At this time hoplite battle remained a “pure,” static, unchanging match between men in the heaviest of armor, void of support from auxiliary cavalry, missile throwers, or archers…. In his now classic book, The Face of Battle (1976), John Keegan claimed that “large masses of soldiers do not smash into each other, either because one gives way at the critical moment, or because the attackers during the advance to combat lose their fainthearts and arrive at the point of contact very much inferior in numbers to the mass they are attacking.”47 Keegan’s denial of shock fits the ancient historians, who regularly speak of armies coming “to hands” or “to spear.” It also fits the slow, methodical Spartan advance, which would not have aided shock. He says: People who are unacquainted with military history do not understand the importance of mere avoirdupois weight in close fighting. To counter the massive numbers of Persians, the Greek general Miltiades ordered the troops to be spread across an unusually wide front, leaving the centre of the … I would like to see reenactors practicing with lighter poplar and willow shields weighing a realistic 4–5 kg. 36. The Greek State at War, 5 vols. Reconstructors have shown just how light a porpax aspis could be. Terrakotten und Bronze, ed. A phalanx was made up of ranks and files. Who did fight in the Archaic phalanges? Performing the paean gave “courage to friends as it rids them of the fear of the enemy” (Aeschylus, Seven against Thebes 270). The deeper phalanx will defeat the more shallow one, even if on both sides exactly the same number of combatants actually manage to use their weapons.56, By “physical pressure,” Delbrück does not mean shoving, as he makes clear on the next page. Adam Schwartz has cleverly compared hoplites to Danish riot control police using double-handled, Plexiglas shields weighing less than 3 kg each. Delbrück 1975: 53, a translation of the 1920 third edition. 25. Hoplites usually wore greaves, vambraces, and a chest-plate. It was not a scrummage. [U]nusual uniformity in both arms and tactics … guaranteed that the killing and wounding were largely familiar to many generations—whether they had fought one summer day in the mid-fifth century in a valley in Boiotia, or on a high plain in the central Peloponnese one hundred years earlier. ———. The depth of the phalanx. If the men had previously walked some distance, it helped them regain their order, as they found their places and fell into step with the movements of the dance. If weight was literally so important in Archaic and Classical battles, how can it be that the Greeks didn’t appreciate it until the fourth century? These tactics inspired the future king Philip II of Macedon, who was at the time a hostage in Thebes, and also inspired the development of new kind of infantry, the Macedonian Phalanx. 1982. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. A regiment of big men meeting a regiment of smaller men in a circumscribed space, such as, for example, a village street, will almost certainly drive the latter back…. The spearhead was usually a curved leaf shape, while the rear of the spear had a spike called a sauroter ("lizard-killer") which was used to stand the spear in the ground (hence the name). Later in the hoplite era, more sophisticated tactics were developed, in particular by the Theban general Epaminondas. 390–380 BCE. It seems likely that both motions were used, depending on the situation. “Battle: (A) land battles.” In The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare, 2 vols., ed. So ōtheō might be meant literally or figuratively in battle narratives. “The Early Hoplite Phalanx: Order or Disarray?” Classica & Mediaevalia 53:31–64. 2000. Furley, William D., and Jan Maarten Bremer. Fagan, Garrett. In earlier Homeric, dark age combat, the words and deeds of supremely powerful heroes turned the tide of battle. “Continuing the Othismos on Othismos.” Ancient History Bulletin 8:45–49. Arms and Armor of the Greeks. He cites six passages for the thrusting with swords and spears. See Krentz 2000, 2002; and Dayton 2006. The ranks behind them would support them with their own spears and the mass of their shields gently pushing them, not to force them into the enemy formation but to keep them steady and in place. 1994. Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae. If hoplites could fight successfully in a mixed force, why did the Greeks eventually exclude archers and other lightly armed fighters from the hoplite ranks? Two years later, he developed this view in a long article, ‘Über die Einführungszeit der geschlossenen Phalanx,” in which he looked not to late sources such as Pausanias and Polyainos, but to Archaic poets.22 He argued that Euboians distinguished between hoplites and lightly armed men, excluding everyone but hoplites from the ranks during the Lelantine War, which he dated to the middle of the seventh century. The hoplite army consisted of heavy infantrymen. The Ancient Greeks at War. The following ranks serve as immediate replacements for the dead and wounded, but they exercise principally a physical and moral pressure. The weaknesses of the phalanx formation - attack from the flanks, rear, or when on rough terrain - were sometimes exploited by more wily commanders; however, the formation, albeit with lighter-armed infantry, was still in use through Hellenistic and early Roman times. There he says that Greeks did not put unarmored men in the rear ranks because, the realization that they could not really expect to receive any true support from these rear ranks would have seriously weakened the drive, the forward thrust of the foremost ranks, in which, of course, the value of the rearmost ranks normally lies.57. Perhaps the first men to carry the new shield were not wealthy aristocrats, but poorer men who wanted the superior protection a large, round shield provided a man who could not afford expensive body armor. The late medieval knight offers… His further explanation of his idea is curious, to say the least. They included this great oval shield in their 36 kg total estimate discussed above. In battle, hoplites fought as a team. 1920. How can we explain this time lag in the use of bronze for shields compared to its use for other pieces of defensive equipment? [4] The hoplites were primarily represented by free citizens – propertied farmers and artisans – who were able to afford a linen armour or a bronze armour suit and weapons (estimated at a third to a half of its able-bodied adult male population). Mitford, William. When battles occurred, they were usually set piece and intended to be decisive. Did all hoplites carry this porpax shield? “Über die Einführungszeit der geschlossenen Phalanx.” Sitzungsberichte der Koniglichen Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. I think of Thrasyboulos’ men in 403, making wooden and wickerwork shields in Peiraieus (Xen. The formation was organized from eight to ten rows deep and could cover a front of a quarter of a mile or more if sufficient hoplites were available. Extended Gradualists argue that hoplite warriors did not fight in a true phalanx until the 5th century BC. Often engagements between various city-states of Greece would be resolved by one side fleeing after their phalanx had broken formation. 1950. ", This page was last edited on 20 December 2020, at 10:54. Mitford clearly has literal pushing in mind, but it is unclear whether he imagines the Greeks in the rear ranks pushing their own men ahead of them. As the paean ended, they found themselves walking confidently forward, ready to fight. There the wails of despair and the cries of triumph rose up together of men killing and men killed, and the ground ran with blood. Gomme 1945–56: 1.10; Lorimer 1947: 128; Andrewes 1956: 31–42; Detienne 1968: 140; Cartledge 1977 and 2001: 153–66; Hanson 1999: 222–42; Schwartz 2009. Each man's shield protected the warrior to his left as well as himself - and he was protected a little by the shield of the man to his right. See Eliot and Eliot 1968: plate 102, 2. 1 Antiquity, 1975), where he conceded that Rüstow and Köchly lacked evidence (1975: 86). Such a small weapon would be particularly useful after many hoplites had started to abandon body armour during the Peloponnesian War. Because their density is so much lower than the density of oak or even pine, a shield made of willow or poplar will weigh roughly half as much as one made of oak and two-thirds to three-quarters as much as one made of pine. The formation proved successful in defeating the Persians when employed by the Athenians at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC during the First Greco-Persian War. [20] Making estimations of the speed of the transition reached as long as 300 years, from 750–450 BC. 31. For the shields of the hoplite phalanx to effectively interlock, each man can occupy a space no bigger than half of the diameter of the shield he is carrying.”35 Matthews imagines that Greek phalanxes sometimes lined up in pyknosisformation and sometimes in synaspismos formation, so that hoplite fighting was “much more varied and dynamic in its nature” than scholars have conceived. The Chigi olpe, for instance, was painted in Corinth about 640, from which Martin Nil-son concluded that “the Chigi vase gives the lower boundary; hoplite tactics were fully enacted in the second half of the seventh century” (1929: 240). The Hoplites were the ancient Greek infantry. Neither mentions pushing. [20] Chronologically dating the archeological findings of hoplite armour and using the findings to approximate the development of the phalanx formation, Snodgrass claims that the transition took approximately 100 years to complete from 750–650 BC. Hoplites in the rows behind the lead would almost certainly have made overarm thrusts. Only after the harvest had been brought in from the fields would the Greeks fight. The short sword was a secondary weapon, used if or when their spears were broken or lost, or if the phalanx broke rank. The shields used by the Greek army would allow them to provide cover for their fellow soldier, a… For the video, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjjU6tSUp34&feature=player_embedded. 1968. “Apollo in Ivy: The Tragic Paean.” Arion 3:112–35. 3. Kagan, Donald, and Gregory Viggiano. [26] Peter Krentz argues that "the ideology of hoplitic warfare as a ritualized contest developed not in the 7th century [BC], but only after 480, when non-hoplite arms began to be excluded from the phalanx". 8. In poplar or willow, these shields would weigh about a third less. The plural also occurs in Tyrtaios F 12 lines 21–22, where the good warrior “turns to flight the enemy’s rugged phalanges,” and Mimnermos F 13 line 3, where the warrior breaks “the massed phalanges of the Lydian horsemen.”. The Diadochi imported the Greek phalanx to their kingdoms. The hoplite was a specially trained Greek soldier around 650 B.C. The ancient Spartans did not, in fact, fight naked, nor did anyone else in classical Greece. In this section I draw heavily on my paper “Marathon and the Development of the Exclusive Hoplite Phalanx,” forthcoming in Carey and Edwards 2011. Rutherford, Ian. ———. Hanson writes forcefully and shows an excellent eye for vivid details. 7. Detienne, Marcel. Xenophon Anabasis 1.8.9; Arrian Anabasis 1.6.2. ———. Nor were these wars particularly ethical. So any discussion of how hoplites fought (or what one of my friends, after reading The Western Way of War, called “hoplite hell”) must now start with Hanson’s interpretation. 34. The police found them “suitable only for defensive fighting: policemen would typically form a line, advance to the combat zone and keep their position. How did hoplites fight? Pritchett cites two passages for the leaning of shields on shoulders. seems to use ὠθισμόfor fighting at the closest quarters (without special reference to its etymological sense).”54 As late as 1938, J. E. Powell’s Lexicon to Herodotus translated ōthismós as “hand-to-hand combat.”55, Nor were nineteenth-century military historians thinking of Greek battles as shoving contests. 1911. Woodhouse labeled this “notion … to put it bluntly, nothing but a fatuous delusion and stark nonsense,” and claimed to understand the real explanation: Hoplites advanced with their shields held straight across their chests, forcing them to slant to the right as they walked. He cited the Chigi olpe, which was then dated to the early sixth or even fifth century, as the earliest definite depiction of a hoplite phalanx. The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece, 2nd ed. At this point, the phalanx would put its collective weight to push back the enemy line and thus create fear and panic among its ranks. Snodgrass, Anthony M. 1964. ———. Munich, 3–41. Most shields, however, were not faced with bronze.9. Uarau: Verlags-comptoir. These existed at times in Athens, Argos, Thebes, and Syracuse, among others. 6. A history of Greece; from the earliest period to the close of the generation contemporary with Alexander the Great, 12 vols. The soldiers in the back provided motivation to the ranks in the front being that most hoplites were close community members. It was said that he “had an anchor as an emblem on his shield, which never ceased moving and was always in swift motion” (Herodotus 9.74.2). For all its prominence in modern discussions of Archaic battle—how many other Greek words made it into Donald Kagan’s opening remarks at the 2008 Yale conference?—the word ōthismós occurs rarely in the battle narratives of the classical historians: twice in Herodotus (7.225.1, the struggle over Leonidas’ body at Thermopylae, and 9.62.2, the end of the battle of Plataia), once in Thucydides (4.96, the battle of Delion), and never in Xenophon. 1991–2008. The principle was very much the same as that followed by the forwards in a scrummage at the Rugby game of football.58. Lane Fox, Robin. [9] In the modern Hellenic Army, the word hoplite (Greek: oπλίτης) is used to refer to an infantryman. Hoplite soldiers made up the bulk of ancient Greek armies. This is the first clear statement I have found of what became the dominant view: a conflict of hoplites was, in the main, a matter of brawn, of shock of the mass developed instantaneously as a steady thrust with the whole weight of the file behind it—a literal shoving of the enemy off the ground on which he stood.61. Did the back rows push the men in front? Wheeler, Everett. ———. But we have to guard against letting assumptions about how hoplites fought prejudge what equipment they used. The Great Battles of Antiquity: A Strategic and Tactical Guide to Great Battles that Shaped the Development of War. Battles were fought on level ground, and hoplites preferred to fight with high terrain on both sides of the phalanx so the formation could not be flanked. Other writers, starting with Johannes Kromayer, have argued that the porpax shield could have been used in a mixed fight.26 While it is true that this shield protects the left side better than the right (as any shield carried in the left hand does), a hoplite could get squarely behind the shield by turning sideways with his left foot forward. “Hoplite Weapons and Offensive Arms.” In Hanson 1991:15–37. Roman equipment also changed, and they reequipped their soldiers with longer oval shields (scutum), swords and heavy javelins (pilum). This idea strikes me as entirely unworkable. London. After th… Helbig, Wolfgang. They could separate quickly, as they demonstrate on the video, but such disparate threats would come so quickly that the shield wall would break apart almost immediately. 1976. In later periods, linothorax was also used, as it is tougher and cheaper to produce. Local levied troops or mercenaries serving under Pyrrhus of Epirus or Hannibal (namely Etruscans) were equipped and fought as hoplites. Instead of having individual heroes, hoplite warfare relied heavily on the community and unity of soldiers. Boardman 1983: 27–33; Franz 2002: 183–84; van Wees 2004: 50–52; Rawlings 2007: 57. 2007. The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. Many armies of mainland Greece retained hoplite warfare. Note, too, that the Lakedaimonians’ use of pipers was exceptional, was worthy of remark: Thucydides 5.70, Athenaios Deipnosophistai 14.624D; Pausanias 3.17.5; Polyainos Stratagems 1.10. And what happens next in Iliad 8? But the biggest difficulty is imagining a battle between one side with shields interlocked and the other with men spaced twice as far apart. ———. Many famous personalities, philosophers, artists, and poets fought as hoplites. I will begin with the weight of hoplite equipment and the nature of the Archaic phalanx, or rather, the Archaic phalanges or ranks. The word hoplite (Greek: ὁπλίτης hoplitēs; pl. a fair reading of the ancient accounts of hoplite battles suggests that in the case of the Greeks—and perhaps among the Greeks alone—the first charge of men usually smashed right into the enemy line: the key was to achieve an initial shock through collision which literally knocked the enemy back and allowed troops to pour in through the subsequent tears in the line…. [M]ost wars involved only an hour or more of pitched battle…. Most soldiers had careers as farmers or workers and returned to these professions after the campaign. Some hoplites served under the Illyrian king Bardylis in the 4th century. The Hoplite Association in London judges 14 lbs to be about the maximum manageable weight (http://www.4hoplites.com/Aspis.htm). 1839. In war the Greek generals would give their warriors the knowledge to fight in a fashion that would allow them to become a dominant force on the battlefield. “The Killing Zone.” In Hanson 1991:87–109. The problem is a practical one, a matter of what Delbrück would have called “die Realität der Dinge.” Since modern soldiers do not fight withporpax shields, we have to look at police (who are not using replicas of Greek porpax shields) and reenactors (who are not really trying to kill each other). More tentatively, he says that a man might have thrust his arm through his left-hand neighbor’s rope, then put his hand through his porpax, and finally grabbed both his loop and his right-hand neighbor’s rope, linking him both left and right. ———. W. J. Renfroe. On Plataia, Mitford says that “the Tegeans, according to Herodotus, made the first impression; the Lacedaemonians then pushed forward, and confusion soon became general among the Persian infantry” (1823: 2.111). Men scattered and bunched. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies. These rather soft woods tend to dent rather than split. The idea that Archaic Greeks fought fairly, following distinctive Greek laws of war, is a mirage based on later Greek claims about the good old days.2 But my job is to discuss the nature of hoplite fighting. In the first American edition of A Greek-English Lexicon (1848), Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott gave “a very hot, close fight” and “to come to close quarters.” In 1908, R. W. Macan wrote that “Hdt. It’s just that here Europe runs out of written history, and to trace the specific evolution of warfare further back we must move to Egypt and the Middle East, where written records go back another two thousand years or so. Sometimes ancient Greek shields had a thin layer of bronze over the wood. 2009. … 74. The Greek armies of the Hellenistic period mostly fielded troops in the fashion of the Macedonian phalanx. Classical Greek sources do use some of the terms that Asklepiodotos uses to describe file intervals, like density (pyknosis) and variants of 'shields together' (synaspismos), in special situations where hoplites would draw close together. Lorimer, H. L. 1947. “The Myth of the Hoplite’s Hoplon.” Classical Quarterly n.s. 2000. A battle between phalanxes in the same formation would have differed a lot from a fight between phalanxes in different formations. 33. The opposing sons of the Achaians, pricking him with swords and leaf-headed spears, pushed him away from them; he shivered as he retreated. The earliest use of the rugby analogy that I have found occurs in G. B. Grundy’s Thucydides and the History of his Age, originally published in 1911: Under ordinary circumstances the hoplite force advanced into battle in a compact mass…. Berlin: G. Stilke. The design of helmets used varied through time. The phalanx provided a wall of protection to the column of soldiers as they … Though they mostly fielded Greek citizens or mercenaries, they also armed and drilled local natives as hoplites or rather Macedonian phalanx, like the Machimoi of the Ptolemaic army. Marshall, S.L.A. J.-P. Vernant. [clarification needed]. 2000. John Hale may well be right: The first Greeks to use big, round shields might have been mercenaries employed in the east.73 When they brought their shields home, they used them in the early phalanges, fighting beside or behind aristocrats armed with the best defensive armor available and using lighter shields. Basic Books. The exception appears in Homer, Iliad 6.6; Homer uses the plural about twenty times. London: Routledge. 1998. Too soon, and the men might lose their edge before they reached the enemy; too late, and faint-hearts might have dropped out before the unifying and invigorating chant began. “Orthodoxy and Hoplites.” Classical Quarterly n.s. Delbrück 1975: 58, a translation of the third German edition of 1920. clashed against each other, and the sound grew huge of the fighting. The actual battle environment for men who served in the phalanx was nearly identical wherever and whenever they fought…. “Eine frühgriechische Kampfform.” Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts 53:90–113. Delbrück, for instance, wrote that, In such a phalanx two ranks at most can participate in the actual combat, with the second rank stepping into the holes of the first at the moment of contact. Van Wees depicts iconography found on pots of the Dark Ages believing that the foundation of the phalanx formation was birthed during this time. The Greeks break their formation somewhat as they run toward the stationary Trojans, deployed in a tight formation outside their city wall. First in Die Perserkriege und die Burgunderkriege (1887) and later in his multivolume Geschichte der Kriegskunst im Rahmen der politischen Geschichte (3rd ed. They developed when Greeks adopted the Celtic Thureos shield, of an oval shape that was similar to the shields of the Romans, but flatter. As hoplites charged, yelling a war-cry such as eleleu! There could be multiple such instances of attempts to push, but it seems from the accounts of the ancients that these were perfectly orchestrated and attempted organized en masse. Paeans before battle are best understood as a subset of paeans in general, which Ian Rutherford has elucidated as song-dances performed by men to honor the god and to demonstrate a sense of community among men.39 Soldiers performed the paean before they began their final advance into battle, as aorist participles often suggest.40 The commander had to choose the right moment to begin the paean. New York: Doubleday. How did the battle begin? Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian. 37. New York: Cornell University Press. A realistic estimate is that a hoplite equipped with a helmet, cuirass, shin guards, shield, spear, and sword carried a total weight of 18–22 kg in the seventh century. Perhaps the only sentence here that I would not quarrel with makes the point that we have very limited literary evidence for Archaic warfare. Instead there was increased reliance on navies, skirmishers, mercenaries, city walls, siege engines, and non-set piece tactics. Washington, D.C.: Combat Forces Press. The upward thrust is more easily deflected by armour due to its lesser leverage. The typical engagement, prior to the hoplites, involved a less organized charge toward the enemy that usually ended in a fragmented battle. “The Nature of Hoplite Battle.” Classical Antiquity 4: 50–61, trans. Fought between leagues of cities, dominated by Athens and Sparta respectively the...: 175–76, 1984 ; Cart-ledge 1977: 15–16 twice as far I! 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Gates of Fire: an Epic Novel of the seventh century bronze age all our Ancient,! Less armour, carrying shorter swords, and had ability to fight another Greek army Pritchett. Discipline and were taught to be decisive lengthy of the Archaic to the enemy hoplite battles not! 2Nd ed another Greek army ( ὅπλον, plural hopla ὅπλα ), referring the. 4–5 kg 3:2, Greeks did not carry long-range weapons including javelins find function! Battle of Thermopylae battle between phalanxes in the end only the triarii would keep a long spear ( )... This increase the likelihood of shock and wickerwork shields in Peiraieus ( Xen 17 ] so might. The cord whenever they fought… mass shoving, so do they they come missile. Being that most hoplites were expected to take part in the 8th century.... Due to its use for other pieces of evidence, he builds a thick description of hoplite... Keyne Cheshire for suggesting that stomping feet and other movements would fit a prebattle context nicely seems impractical an! 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