Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience Read online

Clearly, classicists and professional military historians alike have not been so interested in the experience of Greek battle. The former have seen battle theoretically, as an intellectual exercise from the extremes of textual exegesis to psychoanalysis, dry and devoid of relevance to the how and why of killing and dying; the latter, pragmatists par excellence, squandered the capital of their military expertise, such as it was, by their social distance from, and careful disdain for, the great middle classes who invariably provide the landed infantry of any citizen combative force. The mind of these soldiers alone experienced, analyzed, and preserved for us the true (hideous) nature of pitched battle, and so inevitably became the sole repository of the Greek combat ordeal, and thus the key to Greek military history. In the past, we scholars have not done our job and so as a profession we bear no little responsibility for the promulgation of dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, for the corresponding neglect of Tyrtaeus, 'His white head and grey beard breathing out his strong soul in the dust, holding in his dear hands his groin all bloody' (10.24–5).

  This small collection, I believe, is part of a healthy trend, current in classical scholarship recently, to investigate the 'ordinary' in Greece; only this way can we appreciate the achievements of the extraordinary—the extraordinary who nearly all experienced frequently the horrors of a hoplite battle. On a variety of fronts, archaeological, epigraphic, and linguistic, be it through the use of field-surveys, computer techniques, or expanded prosopographical study, we are learning a great deal about farming, sexuality, food supply, demographics, the accumulation, use, and abuse of wealth, the ratios between rich and poor: life, then, as it was lived, among the vast majority of the Greeks. Whatever the conventional arguments for the need of each new generation of classicists to 'reinterpret' for us the traditional canon of Greek literature, the limits of literary theory—psychoanalytic, feminist, structuralist, deconstructionist, minimalist—surely have now been reached. It is not so much the sheer overabundance (and faddishness) of literary work on the major authors—although any brief look at current American Ph.D. thesis topics in Classics or casual perusal of the learned journals will bear this out—as much as their culpability for the subsequent neglect of the mundane and practical. Literary theorists' appropriation—confiscation, to use a better word—of a Greece, which was not and is not their own, has left us often with a counterfeit empty Greece, sophisticated as it is sterile, with little to offer any outside the university. Perhaps these few essays on the nature of hoplite battle will help to restore in a larger sense what the Greeks all along wished to instill as their sole military, their moral, legacy: that warfare is simply battle, that battle is only fighting, that fighting is always killing and dying, nothing more, nothing less.

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  Part II

  THE MEN AND THEIR EQUIPMENT

  It will be easier to defeat them in battle than to strip away their armor once they are dead.

  Plutarch

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  1

  HOPLITE WEAPONS AND OFFENSIVE ARMS

  J.K.Anderson

  The great round shield, the hoplon from which the hoplite derived his name, cannot be omitted from an account of 'offensive arms,' partly because it determined the conditions under which spear and sword were used; partly because it was used not merely passively, to ward off the enemy's blows, but actively pressed forward in the pushing (othismos)1 that decided the battle when two phalanxes met face to face. 'Set foot against foot; strain shield against shield, crest upon crest, helmet upon helmet; breast to breast close with your man and fight him, grasping your sword's hilt or long spear-shaft' (Tyrtaeus 8.31–4). This exhortation to Spartans engaged in the Second Messenian War (first half of the seventh century BC?) is undoubtedly influenced by two famous passages in the Iliad (13.130–3 and 16.215–17). But the heroes of the Trojan War are described as packing closely together with their own friends, so that shield touches shield, helmet helmet—exceptionally, since Homeric battles are normally affairs of heroes moving about the field in chariots, from which they alight for single combat. What is new in Tyrtaeus is the shield pressed against the enemy's shield.

  The fighting that Tyrtaeus describes is not that of the fully developed phalanx, in which each man takes his appointed place in the file, with the best soldiers forming a 'cutting edge' in front (Xen. Hell. 3.1.23; An. 3.4.42; 5.2.26; 5.4.22) and the remainder, like the iron that gives weight to a blade (Arr. Tact. 12.2), carrying the leaders forward. The young men whom Tyrtaeus addresses may stay shirking out of weapon-shot if they choose, though 'those who dare boldly to stand by each other and come to grips, fighting in the front rank, lose fewer dead and save the people behind them'—the 'naked' folk, who, after the poet has sufficiently encouraged their betters, are told to 'crouch here and there under shield, and pelt the enemy with big stones, or shoot at them with polished javelins, standing close to the

  fully armored men' (Tyrtaeus 8.28; 11–13; 35–8). This mingling of the fully equipped with men who might have no equipment at all, to say nothing of the reliance on the individual's sense of shame rather than on discipline, is foreign to hoplite warfare as it eventually developed. But one cannot suppose that the Spartans would have paid any attention to a lame, feeble-minded Athenian schoolmaster (so Tyrtaeus is described, no doubt fancifully: scholiast on Pl. Leg. 629a) whose exhortations were completely irrelevant to their own battlefield experience. His description of battle, problematic to us, must have been true to reality in his own day.2 At least the individual, biting his lip as he braces his straddled feet firmly on the earth and brandishes his mighty spear in his right hand, is recognizable as the ancestor of the hoplite, though the shield whose 'belly' covers him from shin to shoulder seems larger than the hoplite shield as we know it from other literary and archaeological evidence.3 The combination of armored spearmen and light-armed missile throwers may reflect guerilla warfare in the mountains of Messenia; or the storming of enemy strongholds;4 alternatively, there may have been a transitional period during which hoplite armor and weapons, as known in later times, were carried by at least some individuals, but the phalanx in its later technical sense was still evolving from Tyrtaeus' opposed groups of front-line fighters. Against this view is the suitability of the shield to the tactics of the phalanx, since it covered a man's left-hand neighbor as well as himself (Thuc. 5.71) and was used, unlike other armor, 'for the sake of the whole line' (Plut. Mor. 220A).5 But in favor of a time of development, extending perhaps from the first to the third quarter of the seventh century BC, is the fact that works of art from this period frequently show hoplites carrying a second spear.6 This would appear to be an inheritance from the equipment of the chariot-borne warriors described in the epic poems and shown in the art of the late eighth century BC. (Whether poetry and art depict the actual warfare of any period, and if so of which, is controversial and need not be discussed here.) But the two spears of the epic hero are used indifferently for throwing or for thrusting; it is the use of the first spear for throwing that renders a second spear necessary for thrusting at close quarters.7 The hoplite in seventh-century art is never actually shown throwing a spear, though the possibility that he may have done so requires further discussion. He often carries two spears on the march; in action, like Tyrtaeus' young soldier, he almost invariably wields a single spear in his right hand.

  An early picture of a hoplite carrying a second spear in battle is on a

  small oil-bottle (aryballos) painted at Corinth early in the seventh century BC.8 A soldier, dressed in a loose tunic without body-armor but wearing a high-crested 'Corinthian' helmet and carrying a large round shield, strides from left to right. His left arm is flung forward, and the arm-band (porpax) and hand-grip (antilabe) of his shield are clearly visible. He carries a spear, somewhat longer than his own height, in his right hand, just above waist level. His hand and arm are drawn back for the thrust, with the elbow sharply bent. A second spear, apparently rather shorter and with its head bent to the front in order to accommod
ate it within the picture, appears to be tucked between his shield and the back of his left wrist. His opponents, also helmeted and without body-armor, charge from the right. The first two brandish at shoulder level large spears in their right hands, and carry shields of the indented 'Boeotian' shape, covered with small bosses. A third man throws his Boeotian shield behind him as he draws his straight sword; a fourth has no shield, stretches his left arm forward at shoulder height, with the fingers of the hand extended, and is probably about to throw the spear that he holds in his right hand, drawn back and also at shoulder height. Two more spears appear on each side of the leading warrior with the Boeotian shield. Their shafts are at a slight angle to the vertical; their heads point upwards. They have presumably been thrown, though by whom or at what target is not clear. Behind the hoplite a naked archer is about to shoot to the right—in support of the hoplite? Or attacking him treacherously from behind? In either case, his intentions are frustrated by a naked man who from behind seizes the archer's hair with his left hand, while his right plunges a straight sword clean through his victim's body.

  If this scene represents a contemporary battle and not an episode from a lost epic,9 it seems to portray the state of affairs already deduced from Tyrtaeus—the intermingling of armored and unarmored men and the use of missile weapons, including the bow and arrow, which Tyrtaeus does not mention. The hoplite's second spear may be for throwing—but why is he apparently charging home without throwing it first?

  Bows and slings (more effective than hand-flung stones, but requiring more space for free action) are mentioned by Archilochus (fr. 3), Tyrtaeus' approximate contemporary. They will not long be stretched forth, once the 'mill of Ares,' the war-god, is assembled in the plain, 'but there will be grievous work of swords, for skilled in this warfare are the spear-renowned lords of Euboea.' Since the poet, quite exceptionally, gives the sword preference over the spear for close

  action,10 it is not clear that hoplites are involved; nor is the passage necessarily connected with a treaty banning missile weapons which the Euboean cities of Chalcis and Eretria are said by a late source (Strabo 10.1.12) to have concluded at about this time.11

  Of his own personal equipment, Archilochus (fr. 2) 'emphatically says that his weapon is the spear—the single spear—no one could sing quite in that key about a pair of throwing-spears.'12 He sums up the life of a seventh-century soldier of fortune as follows: 'In my spear-shaft is my kneaded barley-meal; in my spear-shaft is my Ismaric wine; leaning on my spear-shaft I drink.'13 It is further inferred that he was a hoplite because he abandoned his shield when running away, instead of flinging it over his back to protect his shoulder-blades; 'he would hardly have left his shield behind him if it had been anything but an encumbrance; moreover, if no discredit had attached to the incident, he would not have troubled to make a song' (fr. 6) 'about it.'14

  Yet the second spear may have sometimes been found as part of the hoplite's equipment after the development of the regular hoplite phalanx, from which light-armed or unarmored missile-throwers were excluded. The evidence is a painting, perhaps the finest of all pictures of hoplites marshalled in formation and on the point of joining battle, on the small wine-jug known nowadays as the Chigi vase.15 This vase was made at Corinth possibly about the middle of the seventh century BC, and shows two opposed armies, each consisting of a first and second rank of hoplites. Those advancing from the right show the emblazoned faces of their shields. The insides of their opponents' shields are turned to the viewer, with each man's left hand grasping the hand-grip (antilabe) and the arm bent at the elbow, with forearm horizontal, implying the existence of an arm-band (porpax). The porpax was in fact originally depicted in paint applied over the 'glaze' with which the figures are portrayed in silhouette, but this paint can now only be made out with difficulty on the shields of the final figures of the second rank.16 The soldiers of the front ranks of both armies poise spears held shoulder high at the point of balance in their right hands. The point is aimed slightly downwards for the deadly thrust over the shield at the throat. Second spears, whose points break the upper margin of the picture, slope backwards at an angle of about 30 degrees above the warriors' heads. The lower shafts are visible among the legs of the army advancing from the right, but cannot be seen in the left-hand army. The rear-rank soldiers of the left-hand army have only one spear each, carried at the slope on the

  right shoulder. The rear rank of the right-hand army have brought their first spear down, so that the heads project at about waist level into the gap between the ranks (possibly an intermediate movement between the slope and the raising of the spear to shoulder level). Second spears appear at the slope above the soldiers' heads.

  The second spears have been interpreted as 'ghosts,' 'intended to indicate that each man had a second spear in reserve, carried by his servant.'17 But this would contribute nothing to his own safety or the strength of the line if the first spear broke. Meriones in the Trojan War, after breaking one spear, could hasten off to the camp by the ships to retrieve his second (Hom. Il. 13.159–68). But the soldier in the closely ordered phalanx must abide in his place and defend himself as he could with the splintered truncheon. One might suggest as an alternative that the artist wishes to combine two moments in time in a single picture—the front-rank men carried their spears at the slope during the approach, and brought them to the thrusting position just before closing with the enemy. Or, again, the extra spear-points might be intended to multiply and crowd the weapons on both sides, and give an added impression of numbers (the empty space between the ranks, which in the right-hand army is filled with the projecting spear-heads, in the left contains a flute-player, to whose music his companions have advanced).

  But the simplest explanation, that the men (though why not those of the left-hand army's second rank?) actually do have two spears, seems the most acceptable. They must be supposed to be carried at the slope on the left shoulder, and grasped (together with the shield-grip) by the left hand, and indeed traces of two spears carried in this way were still visible at the time the drawings were made for the original publication.18 They are clearly reserves, suggesting a system of tactics in which the first spear was thrown just before the armies closed, and the second was then grasped for thrusting. Two spears, one smaller than the other, appear above a stack of arms behind the rear rank of the second army, and these have attached to their shafts loops intended to give extra purchase when the spear is thrown.19 So do the two spears of a man who is arming himself still further to the rear. On the other hand, no such loops appear on the spears of the men who are in action on both sides; the front ranks are apparently too close to throw before taking their reserve spear; there are no thrown spears in the field (such as appear on the aryballos of a generation earlier); the levelled first spears of the rear rank of the right-hand army are clearly not about to be thrown; and the rear-rank men of their opponents

  have first spears only, and are making no attempt to throw them. Indeed it would be difficult for either rear rank to throw without hitting their own leaders. Perhaps therefore the second spears are intended to replace breakages. In any case, second spears evidently proved more nuisance than they were worth. They do not appear in later art, and the helplessness of the hoplite whose one spear breaks is stressed, more than two centuries after the painting of the Chigi vase, by Euripides (HF 190–203); the hoplite is the slave of his weapons, and if his comrades prove wanting in courage he himself perishes through the cowardice of those by his side. If he breaks his spear, he cannot with his body ward off death, since he has but the one resource. In all this the archer, who keeps himself out of danger and deals death blindly with his myriad arrows, has the advantage. Strange sentiments these, even in the context of the mortal enmity between the archer-hero Herakles and the villainous King Lycus, to win favor with an audience which had grown up believing that the spear successfully opposed to Persian archery had saved Greece from enslavement (Aesch. Pers, 813, 1001–3).

  Needl
ess to say, in classical times the hoplite seldom threw his spear (which none the less could prove an effective missile) except as an act of desperation before running away. Men who intended to stand and put up a fight had better uses to which to put their 'one resource.' Agesilaus of Sparta, fighting his way out of the mountains of Acarnania in 389 BC, stormed a position from which his men were being harassed by the enemy's light-armed troops.

  On the summit were the hoplites of the Acarnanians drawn up in order, and the greater number of their peltasts, and they waited for the Spartans there. They discharged their missiles, and, shooting their spears like javelins, wounded some cavalry-men and killed a number of horses. But when they were almost come to grips with the Spartan hoplites they gave way, and there were killed of them that day about three hundred.

  (Xen. Hell. 4.6.11)

  Again, in 377 BC, Agesilaus, campaigning in Boeotia, turned the Thebans' position and forced them to retire hurriedly. 'While they were running past, some of the polemarchs [Spartan regimental commanders] charged them at the double with their regiments. However the Thebans threw their spears like javelins from the ridges, so that Alypetus, one of the polemarchs, was actually killed, shot by a spear. All the same, the Thebans were routed from this ridge too'

  (Xen. Hell. 5.4.52). On the other hand, when the Athenian democrats were defending Munychia against the Thirty Tyrants and their supporters in 404 BC, their leader Thrasybulus encouraged them by pointing out that the enemy, charging uphill, could make no use of missiles for fear that those who threw them from behind would hit their own leaders. 'But we, letting fly spears and javelins and stones downhill, will reach them and wound many of them' (Xen. Hell. 2.4.15). Thrasybulus' men were not, of course, a regular hoplite phalanx but a scratch force using improvised equipment.