanx was a purely military asset, one outfitted with available armor and manpower, increasingly without special cultural or political significance, one open to those who were not citizens and those who were not landowning yeomen (zeugitai).
If, in a crisis, the Greek polis of the fourth century needed hoplites, it could (most drastically) either buy the arms and outfit the available men without precise reference to formal census registers, or it could induce a rough muster among the general population based on simple age groups rather than careful attention to the accuracy of those enrolled on the hoplite catalogues. As the agrarian exclusivity of the polis army further eroded, hoplite service was probably more and more idealized (and, as Alcibiades saw, exaggerated) by all classes—pentakosiomedimnoi, hippeis, zeugitai, and thêtes—and increasingly the private domain of none.
Although the democracy at Athens may have been the most anti-agrarian of the city-states and sought deliberately to integrate hoplite-landowners into the more egalitarian fabric of her military forces, there is no reason to believe that other poleis did not similarly adapt to the tactical, strategic, and manpower challenges of the new Greek warfare in the fourth century. Agesilaus in Asia Minor had wealthy men supply both a rider and a horse to form his cavalry contingent, not surprising when the Spartans had been employing slaves and mercenaries in their fleet for years.*
This growing separation between farming and infantry service is well illustrated much later by a poignant letter of Alciphron: “Do not go off on military service, boy, but come back to us and enjoy a life of peace. Farming is safe and without danger. It has no armed bands, ambushes, or phalanxes” (Alciphr. 3.16). And he captures well the post-polis separation between farmer and hoplite with the description of the braggart soldier who bores the rural folk with tales of gore and killing (3.36).
Menander (who often idealized the waning agrarian code of his times) in the late fourth century had also written in a lost play that “man’s true goal is excellence in war, farmer’s work is that of a slave,” which also suggests the increasing gulf between the two occupations (fr. 647 Kock). The old nexus between agriculture and warfare was ending in the polis. To the agriculturalist, farming should have “no phalanxes.” To the warrior, the “farmer’s work is that of a slave.” More and more the disequilibrium resembled the atypical communities such as Sparta, Crete, and Macedonia where yeomanry had long been disconnected from fighting, where city-states had been retarded for centuries.
A few anecdotes about the usual relationship between agriculture and warfare in those environments recall their long time perversion of traditional polis values. The early Cretan poet Hybrias had bragged that in his “great spear and sword lies my wealth, and in my fine shield, a screen for the body. With these, I plough; with these, I reap; and it is with these I trample out sweet wine from the vine.” So far, so good. The lyric poet Archilochus, after all, had said about the same thing (e.g., fr. 2). But then Hybrias adds something quite peculiar: “It is for these that I am called master of the serfs, who dare not endure the spear and the sword and the fine shield, a screen for the body. All fall down, grasping my knee and calling me master and Great King” (Athen. 15.695f-696a). Despite the social conservatism of Plato and his disapproval of the fourth-century polis, the philosopher had a natural affection for radically authoritarian regimes like those found in Hybrias’ Crete. In the Republic the penalty for the soldier who deserts his post is reduction to the farm-working class (Pl. Resp. 5.468A; cf. Arist. Pol. 6.1328b6-24)!
Military service was often employed in nonagrarian regimes to preserve serfdom. It did not ensure freedom for the toilers in the field. An anecdote about the youth of the secret police (krupteria) at Sparta is grisly: “The young Spartan krupteria actually went through the fields where the helots were working and killed the strongest of them” (Plut. Lyc. 28.3-5). Excellence in farming was rewarded with murder by those who had no occupation at all other than war (e.g., Plut. Mor 214.A72). A Spartiate himself might be prohibited by law from tilling his own ground. At Crete farmers and soldiers were such separate entities that the former were not even allowed into the gymnasia. Despite the vaunted reputation of the Spartan phalanx, by the fourth century perhaps less than ten percent of its men were full Spartiate citizens, a society that fielded no troops at the Greeks’ last gasp at Chaironeia (338 B.C.).*
Whenever, wherever polis agrarianism was retarded, armed militias were not composed of free citizen agriculturalists, and so soldiers served as a repressive, not a liberating, force for those Greeks who actually produced food. This Spartan, Cretan, and Thessalian tendency—rejected by most of the normative city-states in the polis-period—was in Hellenistic times soon to be characteristic of Greece as a whole. From a fragment of the historian Theopompus, who like any Greek was concerned about the traditional bridge between farming and fighting, we are told of the Macedonian cavalry: “I believe that the Companions, who were not more than 800 in number at that time, enjoyed the produce of more land than 10,000 owners of the best and most extensive land in Greece” (FGrH115 fr.225; cf Glotz 1927: 341). Dark-Age horse culture loomed again on the Greek horizon. Not only was farmland to be used less intensively in an agricultural sense, but militarily it was less productive as well. Land was to produce eight hundred knights—not its true potential of twelve times that number in tough yeomen infantry. And so the historic relationship between farming and fighting was lost, as Greek infantry could no longer be counted on as a stabilizing and egalitarian force in the countryside.
One reason for the collapse of hoplite warfare was the inherent limitations—in actual numbers and tactics—of self-armed, small farmers as sole protectors of the evolving Greek city-state. Throughhout this account I have rejected the seemingly most obvious cause of hoplite decline, the advent of the fearsome horsemen of Philip II and his professional phalangites or the rise of an isolationist “defensive mentality” among the “exhausted” Greeks themselves. Ostensibly, the polis hoplites who went down like magnificent stags on the battlefield at Chaironeia (338 B.C.) signaled the end of the free city-state, and with its demise, the obsolescence of the hoplite phalanx itself.
Philip’s professionals, infantry with frightful pikes of fourteen feet and more, and cavalry who chose to fight year-round if possible, doomed the hoplite code and the hope of the city-state itself. But surely the advent of Macedonian phalangites was also symptomatic, the last, fatal expression of the more serious virus deracinating Greek agrarianism. The phalanxes of Thebes and Athens nearly won at Chaeroneia (338 B.C.), but such a victory in itself—Demosthenes’ views notwithstanding—would not have ensured the end of the Macedonian threat and the continued autonomy of the city-state. The problem lay inside the Greek polis itself, not at Macedon. It was arguably no greater a danger to southern Greece than were the unsuccessful Persian invaders of years past. This growing crisis of the Greek city-state was inherently structural and thus inevitable. It was not solely generational, much less the product of a corrupted fourth-century citizenry: Greek city-states had needed for decades in the fourth century a great number of paid men to fight long and hard in a variety of corps; but to do that, they had learned, under-mined their entire ideology of the citizen hoplite, the backbone of the polis system itself. The hoplites that battled Philip at Chaironeia were just as brave as their ancestors who slaughtered the Persians at Plataea; but the hopes and responsibilities of the city-state were no longer in their hands alone.
The moment agrarian heavy infantrymen lost their supremacy in the Greek mind, social, political, and economic prestige was bound to be given to any who took their special place (e.g., Pl. Leg. 4.706C-707D; Arist. Pol.7.1327b3-17). Here the dilemma was that on the new battle-field thousands, not one particular class or military corps—horsemen, light-armed, technicians, mercenaries, missile men—might enter the fray in lieu of the phalanx. These men usually wanted cash, not the public’s thanks, commemoration on stone, or a few words of stirring eulogy at year’s end. There was neither to be a royal polis of loyal wealthy cavalrymen nor an egalitarian patriotic society of rowers and skirmishers, but simply no polis at all. The chaos of the battlefield reflected the social dis-equilibrium within the disintegrating agrarian city-state. Isocrates (4.146) remarked that the Ten Thousand Greek mercenaries who marched into Asia at the end of the fifth century—military and logistical innovators par excellence—were not so much selected for their nerve, imagination, and skill as much as for their own unsuitability as citizens in their home poleis, men left entirely out of the traditional agrarian matrix. Once agrarian militia ended—as it had to end in the complex economy and society of the fourth-century Mediterranean—the entire protective mechanism of the Greek city-state lay wide open.
Philip—no agrarian adherent of the traditional city-state—had a natural affinity for picking and choosing a multitude of militarily efficacious corps, for transforming diverse units into a coherent military whole. In the strict military sense, that conglomeration of diverse fighters was for a time successful. It resulted not only in increased tactical and strategic options, but also in the short term succeeded in unifying diverse classes and statuses into a loyal mass without the landed chauvinism of the hoplite census. His fighters were not a polis now, but one enormous quasi-Dark-Age clan, a Grand Army on the move whose motley, mongrel underlings swore devotion to their king, a man of mythic stature rather than of commonplace agrarian proportions. Macedonian battle success did not derive, as is sometimes argued, from emulation of the culture of polis infantry. Its dynamism grew out of a complete repudiation of Greek yeomanry, a rejection not only of big shields, short spears, and hoplite snobbery, but a repugnance for the ideology that the battlefield should enhance and reinforce agrarian egalitarianism itself.
The central cause of the decline of hoplite warfare had little to do with braver or more bellicose foreign enemies. The problem lay, as we will explore further in the following chapter, with the inherent limitations of the Greek city-states themselves as players on the wider panorama of Mediterranean life, with the sheer stasis, with the very rigidity of the polis.
But was that dilemma not always the price of Greek agrarianism?
*On occasions where legions fought as phalanxes, see Strabo 7.3.17; Caes. Bell. Afr, 15.3; cf. Wheeler 1979: 314-18. On the Western preference for decisive battle, see Hanson 1989: 218-28.
*See various passages in Herodotus: for Greek parochialism, Hdt. 1.29-30; 59; for Greek views of those who were not armored and who did not relish shock warfare, Hdt. 5.49.5; 7.211.2; 9.62.3-9.63.3, cf. 6.112; for primacy of heavy infantry at Marathon, Hdt. 6.113-117; cf. Wardman 49-52; for late Spartan arrival at Marathon, Hdt. 6.120.
**On the Greek ebullience after Marathon, see Aesch. Pers. 25-32; 52-57; 85-86; 147-49; 278; 728-29; 817; on the Persian cavalry at Marathon, see Hignett 1963: 68-70; Lazenby 1993: 60-61.
*For the Ionian revolt, see various passages in Herodotus: Hdt. 5.49-50, 6.7, 44, 49; cf. 9.6.
*Appropriately nicknamed “Odysseus” (Plut. Mor. 869A; Them. 10.6; Paus. 10.15.5; Thuc. 1.138.3). On Pausanias, see Thuc. 1.128-35.
*P1. Leg. 4.707A-D; 706B-C; Arist. Pol 4.1304a20-25; [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1.1-2; Plut. Them. 7,19; Isoc. 8.48, 64, 69, 75, 79, 101. To the philosophers who viewed battle as natural and inevitable, how the Greeks fought was more important than why they entered a particular war.
*Hdt. 9.48. For Plataea, see Hdt. 9.45-66; cf. Wardman 56-59; for Myclae, see Hdt. 9.90-107.
*On this theme, see Thuc. 1.90-93, Cf. Plut. Mor. 190A: “Is not a wall a dwelling place for woman?”
*Although the decline in dedicatory hoplite panoplies at the Panhellenic sanctuaries in the aftermath of the of Peloponnesian War could reflect the general dislike of killing other Greeks (cf. Jackson 243-47), the sheer scarcity of military votive offerings may also simply suggest the real absence of captured full panoplies—and thus the rarity of major hoplite battles altogether.
*Such as Conon, Iphicrates, Sphodrias, Chabrias, Chares, Charidemos, Agesilaus, Pammenes, Diopeithes, and Timoleon. See, for example, Plut. Mor. 126E; Dem. 9.48; and Pritchett War 2.59-125; Parke 73-97.
*John Lazenby remarks of the eclipse of the conservative Spartan phalanx in the fourth century: “The truth of the matter is not that Sparta’s army at last failed her, but that after her defeat of Athens in 404, she overstretched herself, and so called upon her army to perform too many tasks for which it was not well fitted, against increasingly bold and enterprising enemies” (Lazenby 1985: 40).
*Whitehead 1977: 29-30; 82-83. Paul McKechnie (79-100) found ample evidence of disconnected men in fourth-century Greece. He devoted an entire study to the “outsiders” who had no real citizenship or affinity with a particular polis.
*Xen. Hell 3.4.15; Welwei 195-97. Their phalanx of Peloponnesian allies had traditionally been composed of nonagrarians (e.g., Plut. Mor. 214A72).
*For Cretan farmers, see Isager and Skydsgaard 149-53. Cf. Lazenby 1985: 58, for the composition of the Spartan army.