2 Hanson, The Western Way of War argues for homogeneity among the so-called middle class in part due to their relationship to and with each other on the hoplite battlefield. J. Salmon, ‘Political hoplites’, JHS 97 (1977), 84–101 makes the case for the subconscious community formed by hoplite warfare in the late Archaic Period and the political effects which this may have created.
3 Some scholars have argued that the hoplon shield was introduced and the style of fighting followed. This model is problematic, however, for both political and military reasons. The introduction of new military equipment without a pre existing doctrine on how to use it, especially in a pre-modern economy where doing so would be a risky economic venture, seems highly unlikely. See S. Morillo, J. Black and P. Lococo, War in World History. Society, Technology and War from Ancient Times to the Present (New York: McGraw Hill, 2009), vol. 1, p. 40. On the significance of the heavy shield as a defining characteristic of the hoplite, and a debunking the notion that the hoplite was actually named for his shield see J. Lazenby and D. Whitehead, ‘The myth of the hoplite’s hoplon’, CQ 46,1 (1996) 27–33; Wheeler, ‘Land battles’, in CHGRW, vol. 1, pp. 186–7.
4 It was French scholars who wrote about Greek warfare as an agon, a contest, conceived like a tournament with ceremonies and rules. See, for example, Vernant, Problèmes, p. 21; Detienne, p. 211. The idea was picked up by Y. Garlan, Recherches de Poliorcetique Grecque (Paris: Boccard, 1974) and Y. Garlan, War in the Ancient World, trans. by Janet Lloyd (London: Chatto and Windus, 1975); R. Lonis, Guerre et Religion en Grèce à l’époque Classique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1979). On agonal warfare, see also van Wees, Greek Warfare, pp. 115–117, 126–8, 131–2, 223–6.
5 D. Dawson, The Origins of Western Warfare: Militarism and Morality in the Ancient World (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), p. 50; V. D. Hanson, ‘The ideology of hoplite battle: Ancient and modern’, in Hanson, Hoplites, p. 6 calls it a ‘wonderful, absurd conspiracy’ that was seldom accompanied by sieges, ambushes, strategems, etc.
6 J. Keegan’s The Face of Battle (New York: Viking Press, 1976) began the trend. The quotations is from Hanson, Hoplites, p. 253. See the remarks of John W. I. Lee, A Greek Army on the March, Soldiers and Survival in Xenophon’s Anabasis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); F. E. Ray, Land Battles in 5th Century BC Greece (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), p. 14.
7 Keegan, The Face of Battle, p. 29.
8 P. Ducrey, Le Traitement des Prisoniers de Guerre dans la Grèce Antique (Paris: Editions E. de Boccard, 1999), 1–8, 289–311 and passim. Josiah Ober has made the most explicit attempt to get out the unwritten conventions of hoplite warfare. In J. Ober, ‘The rules of war in Classical Greece’, in The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 53–71, he lists a dozen common customs that were developed after the Homeric epics were put in writing and which did not break down until around 450 during the Peloponnesian war. See also Krentz, ‘Fighting by the rules’, 23–9.
9 H. Berve, ‘Staat und Staatsgesinnung der Griechen’, Neue Jahrbücher für Antike und Deutsche Bildung 1 (1938), 6–7. Cf. Lonis, 90–109.
10 F. W. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1957), vol. I, 264. It is a commonplace to refer to Strabo’s report (10.1.12) that rules of war were agreed upon by Chalkis and Eretria at the time of the Lelantine war. Strabo quotes an inscription in the sanctuary of Artemis at Eretria, prohibiting missiles (telebola). The Argives and probably Thucydides believed as an historical fact that the Spartans and Argives agreed to decide the possession of Thyrea by means of a combat between groups of 300 men each chosen from the two armies. M. Ostwald, Nomos and the Beginnings of the Athenian Democracy (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 42 concludes that religious customs began to be undermined in the last third of the fifth century. Ober, ‘The rules of war in Classical Greece’, 53–71 tries listing the rules, but this theory has recently been attacked by Krentz, ‘Fighting by the rules’, 23–39.
11 Van Wees, Greek Warfare, p. 118.
12 G. B. Grundy, Thucydides and the History of His Age (Oxford: Blackwell, 1948), vol. I, p. 244.
13 A. W. Gomme, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), vol. 1, 12–15.
14 A. M. Snodgrass, Arms and Armour of the Greeks (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 85; Cartledge, ‘Hoplites and Heroes’, p. 24; M. T. Trundle, ‘Identity and community among Greek mercenaries in the Classical World 700–322 BCE’, in E. L. Wheeler, The Armies of Classical Greece (Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), p. 486; van Wees, Greek Warfare, 45–9.
15 Cartledge, ‘Hoplites and heroes’, p. 24. As Aristotle put it: ‘in a politeia, the class that does the fighting wields the supreme power’ (Politics 1279b3); and, we might add, writes the history. On the opposition of ruses de guerre and hoplite fighting, see Heza, pp. 235–44.
16 Latacz, 154ff. Cf. P. Greenhalgh, Early Greek Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 73; Cartledge, ‘Hoplites and heroes’, p. 20 and V. D. Hanson, ‘Hoplite technology in phalanx battle’, in V. D. Hanson (ed.), Hoplites, 67–8 and n. 14 have developed and refined this view arguing that the hoplite shield did not dictate a dense formation but pre-supposed an existing practice of close-order fighting.
17 See the discussion of Latacz’ theory by A. M. Snodgrass, ‘The hoplite reform revisited’, in E. L. Wheeler, The Armies of Classical Greece (Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 3–61, and van Wees, ‘The Homeric way of war’, 1–18; 131–55.
18 H. van Wees summarises this view and lists the adherents in ‘The development of the hoplite phalanx’, p. 125, n. 1; Hanson, The Western Way of War, p. 241. On the so-called ‘Hoplite revolution’ and military revolutions in general, including the legacy of Michael Roberts, see Wheeler, ‘Land battles’, in CHGRW, vol. 1, pp. 186–7; Krentz, ‘Fighting by the rules’, p. 112; Ducrey, 56–64. W. G. Runciman, ‘Greek hoplites, warrior culture, and indirect bias’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4, 4 (Dec. 1998), p. 731.
19 Hanson, The Western Way of War, p. 241. Van Wees, ‘The development of the hoplite phalanx’, pp. 155–6 disagrees with this interpretation and suggests that the hoplite phalanx did not reach its Classical form until after the Persian wars.
20 Van Wees, ‘The development of the hoplite phalanx’, pp. 125–66; Wheeler, ‘Land battles’, in CHGRW, vol. 1, p. 190.
21 The evidence for the view that the hoplite phalanx was fully developed by either 700 or 650 BCE is listed by van Wees, War and Violence in Ancient Greece, p. 152, nn. 5 and 6. Morris, esp. pp. 196–200.
22 Van Wees, Greek Warfare, pp. 166–95; Krentz, ‘Fighting by the rules’, p. 23.
23 Krentz, ‘Fighting by the rules’, 35–6; J. K. Anderson says that when you see the combination of armoured spearmen and light-armed missile throwers on a vase it more likely reflects guerrilla warfare in the mountains of Messenia: J. K. Anderson, ‘Hoplite weapons and offensive arms’, in V. D. Hanson (ed.), Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 16. Van Wees would argue that this is simply the mixed fighters of the archaic period.
24 R. D. Luginbill, ‘Othismos: The importance of the mass-shove in hoplite warfare’, Phoenix 48, 1 (1994), pp. 651–61 criticises the notion that hoplites had either the discipline or the training to change from an open formation engaged in individual combat to the close order necessary for a push. His argument, however, is predicated on the fact that we accept the othismos as a fact. For the contrary argument, see van Wees, Greek Warfare, pp. 166–77, esp. 173.
25 Van Wees, Greek Warfare, p. 167.
26 Poets talk about soldiers ‘leaning their shields against their shoulders’ and exhorting men to stand up ‘legs well apart, both feet planted firmly on the ground, biting your lip’. Hoplites squat and run with their left shoulder twisted forward: van Wees, Greek Warfare, pp. 167–8
with illustrations.
27 Van Wees, Greek Warfare, p. 168.
28 On the stance of the hoplite, the protection afforded by the hoplite shield and its use as an offensive weapon see van Wees, Greek Warfare, pp. 168–70.
29 For the evidence of hoplites with javelins, see van Wees, ‘The development of the hoplite phalanx’, pp. 125–66, esp. 134ff. on ‘battle scenes: what they do and do not show’; see also van Wees, Greek Warfare, pp. 169–71, 173–4, esp. p. 170 on the throwing loop.
30 Van Wees, Greek Warfare, pp. 172–4.
31 As evidence for this interpretation, van Wees points out that archers made up about one-third of all warriors and they stood in the front-line as the equals of spearmen: see van Wees, Greek Warfare, p. 167, figure 13. Bowmen also carried swords and helmets and sometimes a shield. In vase paintings they are always shown face to face with an opponent and they kill with a shot to the head or neck. Archers continued to fight alongside spearmen, but from the early seventh century onwards they were represented in art not as independent fighters but as unarmoured men kneeling or squatting behind hoplites: van Wees, Greek Warfare, p. 170. The Iliad vividly describes how this works. The archer stands ‘under a shield’ of a heavy-armed soldier, but every so often jumps out, looks around to see if he can shoot someone in the crowd, fires a shot and quickly returns to the cover of the shield (Homer, Iliad 8.266–72; 4.112–115, 15.440–4). Thus close co-operation between spearmen and bowmen, unattested in earlier art, must have been a new tactic, made possible by the large, new shields and encouraged by the greater emphasis on close combat. Crouching for safety at a distance from the enemy only makes sense if there is a danger of being hit by missiles. See van Wees, Greek Warfare, p. 168, figure 14, p. 171, figure 18 for Greek pictorial examples of such crouching archers.
32 Herodotus 1.103.1 reports that Greek mercenaries at the Lydian court during the reign of Cyaxares in the late seventh century were surprised by the separation of fighting men in the Median army. The story grew up that Cyaxares had been the first to do this.
33 Van Wees, Greek Warfare, p. 173.
34 Van Wees, Greek Warfare, p. 175 and figures 19, 20. Nine out of ten archers are in Scythian dress, and their exotic appearance helps explain why they were popular with artists when ordinary archers were much more rarely portrayed: painters like the contrast between ‘barbarian’ bowmen and Greek heavy infantry. Scythian archers had no precedent in epic poetry, nor is the idea of putting them among hoplites likely to have been an artistic fiction designed purely for symbolic effect – Thracian peltasts, equally exotic and also often represented in Athenian art, were not shown mingling with hoplites in this way. In all probability, Athens did employ Scythian mercenaries at the time, and these did operate as shown, mixed in with a loose hoplite formation rather than as a separate, independent force.
35 Ducrey, p. 74.
36 Krentz, ‘Fighting by the rules’, p. 29. For a list of armed archers on Athenian vases, see F. Lissarague, L’autre Guerrier: Archers, Peltastes, Cavaliers dans l’Imagerie Attique (Paris: Découverte; Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1990), p. 129.
37 Although there may have been a small cavalry force at Athens in the sixth century, it is only after 479 that the Athenians establish what I. G. Spence calls a ‘proper cavalry corps’: I. G. Spence, The Cavalry of Classical Greece: A Social and Military History with Particular Reference to Athens (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1993), 9–19; G. Bugh, The Horsemen of Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 39; J. E. Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts, p. 44.
38 Herodotus 9.22.1.
39 This is an interesting example of cultural borrowing. See Krentz, ‘Fighting by the rules’, p. 124 and M.C. Miller, Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century bc: A Study in Cultural Receptivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) for a study of how profoundly Persian culture influenced the Greeks. Herodotus says that the Persian cavalry were armed like their infantry (i.e. some combination of spear, long knife [akinakes], bow, helmet and body armour). Although many used javelins instead, he mentions horse archers at Plataea in 479. In the western empire the bow became less popular than the spear by 400 BCE. The 10,000 survivors of Cyrus’ mercenaries were harassed by Artaxerxes’ horse archers until they organised a force of slingers to shoot back.
40 Spence, 1–9.
41 Herodotus 9.22.60. Archers on ships appear at the Battle of Salamis a year earlier. See Aeschylus, Persians, English trans. by Herbert Weir Smyth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1922), 454–464; A. Plassart, ‘Les archers d’Athènes’, REG 26 (1913), pp. 151–213.
42 Thucydides 424.
43 Thucydides 8.71.2; Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.1.33–34.
44 Free will Herodotus 7.104.4; barbarians ‘coerced by the whip’, Herodotus 7.103.4; 223.3; hoplites fighting to the end 7.225.3.
45 Mardonius’ speech in Herodotus 7.9.2.
46 For attacks on the so-called othismos, or massed push, see G. L. Cawkwell in ‘Orthodoxy and hoplites’, CQ 39 (1989), pp. 375–89; A. D. Fraser, ‘The myth of the phalanx-scrimmage’, CW 36 (1942), 15–16; P. Krentz, ‘The nature of hoplite battle’, ClAnt 16 (1985), 50–61 who sees othismos as little more than a metaphor. For those taking a more traditional approach, see J. Lazenby, ‘The killing zone’, in V. Hanson, Hoplites, 87–109; Hanson, The Western Way of War; Pritchett, vol. 1, p. 175, vol. 4, 66–73; J. Buckler, ‘Epameinondas and the Embolon’, Phoenix 39 (1985), pp. 134–43; J. K. Anderson, ‘Hoplites and heresies: A note’, JHS 104 (1984), p. 152; A. J. Holladay, ‘Hoplites and heresies’, JHS 102 (1982), 94–103; and a return to the traditional view in Luginbill, pp. 323–33 who lists the earlier bibliography.
47 Van Wees, ‘Tyrants, oligarchs and citizen militias’, p. 65; van Wees, ‘Men of bronze: The myth of the middle class militia’, in van Wees, Greek Warfare, 47–57. See Konrad Kinzl, A Companion to the Classical Greek World (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), p. 483 on the diversity of hoplites in Argos, Boeotia, Corinth, Megara, etc.
48 Van Wees, ‘Tyrants, oligarchs and citizen militias’, p. 65 who gives the example of the Athenians invading Boeotia in 424 BCE, where the proportion of light to heavy-armed in the Boeotian forces was about 3:2; in the Athenian army the proportion was 2:1. See Thucydides 4.93.3–94.1.
49 Van Wees, ‘Tyrants, oligarchs and citizen militias’, p. 65. Thucydides 5.64.2. Plataea: Herodotus 9.28–29.
50 The high mobility and fluidity of light infantry meant their encounters rarely produced a clear winner, unlike hoplite confrontations which were decided the minute one side left the field. This led Thucydides to comment on the performance of the light-armed troops in the initial stages of the confrontation between the Athenians and the Syracusans in 415 BCE. He felt they fought with fluctuating fortunes ‘as is usual with these troops’: Thucydides 6.69; van Wees, Greek Warfare, 61–5.
51 Krentz, ‘Deception in Archaic and Classical Greek warfare’, pp. 167–200.
52 Thucydides knew the precise number of Athenian heavy infantry invading Megara, but waved away the light-armed as ‘a not inconsiderable crowd’: Thucydides 2.31.1. Xenophon, when describing the military potential of Thessaly notes that the region could field 6,000 horsemen and 10,000 hoplites but only describes its light-armed troops as ‘large enough to take on the whole of mankind’: Xenophon, Hellenica 6.1.8, 19. N. Whatley, ‘On the possibility of reconstructing Marathon and other ancient battles’, in E. L. Wheeler (ed.), The Armies of Classical Greece (Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), p. 316 (p. 134 in original JHS article) points out the absence of information about Greek formations and the stationing of light-armed troops and attendants who would have been present. See also L. Trittle, ‘Warfare in Herodotus’, in Carolyn Dewald and John Marincola (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 212; van Wees, Greek Warfare. pp. 61–5.
53 Van Wees, Greek Warfare, p. 61.
54 Van Wees, Greek Warfare, p. 62, pp. 154–8 (Homer), pp. 173�
��4 (Tyrtaeus). Tyrtaeus F 19.19–20; cf. 19.2 for rock throwing. See Tyrtaeus F 23a.10–14 for hurling javelins, and light-armed fighters.
55 Tyrtaeus fr. 23a-20–22 (West trans.). See Krentz, ‘Fighting by the rules’, p. 39.
56 Diodorus Siculus 12.10.1; Krentz, ‘Fighting by the rules’, p. 31.
57 Thucydides 1.106.1–2; Krentz, ‘Fighting by the rules’, p. 31.
58 Thucydides 418.
59 In the famous passage of Herodotus (Herodotus 7.9b.1–2), Mardonius in a fictional conversation relates to Xerxes I how the Greek art of war was absolutely silly. He says they fight for trivial reasons and limit battle to a level playing field where the victors take casualties and the losers are annihilated. This puts into the mouth of the Persians a view that the Greeks were strategically limited and tactically ritualistic in conducting war. This excludes Xenophon and Tactica and the artistic evidence: Thucydides 5/70–71.1; Polybius 18.28–32. Cf. E. L. Wheeler, ‘The legion as phalanx in the Late Empire’, pt 1, in Y. Le Bohec and C. Woolf (eds), L’Armée Romaine de Diocletian à Valentinian, 1ère Actes du Congrès de Lyon, 12–14 Sept 2002 (Paris: CERGR, 2004), 327, 331–2, 336–9; and Wheeler, ‘Land battles’, in CHGRW, vol. 1, p. 191. On the view that there were very few large battles in the Archaic Period at all, see W. R. Connor, ‘Early Greek land warfare as symbolic expression’, in E. L. Wheeler, The Armies of Classical Greece (Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 83–109.
60 Polybius 18.31.2.
61 Polybius 18.31.2; Polybius 18.32.7.
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