Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (60 page)

Only where the rise of the yeoman class was accompanied by other major economic and social developments was it possible for broader timocracies and even democracies to establish and maintain themselves. From the mid-sixth century onward, the scale of Greek overseas trade increased dramatically, as the appearance of specialized merchant ships suggests, and this allowed substantial groups of traders and crafts-men to develop in cities such as Athens. The rise of professional traders may indeed have been another factor that helped working farmers to gain their independence, insofar as they were able and willing to produce for the market, rather than for home consumption, and improve their profit margins.
⁶⁷
The late sixth century also saw the first wars for naval hegemony and the adoption of the trireme as the dominant warship, which provided seasonal employment for increasingly large numbers of men, and made many of the poor and landless gradually less dependent on their wealthy neighbors for pay.
⁶⁸
In fifth-century Athens, commercial and naval success were reinforced by imperial and other public revenues to create levels of prosperity that allowed not only yeomen farmers but also the rest of the working classes to assert themselves in politics. As a result, legal restrictions on office holding that still existed in name were no longer upheld after circa 450 BC, and, crucially, the introduction of pay for office enabled even working men to serve as councillors and magistrates.
⁶⁹
Yeomen farmers played their role in such developments here and elsewhere, but it is telling that Aristotle regarded farmers as least likely of all working-class men to exercise their political rights, and that a coup d’état in Athens in 411 BC restored rule by the leisure class while cutting out yeomen farmers along with the rest of the “mob.”
⁷⁰

The ultimate fate of the broad timocratic and democratic regimes that did take hold in Greece is a matter of controversy, but it seems likely that in the Hellenistic period, and under the Roman Empire, the trend was a return to de facto rule by rather narrow timocracies, even if the forms of democracy were commonly retained.
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The Development of the Hoplite Phalanx

If this sketch of the changing social and economic structures of the Greek world is along the right lines, then for most of the archaic age only the top 10–15 percent of the population, the gentlemen farmers, could afford to equip themselves with a hoplite panoply. The other 85–90 percent of the community were too poor to afford much armor, and if they fought at all, it must have been mainly with missiles. In other words, even a large archaic city with 10,000 adult males had a hoplite militia of only 1,000–1,500 men, while in many towns hoplites numbered in the hundreds. Not until the rise of yeomen farmers and other independent working families from the mid-sixth century onward could hoplite armies include up to 40 percent of the population and thus have significantly larger absolute numbers.

Our very limited evidence for hoplite numbers in the archaic age does not contradict this conclusion. The sole contemporary source is an inscription of unknown but surely archaic date reported by Strabo (10.1.10) that recorded a festival parade at Eretria in which 60 chariots, 600 horsemen, and 3,000 hoplites took part, presumably the whole of Eretria’s forces. This may sound like a large number but it must be remembered that Eretria, a leading city in archaic Greece, controlled one of the largest territories held by any city-state: in the sixth century, it occupied about 900–1,000 km
²
. If
these troops amounted to 40–50 percent of the population, population density would have been extremely low. Corinth, with a territory of about the same size, raised a field army of 5,000 hoplites in 479 BC, which implies a total hoplite militia of at least 7,500, twice as large as Eretria’s. And according to Herodotus, Naxos, with a territory about half as large, had a total of 8,000 hoplites in 500 BC. This suggests that the Eretrian forces listed in the archaic inscription represented a much smaller proportion of the citizen population.
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Our only other archaic figures are not contemporary: they derive from stories reported by Plutarch, who says that Solon conquered Salamis with a force of only 500 men, and that a catastrophic defeat around 600 BC left 1,000 Samians dead on the battlefield. Since Samos was at least as prominent a power as Naxos and had a slightly larger territory, one would have expected it to be able to raise 8,000 hoplites or more, and this massacre would not have been far above the average of 14 percent casualties for the loser in a hoplite battle. For the loss of 1,000 men to count as a historic catastrophe, the Samian militia must have been much smaller.
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The first indications of much larger numbers of hoplites come from 500 BC onward, beginning with the figure for Naxos already cited, followed by the figure of 6,000 Argive soldiers massacred by Sparta in the battle of Sepeia, circa 494 BC, and the figures for the Greek field armies in the Persian Wars, including Corinth’s 5,000, Athens’ 9,000, and the 3,000 each of Megara and Sicyon, all probably representing at most two-thirds of the total available number of hoplites.
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Herodotus says that at Plataea the proportion of hoplites to light-armed was roughly fifty-fifty. Only Sparta still fielded an archaic-style leisure-class hoplite militia, making up a mere 12.5 percent of its forces.
⁷⁵

For a century and a half since the introduction of the hoplite shield and body armor, circa 700 BC, hoplite militias therefore consisted of leisure-class landowners. Working yeomen farmers began to join their ranks only from 550 BC onward. This chronology happens to fit well with Aristotle’s famous account of the rise of the hoplite phalanx, which is commonly misused as evidence for the rise of a hoplite middle class in the seventh century:

The first political system among the Greeks also emerged from the warriors, after the kingships: the very first form emerged from the horsemen—because strength and superiority in war lay with these horsemen, since hoplite forces are useless without organisation [
suntaxis
] and among the ancients there was no experience or order [
taxis
] in such matters, so that strength lay with the horsemen—but when the cities grew and those with hoplite equipment grew stronger, more people became part of the political system…. The ancient political systems were oligarchic and royal for good reason, because they did not have a large middle class on account of their small populations, so that the multitude, being few, was more ready to endure being ruled even when they
were
organized [
kai kata tên suntaxin
]. (
Pol
. 1297b16–28)

The idea here is not, as some modern scholars argue, that the introduction of hoplite equipment transformed warfare and politics at a stroke, but that there were two phases of development. Once upon a time, hoplite forces existed but oligarchies of horsemen
still ruled because hoplites were too disorganized to play a significant military role and too few in number to assert themselves in politics. Later, however, hoplite numbers increased, their military efficiency improved, and their political power grew. Aristotle had already indicated in an earlier passage when, to his mind, this second phase began:

In ancient times there were oligarchies in all cities whose power was based on their horses, for they used horses in their wars against neighbours, as did, for example, the Eretrians and Chalcidians and the Magnesians on the Maeander, and many of the others in Asia. (
Pol
. 1289b30–40)

The dates of the regimes “in Asia” are difficult to establish, but Aristotle knew that in Eretria the oligarchy of
Hippeis
was not overthrown until sometime after 546 BC, and that in Chalcis a similar oligarchy of
Hippobotai
was overthrown only in 506 BC. It seems to me that Aristotle here does little more than project his political philosophy into the past, and that his account is of almost no historical value. But if one does regard it as useful evidence, as Hanson and others do, then Aristotle supports the view that the rise of the hoplite phalanx was a two-stage process, which had political consequences only in the second stage, with the rise of the “middle-class” hoplite in the late sixth century.
⁷⁶

The strict separation between warriors and cultivators imposed in classical Sparta, Crete, and Thessaly was thus, again, no relic from the Dark Age, but a formalization of the norm established in the archaic age, when hoplites were leisured landowners, living off the labor of slaves and dependants. Even in late fifth-century Athens a formal obligation to serve in the hoplite militia was still confined to the
zeugitai
and the two richer property classes, that is, the leisured elite. The
thetes
, now including large numbers of yeomen farmers, were merely under a moral obligation to contribute to the defense of the city and to join in general mobilizations for short campaigns. The limited legal liability for hoplite service is why Athenian hoplite forces picked from “the list” (
katalogos
) were rarely larger than 1,000 or 2,000 men; why every man in such forces could afford to bring along a slave attendant; and why, according to Aristotle, it was “the rich,” not the middle classes or the poor, who suffered the greatest casualties in the Peloponnesian War. The distinction between leisure-class and working-class hoplites faded in Athens only in the fourth century, when expeditionary forces were no longer handpicked from “the list,” but mobilized by age group; it disappeared completely in 336 BC, when the state began to pay for the basic equipment and training of every hoplite in the reformed
ephebeia
.
⁷⁷

Few Greek states can have matched fifth-century Athens in the egalitarianism of its political climate or the sheer number of its yeomen hoplites. If the distinction between leisure-class and working-class hoplites was nevertheless preserved in military organization at least until the time of the Sicilian expedition, when Athenian democracy was at its peak, the distinction surely also continued to exist elsewhere in fifth-century Greece. Indeed, the creation of a leisure-class hoplite army remained the ideal of Greek intellectuals. Hippodamus of Miletus, Plato, and Aristotle built their ideal states on the premise that the citizens who ruled these states should be soldiers and leave the farming to others. In
Ways and Means
, the pragmatic Xenophon proposed
fund-raising schemes designed to exempt all Athenian citizens from the need to work by providing them with a subsistence minimum at public expense. Greek thinkers did speak of farmers as good hoplites, made strong and tough by their toil, and determined to resist any invasion on account of their attachment to the land (Hanson 1995, 221–23, 242–43). But even if farmers made better soldiers than craftsmen or traders, they were still only second-best to rich landowning hoplites whose physical and mental fitness derived from elite leisure pursuits: wrestling, running, and other athletic exercises as well as hunting. In Hanson’s terms, the “ugly muscle” of farmers may have been appreciated, but “elegant muscle” always continued to be rated most highly.
⁷⁸

The predominance of the leisure-class hoplite in the archaic age undermines Hanson’s idea that the conventions of hoplite warfare, and indeed hoplite arms and armor as such, were shaped by the needs of yeomen farmers, who needed a kind of warfare that caused minimal disruption to their farming duties and was effectively confined to instantly decisive battles fought in close combat, “afternoon wars” in the summer season.
⁷⁹
Since leisured gentlemen landowners were not subject to the same constraints on their time, this explanation will not work. It is in any case highly questionable whether archaic warfare was ever restricted to pitched hoplite battles, and not at all certain that archaic infantry battles were fought in the same way as classical hoplite battles. If, instead of relying on classical caricatures of what warfare was like “in the old days,” one considers what little evidence we have for actual archaic wars, it quickly becomes obvious that sieges, ambushes, and raids were at least as common as pitched battle, and that the rules of engagement spanned the range from restricted “agonal” combat to the mobilization of all resources to inflict the greatest possible damage. Insofar as archaic warfare did have its limitations, these were not imposed by the interests of small farmers, but by the limited military manpower, military organization, and above all public finances of archaic cities.
⁸⁰

How one assesses the impact of the rise of the yeoman farmer in the late sixth century depends to a large extent on one’s views on the nature of hoplite equipment. If, with Hanson and Cartledge, one believes that the hoplite’s double-grip shield, restrictive Corinthian helmet, and heavy body armor are compatible only with fighting in a close-order formation, then the phalanx must have taken its classical form already in 700 BC, and the subsequent rise of the yeoman would have doubled the size of the phalanx without fundamentally changing anything else. If, however, with Snodgrass and Krentz, one believes that the shield and armor were designed simply to give added protection and could equally have been used in an open and fluid style of fighting, then the rise of the yeoman may have been the factor that transformed this earlier style of fighting and created the phalanx in its classical form. On the latter scenario, it is possible that archaic leisure-class hoplites were accompanied into battle by small groups of personal friends and dependants, some of them hoplites, others light-armed, like the heroes of Homer and their “retainers” (
therapontes
). The support and protection of these followers enabled them to carry relatively heavy and constricting armor, but made it impossible to form closed ranks of hoplites. With the rise of the independent working farmer, however, the pool of dependants was reduced while the proportion of poorer hoplites without followers of their own
increased greatly. This may have tilted the balance toward relegating the remaining light-armed to the rear or flanks while forming the hoplites, at last, into an exclusive heavy infantry formation.
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