The Last Full Measure (7 page)

This sounds entirely plausible. Vase paintings show hoplites unprotected on their thighs and, as far as one can judge, on their genitals. But something, nevertheless, seems contrary to common sense. If, over time, warriors find that they have a particular vulnerability—that is, they get killed on a regular basis because of a lack of armor in a vital place, or their tactics expose them to often repeated fatalities, or their gear is defective—they tend to do something about it. On the whole, fighting men have a particular aversion to getting killed. In addition, being gored in the genitals is a very special risk men would passionately seek to avoid (one thinks of the steel codpieces of medieval knights). But this does not seem to have been the case in hoplite warfare (or Roman legion warfare either).

Two ideas present themselves (though neither entirely convincingly). One, that they did have effective protection, or felt they did, in the shield; or, two, that another advantage—a tactical
one—outweighed the disadvantage: Was it more important to be mobile, to be relatively unencumbered? (There is, of course, a third possibility—that they did not rate self-preservation very highly. But this would seem unlikely in the context of citizen-soldiers who sought limited warfare.)

Once engaged, hoplites would change to an overhead grip in order to thrust down over the shield into the neck, face, arms, and shoulders. Spears had butt spikes that could be used for stabbing a fallen enemy, but they also posed their own problem to comrades behind. Plutarch relates that in the great press of bodies in Pyrrhus’s phalanx during the battle of Árgos in 272 BCE many were killed by “friendly fire”—accidental blows from comrades.
⁶⁹
Some spears would have shattered on impact with the enemy front line, but the great press of bodies would have made sword fighting difficult (hoplites were usually armed with the double-edged short sword—although there is pictorial evidence of a sicklelike design not dissimilar to a Ghurka kukri—as well as a dagger called the
parazonium
, or “belt companion”).
⁷⁰
In the great shove a disarmed hoplite himself became a weapon, as companions behind pushed him into the enemy ranks.

The heaviest mortality would understandably be in the front rank, and again one can see the function of providing a special heroic status to those who fought there. Men have to be, in the most literal meaning of the word, encouraged to risk their lives. For example, in the age of musketry, it would often be junior officers, young men seeking advancement (but also the most expendable), who were given the honor of carrying the regimental colors. It was a highly dangerous job because the color bearer was an obvious target and, due to the nature of his role, often exposed. But the function had been, over centuries,
invested
with glory, and if he survived he not only progressed in his career but also enhanced his social standing among his peers as well as the wider society. Through his risk taking he had become empowered. The same could be said
of the Roman
velites
, lightly armored forward skirmishers of the legion who, young and eager to prove themselves, were rewarded for acts of conspicuous individual bravery.
⁷¹
As the Spartan Tyrtaeus expressed it: “Glorious indeed is death in the front rank of the combat, when the brave man falls fighting for his country.”
⁷²

Once the two phalanxes were locked together, the battle came down to
othismos
—the push of shields—by which the rearward ranks sought to shove their comrades deeper into the enemy formation in order to form bridgeheads that could be reinforced and exploited—assuming the pioneers survived long enough to hold the pocket. Hand-to-hand battle would have been frenzied and ugly, rather like the trench-raiding combat of World War I—desperate, fear-choked, grabbing, slashing, brutal killing about as far removed from some heroic model of warfare as one could imagine. Death by trampling and suffocation (a high risk in any close-in combat by massed infantry, as Agincourt eighteen hundred or so years later would demonstrate) was the fate of many who lost their footing. But the need to maintain a heroic aura around battle is compelling (if civilians knew how truly gruesome combat is, societies would be hard-pressed to sustain it), and mass warfare is very rarely depicted on ancient Greek vases; the image that had to be promoted was one of heroic individual combat. The engine of war runs on the intoxicating vapor of mythology.

At some point came the critical moment of resolution when on one side there was a rapid evaporation of morale and the defeated began to peel off from the rear and sides, quickly triggering a general flight (the whiff of defeat is pungent). Retreat often unleashes some primitive bloodlust in the victor, and if there was a complete collapse, undoubtedly men were run down and killed in number, but if some order was maintained by the defeated, a fighting withdrawal would have been a sufficient disincentive to the attackers to take further casualties. Battle, after all, was about driving the enemy off and doing so while minimizing risk. There was a life
to return to. Casualties generally remained on the low side compared with modern warfare—5 percent for the victors and about 14 percent for the defeated.
⁷³

But hoplite battle was far from a bloodless ritual. Victor Davis Hanson describes the aftermath:

(Pydna, 168 BCE, was the battle in which Macedonian phalanxes were massacred by Roman legions. The Macedonian death toll has been estimated as exceeding 60 percent.)

Victory was usually signaled by the erection of a panoply of armor mounted on a tree or pole, and custom dictated that it should not be permanent (too showy an edifice was considered in bad taste). Under the strict code of hoplite combat the dead were invariably reclaimed by their respective sides and an accounting by tribal affiliation was relayed back to the city. Where the bodies lay would have told its own story reflecting the tribal composition of the phalanx. As with any unit based on geographical proximity, whole communities could be devastated (the British Pals
battalions of World War I, and the men from Bedford, Virginia, who died at D-Day, are classic modern examples). At Plataea, for example, (479 BCE) the Athenian dead came from one tribe, the Aiantis. At Leuctra (371 BCE) almost all of the Spartan high command, many of whom were related, were killed.
⁷⁵
The Roman writer Onasander, describing hoplite warfare, remarked that men fought best when “brother is in rank beside brother, friend beside friend, lover beside lover.”
⁷⁶
The last category is certainly at odds with “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” The Theban “Sacred Band” of 150 homosexual couples died to a man resisting the Macedonian invasion at the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE. Plutarch describes the Macedonian king, Philip, reviewing their corpses: “He stopped at the spot where the three hundred lay: all slain where they had met the long spears of the Macedonians. The corpses were still in their armor and mixed up with one another, and so he became amazed when he learned that these were the regiments of lovers and beloved. ‘May all perish,’ he said, ‘who suspect that these men did or suffered anything disgraceful.’ ”
⁷⁷

In Sparta also homosexuality was an institutionalized part of the society and an entirely accepted part of the military.
⁷⁸

In Greek warfare, victory went to the side that controlled the battlefield and not necessarily to the side with fewer casualties. At the battle of Paraetacene (c. 316 BCE), for example, Antigonus’s army lost more than 3,700 killed, while his opponent, Eumenes, had only about 540 dead. But Eumenes could not persuade or force his army to camp among the corpses, and it insisted on moving off for the night. Antigonus, on the other hand, did cajole his men to sleep among the slain and claimed the victory.
⁷⁹

SHIFTS IN WEAPONS
technology and the tactics that flow from them can spell doom for those warriors on the wrong side of
change—the battlefields of history are littered with the corpses of military mastodons. But military change should never be pinned on one factor in isolation. Technical and tactical innovations have a dynamic exchange with social and political ideas. The response to economic pressures such as overpopulation or the dwindling of some natural resource may be expressed in a desire for colonial expansion, or to redress a perceived wrong, and is then packaged in the ideology necessary to the day and to the cause. Ideas, as much as weapons, get warriors killed, and this symbiotic relationship radically alters the lethality of the battlefield. These sea changes happen periodically, and Macedonia in the latter half of the first millennium BCE was the seat of just such a military revolution.

It is sometimes difficult for us to appreciate small changes. We live in an era in which military science, over a period of only a few decades, learned how to potentially evaporate the world. That the Macedonians in about 400 BCE extended the length of a spear by about 8 feet does not seem that much of a big deal. But the extended reach of the 16-to-18-foot
sarissa
multiplied both the potential lethality and the defensive capability of the Macedonian phalanx by an order of magnitude. The longer spear meant that the front five rows (rather than the three of the conventional hoplite phalanx) could present spear points to the enemy—an increase in “firepower” of 40 percent.
⁸⁰

It was a densely packed and determined body that offered what must have been a stomach-churning prospect to its opponents. There was also a radical change in personal armor. The relatively heavy hoplite panoply was discarded in favor of much lighter leather and composite elements; and because the warrior needed both hands to hold his much weightier and longer spear, the great hoplite shield was reduced to a vestigial disk hung at the neck or shoulder (a similar diminution of armor is seen in the purely symbolic gorget of an eighteenth-century infantry officer).
This was not the armor of self-preservation that had characterized the southern Greeks but something much more aggressive. Killing rather than concession drove the Macedonian war ethic, and unlike the southern Greeks, with their emphasis on limited war, the Macedonians brought a totalitarian blitzkrieg mentality to the battlefield that was reflected in their general tactical scheme.

Ancient Macedonia was a frontier of Greece, and there was perhaps more contact there with the horse-raider societies of the steppes. It would not be surprising, therefore, that it adopted from them a horse culture that was lacking in southern Greece. Macedonian society was rough-hewn and tough. Compared with southern Greeks, Macedonians had more in common with other outliers of ancient history—Celts, Picts, Gauls, or Germans: ruled by clan kings, fierce warriors, and stupendous boozers, and not much concerned with the etiquette of their more sophisticated neighbors. Cavalry, and particularly an elite-based cavalry (the Companions), played a critical role in Macedonian tactics. (The word
aristocratic
is often used to describe the social structure and the men who made up the Macedonian cavalry, but with its genteel associations it is perhaps not the best descriptor; we need something much closer to the raw power of a Mafia consigliere or Scottish tribal laird than, say, Louis XIV—more clenched fist than crooked pinkie.)

The general shape of Macedonian battle tactics was in some ways reminiscent of modern armored warfare. The Companions—essentially a royal household unit (
hetaroi
) armed with sword, shield, and short cavalry spear (
xyston
) used for throwing and thrusting—was anchored on the right of the battle line (the right, throughout history, has been the position of honor and status). Alexander, in a shift from the tradition of Greek commanders fighting as infantry, fought with the Companions. The auxiliary cavalry was on the left wing, while the center was filled
by the phalangites with their massed spears. A lighter infantry component—
hypaspists
(from
aspis
, shield)—operated between phalanx and cavalry as mobile attack infantry. The Companions’ role was to smash, panzer-style, deep into the enemy cavalry and with the utmost determination fight its way to its command center. While the phalanx held the opposing infantry, the
hypaspists
exploited the confusion caused by their cavalry’s incursions. It was a tactical model based on the combination of great speed and concentration of force from the cavalry, and a rock-solid infantry center that could either hold or move forward at a steady and irresistible pace.