Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (48 page)

One important work of ancient art may in fact show Greek soldiers fighting in an eastern war of the eighth or early seventh century BC. The oldest-known representation of hoplite soldiers in a phalanx-like formation appears on a silver bowl that was found in a tomb at Amathus, Cyprus (
fig. 9-1
).
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This Amathus bowl was probably created in a Cypro-Phoenician workshop in the late eighth or early seventh century BC, and belongs to a type of vessel that was popular from the Near East to Etruria.
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On the surface of the bowl, embossed or engraved motifs from Near Eastern and Egyptian art fill the central roundel and two surrounding circular bands. The outermost band, however, which runs around the bowl’s rim, is decorated with a battle scene rendered in a more naturalistic style.

Here, troops of various types are engaged in combat at a walled city, some attacking, others defending. The towering fortifications appear to be constructed of ashlar masonry, with crenellated battlements. The attacking army has chariots drawn by pairs of horses, cavalry armed with spears and bows, and archers on foot wearing long Assyrian overcoats and tall conical hats or helmets. Along with these standard elements of Near Eastern warfare there appears a line of four hoplites who are striding or running forward. Nearby, some unarmed men are hacking away with double-bladed axes at date palms and fruit trees in the orchards outside the city. (Could this custom have been picked up by Greeks fighting in the Near East, and carried back home to become part of the “hoplite tradition"?)
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FIGURE 9-1. Amathus bowl. Source: “Traders, Pirates, Warriors: The Proto-History of Greek Mercenary Soldiers in the Eastern Mediterranean,” Nino Luraghi,
Phoenix
, Vol. 60, No. 1/2 (Spring - Summer, 2006), pp. 21-47. Published by: Classical Association of Canada. After Myres, JHS, 1933. Reprinted by permission of Nino Luraghi and
Phoenix
.

Chief interest rests with the line of hoplites. They wear crested Ionian or Corinthian helmets, along with fringed tunics and greaves. Over their heads they brandish spears. Circular shields cover their bodies from jawline to hip. The shields display blazons: swirling rays, a sunburst or star, and, on the shield of the leading soldier, a crouching griffin or winged lion. Luraghi has suggested that the artist employed an unusual artistic convention to show that the hoplites are advancing in line, abreast. “Notice the interlocking legs of the warriors, visually conveying the close order of the phalanx, a detail that does not occur, to the best of my knowledge, in other depictions of rows of warriors in Phoenician metalwork or in Assyrian art.”
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The hoplites are shown approaching a scaling ladder that a nonhoplite has just placed against the city wall ahead of them. On the other side of the city, troops are already climbing a similar ladder. These soldiers hold their pointed shields over their heads to protect themselves from the defensive thrusts of a bareheaded spearman on the tower above (or perhaps also from missiles and rocks). Once the running hoplites begin to climb their ladder, however, they will encounter another hoplite, fighting in
defense of the city. He also is equipped with an emblazoned shield and a crested helmet, and will certainly attempt to ward them off with his own spear. Among the other defenders are archers and spearmen without heavy armor.

It appears, therefore, that mercenaries equipped as hoplites are fighting on both sides in this example of Near Eastern art. The only visual distinction between the hoplites inside and outside the walls is a stippled pattern on the defending hoplite’s helmet. Thus by the end of the eighth or early in the seventh century, soldiers armed as hoplites and arrayed in close formation were fighting as self-contained units embedded within eastern armies that included archers, chariots, cavalry, and lightly armed spearmen. At this date and in this corner of the world, the originals of the hoplite figures on the Amathus bowl are most likely to have been Greek soldiers.

One other possible point of origin for these particular mercenaries is Caria, in the southwestern corner of Asia Minor. Herodotus (1.171.4) credits the Carians with inventing helmet crests, shield devices, and shield grips or handles, and then passing them on to the Greeks. All these items can be plausibly connected to the hoplite tradition. Snodgrass, however, has denied the reality of the Carians’ claims to these military inventions.
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There is no mention of Carians in the surviving Assyrian records to parallel the references to Ionian Greeks.

A Widening Stage: Early Greek Mercenaries in Egypt and Beyond

In about 664 BC, shiploads of Ionian and Carian “Bronze Men” (i.e., hoplites) landed on the shores of the Nile delta and proceeded to loot and pillage the land. So successful were these raiders against the local forces of horsemen and lightly armed troops that an Egyptian ruler promptly engaged them as mercenaries.

According to Herodotus,
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this farsighted Egyptian king was Psammetichus I, founder of the Saite or twenty-sixth dynasty, who ultimately owed his throne to these soldiers from overseas. Subsequent rulers of the dynasty continued the tradition of hiring mercenaries, so that within a century of the first landing of the original “Bronze Men” up to thirty thousand Carians and Greeks were said to have been employed in Egyptian armies.
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An immense fort at Daphnae (modern Tell Defenneh in northeastern Egypt) served as one of their bases.
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The ruins of the fort have been excavated, revealing not only Greek pottery from the seventh and sixth centuries BC but also quarters that in the estimate of the excavators could have accommodated approximately twenty thousand troops.
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About seventy years after the first recorded landing of Greek soldiers in the delta region, a group of their successors inscribed their names on one of the ancient colossi of Ramses II at Abu Simbel, far up the Nile in southern Egypt, where they had traveled in the royal service. These mercenaries came from eastern Greek islands and cities, including Teos, Ialysos, and Colophon.
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Their inclusion of ethnic identifiers after their names at Abu Simbel suggests that as soldiers of fortune they had not settled down permanently in Egypt and “gone native.”

In addition, the tradition of service in Egypt was apparently being passed down within Greek families. The graffiti show that one Greek mercenary had actually been
named “Psammetichus” by his father Theocles, who had presumably fought for another pharaoh a generation earlier. The same royal Egyptian name of Psammethicus even found its way into the family of Periander, tyrant of Corinth.

A remarkable archaeological discovery in Syria reinforces the impression that in the seventh century more “Bronze Men” may have been fighting overseas in the eastern Mediterranean region than in Greece itself. In fact, the earliest Greek hoplite gear ever recovered from an actual battle site comes not from a plain in Euboea or the Peloponnese but from the Syrian city of Carchemish on the Euphrates River. The
hopla
or gear in this case probably belonged to Greeks in the Egyptian army.

In about 605 BC the Egyptian king Necho—who, like his forefathers, manned his garrisons, field army, and trireme fleet with tens of thousands of Greeks—led his forces north to Carchemish to challenge the power of Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylonia. Necho lost the battle, and during the fierce fighting two of his Greek mercenaries apparently lost pieces of their bronze hoplite armor (if not indeed their lives). These artifacts were unearthed at Carchemish during the 1911–14 excavations conducted by a British archaeological team that included T. E. Lawrence, later known as “Lawrence of Arabia” and a bit of a soldier of fortune himself.

One of the items was a bronze greave of Archaic type, discovered in the ruins of the city gate along with arrowheads and the bones of horses and humans. The other was a bronze hoplite shield found in “House D” outside the walls of Carchemish. This building had been destroyed by fire. Alongside the shield, the diggers found items inscribed with the cartouches of the pharaoh Necho and his ancestor Psammetichus I, as well as hundreds of arrowheads, some javelin points, and a sword. The device on the Greek shield was the head of the gorgon Medusa, surrounded by writhing snakes and circular zones decorated with horses and other animals.
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House D may have served as an Egyptian supply station or even the royal headquarters of Necho during the siege.

Here again in this conflict between Babylonians and Egyptians, just as in the fighting depicted on the Amathus bowl, Greek soldiers of fortune seem to have been employed on both sides. Nebuchadnezzar II followed up his victory over Necho at Carchemish in 605 BC by campaigning southward to the old Philistine city of Ashkelon and ultimately to the borders of Egypt itself. By this time (if not long before) the Babylonian king was certainly employing Greek mercenaries. One of these men, a soldier named Antimenidas from Mytilene, defeated a Goliath-like champion in one of the enemy armies. Antimenidas happened to be the brother of the poet Alcaeus (late seventh century BC), who wrote congratulatory verses to mark the mercenary hero’s homecoming to his native Lesbos. It is interesting to note that Alcaeus’ verses seem to imply that by this time Greeks had actually seen the houses of Babylon itself.

You have returned from the ends of the earth, Antimenidas, with the gold-bound ivory hilt of that sword with which, as you fought for the Babylonians who dwell in houses of long bricks, you did a great deed, preserving them all from evil by killing a fighter who lacked only a palm of standing five royal cubits high.
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Greek hoplites of the seventh and early sixth centuries, then, seem more likely to have been professionals fighting in foreign wars than part-time amateurs fighting for
their own cities at home. Is there a connection between these two strands of hoplite warfare—between Greek versus Greek wars on the home front, and mercenary service abroad? It may be that the sporadic wars between city-states and political factions in the seventh and sixth centuries were fueled in part by returning mercenaries, to take up the observation of van Wees quoted above. To use van Wees’s terms, the large number of individuals who fought for their own prestige and wealth would “reinforce the willingness of Greek cities” to fight for communal honor and profit.
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Antimenidas came back to Lesbos from his glorious stint in the Babylonian army at about the time that war broke out between men of Mytilene and some seafaring Athenians who were attempting to settle at Sigeum near the Hellespont. A Mytilenean civil war followed soon after. The soldier-poet Alcaeus fought in both conflicts, and (echoing Archilochus) frankly admitted that he had lost his shield in an engagement with the Athenians. The victors carried it off as a trophy and (Alcaeus imagines) hung it up in a temple.
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Here, perhaps, we can see the “soldier of fortune” mentality brought home to roost on Greek soil, in “patriotic” contests between armies of different city-states.

Wars of limited scope between Greeks on the home front may have been spurred by competition to possess the river of gold, slaves, and other riches that was flooding the Greek world as veterans like Antimenidas returned from the eastern wars, flush with pay and booty. At the same time, warfare between factions or city-states could have functioned as an incubator that inculcated toughness, fighting skills, and martial spirit among each new generation of young warriors. The seemingly pointless battles described by Herodotus could thus have contributed to a very practical outcome. Strengthened by athletic training and hardened to the rigors of hand-to-hand combat in local battles, Greek soldiers could have maintained their extremely profitable monopoly on providing heavily armed infantry to wealthy monarchs overseas.

Snodgrass has aptly described the mercantile nature of the tradition. “It was the Greek infantryman himself who was found to be more widely exportable than either ideas or objects on their own; in particular his services were keenly sought in the role of mercenary.”
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The most lucrative opportunities for ambitious Greeks during the period we call Archaic lay outside the Hellenic world, not within it.

Viking warfare holds up a distant mirror to the two strands of Greek hoplite warfare. On the one hand, the Norse sagas recount the dynastic struggles and homegrown conflicts between nascent states in the Vikings’ home realm—Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. In these home-front contests, Viking armies even practiced a close counterpart to the ritualized and “agonal” Greek hoplite battle—a “battle of the hazelled field,” where two armies met by appointment in a big fenced enclosure. On the other hand, historians have reconstructed—from the sagas of the Vikings and the chronicles of foreigners who were their targets—the relentless overseas raids, sieges, mercenary service, and settlement missions that eventually carried Vikings and their fleets of long ships from Byzantium to Newfoundland.
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