A Companion to Greek Warfare. Группа авторов

CHAPTER 6 The Nature of Hoplite Warfare

       Fernando Echeverría

      The study of warfare in the Archaic period relies on a handful of epic narratives and lyric fragments, on an immense but problematic stock of iconographic material drawn from paintings and sculptures, and on a considerable yet still expanding collection of artifacts, mainly arms and armor.¹ Lacking, however, are detailed historical narratives such as we find during the Classical period, notably Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon. Here is where the trouble begins.² The scattered, fragmentary, unsystematic, and sometimes even contradictory evidence for early warfare has tempted scholars to believe that there was a broad gap between the warfare and society depicted in the Homeric epics and those described by the Classical sources. To fill this gap, radical changes must be hypothesized.

In the late nineteenth century came the concept of “hoplite warfare,” meaning that the Classical period possessed its own style of combat governed by a complex as well as distinctive set of rules and conditions. In the next century came the “hoplite ideology,” meaning that heavy infantry forming a new socioeconomic class sought to transform Greek politics and society. In the course of these scholarly developments, many other subjects were enfolded into the study of hoplites–colonization, tyrannies, mercenary service, archaic legislation, ritualized warfare, property levels, citizenship. The need to bridge an alleged divide between Homer and Herodotus thus led to a reconstruction of the political and social history of the Archaic period around the hoplite as a military, political, and socioeconomic figure, the so-called “hoplite narrative” of recent decades.

      The narrative is a coinage of Victor Davis Hanson’s, meant to subsume older concepts.³ It evidently embraces “hoplite warfare,” a way of taking a Greek type of heavily armed infantryman, one well attested in archaeological as well as literary sources, and making him the origin of a new kind of combat centering on heavy infantry to the exclusion of light troops, missile troops, or cavalry. The new type of combat, in turn, led to changes in the nature of the political organization of Archaic Greece—changes due to military innovation. The emerging Greek political communities of the Archaic period reflected these new patterns and practices in Greek warfare.

      The next intellectual step, seeing these changes as revolutionary, came from viewing the heavy infantryman from a socioeconomic perspective—not just as a particular type of Greek soldier equipped with a specific panoply of weapons and fighting in a certain kind of formation, the phalanx, but also a citizen with landed property and political rights. Hoplites dominated and transformed government as well as warfare, rendering both less aristocratic and more egalitarian. This blend of military and political history became known in the English-speaking world as the “orthodoxy.”⁴

      Missing was any connection between these changes and changes in Archaic attitudes and culture. The hoplite, already turned into an historical force as well as a citizen soldier, needed an ideology, and Hanson and earlier writers have supplied it, in the form of agrarian notions of economy, sacrifice, and hard work as well as civic notions of equality, homogeneity, moderation, and participation. The hoplite soldier thus became a multifaceted, all-encompassing figure who synthesized political, social, and ideological changes in the Archaic period. Elites had given way to a self-conscious and autonomous middle class, which legitimized itself through the practice of an exclusive and highly normative (or ritualized) style of warfare, one taken to be the most adequate, efficient, and economic way of war for the polis. Military change, social and political revolution, agrarian ideology, ritualized combat, democracy and egalitarianism, and class struggle coalesced in a single, coherent story.

      The following pages will sketch the origin and evolution of the scholarly discussion on hoplite warfare, trace the ensuing revolution and narrative, and elicit implications for the reconstruction and understanding of the Archaic period in Greece. They will chiefly address the difficulties that the culminating hoplite narrative presents as a problematic, overstretched modern construct.⁵

      The Cornerstone: Hoplite Equipment

Archaic Greek military equipment has received considerable attention, particularly since the publication of Snodgrass’ seminal work.⁶ A series of modern studies traces the origins and evolution of the main types of weapons and infers that a particular group of them constituted the typical “pack” of the Greek heavily armed infantryman, identified as “hoplite equipment” or the “hoplite panoply.”⁷ This set consisted of six items: an enclosed metal helmet topped by a crest; body armor of different types (fundamentally bronze, but later also leather) but at first predominantly a heavy, double-plated bronze cuirass (the “bell cuirass”); a pair of bronze greaves shaped to fit the lower leg; a two-meter-long spear with bronze ends, a spear point, and a butt spike (the sauroter), which was the main offensive weapon; a short sword (40–60 cm) with straight or curved blade that is usually regarded as a secondary weapon; and a wide (90–100 cm diameter), bowl-shaped round shield (the aspis or Argive shield), with a wooden core and a protruding rim, occasionally covered with a bronze sheet and provided with two handles, a central armband (porpax), and a lateral handgrip (antilabe).

      According to the most recent scholarship, the elements of the panoply appeared in Greece from the middle of the eighth century onward and spread piecemeal during the following decades. They appear in considerable quantities as offerings in sanctuaries and figure prominently in the iconography of the period.⁸ The impact of foreign influences

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