Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience

by Victor Davis Hanson

  If sphagia are powerful actions, nothing is more powerful than the piercing of a human throat so that the blood flows. Two contrasting types of human victim are found: (1) One of 'our own' community and, in the extreme forms favored by myth, of noble birth, a daughter or son of the king; (2) an enemy who can be slaughtered with less

  compunction, as in the two historical cases and the apocryphal story of Themistokles at Salamis; here is where we might expect but in fact fail to find the notion of the scapegoat. The stories of human sacrifice generally are concerned with serious threats to the community from plague or foreign invasion. Most often, as we shall see, these extraordinarily powerful sacrifices are not slotted precisely into the normal sequence of rites leading up to battle but bear on the overall emergency. They are, therefore, more revealing of general attitudes than of the specific meaning of particular rites.

  Of the first type of victim Iphigeneia is the best-known example. The realistic correlate to her sacrifice is the sphagia performed for crossing water or to propitiate unfavorable winds. But the god who must be propitiated here is Artemis, not the powers of the sea or of the winds. In Aeschylus' treatment of the story in the Agamemnon, the reason for Artemis' anger as well as the immediate purpose of the sacrifice are left obscure, and the poet, by calling the sacrificers 'leaders who love battle' (230) and comparing the girl to a young she-goat (khimaira, 232), alludes to the battle-line sphagia.41 At the end of Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis (a part of the play whose authenticity is doubtful) Artemis is addressed as slayer of animals', that is the hunting goddess Agrotera (1570), and as the one who delights in human sacrifice (1524–5), an unmistakable reference to the Tauric Artemis of the same dramatist's Iphigenia among the Taurians.

  The only explicit example of a human sacrifice serving as the battle-line sphagia is that of Marathos, the Arcadian, who because of some oracle offered himself for sacrifice (sphagiasasthai) before the battle-line (Plut. Thes. 32.5, citing the late fourth-century peripatetic philosopher, Dicaearchus). Marathos has accompanied the Tyndaridai on an invasion of Attica and through his death becomes the eponymous hero of the Attic deme of Marathon. Though we lack details the story seems to reflect the aition of how a foreigner gave his name to a part of Attica and thus became its protector, after dying—unusually—in the service of the invading army.42

  The ritual correlates in other stories are less precise. Menoikeus, the son of Kreon, in Euripides' Phoenissae willingly accepts the death prescribed by Teiresias, fresh from success as a military mantis for the Athenians (852), and the commanders and generals concur (973). The context is military and the purpose is to save Thebes from the Seven. But he kills himself on a tower of the walls of Thebes (1090 ff.), not before the battle-line, and the blood he gives to the earth is in

  recompense for Ares' anger at Kadmos' slaughter of his serpent (933–4), not to Ares as the god of war.

  Stories of the death of virgins of the highest birth were particularly popular in tragedy.43 In Euripides' Heraclidae, when Aigisthos and the Argives invade Attica to destroy the children of Herakles, all sources of divination are consulted by the Athenian king and all agree that not bull nor calf but a virgin girl must be slaughtered for Persephone (Eur. Phoen. 403–5, cf. 489–90). Makaria, Herakles' daughter, offers herself; her request that she breathe her last in the hands of women, not men, is granted (565–74). This does not lead us to expect that she will be killed in front of the two armies. When later in the play there is a description of battle-line sphagia performed by both sides and without mention of Makaria one would see no allusion to human sacrifice if the text did not speak (literally) of 'the propitious killing of human throats.' Rather than seeing a very oblique reference to the girl's death that contradicts what we have been told earlier or accepting an interpretation that takes the animals here to be surrogates for humans, I find it more likely that there is a problem in the text.44

  Of examples outside of drama, the story of the Boiotian Leuktrides is interesting because of the way it was developed and attached to an important historical event, the Theban victory over the Spartans at Leuktra in 371 BC. The battle took place near a sacred spot that was interpreted to be the grave of two maidens who had been raped by Spartans. The Theban general Pelopidas was said to have had a dream in which their father charged him with sacrificing (sphagiasai) a maiden to them if he wished to defeat the enemy. Fortunately a young filly strayed into the camp and was consigned to that fate by the seers.45

  While these stories of the surrender and destruction for the gods of noble men and women are usually kept distinct from the specific rituals performed before battle, they can be taken to reflect the general atmosphere of a community in a crisis, such as characterized, to some degree, every battle and every siege. Two historical examples illustrate Greek views. The Spartan king Leonidas' death at Thermopylai in 480 BC was subsequently supported by oracles and interpreted as the necessary loss—we would say 'sacrifice'—which permitted the Greeks to defeat the Persians in the war.46 Again, in 403 BC the mantis of the democratic Athenians fighting to regain the city from the tyranny of the Thirty is said to have advised no move by his fellow soldiers until one of them had been killed or wounded, after

  which he foresaw victory and his own death. When the enemy appeared he led the charge and was killed but his comrades won the battle (Xen. Hell. 2.4.18–19). It may have happened in just this way, or it may be that since the mantis was the first, or among the first, to be killed and since his comrades won, his death was taken to be the powerful surrender, i.e. 'sacrifice,' that brought about the successful outcome.

  The second type of human victim is one of the enemy. Here we might expect to see the notion of a scapegoat and the expulsion of pollution at work, but that does not prove to be the case. The most notorious incident, that of Themistokles' sacrifice of three Persian captives before the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC, has often been accepted as historical and at first sight appears to fit the slot of spbagia before battle. Themistokles is sacrificing on the island of Salamis near the command ship in preparation for the naval engagement with the Persian fleet. Three handsome and splendidly dressed Persian prisoners, nephews of the Great King, are brought forward, at which point a bright flame shoots up from the hiera on the altar and a sneeze is heard on the right. The mantis urges Themistokles to sacrifice the Persians to Dionysos Omestes ('Raw-eater') to save the city and win victory. Themistokles is shocked but the crowd insists on the sacrifice (Plut. Them. 13.2–5, cf. Arist. 9.2, Pelop. 21.3). The story has been shown to be unhistorical because the prisoners were said to have been captured on the island of Psyttaleia, on which the Athenians landed only after the naval victory, and because the god who received the sacrifice was unknown in Athens but a local figure of Lesbos, the home of Plutarch's source, Phainias.47

  The incident is omitted by Herodotus, though one could argue he did so because he was reluctant to attribute such barbarism to the Greeks at their moment of glory. But he does report that earlier that summer some Persians killed on the prow of their ship a comparably handsome Greek (kallisteuon) whose ship they had captured (7.180; the verbs are sphazo and sphagiazomai). They regarded him as a good omen, being their first captive and most handsome. The language and thinking are close to that of the Greek seer at Salamis, as reported by Phainias in Plutarch. It was common (not, as is sometimes said, a rule) in sacrifice to choose through a process of selection the finest victim (the kallisteuon) for sacrifice.48 Here the finest victim serves also as a first-fruit offered to the gods, though that is not explicit in the language. The incident may be no more historical than the killing of the three noble Persians on Salamis since Herodotus is fond of

  commenting on the awful but fascinating strangeness of the Persians and other non-Greeks in ritual matters. But both are probably examples of sacrifice conceived of as offering a prize, a first-fruit, to the gods to gain their favor or to deflect their envy. The sheep and goats of armies or fleets on campaign are appropriate victims but th
ey are not selected as the finest nor are they first-fruits. The stories say that the situation deserves the giving of a prize to the gods. The reality was the killing of the nearest domestic animal.

  ART

  Our last source of information is art. We concentrate on three examples of a warrior killing a ram, two from Attic red-figure vases of the fifth century BC, the third in a series of reliefs of the first half of the fourth century BC, from Lycia in Asia Minor but of Greek workmanship.49 In the first (Figure 1), a warrior wearing a helmet but no armor, while holding the snout of a ram with his left hand and gripping its hindquarters between his knees, drives the point of a sword through the animal's neck. The blood begins to spurt both from the point at which the sword entered the neck and from its point of exit. The ram has been forced to its knees. The scene is entirely the act of sacrifice. In the second example the body of the sacrificer is missing. He straddles the ram whose body is flat on the ground and he pulls its head back by pushing down on its left horn. With his right hand he drives the sword into the animal's neck. The remains of the two bands of the calyx crater show, to the right of the sacrifice, two warriors armed with helmets and shields confronting each other with spears. In the lower band two men, one helmeted, the other wearing a cap, drag a bearded corpse. A youth carrying three spears and a shield faces them, his right hand on his head in a gesture of lamentation. In the third example, the relief shows a helmeted, beardless man wearing a short cape, and kneeling on a ram whose neck he grips between his thighs. With his left hand he pulls the victim's head back and in his right hand he holds up a sword to drive into its neck. To the right stands a bearded man, taken to be the commander of the besieged forces, wearing breastplate and helmet, holding up his shield with his left arm which rests on a spear while his right arm is raised in a gesture of prayer.

  The last two examples certainly allude to heroic scenes of combat. The first is so narrowly focused that it is without context other than that of battle. But it is the most revealing in that it singles out the

  Figure 1 The sacrifice before battle (photograph: courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Dudley P.Allen Fund)

  moment of performing sphagia, of driving the sword through the neck, as a self-contained scene. The absence from all these scenes of altar, fire, and the usual officiants and attendants seen in representations of sacrifice shows that this is the sphagia before battle. The sacrificer may be a mantis but he is also a member of the fighting force, since he wears a helmet and carries a sword. He kills with no special implement but the sword which he will shortly use in battle, and none of the paraphernalia of sacrifice, often lovingly depicted on Attic vases, is in sight. The depiction of the moment of killing the victim is in contrast to the usual representation of sacrifice. Aside from these scenes only the moment of killing a human victim is shown in Greek art, and that too was conceived of as a form of spbagia.50 These scenes give us the essential message of battle-line sphagia. There are no signs of good omen, no symbol to represent the divinity addressed, not even the community of sacrificers though we know how concerned they were with this sacrifice. It is the act of killing, pure and simple, that matters at this moment.

  CONCLUSIONS

  The various types of formal killing of domestic animals, which we lump together and call sacrifice, were subject to a variety of meanings for the Greeks and were used in a wide range of contexts for diverse purposes. The actual context of any particular performance tended to limit its meanings. In warfare, the immediate aims of ritual seem especially clear. The stories told about remarkable sacrifices in the course of war and the imagery of poetry suggest how these sacrifices might be interpreted—as surrender of something of value to the home community to save the rest of the community, as passing on to the gods the first-fruits of success, and as the appeasing of dangerous powers. But how much of this impinged on the historically attested enactments? As the two armed forces move toward conflict the aims of ritual become narrower and more single-minded.

  Ostensibly every step taken is approved by the gods through the signs they give in answer to inquiry. At the same time, proper acknowledgment of the role of the gods, of their power, is made through sacrifice, libation, and prayer. But the initiative is in the hands of men. The decision to go to war is taken by political institutions. It may be ratified by divination; or rather the timing, and thus also the place, for the decision's being put into effect are approved or delayed or, rarely, cancelled altogether by divination. So

  Thucydides reports that a Spartan campaign was given up because the border-crossing sacrifices proved unfavorable (5.54.2, cf. 55.3 and 116.1). Had we more details we might well see that there had been disagreement about the advisability of the campaign or its timing, so that the failure to get the right signs at once was sufficient to reverse the decision. The religious and the pragmatic are so closely intertwined in this world that it would be futile for us to try to judge whether genuine religious feeling or practical considerations were at work. When a decision was firm or effectively inescapable, men continued sacrificing for the necessary omens until they were obtained or until the issue was moot, when the enemy was upon them. We do not need to believe that any Greek soldiers ever failed to defend themselves in this situation.51

  The whole sequence of rites leading up to battle expressed what men desired, the ideal outcome being the collaboration of gods with men at every step. But the repeated sacrifices until the desired signs were received say more about the determination of the sacrificers than their willingness to govern their actions by divine guidance. Herodotus has Mardonios say, in effect, when the sacrifices do not come out as he desired (katathumia), 'To hell with trying to force (biazesthai) the sphagia (Hdt. 9.45.2, 9.41.4). In the mouth of the foreigner is put a sceptical, ill-omened but recognizable description of what is being done.

  At the last moment when the battle-line sphagia are performed, all aims culminate in and are subordinated to a single expressive action—the killing of the animal, which is immediately followed by the killing of men.52 The spirit of the battlefield ritual has been caught by Albert Henrichs in his study of human sacrifice in Greek religion:

  the brutalizing experience of battle and impending doom… lies also at the root of the sphagia sacrifice as such in its regular animal form…men at the threshold of hand-to-hand combat sought unusual ritual remedies in an effort to cope with extraordinary psychological strain, and with the threat to their lives. Sinister and different, the sphagia anticipated the bloodshed of the battle and marked its ritual beginning.53

  I have tried to clarify these unusual ritual remedies and to show that they are not in themselves distinctive but are sinister and different primarily because, as all activity accelerates to the clash of armed men, everything that is not essential gives way to the stark fact of the act of killing, not softened or veiled by the forms of normal sacrifice in a communal or familial environment.

  It was the view of Alfred Loisy that in divinatory sacrifices the sacred action is a sign or representation of what is wanted, just as the portent is a sign of what is going to happen. Such sacrifices are in effect magical, designed to control and direct and not only to inquire. Loisy's knowledge of Greek practice was faulty and his further notion that magic is a confusion in the primitive mind now finds few adherents.54 If, however, we think of such ritual as expressive action, it can be seen as representing simply what is desired and of serving to focus, while at the edge of the chaos of battle, on that goal.55 The repeated sacrifices leading up to battle are in a sense magical, most clearly in the concentrated sphagia for crossing boundaries of water. At other times, the absence or vagueness of a divine recipient or addressee, the indifference to sacred places and instruments and to the disposal of the victim, are clearest in, if not limited to, the final sphagia. Divination is not abandoned; rather, the acts of killing and of divination are combined, their distinction collapsed. Battle was slaughter, 'us' killing 'them.' In the act of sphagia everything was reduced to a single act
ion, a single stroke. Expressed fully, what the sacrificers said was: 'O gods! We destroy this life. We wish to kill and not be killed. Support us.' Put even more simply, it is an act and a wish: 'We kill. May we kill.'

  NOTES

  1. In addition to Connor 1988, Lonis 1979, and Pritchett, War 1 and War 3, cited in full in the Bibliography of this volume, essential contributions on the subject of the present essay are the following: Walter Burkert, Homo Necans. The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrifice and Myth (Berkeley, 1983). Jean Casabona, Recherches sur le vocabulaire des sacrifices en Grec des origines a la fin de I'époque classique (Aix-en-Provence, 1966). S.Eitrem, 'Mantis und Sphagia,' SymbOslo 18 (1953) 9–29. Albert Henrichs, 'Human sacrifice in Greek religion: three case studies,' in Jean Rudhardt and Olivier Reverdin, eds, Le sacrifice dans I'antiquité (Vandoeuvres, 1980) 195–235. Arthur Darby Nock, The cult of heroes,' in HThR 37 (1944) 141–73= Essays on Religion and the Ancient World II (Oxford, 1972) 575–602. Harald Popp, Die Einwirkung von Vorzeichen, Opfern und Festen auf die Kriegführung der Griechen im 5. und 4. Jahrhundert v. Chr. (Diss. Erlangen, 1957). Jean Rudhardt, Notions fondamentales de la pensée religieuse et actes constitutes du culte dans la Grèce classique (Geneva, 1958).

  Friedrich Schwenn, 'Der Krieg in der griechischen Religion' (part 2) ArchRW 21 (1922) 58–71. Paul Stengel, Opferbräuche der Griechen (Berlin, 1910).——, 'SPHAGIA,' ArchRW 13 (1910) 87–91. Theodorus Szymanski, Sacrificia Graecorum in bellis militaria (Diss., University of Marburg, 1908). Virtually all the relevant passages are presented and discussed. Ludwig Ziehen, RE 3A, 2 (1929) 1169–79, s.v.Sphagia.