Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (39 page)

a conflict of hoplites was, in the main, a matter of brawn, of shock of the mass developed instantaneously as a steady thrust with the whole weight of the file behind it—a literal shoving of the enemy off the ground on which he stood.
⁶¹

The context for this passage is Woodhouse’s peculiar discussion of Thucydides 5.71, where Thucydides says that each man kept close to his right-hand neighbor’s shield out of fear. Woodhouse labeled this “notion … to put it bluntly, nothing but a fatuous delusion and stark nonsense,” and claimed to understand the real explanation: Hoplites advanced with their shields held straight across their chests, forcing them to slant to the right as they walked.

Not surprisingly, the great commentator on Thucydides, A. W. Gomme, objected:

a Greek battle was not so simply “a matter of brawn, a steady thrust with the whole weight of the file behind it—a literal shoving of the enemy off the ground on which he stood” (did the back rows
push
the men in front?), as Professor Woodhouse supposes. It was not a scrummage. The men all used their weapons, and had their right arms free.
⁶²

The parenthetical remark drips with sarcasm—Gomme italicized the word
push
. Did the back rows
push
the men in front? Obviously not, he means. No publicity is bad publicity, however, and Gomme had mentioned the rugby scrum again.

The analogy caught on in spite of both Gomme and a short 1942 article by A. D. Fraser called “The Myth of the Phalanx Scrimmage,” which takes as its point of departure the assumption that the rugby model dominates the field, at least in England.
Pritchett dismissed Fraser’s note as a “strange article … [that] claims that there are only ‘three literary references’ to pushing.”
⁶³
By the time Pritchett wrote this put-down, in 1985, the full-scale rugby scrum, all ranks uniting in one giant shove, had become the standard view of how Greeks fought.

I first challenged this model in an article published in the same year in
Classical Antiquity
—in fact, I suspect that an earlier version of that paper, submitted to another journal and rejected by a cranky anonymous reader using a manual typewriter, prompted Pritchett’s chapter. Though I have been rebuked by literalists such as Robert Luginbill and Adam Schwartz, I take heart in the number of other writers since 1985 who have declared themselves skeptical about the rugby model.
⁶⁴

It is true that, unlike the noun
ōthismós
, the verb
ōtheō
(push) and its compounds occur frequently in the classical historians, in lines such as “on the right the Athenians pushed the Syracusans.” The rugby model takes these verbs literally. (Luginbill’s “natural reading” really means “literal reading.”) Now there is no doubt that the classical historians sometimes use
ōtheō
figuratively. For example, Herodotus refers to Miltiades pushing the Apsinthians away by walling off the neck of the Chersonesos (6.37.1) and speaks of the Greeks pushing the Persians back in reference to Xerxes’ invasion as a whole (8.3.2). So
ōtheō
might be meant literally or figuratively in battle narratives.

How can we decide which?

The historians worked in a literary tradition going back to Homer, from whom they inherited
ōtheō
. The natural way to understand
ōtheō
in the historians is to assume they use it as Homer does. If he describes mass shoving, so do they. But if he does not, the natural interpretation is that they do not either.

Pritchett opted for the former. “The
ōthismós
is as common in Homer as it is in later hoplite warfare,” he writes, “although the noun is not used.”
⁶⁵
In his description of Homeric fighting, he says that “they pushed, leaning their shields against their shoulders … while they thrust with swords and spears.”
⁶⁶
This combination of pushing, leaning shields, and thrusting swords and spears never occurs in the poem. Pritchett cites two passages for the leaning of shields on shoulders. Neither mentions pushing. He cites six passages for the thrusting with swords and spears. Only one mentions pushing. It comes in book 13, in what Pritchett describes as “the most informative passage.”
⁶⁷
The Greeks are massed together closely in what sounds like a hoplite phalanx as Hektor attacks (13.145–48):

But when he met the dense phalanges he came close and stopped. The opposing sons of the Achaians, pricking him with swords and leaf-headed spears, pushed him away from them; he shivered as he retreated.

Here the Greeks are fighting inside their camp wall, their backs to their ships, when a small group of nine champions, each one named by the poet, rallies together. There’s no mention of shields clashing, and the stabbing and the pushing happen at the same time. The Greeks used their weapons, not their shields, to drive Hektor back, slowly—he was “pushed” back rather than routed. A figurative “push” makes equally good sense in the other passages Pritchett cites as evidence of an
ōthismós
in the
Iliad
.
⁶⁸

The
ōthismós
is as common in Homer as in hoplite warfare, but not in quite the sense Pritchett intended.

I want to return briefly to the battle of Koroneia, a favorite of the literalists. It’s an interesting case where Xenophon uses the verb
ōtheō
while alluding to a passage in Homer that does not use it. In the
Hellenika
(4.3.19), Xenophon writes:

Clashing their shields together, they pushed, they fought, they killed, they died.

Xenophon uses the same verb,
symballein
(“clashing their shields”), that Homer does in
Iliad
4.446–51 = 8.60–65:

Now as these advancing came to one place and encountered,

they clashed their [leather] shields together and their spears, and the strength

of armored men in bronze, and the shields massive in the middle

clashed against each other, and the sound grew huge of the fighting.

There the wails of despair and the cries of triumph rose up together of men killing and men killed, and the ground ran with blood.

The allusion is clearer in the expanded version of the scene Xenophon gives in his
Agesilaos
(2.12–14). Here we have, as in Homer, the peculiar noise of battle, men killing and men dying, and blood on the ground:

Clashing their shields together, they pushed, they fought, they killed, they died. There was no screaming, nor was there silence, but the noise that anger and battle together will produce…. When the fighting ended, one could see, where they met one another, the ground stained with blood.

And what happens next in
Iliad
8? Fighting at a distance (
Iliad
8.66–67):

So long as it was early morning and the sacred daylight increasing, so long the thrown weapons of both took hold, and people fell.

If Xenophon has this
Iliad
scene in mind, “push” cannot be a mass shove in either the
Agesilaos
or
Hellenika
passages.

A few years ago Simon Hornblower commented that “only an unusually arrogant scholar could claim to know exactly what kind of thing went on in a hoplite battle.”
⁶⁹
I am thankful that he included the words “unusually” and “exactly.” I feel close to certain that hoplites never carried 30+ kg of equipment. I feel confident that Archaic phalanges included archers, javelin and stone throwers, and slingers as well as men with helmets, breastplates, shin guards, and shields. The men who came to be called hoplites were not equipped identically. A man might use a Corinthian helmet or a felt pilos, a bronze cuirass or a linen corselet, a round or Boeotian shield—or some but not all of these items, depending on personal preference or simply whether he could afford them all. Whether they lined up with three feet per man or had a few feet more, most armies lost their formation as they advanced and charged. The neat blue and red rectangles we draw on battle plans should not seduce us into thinking of untrained Greeks as capable of marching precision. As for a collision and a shoving match, I’m skeptical that a general collision or general shove occurred, but willing to believe that some men ran into each other and that some literally shoved an enemy when they thought it would give an advantage in the hand-to-hand fighting. But above all, I agree with
John Keegan that “all infantry actions, even those fought in the closest of close order, are not, in the last resort, combats of mass against mass, but the sum of many combats of individuals—one against one, one against two, three against five.”
⁷⁰

The Origins of the Hoplite Phalanx

At the 2008 Yale conference, Anthony Snodgrass repeated a suggestion he had made in print in 2006: Future considerations of the hoplite’s development ought to start from the physical evidence, especially the dedications at Olympia.
⁷¹
Greeks dedicated helmets, cuirasses, and greaves by the late eighth century. The
porpax
shield first appears in vase painting in the early seventh century, or even the late eighth if a round shield with a figured shield device proves a shield intended to be held right side up (that is, a double-grip shield). Then the dedications of armor increase sharply about the middle of the century. Snodgrass therefore maintains that individual hoplites existed before the hoplite phalanx. In his view, aristocrats adopted the more expensive equipment first. They fought in a mixed force that included more lightly equipped troops until the middle of the seventh century, when the number of hoplites was large enough to exclude all other fighters from the ranks, restricting them to supporting roles.

I think we can squeeze a bit more out of the material evidence. Peter Bol’s study of the bronze shield fragments found at Olympia suggests that bronze rims, bronze emblems, and bronze facings came into use no earlier than the last third of the seventh century. For sixty to seventy years, therefore,
porpax
shields were made of perishable materials, wood or wood and leather. How can we explain this time lag in the use of bronze for shields compared to its use for other pieces of defensive equipment?

Perhaps the earliest warrior on a Greek vase who certainly carries a double-handled round shield in action provides a clue.
⁷²
He does
not
wear a bronze-plate cuirass. Perhaps the first men to carry the new shield were not wealthy aristocrats, but poorer men who wanted the superior protection a large, round shield provided a man who could not afford expensive body armor. I think of Thrasyboulos’ men in 403, making wooden and wickerwork shields in Peiraieus (Xen.
Hell
. 2.4.25). They had defeated the Thirty’s forces once, but as they anticipated the fighting to come, they needed to equip javelin and stone throwers with enough protection to let them join the hand-to-hand fighting. A big shield would be enough, for a brave or desperate man. John Hale may well be right: The first Greeks to use big, round shields might have been mercenaries employed in the east.
⁷³
When they brought their shields home, they used them in the early phalanges, fighting beside or behind aristocrats armed with the best defensive armor available and using lighter shields. If the Boeotian shield on vases is often used by a hero, perhaps that is because it was used by aristocratic
promachoi
, aristocrats who fought in the front line.

As the richer warriors began to adopt the
porpax
shield, they decorated it more impressively with bronze fittings, which then begin to turn up at Olympia. Because a bronze cuirass was less critical for warriors armed with the
porpax
shield, it became
less common, so that by the end of the sixth century a hoplite normally wore a leather and linen corselet, if that.

If hoplites could fight successfully in a mixed force, why did the Greeks eventually exclude archers and other lightly armed fighters from the hoplite ranks? I believe the impetus came from the Persians.
⁷⁴
Herodotus says that the Median king Cyaxares was the first to divide his forces into spearmen, archers, and cavalry, in the late seventh century (1.103). He’s likely to be wrong: The Assyrians probably used an integrated tactical system, employing specialist contingents of different kinds, already in the eighth century.
⁷⁵
The Greeks had no such specialized contingents until much later. Archaic Greek cavalry was really mounted infantry, men who rode to get into position but dismounted and fought on foot. Archers and other lightly armed men fought in the same ranks. Such armies could not match the Persians. The way forward was shown by Miltiades, who armed all the Athenians at Marathon as hoplites and closed with the Persians before their mounted archers could get into position. Thereafter other Greeks emulated the exclusive phalanx and experimented with specialized contingents of archers and cavalry and even, at Athens, Persian-style mounted archers.

Let me close with a comment on the “grand hoplite narrative.” I would return to a view close to that articulated by George Grote, who thought that “the gradual rise of the small proprietors and town-artisans” in the seventh and sixth centuries led to heavily armed infantry replacing cavalry and that the Persian threat led to an equally important increase in the number of rowers in new, larger Greek fleets. “All these movements in the Grecian communities,” he wrote, “tended to break up the close and exclusive oligarchies with which our first historical knowledge commences; and to conduct them, either to oligarchies rather more open, embracing all men of a certain amount of property—or else to democracies.”
⁷⁶
Provided that we substitute mounted infantry, men who rode to battle in all their fine gear but fought on foot, for Grote’s (originally Aristotle’s) cavalry, this passage sounds right to me. It isn’t that the hoplite phalanx was politically unimportant. In the big picture, it was very important. But its history is complex. Grote rightly linked both an increasing number of men who could afford hoplite equipment and an increasing number of men who rowed in the fleets to the lengthy evolution toward political equality in ancient Greece.
⁷⁷