by John Keegan
The Greek field pattern, however, resisted rapid overrunning by a raiding-party bent on harm; Greek farmers generally embanked or walled their holdings, often the constituent plots as well, and did so even if they lived apart from their neighbours; as a result, ‘ravagers could not gallop wildly through the Greek countryside, spreading fire and ruin at will … Fences, hills, small orchards and vineyards all made progress slow.’16 In short, the territory of the Greek city states was defensible, so defensible as to make common effort for the defence of the whole a rational military choice. If the enemy, who in the nature of things came from close at hand and could not therefore keep preparations for war secret, could be checked at the border, during the brief span of time when he might wreak his worst, the farms of the landholders, whose product supported them as citizens and warriors as well as heads of families, might collectively be spared damage.
This analysis was widely accepted before Hanson began his studies, if not in the detail he supplied. To it, however, he added a transforming idea. Given the extreme brevity of time in which attack could be made effective in the Greek farming world — and, as he points out, at least eighty per cent of those we call ‘citizens’ of the city states were countrymen and not town-dwellers — and given also that the attackers left their own fields vulnerable to spoliation when they marched off on campaign, the highest premium was placed, or placed itself, in settling matters as quickly and decisively as possible.17 The ‘idea’ of military decision thus planted itself in the Greek mind beside those other ideas of decision — by majority in politics, of outcome by the inevitability of plot in drama, of conclusion by logic in intellectual work — which we associate with our Greek heritage. It is important not to advance effect over cause. The intellectual glories of Greece belong to an age at least two centuries beyond that when the Greeks began to fight in the massed ranks of the phalanx, in a narrow field of battle, shield against shield, spear against spear. Also, civilised though they were, they remained closely enough in touch with their past to have preserved the primitive passion for revenge, a response to insult which the great gods of their pantheon practised without remorse in the myths all Greeks knew by heart. As a result, suggests Hanson,
the Greek manner of fighting [may] be explained as an evolving idea, a perception in the minds of small farmers that their ancestral lands should remain at all costs inviolate — aporthetos — not to be trodden over by any other than themselves, land whose integrity all citizens were willing to fight over on a moment’s notice … most Greeks felt that revenge in the old form of pitched combat was the most honourable and expedient way of resolving an insult to their sovereignty. Their tradition, their duty, indeed their desire, was for a ritualistic collision, head-on with the spears of the enemy, to end the whole business quickly and efficiently.18
It may be also that another form of competition, whose origins the modern world finds in the Greeks, further helped to supply them with the idea of fighting for an unequivocal result on the battlefield. That was competitive athletics, and the associated contests of chariot- or horse-racing, boxing or wrestling which in 776 BC began to be organised among the established Greek states, at four-yearly intervals, at Olympia in the western Peloponnese, in the territory of the city of Elis; they were carried on uninterruptedly for more than a thousand years until AD 261. Competition at sport and games already had a long history in Greece; Homer depicts the heroes of the Trojan War engaging in two-horse chariot races, boxing, wrestling, weight-throwing and running at ceremonies held by Achilles ‘to accompany the burial rites of his comrade Patroclus, killed by Hector in individual combat before the gates of Troy’.19
Many other peoples had or were to develop similar customs: the Hopi of Arizona held races in which the runners symbolised clouds and rain in the hope that the event would bring one from the other during the growing season; numerous hunting peoples, like the North American Huron and Cherokee, devised games or tests of skill which prepared the players for the chase by either ritual or practical means; even the individualistic steppe nomads rode against each other in contests to carry an object over a winning-line.20 Yet, in general, competitive sport was alien to the horse peoples, especially if it involved rough physical contact, which the Greeks believed they associated with personal insult, if a contrived dialogue between Solon and a Scythian visitor to the Olympic games is reliable evidence. Carvings from tombs of the Egyptian New Kingdom show soldiers wrestling, but the competition is between Egyptians and Syrians or Numidians, who are represented as conceding defeat. It is not a depiction of struggle between equals, which the Greeks thought supplied games with their point.21 When Herodotus visited Egypt from Greece in the fifth century BC ‘he was astonished to find no organised games; [but] open competition in games is incompatible with such rigidly stratified societies as those of the ancient Near East, with their Pharaohs and other absolute monarchs at the apex, divinely sanctioned and sometimes gods themselves.’22
Games, particularly the violent games of boxing and wrestling, had their critics in the Greek world, whose objections were similar to those we hear today: that successful athletes were over-rewarded, set an example of asocial individualism, and suffered disabling injuries which unfitted them for active life. Plato flatly stated that the tactics of boxers or wrestlers ‘are worthless in wartime and do not deserve discussion’. His judgement was too idealistic. Harsh sports, fought for a clear-cut result, reinforced the Greek military ethic; and in any case, Greek warfare was itself so brutal that no simulation was rough enough to unfit men to bear its horrors.23
Greek warriors took their place in the battlefield ranked shoulder to shoulder in a compact mass, usually eight rows deep. After the eighth century they were equipped in uniform style, though with weapons and armour the individual supplied for himself; the cost of the equipment, particularly of his bronze helmet, breastplate or the greaves that protected his shins, was a costly charge on his income and could be borne only by a man of property.24 (The survival of bronze armour into the Iron Age is explained by the inability of contemporary ironsmiths to produce metal of sufficient malleability to form large sheets of an equivalent resilience; though iron was elsewhere already being used to armour soldiers with scales or hoops fixed to a leather tunic, and iron helmets appear to have been in common use in the Near East, neither provided the protection afforded by bronze.) Such protection was essential to the man who took his place in the phalanx — the word (literally ‘a roller’) is cognate with that for the finger, perhaps because fingers project like parallel spears from the hand — since the shock he had to withstand was not that of a sword or arrowpoint which might be deflected by a glancing surface but of a sharpened iron point, mounted at the end of a solid shaft of ash which, when thrust with all the muscular strength an opponent could muster, would penetrate anything but the best metal.
The man in the phalanx also protected himself with a round, convex shield, the hoplon, from which derives the word hoplite used to identify the Greek soldiers of phalanx warfare. It was made of wood reinforced with iron, measured three feet in diameter, and was suspended from his shoulder by a leather strap and manipulated by a grip for the left hand. The right hand was thus left free to couch the spear between elbow and ribs and drive the point at the man opposite in the enemy ranks. It is a famous observation, first remarked by Thucydides, that the phalanx in motion tended to slip to its right, as each man moved closer to the protection of his neighbour’s shield. In contact with each other, two opposed phalanxes might be seen to wheel gradually about an invisible axis under the collective force of this individual urge to self-protection.
Phalanx did not meet phalanx without the preliminaries that all Greeks felt necessary. Sacrifice was one of them. ‘For the Greeks no undertaking was without its appropriate ritual, giving assurance or approval or, at least, the withholding of hostility on the part of the supernatural powers … every stage of the process that led up to a clash of hoplite phalanxes on the field of battle was marked
by attention to the gods.’ An army marching out to war drove sheep with it to be sacrificed at the crossing-places of rivers or borders, at camp-sites and eventually on the battlefield itself. This sphagia, ‘the rites of bloodletting’, may have been performed ‘in the hope of securing assurance by signs that the outcome would be favourable; it may have been a ceremony of placation; it may have been something much cruder, an anticipation of the bloodshed of the battle [which] marked its ritual beginning, offered in a spirit of appeal to the gods: “We kill. May we kill.” ’25 By the time the moment came to perform the sphagia, however, the hoplites had usually reinforced their courage by more than ritual. It was common practice for both sides to eat a ceremonial mid-morning breakfast before the clash of arms; this last meal certainly included a wine ration, perhaps a larger one than on normal days. Drinking alcohol before battle is an almost universal practice where wine or spirits are available. The hoplites would also have heard the exhortations of their commanders and then, immediately after the ritual slaughter of the sphagia, moved forward themselves, uttering the paean, the battle-cry reproduced by Aristophanes as a ululating ‘eleleleu’.
Whether the commanders took their place in the front rank is much debated; in the Spartan phalanx it appears that they did, as Homer has his heroes do in his descriptions of what is now called the ‘proto-phalanx’ in the Iliad. Thucydides, a veteran as well as a historian of battle, implies as much, for he says that the tactical subdivisions within the Spartan shield wall could be identified by the distinctive dress of the commanders standing in first line. That they chose the post of maximum danger chiefly reflects the strength of the warrior ethic in their society. Elsewhere, particularly at Athens, customs were different. ‘An officer class simply did not exist in classical Greek cities’ — military posts were as elective as civilian — and there was no tactical point in the leading men putting themselves at the front. Phalanx warfare was won not by encouragement by example, but by the united courage of equals in a terrifying, short-lived clash of bodies and weapons at the closest range.26
Hanson has brilliantly and imaginatively reconstructed this ghastly and wholly revolutionary style of warmaking. He discounts the significance of preliminary skirmishing by the light-armed infantry, propertyless men who could not meet the cost of armour, and equally that by the few, rich mounted warriors who may have accompanied the army. The Greek countryside, which could not carry a horse population, does not lend itself to cavalry action. Once the opposed phalanxes arrived at one of those few level sites which it was recognised provided the conditions for a test of strength — ‘once the Greeks go to war’, Herodotus wrote, ‘they choose the best and smoothest place and go down and have their battle on that’ — they wasted no time.27
Crossing a no man’s land perhaps 150 yards wide at a clumsy run, under a weight of armour and weapons of seventy pounds, the ranks drove straight into each other. Each individual would have chosen another as his target at the moment of contact, thrusting his spear point at some gap between shield and shield, and seeking to hit a patch of flesh not covered by armour — throat, armpit or groin. The chance was fleeting. As the second and subsequent ranks were brought up short by the stop in front, the phalanx concertinaed, throwing the weight of seven men on to the back of the warriors engaged with the enemy. Under this impact, some men inevitably went down at once, dead, wounded or overborne from the rear. That might create a breach in the shield wall. Those in the second or third ranks strove to open it wider with their spears, thrusting and jabbing from their relatively protected position at whoever they could reach. If it widened, there followed the othismos, ‘push with shield’, to widen it further and to win room in which swords, the hoplite’s secondary weapon, might be drawn and used to slash at an enemy’s legs. The othismos was the more certain method, however: it could lead to the pararrexis or ‘breaking’, when those most heavily beset by the enemy’s pressure began to feel the impulse to flight, and either broke away from the rear ranks or, more shamefully, struggled backward from the point of killing to infect their comrades with panic also.
Once the phalanx broke, defeat inevitably ensued. The opposing hoplites who found free space in front of them would aim to spear or cut down those who had turned their backs; ‘there was even greater danger from the entrance of both cavalry and light-armed skirmishers … now for the first and only time since the minor pre-battle skirmishing, it was possible for them to enter the battlefield and demonstrate that they were, after all, effective fighters as they rode or ran down the helpless prize troops of the enemy.’28 Escape from the light-armed was difficult. The hoplite might throw away his shield or spear as he ran, but could scarcely divest himself of his armour in flight. Men would if they could; Thucydides remarked that after an Athenian defeat during the Sicilian expedition in 413 BC ‘more arms were left behind than corpses’; at the moment of choice between life and death the citizen-soldier would certainly discard even the costly body-armour which marked him out as a man of standing at home, if that offered survival.29 Yet to do so might not greatly hasten his flight. After the mere half-hour or hour that the clash of arms had lasted, the hoplite was physically exhausted, perhaps as much by draining terror as muscular effort, and could not outpace the fresh light-armed men who harried his footsteps. The bold and well disciplined might make a fighting retreat in small groups; the philosopher Socrates, who survived the Athenian defeat at Delion in 424 BC, did so by taking a party under command and ‘making it clear even from a distance that if anyone were to attack such a man as he, he would put up considerable resistance’.30 Most men who left ranks that had been broken, however, simply ran for their lives, often to be cut down as they lumbered to safety.
It has been estimated that a phalanx might lose fifteen per cent of its strength by defeat, either through outright killing, death from wounds — typically brought on by peritonitis, following a penetration of the gut — or in the massacre which followed flight. The losses might, nevertheless, have been far greater had the winners pressed home their victory. Generally they did not. ‘Pursuit of fleeing hoplites was [not thought] crucial: most victorious Greek armies saw no reason why they could not repeat their simple formula for success and gain further victory should the enemy regroup in a few days and mistakenly press their luck again.’ As a result, ‘both sides were usually content to exchange their dead under truce’ — it was held a sacred duty by all Greeks that those who fell fighting should receive honourable burial — and then ‘the victors, after erecting a battlefield trophy or simple monument to their success, marched home triumphantly, eager for the praise of their families and friends on return’.31 Why, since Greek battle partook of such unprecedented ferocity, did Greek war lack what moderns would see as a justifying culmination in destruction of the defeated army? That it did not is a point on which Hanson is adamant: ‘Ultimate victory in the modern sense and enslavement of the conquered was not considered an option by either side. Greek hoplite battles were struggles between small landholders who by mutual consent sought to limit warfare [and hence killing] to a single, brief, nightmarish occasion.’32
We can propose two explanations for this strange incompleteness of Greek warfare in the classical age, one with very old roots, the other to which the novel character of the Greek polis had itself given birth. For all its deadliness, so alien to the primitives, with whose tentative evasive or indirect tactics we are now familiar, there nevertheless remained strong traces of primitivism in Greek warmaking. One was the impulse to revenge: Greeks may not have made war over wife-stealing — though even modern scholars accept that such an episode might have been the occasion, if not the deeper cause, of the Trojan War in the heroic age — but they may have considered invasion of a city state’s fields an affront as outrageous, in a different way, as the violation of tabu. If that were the essence of the provocation, it partly explains the immediacy of the hoplite response. The taking of satisfaction, also a very primitive emotion, may then explain why the response stopped
short of Clausewitzian decision. It was already an extraordinary leap into the future for the Greeks to overcome the natural human dread of pushing personal exposure to its tolerable limits, and that is how their adoption of hoplite tactics ought to be seen: fighting face-to-face with death-dealing weapons defies nature, and they bore it only because all shared the risk equally, and sustained each other’s courage, as well as place in the battle line, by pushing shoulder against shoulder. After that risk had been undergone it ought not to surprise us that the survivors felt they had done enough. To press on from the battlefield, to run to ground those who had opposed them, had the exhausted hoplites’ powers allowed such an extra effort, would add an additional dimension to warmaking for which even the ever-open Greek mind might not have been ready.