Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (16 page)

Van Wees places Homeric warfare in the context of the interaction between the oral poet and his audience. The battle narrative alternates between close-ups of the front-rank fighters and panoramic images of the mass of men in action.

To the modern reader, unfamiliar with the kind of fighting described by the poet, the panoramic scene of “shields clashing” at the beginning of the first battle may suggest a collision of two close-order phalanxes, while missiles flying all morning at the beginning of the third battle may sound like long-range skirmishing. But to audiences who understood how the heroes fought it would have been obvious that such images simply represented two sides of the same coin. In the fluid, open-order action of the epic, mass fighting takes place close range and long range at the same time.
²¹⁴

The open order and fluid combat of the
Iliad
provides a model for van Wees of how Greek hoplites fought in the seventh century. In addition, he finds support for his thesis in the poetry of Tyrtaeus.

Tyrtaeus has long figured into the orthodoxy and has often been cited as proof of the existence of the classical phalanx. Van Wees concedes that “some of the main
themes of Tyrtaeus’ surviving work may indeed at first glance deceptively suggest phalanx tactics.”
²¹⁵
There is the importance of close combat: “Set foot against foot, press shield against, fling crest against crest, helmet against helmet, and chest against chest, and fight a man, gripping the hilt of a sword or a long spear.” A second theme is cohesion: “Fight while staying together, young men” (F 10.15 West); “those who [fight] while staying together die in smaller numbers and save the men behind them” (F 11.11–13); “speak encouraging words to the next man when you stand beside him” (F 12.19). Tyrtaeus also stresses the need to stand one’s ground: “legs well apart, both feet planted firmly on the ground, biting your lip, covering thighs and shins below and chest and shoulders with the belly of the broad shield, shaking a mighty spear in your right hand” (F 10.16–32; 11.4–27). However, van Wees points to other elements of the poetry that appear in both pre-selected passages and especially in fragments that survive by chance on papyrus, “which show that our poet did
not
have the classical phalanx in mind.”
²¹⁶
In these the poet must exhort the soldier to make his way to the front line: “those who
dare go into close range and towards the front-line fighters
(
promachoi
), while staying together, die in smaller numbers” (F 11.11–13).

Tyrtaeus’ Spartans, in other words, have the space and freedom to move around the battlefield. They are still able to behave just like the warriors of the
Iliad
, who wander around their battlefields quite freely, individually and in small groups, moving “towards the front-line fighters” or dropping back “beyond the range of missiles,” leaving and entering battle as they see fit. Just like Homer’s heroes, the Spartans must be fighting in an
open and fluid order
.
²¹⁷

Van Wees sees other aspects of the poetry that contradict the idea that the warriors in the martial elegies of Tyrtaeus have a fixed place in a tightly organized formation. For instance, light-armed missile troops play a prominent role. Instead of fighting outside the phalanx as in the classical period, the light- and the heavy-armed “are part of a single, undifferentiated formation.” One exhortation by the poet to fight hand-to-hand is especially telling. “And you, light-armed, squatting under a shield here and there, must throw great rocks and hurl smooth javelins while you stand close by the heavy-armed (F 11.35–8).” “The light-armed here are clearly not a separate body of troops, but scattered ‘here and there’ among the hoplites,” van Wees points out, “and ‘squatting’ for cover behind the latter’s shields. The same mode of operation is described in the
Iliad
, where archers are protected by other men’s shields, and only briefly break cover to shoot their arrows.”
²¹⁸

Using both the literary and iconographical evidence, van Wees traces the slow transformation of Greek warfare from the Dark Age to the creation of the hoplite. Dark Age Greek warriors wore little or no armor; they fought with a light shield and a sword in close combat; the weapons they used at long range included either a pair of throwing spears or bow and arrows. Both archers and spearmen fought independent from one another in a wide, open formation. The relative status of different styles of fighting changed with the emergence of the hoplite in the last quarter of the eighth century. The heavy armor and heavy shield enabled the hoplite to engage the enemy at closer range. Therefore, he could use his spear for thrusting as well as throwing. As formations became denser, archers started to play a subordinate role as auxiliary
troops; they moved among the ranks and behind the shields of the hoplites. “Not until the last third of the seventh century did the majority of hoplites stop carrying throwing spears and begin to rely on the single thrusting spear and sword only. Even then, as Tyrtaeus shows, formations remained relatively open and fluid: hoplites and light-armed intermingled and soldiers continued to enjoy considerable freedom of movement on the battlefield.”
²¹⁹

When did the classical phalanx emerge with its closely packed ranks? Van Wees considers the possibility that the phalanx continued to evolve until after the Persian Wars in the fifth century.

Perhaps we can only say that the type of phalanx described by Thucydides and Xenophon must have developed some time after 600 BC and before the Peloponnesian War. Either way, it is clear that the emergence of the hoplite was only the beginning of a lengthy process, which certainly lasted more than a century and may have lasted more than two centuries, leading to the creation of a close-order, hoplites-only phalanx. The classical hoplite formation, then, was not the long-lived military institution of scholarly tradition, but merely one phase in a history of almost four centuries of slow change towards ever denser and more cohesive heavy infantry formations, culminating in the mid-fourth century with the creation of the Macedonian phalanx.
²²⁰

If the hoplite phalanx did not fully develop until the fifth century, this rules out any hoplite-led political revolution in archaic Greece. But in this volume, van Wees argues that something like the agrarian revolution Victor Hanson details in
The Other Greeks
took place about two centuries later. The thesis that van Wees presents in the present volume builds on some of the arguments in his book
Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities
,
²²¹
which Hanson addresses in his chapter.

Notes

      
1
. Lewis Mumford,
The Transformations of Man
, New York, 1956, 46–47.

      
2
. 
Laws
1.626A.

      
3
. Thucydides 3.82.2.

      
4
. George Grote,
A History of Greece
, New York, 1846, II, 106.

      
5
. Grote, II, 106.

      
6
. Grote, II, 107.

      
7
. Grote, VII, 84.

      
8
. Grote, III, 16.

      
9
. In arguing for a ninth-century Homeric society Grote (II, 160) reasons that “there is nothing either in the
Iliad
or
Odyssey
which savors of
modernism
, applying that term to the age of Peisistratus; nothing which brings to our view the alterations, brought about by two centuries, in the Greek language, the coined money, the habits of writing and reading, the despotisms and republican governments, the close military array, the improved construction of ships, the Amphiktyonic convocations, the mutual frequentation of religious festivals, the Oriental and Egyptian veins of religion, etc., familiar to the later epoch.”

    
10
. Grote, II, 155.

    
11
. Grote, II, 107.

    
12
. Grote, II, 107.

    
13
. Grote, II, 107–8.

    
14
. Grote views (I, 340–69) the period immediately following the first Olympiad as momentous in the passage from an age of imagination, emotion, and religious feelings to one of recorded history and science, and concern with the present. The early Greek myths, the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
specifically, furnished a quasi history and a quasi philosophy that “filled up the vacuum of an unrecorded past.” The vast majority of Greeks still clung to mythopoeic ways of thinking, “the staple of the uninstructed Greek mind,” throughout the historical period. But the meaning of the word myth changed, and it “came to carry with it the idea of an old personal narrative, always uncertified, sometimes untrue or avowedly fictitious [pointedly opposed to
historia
]. And this change was the result of a silent alteration in the mental state of society,—of a transition on the part of superior minds (and more or less on the part of all) to a stricter and more elevated canon of credibility, in consequence of familiarity with recorded history, and its essential tests affirmative as well as negative.” The transition to historical time is remarkable: “a sensible progress is made in the Greek mind during the two centuries from BC 700 to BC 500, in the record and arrangement of historical facts: an
historical sense
arises in the superior intellects, and some idea of evidence as a discriminating test between fact and fiction.”

    
15
. Grote comments (II, 65) on Aristotle’s inability to explain the voluntary obedience his ancestors paid to their early heroic chiefs, “such remarks [of Aristotle] illustrate strongly the revolution which the Greek mind had undergone during the preceding centuries, in regard to the internal grounds of political submission. But the connecting link, between the Heroic and the republican schemes of government, is to be found in two adjuncts of the Homeric royalty … the boule, or council of chiefs, and the agora, or general assembly of freemen.”

    
16
. Grote, III, 14.

    
17
. Grote, II, 93.

    
18
. Grote, III, 17.

    
19
. Grote, III, 31.

    
20
. Since he dated Pheidon of Argos to between 770 BC and 730 BC, Grote placed this controversial figure outside the age of tyrants proper. On the other hand, Grote presumably would have attributed the despot’s remarkable military success to a hoplite army, which he also dates in the eighth century.

    
21
. Grote, III, 28.

    
22
. Grote, III, 31.

    
23
. Grote, III, 21.

    
24
. Grote, III, 23.

    
25
. Grote (II, 276–77) comments further, “These Thessalian cities exhibit the extreme of turbulent oligarchy, occasionally trampled down by some one man of great vigor, but little tempered by that sense of political communion and reverence for established law, which was found among the better cities of Hellas. Both in Athens and Sparta, so different in many respects from each other, this feeling will be found, if not indeed constantly predominant, yet constantly present and operative.”

    
26
. Grote, III, 30–31.

    
27
. Grote, II, 456.

    
28
. Grote, II, 455.

    
29
. Grote, II, 453.

    
30
. Grote, II, 389.

    
31
. Grote, II, 400.

    
32
. Grote, III, 128.

    
33
. Grote, III, 128.

    
34
. P.D.A. Garnsey,
Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis
, Cambridge, 1988, nuances this “22 percent cultivable” figure.

    
35
. G. B. Grundy,
Thucydides and the History of His Age
, London, 1911, 248.

    
36
. For example, Grundy commented on the weight of the Corinthian helmet (244), “I have tried on a Greek helmet found at Delphi, and I have also tried on various helmets of genuine armour dating from various periods in the Middle Ages. The iron [
sic
] of the Greek helmet was extraordinarily thick, and its weight was, I should say, nearly double that of the heaviest helmet of the medieval period, even than those used by the Spanish common soldiers of the sixteenth century, which were naturally made of inexpensive metal.”

    
37
. Grundy, 267–68.

    
38
. Grundy, 268.

    
39
. Grundy, 271.

    
40
. Grundy, 271.

    
41
. Grundy, 271.

    
42
. Grundy, 270.

    
43
. Grundy, 268.

    
44
. Grundy, 256.

    
45
. Grundy, 257.

    
46
. Grundy, 260.

    
47
. Grundy, 261.

    
48
. Grundy, 262.

    
49
. Grundy, 274.

    
50
. Grundy, 279.

    
51
. Grundy, 281.

    
52
. Martin P. Nilsson, “Die Hoplitentaktik und das Staatswesen,”
Klio
22 (1929), 240–49, p. 240, translations by Gregory Viggiano.

    
53
. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff,
Die Textgeschichte der griechischen Lyriker
, Berlin, 1900; see fragment 11, 23–24.

    
54
. Nilsson, 241–42; Nilsson accepts that Tyrtaeus is problematic on these grounds but remarks, “one cannot help finding also in the words of fragment 11, V.11 παρ ’ἀλλήλοισι μένοντες, which stick fast, a prefiguring of the phalanx.” See fragment 12 and fragment 11, 29–34.