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CHAPTER 6
The Hoplite Revolution and the Rise of the Polis
GREGORY F. VIGGIANO
In his seminal 1937 article, “When Did the Polis Rise?” Victor Ehrenberg notes that it is impossible to give exact dates for the “rise” and that the polis was no doubt the product of a long evolution.
1
He acknowledges that “rise” can only mean true origin, which scholars as a rule place long before the sixth or fifth century. However, “some strange pronouncements in a contrary sense,” the assertions of Berve in particular, provoked Ehrenberg to reassert the orthodox position. Earlier Ehrenberg had protested
2
against Berve setting the formation of the Greek state as late as the turn of the seventh to the sixth centuries.
3
But he was astonished when Berve later argued for a fifth-century date: in the generation of Pindar and Simonides the “growing spirit of the Polis is scarcely yet apparent”; “not under Cimon but under Pericles, the dynastic form of rule is dissolved totally into the self-accomplishment of the Polis.”
4
Ehrenberg points out the fallacy in thinking that realization of the polis does not occur until its climax in the fifth century. Such a model as Berve’s limits the polis to about the period of Periclean Athens since it declines soon thereafter (e.g., Thuc. 3.82ff.).
5
In recent years, similar attacks on the orthodox view
6
threaten once again to reduce the polis to a “phantom which would owe its existence perhaps to the speculation of philosophers and rhetors of the fourth century.”
7
Ehrenberg suggested that Berve confused the Polis with the “democratic polis” of the fifth century. In fact, as early as 800 BC, the Greeks knew the polis in a purer and simpler form even before the first legislators and the tyrants. The thrust of Ehrenberg’s argument is that the polis existed well before it had reached what many consider its apex if not its predestined form. The first stage involved the emergence of the polis-city. Following the formation of the walled polis-town and its unification with the hinterland, the rule of the town replaced the domination of the pure aristocracy. The concept of
dikē
, which had over time become a traditional and admitted principle of the state, restrained the aristocracy and made it responsible to the will of the community of citizens. This description of the process of the internal formation of the state would not arouse much controversy today. It is the second stage Ehrenberg identifies in the rise of the Greek state that scholars have vigorously challenged in recent years. That is when, in the seventh century, a more egalitarian form of the state resulted from
the “family-polis” giving way to the “hoplite-polis.”
8
The idea that a rising and middling group of farmer-citizen-soldiers burst the bonds of exclusive political privilege and paved the way for broader oligarchies and later for democracies traces its roots back to Aristotle. One of the most common forms of attacking this position has been to deny the existence of a substantial middling stratum of farmers, to make early Greek political history an affair of elites.
9
This view has drawn much inspiration from attempts to downdate the classical phalanx. Ehrenberg sought to prevent the assumption of a “totally new and arbitrary use of the term ‘Polis’ ”;
10
in this light I want to reassert the traditional hoplite narrative in the face of the current challenges and put the phalanx in its proper context in the history of the polis.