Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece (68 page)

  
23
. In addition, there are the famous passages attesting to the unsuitability of the heavily armed hoplite fighting either in solo combat (Eur.
HF
190ff; and cf. the ease of hitting someone while in rank: Xen.
Cyr
. 2.1.16–18) or on rough terrain that could break ranks and leave fully equipped soldiers at the mercy of lighter-armed and mounted troops (and, in contrast, the suitability of flat land for hoplite collisions): Hdt. 7.92; Polyb. 18.31.2–7; cf. 11.15.7–17; Arist.
Pol
. 5.1303b12. In recent years a number of groups and individuals have reconstructed hoplite shields, and remarked on the disadvantages of such equipment in staged fluid fighting, especially the double-gripped shield in comparison to more easily maneuverable center-grip shields:
http://www.lloydianaspects.co.uk/armour/hoplite/hoplshld.html
. Note that on occasion, at battles like Delium and Nemea, it is remarked that atypically rough terrain (the ravines at
Delium; the underbrush at Nemea) tends to bother hoplites and leads to unexpected and unwelcome surprises.

  
24
. For the nature of the
aristeion
, see Pritchett 2.276–90. Why arises the moral disdain for shield tossers—and those who leave the line of battle (cf. Hdt. 7.1.104.4), or those whose cowardice endangers the line (Eur
. HF
191–92)—in the collective martial ethos, if battles were determined by the preeminence of soloists? Cf. Aristotle (
Pol
. 7.1324b10–24) on the difference between nonpoleis societies who reward or emphasize individual kills—which de facto seems to me to suggest a contrast with phalanx warfare, where heavier armor, reduced vision, massed attack, and the need to keep formation would both make it harder to distinguish individual kills, and deprecate such knowledge in comparison with keeping the battle line unbroken and hoplites in rank protecting those at their right.

  
25
. Cf. the plates (XIV–XVII) in van Wees 2004 of near-naked tribesmen with long spears advancing to battle in fluid fashion—as if such unprotected warriors in any way shed light on early hoplite spearmen sheathed in bronze, linen, and wood. Would we expect New Guinea highlanders to do the same if encumbered with the hoplite panoply?

  
26
. See Krentz’s essay in this volume, where he comprehensively reviews various methods for adjudicating weights of the panoply.

  
27
. See again the arguments of Krentz, who would downgrade previous estimates of the hoplite panoply from about 32 kg (ca. 70 lbs.) to a high of 22 kg (ca. 48 lbs.). I do not know why Krentz believes that hoplite shields were rarely faced with bronze blazons, which in various manifestations appear ubiquitously in ancient literary accounts and in vase paintings.

  
28
. E.g., “There are in fact good reasons why the classical phalanx could only have emerged in the classical period” (van Wees 2004: 196). Note the key phrase “classical phalanx” in contrast to just “phalanx.” Yet, the “archaic” phalanx no doubt emerged in the archaic period, and the Hellenistic phalanx emerged in the Hellenistic period as well.

  
29
. Some examples of the longevity of hoplite weapons: Paus. 4.16.7, 8.21.1; Diod. 17.18; Plut.
Pel
. 12;
Mor
. 241F17; Xen.
Hell
. 5.4.8.

  
30
. There are a number of examples that refer to workshops that turn out arms and armor (Lys. 12.19; Diod. 14.43; Plut.
Mor
. 835B–C; Ar.
Av
. 491;
Pax
1210ff; Dem. 36.11), and to the state or general in the field supplying weapons to hoplites (Diod 12.68.5, 14.43.2–3, 15.13.2; Thuc. 6.72.4, 8.25.6; Xen.
Hell
. 4.4.10; Aen. Tact. 10.7).

  
31
. On the notion that Coronea was unique and not representative of the collisions of other battles, see, for example, van Wees 2004: 188. When Wheeler (209) says that Xenophon disapproved of the crash at the second stage of Coronea and that such a collision made the battle unusual, he misses entirely the point of the passage. Again, what was exceptional about Coronea was that (a) Agesilaus chose, unlike at the second stage at Nemea when such a gambit was shunned, to hit an opposing contingent head-on when he had perhaps the safer option of striking it, as it passed by, in the flank; (b) the battle ended up pitting the best troops, formerly stationed on the right wing of each respective army, in a direct collision, ensuring not the flight of a weaker contingent, but unusually savage fighting not characteristic of the usual formula (outside of Leuctra) of the strong wing hitting the enemy’s weak counterpart. If we were to believe van Wees and Wheeler, Agesilaus chose suddenly to employ his phalanx in a manner in which his own hoplites would have had little, if any, prior experience.

  
32
. Van Wees 2004: 188–91 envisions a quite different scenario. Running is simply to curb exposure to missiles, and prompted mostly by psychological considerations that bring no real physical advantages: hoplites “must have slowed down in the last few seconds and ground to a halt within ‘spear-thrust.’ ” Frequent references to hoplite weight and pressure are “figurative.”
And common examples of pushing, and the advantage that accrues from greater weight of the phalanx, refer to “psychological pressure.”

  
33
. So I do not understand what Wheeler (187) quite means by the rhetorical “This chapter’s assessment of archaic and classical Greek land combat will not assume the correctness of the ‘face-of-battle’ approach”—a term he never explicitly defines.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Paul Cartledge
is the inaugural A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture, Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, and President of the Fellowship, Clare College. He is the author, coauthor, editor, or coeditor of more than twenty books and two monograph series. He holds the Gold Cross of the Order of Honour, Hellenic Republic, and is an Honorary Citizen of Sparti, Greece.

Lin Foxhall
is Professor of Greek Archaeology and History at the University of Leicester, and has held posts at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, and University College London. She studied at Bryn Mawr College, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Liverpool. In 2005–6 she held a Humboldt Research Prize at Freiburg University and was Visiting Professor at the University of Aarhus in 2010. She has worked on archaeological projects in Greece and Southern Italy and currently codirects a field project in Calabria. She has written extensively on agriculture, land use, and gender in classical antiquity. Her publications include
Studying Gender in Classical Antiquity
(Cambridge University Press, 2013),
Olive Cultivation in Ancient Greece: Seeking the Ancient Economy
(Oxford University Press, 2007), as well as
Money, Land and Labour in Ancient Greece
(Routledge, 2002) with Paul Cartledge and Edward Cohen, and
Intentional History: Spinning Time
(Stuttgart: F. Steiner-Verlag, 2010) with Hans-Joachim Gehrke and Nino Luraghi. She lives in rural Leicestershire with her family and many fruit trees.

John R. Hale
is a classical and underwater archaeologist at the University of Louisville. Since earning his BA degree at Yale and his PhD at Cambridge, he has conducted fieldwork in Scandinavia on the ancestors of Viking longships, in Portugal on ancient harbors, and in Greek and Israeli waters in a search of shipwrecks from the time of the Persian Wars. A rower himself, Hale takes particular interest in the role of oared galleys in ancient sea battles and the quest for maritime supremacy. In his book
Lords of the Sea
(Viking Penguin, 2009), Hale presents a new reconstruction of the Greek trireme, as well as a new interpretation of Athenian history that integrates the naval enterprises of Athens into the political and cultural life of the city. Hale has also investigated Delphi and other Greek oracle sites. His research has been published in

Antiquity
,
Scientific American
, and
The Journal of Roman Archaeology
, among other publications. At the University of Louisville, Hale is an Adjunct Professor of Anthropology and Director of Liberal Studies.

Victor Davis Hanson
received his PhD in Classics from Stanford University in 1980. He is Professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Hanson is a weekly syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services and the author or editor of twenty-one books, among them
The Western Way of War
,
The Other Greeks
,
Carnage and Culture
, and
A War Like No Other
. He is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal (2008), the Bradley Prize (2009), the Eric Breindel Award (2002), and the American Philological Association Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching (1992). He lives on his farm in Selma, California, where he was born in 1953.