CHAPTER 24
DANIEL P. TOMPKINS
AS the battle of Marathon loomed, Greek forces performed sacrifices, sphagia (Hdt. 6.112, Pritchett 1: 112). Their Spartan allies, delayed by the phases of the moon and Carneia festival, were not on hand, but the Greeks won anyway (Hdt. 6.106–7, Pritchett 1: 117). After defeating the Persians, the Greeks burned and buried bodies (Pritchett 4: 83), and erected and sacrificed to a trophy (Pritchett 2: 248). A decade later, after the Battle of Salamis, the Greeks gathered booty (Pritchett 5: 369, 506), buried their dead, erected a cenotaph (Pritchett 4: 126, 173, 258), sent the first fruits to Delphi (Pritchett 1: 55), sacrificed, and set up a trophy (Pritchett 2: 248, 271 n. 75).
These battles adumbrate the larger picture of Greek military ritual, indicating that routine stages of Greek combat were dignified by formal moments or gestures that were a) communal and cohesive; b) frequently religious, involving a sacrifice; and c) frequently culturally distinctive within the Hellenic population, as the absence of the Spartans indicates.
After discussing each of these topics, this chapter concludes with a review of recent interpretations of military ritual, suggesting that the term “ritual” in the present day has taken on so many connotations as to reduce its analytic utility, and that the claim that rituals promote “social cohesion” requires careful review.
THE RITUALS OF GREEK COMBAT
Scholarship on Greek military history in the past four decades has been distinguished for its rigor, breadth, and inquisitiveness. W. K. Pritchett’s thorough coverage of ancient texts and inscriptions and modern scholarship, and his patient consideration of different approaches to a multitude of military topics, make his multivolume work, The Greek State at War, an ideal starting point for a review of military ritual. Using Pritchett’s work, we can distinguish the following generic elements of battles in Classical Greece (i.e., roughly from the early sixth century to the time of Phillip and Alexander in the late fourth century).
Before Combat: Oracles
Greek states and others seeking guidance on decisions often consulted oracles, asking, “Will we marry?” “Does sea trade look profitable?” “Will we conquer?” Of questions routinely posed to the Oracle at Delphi, Pritchett says the last was the most common, and we see it both in Thucydides (1.118) and in Herodotus. Negative responses made recipients anxious, as in Herodotus’s description (6.77.2; Pritchett 3: 304) of a Delphic response that panicked the Argives:
But when the female routs and banishes the male,
Winning fame among the Argives,
Many Argive women will tear their cheeks.
In future days, observers will note
“The terrible triple-coiled snake has perished, conquered by the spear.”
This oracle, Herodotus says, “caused fear among the Argives,” evidently because they recognized that “the female” was their enemy Sparta, a feminine noun (for full discussion, see Pritchett 3: 296–321).
Military Vows
A second ritual before entering combat was the vow, “on behalf of the whole community” (Pritchett 3: 231), promising gifts to the deity in return for assistance in battle. Hector in the Iliad (6.274–278) calls for substantial gifts to Athena for assistance against Diomedes, and the Greek leaders pledge to force a tithe from Greek states that had voluntarily gone over to the Persian side (Hdt. 7.132.2; Pritchett 3: 232).
The most important recurring word in Pritchett’s chapter on vows (3: 230–9) is “if.” Max Weber (1993: 25–7) distinguishes between the “technically rational … purely business-like, rationalized” quality of magic, which is supposed to imply a divine obligation to an entreaty, and prayers that have conditional, “non-magical motives” and far from expecting automatic divine assistance, treat the god as a “great lord … whom one cannot approach with devices of magical compulsion, but only with entreaties and gifts…. The pervasive and central theme is: do ut des.” (“I give in order that you give.”).
ON CAMPAIGN: SACRIFICE BEFORE BATTLE
Sacrifice before battle took two forms, usefully distinguished by Pritchett (1: 109–15). Greek armies offered ta hiera, “sacrifices taken for divination purposes before an enterprise,” and ta sphagia, “supplicatory and propitiatory” sacrifices during the battle: the difference in scheduling hinged on the different functions of these rites. In the first case, omens were consulted: “hiera are the sacred parts of the sacrificed animals,” especially the liver. If the reading was negative, the army did not leave camp: this happens to the Spartans three times in Book 5 of Thucydides (5.54.2, 55.3, 116; Pritchett 1: 113). On the other hand, ta sphagia were “last-minute sacrifices to invoke the gods’ continued favor” (Pritchett 1: 111), sometimes offered after a battle had been begun, as in Thucydides 6.69. Their purpose was simply to keep the gods’ favor. Herodotus mentions sphagia six times during the Greek preparation for the battle of Plataea.
The Athenian general Phocion performed the usual sacrifices before the battle of Tamynae (349/8); Plutarch (Phoc. 13.1–3) suggests that Phocion kept his men in camp even as opposing troops were marshaling for battle, then, when he was ready, attacked.
Pritchett’s useful chart (1: 114) shows that Thucydides and Polybius discuss sacrifice before battles far less often than Xenophon and Herodotus. Michael Jameson (1991: 197) concludes that Spartans “offer the fullest examples of religious practice in warfare,” including the king’s sacrifice to “Zeus the Leader.” He notes that both Athenians and Spartans sacrificed the sphagia to Artemis Agrotera, “Artemis the Huntress,” a title that perhaps shows that warfare originated in disputes over unsettled border regions (Jameson 1991: 204–6).
Festivals and Phases of the Moon
It would be easy to conclude from the massive scholarly attention to the Dorian Carneia that lunar festivals as a genre deeply influenced Greek military behavior. In fact, however, aside from the Carneia (see Hdt. 6.106–7), lunar influence occurs nowhere else in Herodotus and in Thucydides only apropos Nicias’s distinctive religiosity (7.50.1) and the single-sandaled escape on a moonless night from Plataea (3.22.1, which continues to perplex scholars; cf. Hornblower 1992: 172, and West 2003: 439). Indeed, Herodotus’s Magi remark that Greeks were more influenced by the sun than the moon (7.37).
Festivals occasionally prevented Sparta, as well as some other states (never Athens), from undertaking expeditions. “One may conclude,” Pritchett says, “that it was part of the etiquette of ancient warfare that religious obligations … often prevailed over purely military considerations, but abstinence from aggressive military operations during enemy festivals was not always observed. The legality of aggression seems to have hinged on the issue of a formal proclamation of a truce” (Pritchett 1: 119–26, at 126). Pritchett mentions the Spartan annihilation of Plataea in Thucydides (see 3.3.56, 65) as one such case.
Purification
Greeks did not practice “purification” on a Roman scale. But several accounts record purification practices, sometimes involving a march between the severed halves of a person (Apollod. 3.13.7; Hdt. 7.39–40) or animal (Curt. 10.9.11; see in general Pritchett 3: 196–202).
Initiating Combat
Infantry battles did not generally involve a “challenge” from one side to the other, but they often did begin with the two sides facing each other openly, sometimes, as before the battle of Marathon, for several days (Hdt. 6.110). Similar behavior was common in naval warfare. In these confrontations, opponents might engage in taunting, as at Plataea (Thuc. 6.63.3, 7.3.1; Hdt. 9.20). “In 407, when the Peloponnesian fleet lay at anchor in the mouth of the harbor of Ephesos, the Athenian Antiochus entered the harbor with his own ship and another, shouting insults and making contemptuous gestures” in violation of Alcibiades’s orders: he is killed in the ensuing battle (Plut. Alc. 35.5). Taunting can be treated as a form of ritual.
The Marching Paian
In introducing the paian, Pritchett remarks that “Greek history presents many mysteries and imponderables—facts which in spite of literary and other evidence are hard to interpret or understand” (Pritchett 1: 105). Singing the paian, of course, removed any possibility of surprise attack. Ancient authors seem unperturbed by this. They also disagree as to the paian’s original purpose, which might have been “to avert evils” (see Ath. 14.701 et al.), or to enable marching in step (Thuc. 5.69–70).
The paian is initially associated with Spartans and Dorians; that is, at least, a possible inference from surviving sources. Dorian allies of Athens use the paian in a night battle in Thucydides (7.44.6), with disastrous consequences. It is only after a century of Dorian paian-singing that an Athenian recommends it (Thrasybulus, in Xen. Hell. 2.4.17; see Pritchett 1: 105–8.)
AFTER COMBAT: THE BATTLEFIELD TROPHY
Thucydides and Xenophon list fifty-eight and thirty trophies. In all of Herodotus and Polybius, only one trophy appears. W. K. Pritchett notes that “it is far from clear that the Greeks ever thought about the origins of the war-offering, whatever that origin may have been.” Pritchett suggests not an origin but a function: trophies were erected as “more or less permanent” memorials either immediately after the battle (thus serving as “rituals of warfare”) or later (see Pritchett 2: 246–75, who lists the conventions of trophy erection). The victor placed a trophy at the battle’s turning point (trophé; see for instance Thucydides 2.92.5 and 7.54). In naval victories, the nearest shore served. In one case, a “victorious Peloponnesian fleet sailed more than 80 km to erect a trophy in enemy territory, evidently to make a statement” (Krentz 2007: 175).
Trophies were considered inviolable; they were not renewed when they decayed; they could be erected only by the side that held possession of the battlefield. Pride and patriotism, however, could disturb this seemingly orderly protocol often, as seen in the six disputes over which side has the right to set up a trophy (Thuc. 1.54.1, 1.105.6, 2.92.4–5, 4.134, 7.34.7–8, 7.54.1, 8.24.1).
Dedications of Armor
Dedications of spoils have a long history in Greek culture, going back to Heracles, who dedicated akrothina and established the Olympic festival (Pind. Ol 10.56). Publicly displayed, spoils reminded citizens of the glories of past battles but also “showed … that in war as in peace the gods had answered the city’s prayers, and that they might do so again” (Jackson 1991: 235). Leaders and individual soldiers made the dedications (Pritchett 3: 244, 269). Some dedications commemorated noteworthy victories (e.g., the shields from Pylos; Lippman et al. 2006). Dedications from naval victories could take the form of a ship left on land (Thuc. 2.92.5; Pritchett 3: 283). Pritchett says the “most interesting account” concerns a land victory of Athenians over Ambraciots (Thuc. 3.113–14): a herald, arriving to request permission to bury Ambraciot dead from a defeat two days earlier, learns suddenly, only after seeing a huge pile of armor, that an additional massive slaughter of countrymen had intervened. Shattered, he departs with his mission unaccomplished (Pritchett 3: 286).
Stripping the Dead
Immediately after the battle, victors stripped the dead of panoplies, leaving nude bodies on the field and dividing the spoils, with a large number to the commander. In the Ambracia victory, Demosthenes, the general, received three hundred panoplies and dedicated them in Attic shrines. Pritchett summarizes the herald’s mission again in discussing burials (4.246; see also Tritle 1997).
Booty
Booty from war was traditionally tithed, producing, as Plutarch notes, a boon for religious sites like Delphi. A speaker in Plutarch’s The Pythia’s Prophecies says, “you see the god completely surrounded by choice offerings and tithes from murderers, wars, and plunderings, and his temple crowded with spoils and booty from the Greeks … upon the beautiful votive offerings you read the most disgraceful inscriptions: ‘Brasidas and the Acanthians from the Athenians….’” Booty could include slaves, land, and money. As the quotation indicates, booty was labeled with inscriptions (Mor. 401C–D; further discussion in Pritchett 1: 93–100).
Burial of the War Dead
“Soldiers explain the imperiling of live soldiers to bring in the bodies of their dead comrades as fundamental to morale and unit cohesion: it is the pledge of the group to the individual, which allows the group to demand in return that the individual risk his life” (Lendon 2005: 3). Warriors, as Pritchett said (4: 96), could be sure of a burial.
The custom of returning enemy dead has a long history in Greek culture, going back to mythical figures such as Theseus or Heracles (Pritchett 4: 97). As to the location of the burial, Pritchett concludes after reviewing the evidence that Jacoby, Gomme, and Andrewes err in saying that it was “common Hellenic custom to bury the fallen in a polyandrion on the battlefield” (Pritchett 4: 94–7). As Krentz notes, “Greeks took recovery and proper burial of battle dead very seriously…. The failure of Athenian commanders to recover all their dead from the naval battle at Arginusae (406) resulted in the trial and execution of six generals” (Krentz 2007: 212).
Bodies could be disposed of either by inhumation or cremation. Krentz reviews the key evidence from the fifth century in a single paragraph: Athenians generally cremated their dead, bringing bones and ashes back to Athens for burial: exceptions occurred at Marathon and Plataea; Spartans buried their dead on the field or nearby; practices in other cities varied (Krentz 2007: 175). The burial ritual, as Pritchett points out (4: 102), followed elaborate rules for prothesis, lying in state; ekphora, carrying out to burial, and a feast.
The Athenian agon epitaphios and logos epitaphios
Athenian burials included games (agon, not mentioned in Thucydides) and a speech (logos; see further Pritchett 4: 106–25). The speech for the dead appears in a series of “versions” in the fifth and fourth centuries, the most famous being the one attributed to Pericles by Thucydides (2.34–46). Gorgias, Lysias, Plato (Menexenus), Demosthenes, and Hypereides all composed versions of the funeral speech (Loraux 1986 discusses the genre of the funeral speech and various versions).
Sacrifice after the Battle
The epinikia (victory) sacrifice accompanied erection of the trophy. Historians vary in their treatment: Herodotus records no post-battle sacrifices, others have scattered references (Thuc. 4.116, 7.73.2); Pritchett (3: 186–9) provides an extensive list.
“RITUALS OF COMBAT” AND GREEK CULTURES
There is no canonical number of Greek “rituals of combat”: other scholars could easily classify additional examples of military behavior as “ritual,” expanding the list above: examples might include the various Athenian festivals with military associations, like the Niketeria (commemorating Athena’s defeat of Poseidon, Pritchett 3: 168) or celebrations of “major military victories” (Pritchett 3: 171–83, citing Plut. Mor. 349D–E). For many of these details are lacking, though we do learn that Athenians held a rowing race for ephebes to commemorate the victory at Salamis, and initially promised sacrifice of a goat to Artemis Agrotera “for every barbarian killed” at Marathon, then, “after the battle, when the immense number of the dead became apparent … passed a resolution asking the goddess to release them from their vow on condition that they sacrifice five hundred goats every year” (Pritchett 3: 173–6).
It would also be possible to annul some entries in the list of “rituals” above, for instance “Initiating Combat,” on the ground that they are not genuinely “ritualistic.” We can stipulate to these fairly obvious points and move on to another, possibly more interesting one: how much of the ritualized behavior described above is “universal” in the Greek world, and how much is culture-specific, that is, found only in Ionic, Dorian, or other settings; and why is this so?
To some degree the clustering of certain festivals as Dorian or Ionian (or sometimes, Spartan or Athenian), may simply be accidental, the function of a particular author’s emphasis. The historians do not explain, for instance, why the paian dates only to 404/403B.C. in Athens, while other Greeks employed it from the time of Salamis. On the other hand, some phenomena, identifiably Spartan or at least Dorian, may yield more worthwhile information. These include the Carneia festival and the temple of Phobos, “Panic Fear.” It is also worth noting that “rituals” were not timeless, but seem introduced at specific points in time, for particular reasons.
The Carneia
“[W]ar could not be waged during the period of the festival,” according to Walter Burkert (1985: 234). Pritchett’s more precise discussion (1: 117) relies on Herodotus 6.106.3: departure (on a military mission) must be postponed at Sparta “until … the full moon … in the first half of the month”; or in Athens, until the first quarter. In either case, Dorians observed the festival of Carneia in the late summer even when observance interfered with missions at Marathon in 490 and Thermopylae in 480 (Hdt. 6.106, 7.206).
For the purpose of this discussion, we can leave aside the substantial (though fascinating) topic of local calendars in Greece and ask a) whether it is credible that religious motives caused the Spartans, the acknowledged leaders in Greek infantry warfare, to forgo combat on two important occasions; and b) whether other Greeks would have behaved like the Spartans in such emergencies.
As to a), the question is difficult to answer, but we need to distance ourselves from modern attitudes and preconceptions. As Kenneth Dover suggests (1987: 195), “To understand pre-Christian religious attitudes requires a great imaginative effort, and those who make it are commonly regarded as imposters by those who cannot.” It is indeed entirely feasible that in the cultural, psychological, and emotional context of the time major state activities could be conditioned by religious observances that were considered essential for the well-being of the community.
Turning to b), Pritchett insists that “the Greeks, especially those of the Peloponnesus, among whom the force of religious routine appears to have been the strongest, could not bring themselves easily to forego observance of venerated solemnities.” Pritchett adds that Spartans did once attack during a festival, but also that “the Olympia and Carneia [Hdt 8.72] … like the Hyakinthia in 479 B.C. [Hdt. 9.7] … prevailed over the necessities of defense, and the Lakedaimonians put out of mind both the duties of fidelity toward an exposed ally, and the bond of an expressed promise” (1: 125–6). Ionian or Athenian equivalents to this Spartan behavior seem not to exist.
Phobos at Sparta
In a discussion of “military calendric festivals” (3: 157–63), Pritchett focuses on “Peace” (Eirene) and “Panic Fear” (Phobos). Discussing the latter deity, Nicholas Richer (2005: 111–22) notes that an earlier representation of “panic,” the theriomorphic Pan, was shunted aside in Spartan practice and replaced by the more abstract, and thus more capacious, Phobos.
Plutarch says more about these abstractions:
The Spartans have temples not only of fear but also of death, laughter, and other such feelings [pathematon]. And they honor fear not as divinities whom they avoid, considering them as harmful, but believing that the constitution is best held together by fear.
Plutarch adds that citizens who most fear the laws are the most courageous in war. Where there is deos (“apprehensive fear”) there is also aidos (a sense of shame and reverence). Though a deity, Phobos had no festivals, and his temple was closed in times of peace (Agis and Cleomenes 9, my translation; Pritchett 3: 162).
The Spartan temple to Phobos is steeped in ambiguity. Phobos has two implications: it can help Spartan hoplites cause “panic among the enemy,” but it may also testify to the worry and anxiety that underlies Spartan behavior at key moments (Richer 2005: 113).1
And deos introduces a further ambiguity: deos in Thucydides can range from “dread” to “serious apprehension,” and be translated as “apprehension that leads to rational decisions.” It does not usually mean “panic fear,” while phobos rarely means “apprehension,”2 When Thucydides’s Athenians twice say they were compelled by deos, “apprehension” (along with time, “honor,” and ophelia, “interest,” 1.75.3, 1.76.2), they place themselves at a distance from the Spartans, who in two key passages are moved by “alarm at the Athenians as their power increased” (1.88, 23.6). Although political scientists often view this triad, “honor, apprehension, and interest,” as universal and applicable to all governments, it retains specific application to Athens as distinct from Sparta. By this argument, it is Athenian culture, not universal drives, that motivated Athenian imperialism.
JUSTIFYING WAR
When and why should a polity or a culture decide to go to war? When and why should peace seem preferable? For centuries in Western Europe, the language of Thomas Aquinas encouraged leaders to be punctilious in declaring, though no less sanguinary in practicing, war:
Sovereign authority within a state (auctoritas principis)
Just cause (causa iusta)
Right intention (intentio recta)
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (2.2.40.1)
More recently, the 1997 catechism jettisoned Aquinas’s language, reducing these causes to a single ius ad bellum, “self-defense” (2308).3
The arc of ancient Greek commentary on justification of war yields, not the systematic reflections of an Aquinas, but multiple illustrations of the “agonistic” spirit, the fiercely competitive attitude that led to many Greek conflicts. The Iliad is famous not only as a poem about war but also as a portrayal of interpersonal conflict. Interpersonal and interstate motivations overlap: the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles, full of references to honor, shame, and lost face, sheds light on the motives for interstate disputes as well: these often seem to grow out of disputes about face, recognition, and revenge. Homeric justifications for war sometimes lapse into unanswerable questions and non sequiturs (see the speeches of Achilles and Sarpedon, at Iliad 9.318–343 and 12.310–328.). Herodotus opens his historical epic with a condensed parody of accounts of Greek-Asian abduction and revenge (tisis): Io, Europa, Medea, and Helen, all in two short chapters (1.2–3). As the narrative proceeds, this light-hearted sendup gives way to increasingly brutal manifestations of tisis: revenge between states, punishments by absolute rulers.
At first sight, Thucydides seems to dismiss Herodotean tisis, presenting an Agamemnon who relied not on pledges of group revenge but on superior power (1.10). Even this “realistic” historian, however, recognizes that Greeks go to war over matters of honor (1.25). “‘Is it really credible,’ Beaumont asks, ‘that the Corinthians disliked the Corcyraeans to such an extent as to fight them for the reasons that he [Thucydides] gives,’” that is, over slights, honor, and prestige? Moses Finley answers affirmatively, historicizing the complaint: “What does it mean to call the silver trade a ‘more concrete’ reason than the one offered by Thucydides? Does it not mean merely that someone living in the 1930s preferred trade to honor and prestige as the explanation for the outbreak of a major conflict?”4
The tension between “cultural” and “realistic” justifications of ancient wars—between honor and profit—continues unabated (Lebow 2010: 123–7 summarizes the weakness of “realistic” analyses of war). Josef Wiesehöfer (2010: 75), for instance, insists that the Persian invasion of Greece was not a matter of revenge, but part of an effort to build a “protective ring of territories” that also included Macedonia, Scythia, Arabia, and possibly Ethiopia.
Koine eirene, “common peace,” is the label applied to a group of treaties from the fourth century. It might in fact be said to begin in 412/11 with the Spartan peace treaty with Persia that stipulated that “the King may plan as he wishes” about the Greek coastal cities of Asia Minor in return for Persian support: a “Faustian bargain,” according to David Lewis (Thuc. 8.58.2; Cartledge 1987: 79). The Peace of Antalcidas in 387/6 then ceded control of these cities to Persia in a “Spartan betrayal of panhellenism” (Lewis 1977: 144). A series of agreements with the King followed, ending only after mid-century when Philip the Great filled his role (in 338). Did these efforts reveal a Greek consensus on the need for peace, or did they simply reflect new devices for powerful states to exercise control? Cawkwell (1961: 86) hints at the former: “the various congresses [were less] mere endings of wars [than] a series of diplomatic negotiations in which concessions were made by various parties in recognition of the changing balance of power. In this way much was accomplished by diplomacy that might have made wars more difficult to conclude.” Cartledge, on the other hand, notes that the peaces with Persia subjugated Greek cities as “Persian subjects ruled by oligarchies” for fifty years, when they moved “from the frying-pan of the Achaemenids to the fire of Alexander’s Successors.” Cartledge (1987: 196) emphasizes the “exploitation of the majority” that was to be expected in such an arrangement.
What Do We Mean when We Speak of “Ritual”?
The topic of this chapter is “rituals of warfare.” But what does “ritual” mean today? The question is not an idle one. It is nearly a century since Robert Park, one of the founders of the Chicago school of sociology, began to write about “social ritual” (see e.g., Park 1915: 584, 1921: 11). When Robert Merton (1938: 673) spoke of “ritualistic adherence to institutionally prescribed conduct” in the 1930s, he meant routinized, sometimes obsessive, behavior. Subsequent studies in the social sciences have given “ritual” a range of meanings.
In classical scholarship, “ritual” is less secularized than in some other disciplines, but it remains a broad and ill-defined category. “Diffusion of military success to the community was achieved in antiquity primarily by three different means: rituals, monuments, and ideological concepts. Rituals included triumphal processions, sacrifices to the gods of victory, organized celebrations, and ceremonial departures and arrivals to and from military campaigns” (Hölscher 2003: 13).
Triumphs, celebrations, departures, and arrivals: Tonio Hölscher says that these enabled “emotional participation of broad groups of the population” and “solidarity, psychological effort, and dedication to normative values.” Hölscher does mention religion several times, but even then insists that in Greece and Rome the “religious dimension was not as strong as in other states of the eastern Mediterranean world” (2003: 13–14). Hölscher is speaking of “social ritual.” On the other hand, Walter Burkert’s approach is far less secularized: he describes war itself as a “ritual, a self-portrayal and self-affirmation of male society,” which “finds stability in confronting death, in defying it through a display of readiness to die, and in the ecstasy of survival” (Burkert 1984: 47).
A third example of outstanding scholarship recognizes Burkert’s perspective but emphasizes social ritual more than ecstasy and self-affirmation. This is Robert Connor’s essay (1988) on “early Greek land warfare as symbolic expression.” Connor notices the organization of the army into tribal divisions, the bronze armor, the trophies, all of which “validates the pre-eminence of the hoplite class.” Like other scholars, Connor notes the changes in combat—the increased use of light-armed soldiers, for instance, that came with the heavy fighting of the Peloponnesian War. These tended to “devalue the status of the hoplite class.” The new prominence of “slingers, archers, javelin-hurlers … traditionally drawn from those classes in society that could not afford the investment in heavy armor … elevate[d] their civic status at the expense of the hoplite classes, and risk[ed] eventual political repercussions” (Connor 1988: 27).
The studies mentioned above, samplings from a rich trove of anthropologically oriented scholarship on ancient warfare, reveal that “ritual” provides a useful but often imprecise tool for understanding military behavior.
SOCIAL VERSUS TASK COHESION
The German Wehrmacht by many accounts remained an effective fighting force in World War II even when defeat seemed certain. Desertion rates were low and loyalty to unit leaders high. Seeking to analyze and understand this success, scholars developed theories that influenced historians in other fields, including our own. “Social cohesion,” one of the most influential concepts to emerge from this activity, shaped the interpretive community of military historians even when unacknowledged (see further Culham, 258–9).
Two chief strands of work on “social cohesion” were historical and sociological. Military historian S. L. A. Marshall’s forcefully written and initially persuasive book, Men against Fire, asserted that most American infantrymen refused to fire their weapons in combat: a startling claim that was accepted by the most eminent authorities. Marshall argued that readiness to fire coupled with improved communication skills would lead to improvements in “tactical cohesion.” Marshall’s vivid portrayals of men in battle continue to be influential in some circles today, even though Roger Spiller showed more than two decades ago that Marshall had falsified his data, inventing “ratio of fire” findings that misrepresented the actual behavior of American soldiers in combat (cf. Marshall 1947; Spiller 1988).
The sociological strand derives chiefly from the pioneering essay by Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II” (1948). Interviewing Wehrmacht veterans, Shils and Janowitz concluded that ideology was far less effective in motivating German soldiers than “primary group loyalty,” and that this loyalty resulted from conscious, often manipulative, leadership. More recent work, for example, Omer Bartov’s Hitler’s Army, concludes, against the Shils-Janowitz study, that only “brutalization” held a unit together under the adverse conditions of the Eastern Front. “It was precisely because, rather than in spite of what they called the ‘Verwilderung’ of the troops, that it became possible to enforce such brutal combat discipline on them without stirring any visible spirit of rebellion” (Bartov 1992: 32–5, 72).
“Social cohesion” is a popular concept in many quarters. Supporters of democracy would be gratified to find a direct connection, for instance, between battlefield organization (e.g., as hoplites) and civic association. But what one scholar has called “the simple mechanism of the phalanx in maintaining the cohesion of the polis” (Berent 2000: 184) turns out not to be simple at all, for reasons that include the following:
1. “Social cohesion” is itself a fairly vague concept that lacks analytic value. “When social cohesion becomes synonymous with a good society, it no longer carries analytical value.” (Chan, To, and Chan 2006: 280)
2. Unless the scholar follows Marshall and takes up fiction writing, evidence is required. One of the best sorts of evidence is the interview: but even this is not conclusive. Though both Bartov, on the one hand, and Shils and Janowitz on the other relied on interviews, their findings were contradictory. In antiquity, we have no interviews at all. We are forced to engage in bricolage from the shreds of evidence that remain. Drawing conclusions about the mental state of social groups is thus far more difficult than it is when a large sample of veterans is on hand.
3. To the extent it has been studied by social scientists in recent years, “social cohesion”—coming together as a social group, for instance a family or clan or club—has been found not to contribute to military effectiveness: “social cohesion” in the sense of “the emotional bonds of friendship, liking, caring, and closeness among group members … to the extent that its members like each other … and feel emotionally close to one another … has no reliable correlation with performance and … can even undermine task performance.” Recent studies suggest that focused “task cohesion,” with the emphasis not on camaraderie but on job completion, is more useful in practice than “social cohesion.” (MacCoun, Kier and Belkin 2005: 2–3. National Defense Research Institute 1993: 283–331)
What does this mean for ancient military history? Nothing dire. The fine scholarship of recent decades will stand on its own. But looking forward, it may be worthwhile to seek a finer-grained understanding of the relationship between the “rituals” of ancient warfare and the “social cohesion” that is sometimes deemed a correlate, while noticing too that “social cohesion” is an elusive concept. It may now be appropriate to ask further questions: what argument is required to demonstrate that ritualized practice (marching in the phalanx, for instance) correlates with social cohesion, or that social cohesion itself is easily attained. Lisa Kallet-Marx (1994) has urged attention to
the social variety that existed even in a predominantly peasant society like Athens. Did urban dwellers think the same as the rural citizenry? Was old wealth of like mind as new? Did landless sailors have the same values as the moderately well-off peasant? The conclusion is unavoidable that the composition of both juries and Assembly was not entirely homogeneous in background or in values; rather, as Wesley Thompson has shown, Athenians were a mosaic of disjunctive ideologies.
“Disjunctive ideologies”! Kallet-Marx is not alone in pointing to these bumps and fissures (note, for instance, the disruptions described in Hanson’s lament, “Hoplites as Dinosaurs,” 1999: 321–49). Clearly, Athens at its most successful overcame the disjunctions, but they remain worth noticing if we are to recapture the rich texture of Greek military history.
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