closed formation that he recognized as a forerunner of the Classical phalanx, did the most important fighting.33 The impact of this discovery cannot be underestimated: Latacz had questioned the gap between Homeric and historical combat that Grote had established more than a century before and that had led to hoplite warfare being regarded as an important military innovation—an innovation for which Ritualism could provide a cultural context. Latacz’s work thus struck a blow against a century of scholarship.34 Most later writers, however, chose to embrace Latacz’s idea of a proto-phalanx without questioning the larger notion of hoplite warfare and ideology.35
Hoplite Orthodoxy (cont’d)
During these decades, the orthodox Anglo-American view of hoplite warfare continued to develop. In light of the importance of both hoplite warfare and the related ideology, scholars argued that the nature of the Greek polis was essentially military, and thus reinstated the Aristotelian principle of the “community of warriors”: military values and practices determined social change, political participation, and institutional organization.36 The possession of weapons was a crucial political asset, as proved by successive revolutions and coups d’état in Archaic and Classical Greece. To be sure, changes occurred gradually, as a middle class of farmers (the traditional demos) undid aristocratic influences amid intense political struggles. As a result, new timocratic systems emerged.
The archaeologist Lorimer expanded on the principle of technological determinism.37 She argued that tactical changes in the hoplite era resulted from “a single structural alteration,” the double-grip system of the Argive shield.38 The reason to account for the unprecedented spread of the shield was its (presumed) superiority, and the reason to justify the adoption of the phalanx was the peculiar characteristics of the panoply; its subsequent spread throughout Greece was attributed to its tactical superiority and to the dynamics of “peer polity interactions” and an “arms race.”39 A small change in equipment led to a chain reaction that put an end to “heroic” and cavalry combat.
Andrewes explored the political consequences of the rise of the hoplite.40 He embraced the Aristotelian definition of Greek tyranny and Grote’s and Weber’s idea of the end of traditional oligarchies being overthrown because of collaboration between the new middle classes (once again, the traditional demos) and ambitious demagogues. Internecine struggle, or stasis, resulted from the clash between oligarchs and their foes, and often led to the establishment of tyrannies rather than (or as well as) some measure of reform. The rise of the hoplites need not lead straight to some new, stable political system such as Athenian democracy or Spartan monarchy cum oligarchy. To speak of the hoplites as political revolutionaries would be a complex proposition. Nevertheless, military change led to social transformation that, in turn, prompted political upheaval.41 Other scholars stuck to the more cautious language of a hoplite reform that ratified military and social changes.42
Another archaeologist, de Polignac, somewhat altered the hoplite orthodoxy. His study of rural sanctuaries during the Archaic period presented them as nodes in the ideological definition of the community as well as markers in the political definition of the landscape.43 Because these sanctuaries had to be protected, they led to a new kind of warfare in which the community as a whole could be involved. This was “hoplite warfare” as de Polignac understood it. He had overthrown determinism as a reason for the introduction of the phalanx and shifted emphasis away from social and political struggles to territorial conflicts between poleis. Yet he did not reject the development of hoplite ritualism or ideology, or some kind of hoplite military reform.
A third archaeologist, Morris, endorsed this line.44 He expressed skepticism about orthodox views, but subscribed to notions such as vertical social conflict between the agathoi and the kakoi, the emergence of the egalitarian principle of the polis, and what he called the “middling tradition.”45
These writers prompted a period of exploration that produced revised or updated accounts of hoplite warfare, all attempting to insert new discoveries into the framework of a hoplite revolution or reform.46 Most reinstated determinism and retained some sort of social struggle, while allowing for more complex social and political causality. The leitmotif of these accounts was the ever-broadening use of the term hoplite. As befitted their backgrounds, the nineteenth century Prussians used both “hoplite” and “phalanx” in a narrow, military sense, even if they used them tendentiously where evidence was lacking. Next came Classicists and historians speaking of the “hoplite panoply,” “hoplite equipment,” “hoplite shield,” “hoplite forces/army,” “hoplite tactics,” and “hoplite warfare/battle.”47 By the late 1960s, scholars of almost all persuasions were speaking of a “hoplite assembly,” “hoplite landowner,” “hoplite farm,” “hoplite ritual,” “hoplite ideology,” “hoplite ethos,” “hoplite discipline,” “hoplite agon/agonalism,” “hoplite polis,” “hoplite republic,” “hoplite democracy,” “hoplite status,” “hoplite class,” “hoplite system,” “hoplite state,” and so on.48
Fifty years ago, Snodgrass warned that “we should be hesitant in our application of the term [hoplites] to the earlier stages of Greek armament.”49 The conceptual caution he was urging went unnoticed, even though the need for it only increased, as the constellation of themes provided in the preceding paragraph were engulfed in the most ambitious concept yet, a “hoplite narrative.”
The Hoplite Narrative
The final step toward the consolidation of the model of “hoplite warfare” came with the work of Hanson, perhaps the most influential Greek military historian of recent decades.50 Hanson’s work during the 1980s and 1990s, which was a reaction to the challenges made by the revisionists, became the main reason for the model’s survival. Hanson reinstated the traditional elements of the model: the peculiarities of the hoplite panoply, the deterministic identification between hoplite and phalanx, Greek warfare as phalanx battle, the simplicity and ritualism of phalanx warfare, and the hoplite class as an anti-aristocratic and egalitarian social group.
In so doing, he took for granted a century’s worth of assumptions. A cultural gap separated the “Homeric world” from the “historical world” of the polis, necessitating a period of changes and adjustments. Common to the two periods was some community of warriors, so that the Greek political community, the polis, was isomorphic with the army.51 Technological determinism, that bane of military history, meant that superior new weapons immediately rendered old types obsolete, and therefore replaced them; new weapons entailed new tactics, and new types of fighters. As in Lorimer, ancient Greece experienced an unacknowledged arms race driven by the principle of superiority in design, performance, and effectiveness. A sort of class struggle—but one owing more to Aristotle or even Livy than to Marx—was axiomatic. Aristocrats battled the lower orders in the context of political and social unrest connected to the rise of tyrannies. The whiff of Marx notwithstanding, the polis was intrinsically egalitarian and democratic. The hoplite values of solidarity and equality impregnated the social and political institutions, such as assemblies and courts, that emerged from several centuries of unrest in the Archaic and early Classical periods.52
Hanson nonetheless made four distinct and far-reaching contributions of his own. First, he described an economic revolution at the beginning of the eighth century in Greece that allowed the exploitation of new farmlands and thus explained the rise of the “hoplite class,” a group of non-elite landowners presented as middle-class independent farmers or yeomen. Second, he connected the ideology of egalitarianism and ritualism to the agrarian nature of the “hoplite class,” and imported the term agrarianism to define the hoplite worldview and hoplite agenda, thus linking warfare to the economy. Third, he adapted John Keegan’s ground-level approach to battle to ancient Greece and thus explored the
