Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience Read online

  The extended campaign where episodic fighting breaks out instantaneously, accidentally, or unknowingly between either soldier

  or civilian, in the guise of horseman, archer, skirmisher, guerilla, or terrorist, was relatively absent in Greece on a large scale from the rise of the city-state until the later fifth century. Many scholars believe this and are surely correct on this count to discuss the 'ritualized' nature of early and classical Greek battle—provided they refer primarily to its predictable sequence of action, often identically replayed, regardless of the place, or time, or the particular Greek combatants present. For example, after the ordered columns of armored infantry squared off, the 'general'—battlefield leader is a better term—gave his brief harangue, a sheep or goat was sacrificed before the front line, and then, as Xenophon said of Koroneia, the men charged, collided, pushed, collapsed, killed, and died. By Hellenic tradition, and also because of the rarity of skilled cavalry and the ubiquity of nearby rough terrain, real pursuit of the defeated was limited. Instead, there was usually a mutual acknowledgment, often unexpressed, to abide simply by the decision of the battlefield dead, to view and then exchange their corpses, to allow the victors to erect a battlefield trophy, and to permit the losers to mope home in defeat and dejection. In the mind of the hoplite, what would be the point of further hostilities, when the losing combatants had no grounds for complaint over the location, time, and circumstance of battle, nor over the number, equipment, generalship, and tactics of their foe, no complaint at all over the outcome other than their own failure of bodily strength and loss of nerve?

  'Strategy' for the army of the invading hoplite landowners was largely the science of collecting and deploying the various contingents of the alliance, choosing the route and time of invasion, and, if need be, organizing a provocative, rather than a destructive, attack on the farms and agricultural installations of the defenders. For those attacked, it could occasionally be a case of riding it out safely behind the municipality's walls (siegecraft at this time still being in its infancy), thus wisely, but less courageously, allowing a brief, and usually relatively benign, ravaging of their farms, as the invader grappled with the myriad tasks of destroying cereals, vines, and olives on any wide scale. Yet, far more often men wished to fight. The decision was quickly made to assemble the farmers, to preserve their pride and the sanctity—rather than the viability—of their ancestral plots, to march out in columnar formation and to meet the trespassers in a single, pitched battle.

  In the battle's aftermath, permanent occupation of the defeated's prime lands, absolute destruction of his rural infrastructures, murder,

  rape, and enslavement of his people—the whole repetitious nightmare of the 'campaign' of modern warfare—rarely followed in the Archaic and early Classical Periods. That belongs more to those terrible, final years of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) when the agriculturalists' absolute monopoly and control over conflict vanished. Then much that was found tried and true by two prior centuries of landed amateurs—their arcane rules, their ethos of battle, which limited infantry conflict in a social, economic, chronological, and even spatial sense—was finally cast away, repudiated, through the steady and barbaric escalation of twenty-eight years of war. The combatants, Sparta and Athens, were, to employ a cliché, atypical societies; diametrically opposed in spirit, they were ironically similar in their relative independence from the dominance of free agriculture and thus immune both from the traditional requirements of farm work and from the confining regulations of hoplite battle, which was so agrarian in outlook and practice. They were 'free' instead, unlike most other smaller Greek poleis, to wage among themselves a new war so akin to the agony of our own. Butchery in the streets of Plataia and Mykalessos, skirmishing at Aitolia, Sphakteria, and Sicily, abject murder on Corcyra and Melos, all widened the scope of battle far beyond the old afternoon killing-fields of the past.

  'Tactics', too, from 650 BC to the later fifth century were deliberately as banal and one-dimensional as strategy. They consisted mainly of determining the proper, albeit elusive, ratio between the breadth and depth of the phalanx, a few rudimentary flanking movements, and the placement, always somewhat political, of the particular allied troops on the proper wings. By design, little—very little—was left to chance. With the accompanying absence of reserves, specialized units, the surprise attack, the night engagement, and the concealed ambush as decisive encounters, there was no desire for elaborate, pre-battle tactical planning. Nor, then, was there reason for any other to enter infantry battle except the owners of small farms, the wearers of bronze armor. The landless, rootless poor who could act either as light-armed skirmishers or guerillas in difficult, mountainous terrain were unwelcome and thus they were relegated to rowing in the fleet or occasional harassment, mopping-up and scavenging before and after battle. After all, in the great age of the hoplite their presence on a wide scale could only prolong war (and cost money), endangering the very economy, the very purpose of pitched battle, by blending D-Day into nightmarish Vietnamization, war into cold war, by creating an overall climate of farming, but no farming. Besides, the elevation

  of such 'trash' into real militiamen might bring along with it their dangerous ideas about land redistribution and the radicalization of democracy. And in the Greek mind—the landowning Greek mind at least—there was a somber pathos to the notion that skirmishers could kill from afar their social betters, without recourse to hand-to-hand combat and the burden of hoplite armor. Yet, hoplite snobbery was of a peculiar sort: on the other social extreme, chateau generals and indeed generalship itself, as we know it, were also virtually non-existent. Such plumed officers and other assorted military intellectuals and planners were not only unneeded, but disliked and unwanted as well. The elite cavalry likewise played an insignificant role, one more of mutual posturing and prancing than real charging into the ranks of armed men; whatever their claims to martial virtue, they were nearly as irrelevant in battle as their impoverished opposites on the social scale.

  Consequently, the often noted 'paradoxes' of Greek warfare—the ravaging of cropland, but the accomplishment of little lasting agricultural damage; the decisive hoplite clash without extensive battle fatalities; the choice of level battlefields rather than the garrisoning of defensible, mountainous passes; the adoption of heavy, bronze armor under the summer, Mediterranean sun; the exclusion not merely of the very poor, but of the very rich as well—must not be seen at all as true incongruities. All are explicable in light of the small farmers' Utopian agenda: free men who arose out of the Dark Ages as independent landowners intent on creating and preserving an exclusive society, an agrotopia, in their own image. Hoplite battle—itself most often arising over a struggle for disputed borderlands—for over two centuries was real war in an artificial climate—the private domain of a rural, middle class where all of like circumstance could fight and yet never really endanger their mutual agricultural prosperity. For one of the few times in history, bloodletting served in the long run to spare, rather than to expend, lives. In short, Greek warfare for over two centuries was a wonderful, absurd conspiracy.

  Although it was clear to the vast majority of the Greeks that the collision of men, always stumbling and grappling in the melée of infantry battle, was their only image of war, it has not necessarily been so in the minds of their modern successors. On the contrary, all too little has been written about the environment of a Greek battle, unique though it surely was. Yet, we see fallen hoplites on the public panorama of extant monumental sculpture from many temples, spear-thrusting on a great number of red- and black-figure vases, and

  descriptions of fighting throughout all varieties of Greek literature; this suggests, does it not, that most Greeks were disinterested in the parade, the May-Day march, and things quasi-military, resigned instead to the notion that war was only the few minutes of fighting and dying? That the claim of modern scholarly 'neglect' of the Greek battle phenomenon is no exaggeration is clear from recent controversy over
the very nature of hoplite fighting; some, for example, have sought to argue against the pushing of crowded ranks, as if phalanx combat was instead relatively fluid, characterized by individual skirmishing, not a concentrated, massed thrusting of shields. The significance of this 'controversy' is not the persuasiveness of the argument (it is demonstrably false), but rather, at this late date, its very existence, for its presence is surely symptomatic of our own intrinsic misunderstanding of the battlefield experience of the Greek hoplite, misunderstanding of what Greek battle was, and thus, too, what Greek battle was for.

  Instead, scholars for over 150 years have concentrated on the very three areas of warfare which were not so important to the great class of small landholders who comprised the hoplite infantry of most Greek city-states. Strategy, tactics and the 'sociology' of Greek warfare tell us very little about the fighting experience in the life of these citizens of the polis. Nor can this lack of interest in battle reflect a scarcity of information in our written, pictorial, or archaeological sources. Ancient historians, it is true, concentrated mostly on the campaign. Even when they do turn to factual, rather than rhetorical, descriptions of key battles, there is more emphasis on rudimentary tactics and deployment than on the fighting itself. Nevertheless, because hoplite battle was a common, shared experience to most men of the city-state, bits and pieces of the true story emerge in nearly all Greek literature, from the poetry of Tyrtaeus to the comedies of Aristophanes. The constant finds of hoplite arms and armor and the frequency of battle scenes on Greek vases and in sculpture reinforce this picture drawn from literature. Consequently, if there is any interest, we can present a confident account of the nature of hoplite battle. True, recent scholarship devoted to most Greek social and economic history has often been less than positivist, in the sense that classicists long ago discovered what we could 'know' with certainty about the Greeks, and left it to us to fill in the gaps through less certain testimonia and (sometimes faulty) modern analogy. Yet, the study of Greek battle is surely an exception; this volume, it must be confessed, could have been composed many years ago at the very

  dawn of Classical scholarship. The real reason for these traditional (and repetitive, if not misguided) approaches to Greek warfare that resulted in neglect of the battlefield is to be found not in the primary sources: the fault lies with the peculiar nature of classical scholarship in general, and with the predilections of military historians in particular.

  Classicists have most often framed the study of Greek warfare from their own individual training and interests—uniformly originating out of the university and thus long study in archaeology, philology, and history. Battle was to be political history, battle was to be Greek philology, battle was to be historiography. And so, for example, they have chronicled the military 'strategy' of a Pericles, Agesilaos, or Epameinondas, but only as an ancillary to a larger, historical interest in the rise of Athenian, Spartan, or Theban hegemony. Even when individual battles were studied—their number always small and static—it was usually through the process of 'reconstruction': key Greek words were to be analyzed and re-analyzed, inferior, pedantic, tactical manuals of much later ages consulted, passages in original sources questioned and rejected, numbers of faceless combatants surmised, sterile wings and contingents of men moved and removed—all like chess pieces on some ivory board, as if this approach alone could ever explain why or how one group of men collapsed and fled the battlefield. Similarly, arms and armor, ironically the most tangible of all evidence for hoplite fighting, were discussed largely as an offshoot of archaeological excavation; that is, their shape, form, construction, and finish were seen (as other decorative bronzes and sculpture) as works of art, rather than heavy, cumbersome tools to protect real men from awful arrow, spear, and sword attacks. Usually, then, their actual weights, the effectiveness of their protection, and the difficulty inherent in their very construction and usage were less well studied. Instead, like pots and temples, discussion of arms, of tools of mayhem and slaughter, centered on date, origin, type, and aesthetic quality and was more often introduced in the manner of a museum catalog or the slide show of an art history class, than in the proper framework of frightful killing and dying.

  The rise of sociology and psychology in the twentieth century as legitimate 'sciences' has also led the more creative in Classics to envision Greek infantrymen as everymen, primeval warriors or young adults engaged in a universal rite of passage into manhood, thus seeing the undeniably ritualistic nature of Greek warfare as something other than a deliberate, contrived contest between small

  farmers. Their pitched battle, in this more recent and fashionable view, is the arena where society showcases these initiations—characteristic of all cultures and thus not unique to the classical Greeks—as part of larger religious and civic obligations; the hoplite dance, group war-cry, and trophy, are all, then, sure evidence for the predictable social expression of like individuals of roughly any time or place. Yet, there was something very real, very exclusively murderous to all involved in Greek battle which is often forgotten here by anthropologists and other social scientists, something more than a mere nexus for social and religious study. Does not such an effort to explain conflict in universally 'human' terms inevitably become inhuman? The Greeks' experience was always the bloody pit of the ugly cock fight, not the posturing of the banty rooster; in short, the battlefield of Greece was often a deliberate mini-holocaust, predicated on very precise physical and mental criteria and a moral imperative specific to hoplite infantrymen, and thus far removed from the tribal give and take found in other preindustrial societies.

  Military historians of Greek warfare—originally an odd breed of nineteenth-century German nationalists—while out of favor now, have been far more pragmatic than classicists and, in that narrow sense at least, therefore more successful in revealing what ancient battle was 'like'. For example, in the work of Johannes Kromayer and his numerous associates, Greek strategy and tactics were at least predicated upon close attention to topography. They explored the Greek countryside and calibrated the size of ancient battlefields, always seeking to understand whether the armies of Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon might actually fit the physical conditions of the (albeit modern) landscape. Hans Delbrück went even further. His idea of Sachkritik (the effort to comprehend 'the reality of the thing') was all important, as if Greek warfare could not be understood unless drill, maneuver, and even equipment were explicable through analogy to the common practice of the German army. The fault, however, with these scholars, the first scientific military historians to categorize Greek warfare into neat compartments—arms, logistics, tactics, and strategy—was not their ethnocentric demand for practical references to the conditions of real, though contemporary, warfare. Indeed, that particular interest was their chief strength. Rather, it was their marked distance, not merely in time, but, more importantly, in spirit, from the combatants of the ancient battlefields. Rife snobbery is present in their handbooks and at times obnoxious. In truth, most were either officers themselves

  or civilian 'consultants' who mingled intimately with the upper civilian and military strata of society. Either way, the result was predictably the same: they gazed down on the Greek battlefield from the 'proud tower' of their own privilege, naturally searching in vain for similar kindred spirits of an ancient officer class or military intelligentsia, who practiced 'operational control' and exercised 'articulation'—a class which they never realized did not exist. 'Theaters,' 'Fronts,' 'Flanks,' and 'Salients,' after all, are nonsensical terms when applied to the Greek battlefield.

  Military historians' influence, then, on balance, also has been often detrimental, since it ignores most battle experience. It is a misreading of ancient realities by faulty modern analogy whose influence is still felt today; it has imposed an artificial, glamorized separation between hoplite and commander, fighting and tactics; it is an amoral view of the phalanx from without, which tells us very little, at the expense of the picture from within, whi
ch reveals so much more about the mind of the Greeks. Indeed, the very notion of a brief collision of uniformly armed equals—little tactics, little strategy, little generalship—must have disturbed these men and so they did their best to reinvent Greek warfare into something that it was not. Their legacy in some sense is the generation of 1914, when a classical education, drawing the wrong lesson from a selective reading of ancient texts, contributed to, rather than assuaged, that madness.