Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (10 page)

These battle traits of the Greeks established a distinctive Western way of war. “Firepower and heavy defensive armament—not merely the ability but also the desire to deliver fatal blows and then steadfastly to endure, without retreat, any counterresponse—have always been the trademark of Western armies.”
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The geography of most of the major
city-states favored this type of warfare. The valleys of Argos, Athens, Corinth, Mantinea, Sparta, and Thebes were surrounded and divided by nearby mountain ranges. “Such small and rolling plains not only favored the culture of small farming, but also allowed heavy infantry to march unencumbered, and gave no natural shelter for the less armored; the nearby hills also protected the flanks of such ponderous infantry columns from the sweeps of flanking horsemen.”
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However, the brutal but brief and limited hoplite battles, which served as “a glorious method of saving lives and confining conflict to an hour’s heroics between armored infantry,”
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did not dominate throughout the entire life of the polis. Following the Persian invasions of Greece in the early fifth century, the rise of sea power and the constant struggle between Sparta and Athens for hegemony and empire changed the nature of warfare. In addition to naval forces, Greek warfare started to make use of a variety of light-armed troops, skirmishers and missile troops by the fifth century. Hoplites themselves had begun to wear lighter body armor. Cavalry, artillery, and sieges became integral to campaigns that were waged over longer periods of time and in multiple theaters of operations. But the process that culminated in the phalanx of Philip II and Alexander did not take hold until the early fourth century. Instead, Hanson focuses on the seventh and sixth centuries when discussing the ideal of the middling farmer-citizen-soldier who voted to fight the wars of his polis. “For at least the two centuries between 700 and 500 B.C., and perhaps for much of the early fifth century as well, hoplite infantry battle determined the very nature of Greek warfare, and became the means to settle disputes—instantaneously, economically, and ethically.”

Hanson’s account differs from other treatments of the orthodoxy by concentrating not on strategy and tactics but on the combat experience of the average Greek soldier. Like Adcock, Hanson cites the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germans Köchly and Rüstow (1852), Droysen (1888), Delbrück (1920), and, especially, Kromayer and Veith (1928) for their expertise in Greek hoplite arms, drill, and deployment, and the strategic limitations of the generals.
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But Hanson has more serious reservations about the approach of these scholars to Greek battle. Their handbooks, “exemplars of nineteenth-century scholarship at both its best and its worst, view conflict strategically, topographically, logistically, tactically—in the end, nonsensically and amorally.” The analytical distance in their accounts of the battles marks their detachment from the subject.
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Even later British scholars such as Tarn (1930), Griffith (1935), and Greenhalgh (1973) maintain to an extent “the previous obsession with deployment, drill, weapons and tactics.”
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On the other hand, Hanson praises the shift in focus accomplished by Kendrick Pritchett in his five-volume
The Greek State at War
(1971–1979). “For the first time Greek warfare was really seen in its proper function as a social institution, as commonplace and integral an activity to the Greeks as agriculture or religion: in Garlan’s words, “ ‘ancient war has a reality, a manner of being, a practice and a mode of behavior that are as wide as society itself.’ ”
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Inspired by John Keegan’s
The Face of Battle
,
The Western Way of War
depicts in graphic detail what it must have been like for Greek infantrymen to fight in the typical hoplite battle.
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Hanson shows the Greek fighter as “warrior, killer and victim.” “I try to suggest what the
environment
of ancient Greek battle was, the atmosphere in
which the individual struggled to kill and to avoid death, the sequence of events seen from within the phalanx. I ask the question, What was it like? at any given stage of the fighting.”
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“John Keegan … had demonstrated that a firsthand description need not be mere blood and guts, but could tell us much about the society that yielded such fighters—and indeed about the human condition itself.”
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Several of the areas Hanson covers have been the subjects of much recent debate, including the weight and awkwardness of hoplite armor and its impact on fighting style, and the nature of the collision and the pushing of the troops.

In keeping with the orthodox belief that hoplite arms and armor must have been created for the special needs of close fighting in tight formation, Hanson discusses the disadvantages of the panoply.

Heavy, uncomfortable, unbearably hot, the panoply was especially poorly suited for the Mediterranean summer; it restricted even simple movement, and in general must have made life miserable for the men who were expected to wear it. Most modern estimates of the weight of hoplite equipment range from fifty to seventy pounds for the panoply of greaves, shield, breastplate, helmet, spear, and sword—an incredible burden for the ancient infantryman, who himself probably weighed no more than some 150 pounds.
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The gradual move toward lighter panoplies over the 250 years from the seventh to the fifth century seems to have been in response to the discomfort the hoplite experienced.

The introduction of a so-called race in armor at the Olympic Games (520) and the final Greek charge at Marathon (490) may reflect a newfound mobility arising from a reduced panoply. Such activity would have been quite impossible for the original hoplites of the seventh century, whose limbs were virtually encased in bronze. In any case, it is clear that the hoplites of the fifth century never had any auxiliary protection for the arms, thighs, and ankles. Their helmets, body armor, and greaves all became sleeker, lighter, and at times disappeared altogether, again suggesting continual displeasure with the weight of the old equipment of their forefathers.
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Two items receive the most discussion from scholars since they are essential to the panoply: the double-grip shield and the “Corinthian” helmet. Hanson analyses the uses of the shield. “The advantage over the earlier ox-hide models of the Dark Age was the greater protection against standing spear and sword thrusts, allowing the warrior the chance to approach his enemy at much closer range.” The double-grip system relieved the weight of the shield by distributing it over the entire arm, but had several drawbacks.

Overall body movement was impaired [by this grip] as the left arm—for most men the more awkward and weaker one—had to be held rigidly, stuck out in front of the body waist high, elbow bent and the forearm straight and parallel to the ground, the hand tightly clenched to the grip. If the hoplite bent down or slipped, the lower rim of the shield would scrape the ground—a
likely occurrence when its wearer was not much over five and a half feet in height. Balance was affected as well, and crouching or even bending over was difficult. Nor could the shield be easily handled once battle commenced. Because the entire arm was needed to maintain its great weight, the angle of deflection could be adjusted only with difficulty, and its shape suggests that it may have been designed largely for pushing ahead. The shield could not be brought over at any angle to protect a man’s right side, and we hear of entire phalanxes caught helpless by a flank attack upon the extreme right, where the last file of hoplites had no protection at all for their unshielded sides.
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The Corinthian helmet was the most widely used headgear throughout Greece during the first two centuries of hoplite warfare. The orthodoxy contends that only a warrior fighting in a phalanx would wear equipment that imposed such restrictions on sight and hearing. “It would not be surprising if the simple formation and tactics of phalanx warfare—the massing into formation, charge, collision, and final push—grew, at least in part, out of the lack of direct communication between soldiers and their commander; dueling, skirmishing, hit-and-run attacks were out of the question with such headgear, and the isolation created by the helmet demanded that each individual seek close association with his peers.”
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Following the initial charge across no-man’s-land, the battlefield having become filled with blinding dust and deafening noise, actual battle would commence with the horrific shock of the two armies colliding. Hanson argues against those who deny this aspect of hoplite battle took place.

Some have suggested that the initial clash of many infantry battles is at times not literally a collision, there being a last-second avoidance of a real impact between the two bodies, a mutually understood step back on each side. Keegan, for example, … has said that “large masses of soldiers do not smash into each other, either because one gives way at the critical moment, or because the attackers during the advance to combat lose their faint hearts and arrive at the point very much inferior to the mass they are attacking.” (71) And yet a fair reading of the ancient accounts of hoplite battles suggests that in the case of the Greeks—and perhaps among the Greeks alone—the first charge of men usually smashed right into the enemy line: the key was to achieve an initial shock through collision which literally knocked the enemy back and allowed troops to pour in through the subsequent tears in the line. That is exactly what Arrian meant when he remarked that the idea of Greek battle was to force back the enemy during the initial charge. While in most cases such a crash was spontaneously transformed into a grinding, hand-to-hand struggle between two locked phalanxes, each striving to tear a gap in the battle line of the other, on occasion we do hear of an entire army demolished, simply rammed right off the battlefield in shambles because of the force of the initial crash of men on the move.
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Hanson proposes four reasons why a terrible collision of soldiers on the run took place within the first few seconds of ancient Greek battle. First, they had no choice.
The great depth of the phalanx with its eight ranks of men generated irresistible momentum during the charge. “If they hesitated or gave into any natural fear of physical collision, they would, nevertheless, be shoved onward—or else trampled by successive waves piling against their backs from the rear.”
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Second, the protection afforded by the “unusual and bowl-like shape” of the hoplite shield gave the soldier a sense of invulnerability, which encouraged him in the seconds before the collision. Third, there was also the possibility of missing “the barrier of an enemy shield or spear, that rather than hitting a wall of wood and/or flesh, a point of iron, a plate of bronze, they might be forced in
between
the small gaps of running soldiers—a chance that they might smash their way through arms and legs, and begin stabbing at the second or third rank of the enemy phalanx.”
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Finally, Hanson points out that the hoplite was probably not rational at this stage and was affected by a “group” mentality. “He and the other men may have been drinking together in the morning before battle and may not have been sober but, rather, functioning in these moments on ‘automatic pilot.’ ”
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Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the orthodoxy in general and of Hanson’s depiction of it in particular is the nature of the
othismos
or “push” of shields. Following the collision of the warriors and a period of close-in fighting with thrusting spears, and then with short swords after the spears had shattered, the orthodoxy maintains that a sort of pushing or shoving match ensued. The precise nature of this obscure tactic mentioned in the sources has eluded modern scholars.

In most hoplite battles, it is true, the initial collision of men and subsequent hand-to-hand fighting soon gave way to the
othismos
, the “push” of shields, as one side eventually achieved a breakthrough, allowing its troops to force their way on into and through the enemy’s phalanx. On occasion, we hear that neither side could open up the requisite tear, and thus both sides simply butchered each other right where they stood, the dead discovered with “all their wounds to the front.” (Diodorus 15.55.2) In these rare cases, the soldiers in the rear could not push their way to victory, but were forced to step up a rank over the fallen corpses and take their own turn in the stand-up killing…. That the push of shields in a hoplite battle might not lead to a quick collapse soon after the crash is clear also from the second stage of fighting at Koroneia, where the Theban and Spartan phalanxes met head-on: “throwing up their shields against each other, they pushed, fought, killed, and died.”
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The troops stationed in the rear of the phalanx played a critical role in applying steady pressure without breaking formation once the push began.

The real importance of these men in the rear was simply to push those in front with their shields—in Asklepiodotos’ words, “to exert pressure with their bodies.” Of course, from the moment of impact they had been doing essentially just that, as they piled up behind their file leaders; increasingly, their pressure grew stronger or more desperate, since they were striving to force back the entire mass which was itself trying to press forward. It is surprising how
many ancient authors saw the crucial phases of hoplite battle as “the push,” where each side sought desperately to create the greater momentum through the superior “weight” or “mass.”
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… The ancients took it for granted that the deeper the column, the greater its thrusting power and momentum; … most phalanxes were generally described not as rows, or ranks, or spears, but rather as “shields” in depth, which may indicate that the main idea for the ranks in the middle and rear was to push ahead with their shields and bodies. On occasion hoplite battle could be summarized simply an
othismos aspidon
, “the push of shields.” The goal was to break the deadlock in those precious few moments before exhaustion set in.
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