Collections: Hoplite Wars, Part I: The Othismos over Othismos

Collections 41 Minutes

This week (and next) we’re looking at hoplites, the heavy infantry of the ancient Greek poleis in the (early? mid? late?) Archaic and Classical periods, into the Hellenistic. In particular, I want to outline the major debate, which I have alluded to quite a few times here, that swirls around hoplite warfare and the phalanx. While this is often represented as simply a debate on tactics – the othismos over othismos – as we’re going to see the debate has implications that stretch well beyond battle tactics into questions of the political and social structure of the polis and the place of hoplites in it. Indeed the implications for the nature and development of the polis are almost certainly more important than the implications for hoplite tactics.

I had wanted to roll this out in a single post covering the two ‘schools’ of thought (generally known as ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’) on hoplites, offer a historiography (an account of the debate) and then give my own view on the question, but that has proven rather long and unwieldy, so I’ve opted to break this up. In this part, we’ll lay out the groundwork of how the debate has developed and where it currently stands and then next week we’ll look at the broader implications – which are in many cases, as interesting if not more interesting than the narrow tactical or chronological questions – and my own view of what a profitable synthesis might look like.

Via Wikipedia, a black figure krater from c. 530 showing two hoplites attempting to murder each other in combat, which is also a reasonable summary of what hoplite studies have looked like since the 1990s.

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What is a Hoplite?

Before we dive in, we need to clarify some terms and outline periodization or nothing that follows is going to make very much sense.

First we can begin with the very basic question of what is a hoplite?

The term ‘hoplite’ (Greek hoplites (ὁπλίτης), plural hoplitai (ὁπλῖται)) means ‘equipped [man]’ or ‘armored [man],’ from hoplon (ὅπλον), “equipment, tool, weapon.” You will still sometimes hear that hoplon was the name for the hoplite’s shield, but this is not quite right: the shield was an aspis, whereas hopla (the plural of hoplon) is used to describe a hoplite’s full kit. Diodorus offers the etymology of hoplite, “these were earlier called hoplites from the aspides, and then took a new name, peltasts from the pelte [a lighter shield]” which at no point insists that the aspis was called a hoplon (Diod. Sic. 15.44.3).2 So while many Greek troops are named for their shields – chalkaspides, argyraspides, peltastai, thureophoroi, etc. (notice all of those –aspides!) – especially in the Hellenistic period when Diodorus is writing (which may be why he makes this guess), hoplites were not one of them: they were not named for their shields but for their whole panoply.

Via Livius.org, an (early) fifth century hoplite on what looks to me to be a kylix (though I can’t see the typical handles? I confess, I am not a pottery-person). You can see the porpax-antelabe double-strap system on the back of the aspis very clearly here. The hoplite’s panoply consists of his spear, the aspis, a Corinthian helmet (to the left), greaves (on his legs) and a tube-and-yoke cuirass, which was a cheaper (usually textile, possibly sometimes leather) alternative to a bronze cuirass.

We might thus define a hoplite as a “fully equipped man,” where the equipment in question was generally at a minimum the aspis (a large round double-strap grip shield), a doru (a fairly standard one-handed thrusting spear whose only unusual characteristic is that its spear-butt is unusually developed) and a metal helmet; one certainly gets the sense from the sources that some sort of body armor was also an expectation here (e.g. Hdt. 9.63.2, but it is not clear how often that was realized in practice (frequently, it must be said – but perhaps not always). These men also generally carried swords as backup weapons.

By the time we can see them clearly (in the 400s) these fellows generally fight in a formation the Greeks call a phalanx (φάλαγξ), but we need to issue an immediate caution that φάλαγξ is not a technical term in Greek but rather the equivalent to Latin’s acies in that it just means “battle line.” Consequently Greek authors can and will use it to refer to any clear battle line and it gets used of hoplites, but also pike-wielding sarissa infantry and also Roman legions and also barbarians and also chariots and also elephants at points. The word is actually even more general than this and seems to have at its core the idea of a beam or trunk – it can mean the main mass of something (as opposed to its edges), like the trunk of a tree or a beam of wood, it can mean the finger-bone but also is used for rows of eyelashes. And you can kind of get how, metaphorically, you get from finger-bones in a row or eyelashes in a row or beams or planks (in a row at regular distances) or even just the central mass of a tree to either men lined up neatly or the central mass of an army.3

We’re going to get into the particulars of exactly how we might imagine hoplites fought and how exactly a phalanx of them (keeping in mind you can have a phalanx of other things) might fight as we go along. But those are our key terms: a hoplite is a soldier with a specific ‘full’ or ‘heavy’ equipment set (aspis, spear, sword, helmet, cuirass) and hoplites sometimes fight in a close-order shield-wall infantry formation called a phalanx. I don’t want to go much further than this because what we’re going to see in part two is that some of the fights about hoplites and especially about the phalanx are definitional and I don’t want to load those dice here before we’ve even introduced the debate – better to come at it with relatively few assumptions.

On to periodization. We generally break down this period of Greek antiquity into the following periods:

  • The Greek ‘Dark Ages‘ (c. 1100-c. 800) during which we have no written evidence (the writing of the earlier Bronze Age having been lost and the ancient Greek script we know not having been invented) and thus it is very hard for us to talk with much confidence about how warfare worked (except that it wasn’t phalanxes).
  • The Greek Archaic Period (c. 800-480). Writing returns at the beginning of this, but the Greeks won’t start writing their own history until the Classical period, so our sources mostly view the Archaic as the distant past. This is the period where the polis and hoplites are emerging, though as we’ll see the ‘when’ and ‘how’ of that are core to the debate.
  • The Greek Classical Period (480-323). This is the period where the independent Greek poleis are at their height and where ‘hoplite warfare’ is the predominant (but not only) method of warfare. It is also much better documented than the others. It ends with Greek independence being shattered and hoplite armies largely replaced by Macedonian armies (which operate under a different, but related, system of close-order heavy infantry).
  • The Hellenistic Period (323-31). There are still some hoplite-armed troops around in this period, but they are increasingly less relevant compared to Hellenistic armies, which we’ve already discussed at length. This period ends when the Romans steamroll everyone and set up a Mediterranean-wide empire.

Obviously we’ll be mostly focused on the Archaic and the Classical, the dividing line between which are the Persian Wars (492-490, 480-479) which are also some of the first relatively clear descriptions of Greek warfare in a high degree of detail and which are generally (some hoplite-heterodox scholars contest this) taken to be our earliest solid descriptions of hoplite warfare. But there’s a challenge here because our main source for the Persian Wars (Herodotus) is writing not in 479 but in the 430s. Meanwhile our understanding of the mechanics of hoplite warfare emerges out of Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War (431-404; he’s probably writing c. 400) well into the Classical period. So the sources where hoplite warfare becomes explicit (we’ll talk poetry a bit later) are writing about 480 in 430 or about 430 in 400, but a lot of our questions about hoplites relate to how they fought in the Archaic (800-480).

That means – and this is quite important for what follows – hoplite arms and armor emerge in our archaeological record during the Archaic well before we have literary sources offering solid, detailed descriptions of how men using that equipment fought. Much of the hoplite debate thus lives in the Archaic when our evidence is quite thin and often frustratingly ambiguous.

With that out the way, we can get to the debate.

Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy

Fundamentally the debate about hoplites function as a debate between two ‘schools’ of thought, generally termed the ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ schools on hoplites. Hoplite ‘orthodoxy’ is associated most of all with Victor Davis Hansen, but has other defenders (e.g. Adam Schwartz, Gregory Viggiano), while the ‘heterodox’ school is most associated with Hans van Wees and Peter Krentz, but includes many other current scholars (Fernando Echeverria, Roel Konijnendijk, etc.). But I often think the way we talk about this debate is really hard for non-specialists to get a handle on and it often remains at this level of ‘these folks and those folks.’

But here we want to explain what is actually being disputed, which can be quite hard to get clearly answered in a lot of the flurry of writing on this topic because since the mid-2000s at least, everyone either mostly assumes their (scholarly) readers know the grounds of dispute or that their (public, popular) readers do not need to know and need only be told ‘how it is’ (according to them). Consequently, a lot of modern works present a historiography of the debate (which we’ll do in a simple form in a moment) without actually running down the exact positions of the two camps, which can make it hard for a new reader to get a sense of what we’re even arguing about.

Both the ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’ schools on hoplites consist of a series of connected answers to key questions about hoplites: questions about hoplite equipment, tactics, organization, place in society and both when and how hoplite warfare (as we see it, particularly in Thucydides) developed. These answers are connected, by which I mean that if you answer a given way for, say, questions, A, B, and C, it starts to logically ‘lock in’ answers to later questions. But I would suggest that in fact some of these propositions are only weakly connected – they might suggest paired answers but do not require them and the evidence might well suggest (indeed, I’d argue it does) that on some points, we ought to be ‘mixing and matching’ or ‘splitting the difference’ Indeed, this is, in my view, some of the most fertile ground for productive synthesis: these ‘schools’ do not need to remain ‘pure.’

I think the best way to tackle that complexity is to first, outline in brief the opposing schools of thought, then give a brief historiography (the ‘history of the history’) of how these schools came to be, then take their key contentions apart and see if we can assemble something of that synthesis.

So for our brief outline:

We can state the orthodox position on hoplites, in its simple form with the following propositions:

  • The hoplite phalanx emerged early, in the eighth century, at the same time as we see the earliest evidence for the heavy armor that will typify the most wealthy hoplites.
  • It rapidly reached a ‘pure’ form, with light troops excluded from the phalanx and combat proceeding as close infantry shock actions (discussed below), such that this form dominated Greek warfare through the Archaic period (c. 750-490BC) and was thus deeply entrenched by the Persian Wars (492-479).
  • We can know this in part because hoplite equipment is largely too cumbersome and awkward to be effectively used for other forms of fighting, and thus in particular the strap-gripped dished round shield (the aspis) can only be effectively used for this kind of fighting.
  • Hoplites were drawn from a broad ‘yeoman farmer’ middle-class (like Rome’s heavy infantry in the Middle Republic) and thus the bulk of citizens were required to serve as hoplites.
    • (There’s a corollary here that I’ve noted before: that the population of Greek poleis may thus be estimated from the number of hoplites they field.)
  • In battle these hoplites fought in an othismos (ὠθισμός, ‘pushing’ ‘jostling’ – we might translate to the English ‘press’4 – this is an important word, so mark it), which they understand to be pushing match, where men in the rear ranks use their shields to push the front ranks forward and the two formations shove against each other, with spears and swords confined to auxiliary use in something a lot like a rugby scrum.
  • This odd form of combat is in a sense, fundamentally ritual, intended or at least developed out of a need to limit the duration of wars to sharp bursts of violence that fit within the agricultural calendar.
    • In this vision wars are decided by pitched battle (raiding, sieges and such are lesser, secondary or absent), with armies lining up on open plains for a ‘fair fight’ with limited or no effort at ambush, pursuit or trickery, at least until the Peloponnesian War (431-404) if not until the Anabasis of the Ten Thousand (401-399).
    • Thus there is an expectation that victory in a pitched battle entitled the winner to dictate a limited peace to the loser, but that ‘absolute’ war goals were avoided and instead communities might expect to replay the same basic battle multiple times over decades while never seeking to entirely destroy each other.
    • Victor Davis Hanson, of course, has an entire second theory about how this is the foundation of a ‘western way of war’ which is quite poorly constructed, which we won’t cover here.
  • That limited, ritualistic style of warfare persisted through the Archaic, but breaks down during the Peloponnesian War (431-404), where we start to see longer wars, more sieges, more mercenaries, more light troops and so on. Thus there is a long, rural ideal form of warfare (the Archaic hoplite phalanx) which is ruptured by the the emergence of more complex, urban polis societies with their greater economic complexity and ability to escalate to more extreme forms of warfare. A sort of ‘fall of man’ but it is the ‘fall of hoplites’ – complete with an Edenic distant past and a worse present.

As you might imagine, the heretodox school rejects, or at least substantially revises basically all of these points: In the heterodox school:

  • While we start to see hoplite equipment in the eighth century, the hoplite phalanx – the tactical formation which excludes light infantry and cavalry – emerges very late, perhaps as late as the 550s or even the 490s or even – in some extreme arguments – only in the mid-400s.
  • There is thus no long period of ‘ideal’ Archaic hoplite warfare, where the system functioned in an ideal form over many generations, but instead hoplite warfare emerges ‘fully formed’ perhaps only moments before we see it in our texts; it is thus ‘new’ in 490 (or perhaps 431!).
  • This is in part because hoplite equipment emerged gradually and piecemeal over a long period, with the fully panoply only present around c. 650 and hoplite equipment could be and was used for kinds of warfare other than the hoplite phalanx.
    • Let me pause for a moment to note that in both of these arguments the definition of ‘hoplite phalanx’ is very rigid: a fixed formation composed entirely of hoplites with no light troops intermingled, in close-order with fixed positions for the men. You may note this is a much more rigid definition than just a shield wall and indeed far more rigid than how the Greeks use the word phalanx (φάλαγξ), which they can use to describe almost any close-order heavy infantry formation using shields.
  • The hoplite class was much smaller than the orthodox suppose, consisting in the main of ‘rich peasants’ and rentier-elites, rather than ‘yeoman farmers,’ and as such made up a much smaller proportion of the citizen population, perhaps around a quarter or a third of all adult citizen males in the Classical period, rather than nearly all (and even fewer in the Archaic period).
    • Here is some ‘linkage:’ the orthodox position often sees hoplites arising earlier at the same time as the first wave of tyrants in Greece, seen as the product of revolt by the demos (‘the people’) against narrow oligarchies, whereas the heterodox points out the chronology does not work and also hoplites were themselves oligarchic in nature, drawn from well-off farmers, not typical ones.
  • The pressing of the othismos was metaphorical: hoplites did not smash together nor did they shove on each other in a rugby scrum, but rather fought at spear’s reach (eis doru), in a series of one-on-one fights, with combatants moving forward to strike or backwards to avoid being struck in a somewhat more fluid (but still organized and fairly rigid) formation. The ‘pressure’ was thus morale pressure, not physical pressure.
    • The heterodox phalanx is thus a looser formation, which is not built for ‘shoving‘ and is meaningfully more flexible on the battlefield.
  • Because of the development timeline there was no long period of ‘ritual limited warfare,’ but rather a set of assumptions about ‘proper war’ honored mostly in the breach. Raiding, sieges, pursuit never went away and the troops to perform them – cavalry, light infantry – remained important in Greek polis armies throughout.
    • Consequently, whereas the orthodox view regards wars as fundamentally limited with a tacit agreement that the winner of a pitched battle will be able to dictate a limited peace, the heterodox school sees hoplite warfare as much less limited, especially in the Archaic, with more absolute war goals and a wider set of theories of victory to achieve them.
  • Consequently, Thucydides and Xenophon are not so much representing the sudden rupture of an ancient set of military assumptions, but rather perhaps simply the high-water-mark of hoplite dominance and the consequent complaints as the waters recede.

As you can see, both schools weld together chronological assumptions (‘when did the phalanx emerge, how completely and how long did it remain in a position of unique dominance?’), social assumptions (‘who was a hoplite, how rich were they, what were their political roles and political tendencies?’) tactical assumptions (‘how did the phalanx function, how was it shaped by its equipment, what were the role of non-hoplites?’) and strategic assumptions (‘what was the purpose of war among poleis, what did they fight over and what was their overall theory of victory?’).

So if those are the positions, how did we get here and why does the debate seem ‘stalled out?’

Via Wikipedia, the Chigi Vase (c. 650) which is one of the most relentlessly disputed objects in all of this. On the one hand it appears to show two rows of hoplites engaging in a shock action. On the other hand, the figures on the vase appear to carry two spears (one for stabbing, one for throwing), implying that this was not yet a pure ‘shock’ formation. Moreover it is unclear from the artwork that this formation has depth – that is, multiple ranks formed together. Since depth is a key component of distinguishing between a shield-wall shock formation (like the phalanx) and simply a skirmish line with shields, the question of “when did these formations acquire depth” is crucial.
If you interpret that second rank (far left) as being directly behind the first rank (the artist just spacing them out for composition and to show the musician) then you have a strong argument this depicts something very much like a phalanx in 650 (well before the ultra-gradualist Hans van Wees would have it). On the flipside, you don’t have to interpret it that way and if you instead imagine this as a skirmish line with a large interval before a second skirmish line, than this is not a phalanx and you instead have evidence of hoplites fighting in a more fluid way, which would support van Wees’ arguments.
This is a core part of this dispute: nearly every piece of Archaic-period evidence is to some degree ambiguous and can be interpreted to support either camp.

Greeks, Germans and an Englishman

This summary I am going to present, I should note, is not by any means original to me but instead draws heavily on the historiographies presented by Roel Konijnendijk (a major hoplite-heterodox scholar) at the opening of his Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History (2018) alongside Donald Kagan and Gregory Viggiano’s (who sit on the hoplite-orthodox side) “The Hoplite Debate” chapter in their Men of Bronze (2013).5 This is a much simplified summary, but hopefully useful to see how we got here proceeding in five (perhaps six) phases. This is a historiography; Historiography is the ‘history of the history’ as it were, the history of a historical debate and so the topic of interest if we want to understand why these two schools formed the way they did.

The first phase, ably detailed by Konijnendijk is the phase we might call Prussian Foundations: a number of significant German-language scholars laid out the groundwork on the hoplite phalanx from the mid-to-late 1800s to the first decade of the 1900s, beginning with the work of Wilhelm Rüstow and Hermann Köchly and culminating in the work of Hans Delbrück.6 As Konijnendijk notes, these were nearly all military men and that influence permeates their vision of Greek warfare.In particular, they operated from an assumption, perhaps only tenable before the First World War, that the principles of war hadn’t really changed since antiquity and so the basic maxims, organizations and patterns of thinking they used would be readily applicable to polis armies composed primarily of hoplites. This is one of the frequent flaws of pre-1940-or-so scholarship: a failure to recognize the gulf of experience between the past and the present, in part because the gulf wasn’t quite so wide yet so military aristocrats of the 1890s or 1900s could imagine they were no so different from military aristocrats of the 490s or 390s (when in fact they were).

In short these late-18th, early-19th century German thinkers operated by analogy from the warfare they knew in their own past and a result developed a model of hoplite warfare predicted on the patterns of early gunpowder warfare.

The model they had, of course, was late-early-modern gunpowder warfare: rigid, performed in tight ranks with lots of control by command, where the actions of elite light forces and cavalry – high status units – would be rigorously recorded. That model was breaking down in their own day but still informed their sense of what warfare in the past might be like. And their model of hoplite warfare follows on this: tactically rigid, conducted with very tight ranks in pitched battles. Light infantry and cavalry, if not mentioned, must be unmentioned because they were absent, not because they might be politically or socially marginal.

And indeed, we too often jump to imagining close-order heavy infantry as literally ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ in this way, even though that was not how early modern pike squares or medieval shield walls or Roman legions or even hoplites fought. But it was how infantry was taught to fight (even if they didn’t always fight that way) with muskets during the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. And one feels in the Prussians some of that same assumption of tight, almost suffocating rigidity seeping in: they assume a standard depth, highly standard equipment, standard units (which they happily call ‘battalions’ and such) and they assume formation drill, because it was utterly standard in their warfare – even when it appears to be entirely absent from their subjects and when a more comparative frame would have told them such drilling was also absent from many other military traditions.

Note that what these historians are producing is a model, a sort of blended, formalized picture of an ideal hoplite battle in the sources – for these scholars had an incredible grasp of the source material – which risks then becoming the straight-jacket into which the sources are then fed. That rigid vision in turn forms the foundation for hoplite orthodoxy.

The next phase is the step into the Anglophone scholarship, which is where the debate will live for the next century; we might term this phase one of English Orthodoxy. The key initial figure here is G.B. Grundy, writing in the 1910s. Grundy takes the phalanx of the German scholarship and if anything interprets it even more rigidly, taking a general mental model and turning it into a ritualistic practice of war, arguing this was grounded in agricultural practice and the need to keep warfare limited for that purpose.7 He is also responsible for developing the ‘rugby scrum’ vision of what two phalanxes coming together might look like.

Grundy is also in no small part responsible both for the ‘fall of Man’ vision of hoplite change and for the orthodox interpretation of the othismos as well as developing a social vision for the place of the hoplite. As Konijnendijk notes – and indeed as Victor Davis Hansen has noted8 – Grundy doesn’t appear in citations nearly as much as his influence would imply; one is left to assume it is in part because he was a giant racist and no one is quite comfortable admitting that they are still using the historical model he constructed for his racism as the foundation for their assumptions. In particular, Grundy believed that the Greeks were racially predisposed to hoplite warfare and thus that the decline of its rigid customs was ‘racial decay,’ thus introducing this strain of the decline of hoplite warfare as a kind of ‘fall of man’ analogy.9

This phase then continues past the 1910s as scholars work out – or at least codify, as many of these conclusions had already occurred in some form among those first German scholars – implications about the connection between hoplites and the emergence of the polis, its structure, the rise of tyranny and such, as well as the supposed close connection between hoplite warfare and hoplite equipment (supposed at this point to have emerged at the same time and relatively quickly together).10

My own speculative spacing of the hoplite phalanx. Generally speaking, ‘hoplite orthodoxy’ scholars contend the normal formation is very tight, close to Asclepiodotus’ synaspismos shown at the bottom. As you can see, the spacing is almost workable in terms of fitting the bodies in, but leaves almost no room to fight (but if you think it is a rugby scrum, why not?).
On the other hand, hoplite-heterodox scholars tend to argue for a looser order of perhaps 90cm or more (‘compact’ or open order above). For my part, I suspect all of these spacing systems were used, but that the 90cm spacing was probably standard, however one should not assume too much systemization out of this because – as P. Connolly notes (“Experiments with the Sarisa” JRMES 11 (2000)) these are just multiples of arm-length units, not rigid spacing measured by rulers. That said I think the fact that the aspis just barely fits at 45cm (one forearm=very roughly one cubit) and creates a continuous protection at 90cm (one full arm = ~ two cubits) is not an accident: the shield is well-suited for these intervals (almost like it was designed for them).

The othismos over othismos

The next phase we might call the Cracks in the Armor of hoplite orthodoxy because the response to this really begins with Anthony Snodgrass’ work on Greek arms and armor (notably Arms and Armor of the Greeks (1967)), though he was not wholly alone. By the 1950s, the archaeological and representational evidence for the development of Greek arms and armor in the Archaic period had gotten a fair bit better and Snodgrass is the first fellow to pull it all together in a book that is still a valuable reference text for discussing arms and armor. Snodgrass’ greater amount of material (and his frankly far greater mastery of the material) allowed him to demonstrate among other things that hoplite equipment did not appear all at once in the 700s, but rather emerged gradually and piecemeal, with the fully panoply not available until the 650s and even then incompletely adopted. There must then have been lone warriors using this equipment outside of the phalanx before a full formation was developed to accommodate it and so it must be able to be used outside of the rigid phalanx. That observation alone shakes many of the evidentiary pillars of orthodoxy mightily in terms of both chronology and tactics. It also shakes the political and social assumptions, because if hoplite equipment was introduced slowly and in piecemeal fashion, then the traditional aristocrats – the only fellows who could afford it – could have remained an elite warrior class and so the connection between hoplites and the emergence of a broad yeoman political class was weakened.

That movement then set the stage for the Restatement of the Orthodoxy, led by Victor Davis Hansen and his Western Way of War (1989, henceforth WWoW). This book has become so influential that students – and even scholars – often go no further back than it and so one often gets the impression that WWoW was a remarkably original or groundbreaking statement on hoplites, which to a considerable degree it isn’t. What WWoW does is take the method of probing battlefield experience advanced by John Keegan in The Face of Battle (1976) and apply it to a quite doctrinaire hoplite-orthodoxy model. Indeed, VDH notes (xvii) that he is doing this in part to refute the “idea of widespread fluidity in the phalanx,” which is to say Snodgrass and co., though he does not name them.11 In particular, VDH reiterates – without much in the way of new evidence – that hoplite equipment was simply too cumbersome to use in other ways, thus trying to restore the connective tissue between hoplite equipment showing up in the archaeological evidence and the emergence of the phalanx as a fighting formation. In the first edition of WWoW, he essentially called for a new archaeological study to supply that evidence and Eero Jarva answered with Archaiologia on Archaic Greek Body Armour (1995), a book that assembles a lot of useful evidence only to – straight-jacketed by WWoW assumptions – sometimes interpret it quite strangely.12

Post-Publication Edit: I wanted to actually add one more note here. Above, I mention in passing that WWoW is indebted in its approach to John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (1976); indeed it is effectively the application of the Face of Battle approach to hoplites, complete with a chapter-length digression on the role of alcohol which makes sense in The Face of Battle but is entirely out of place in WWoW. And this, at least, other hoplite scholars have generally observed, but the next step is tricky: Keegan’s work is in turn heavily indebted to Ardant du Picq’s work, Études sur le combat (‘Battle Studies’ in English; 1870). Keegan does not entirely hide this – Ardant du Picq is in his bibliography and gets three pages of discussion in his historiography – but unless one has engaged with Battle Studies, the extent of Keegan’s debt to Ardant du Picq is not immediately obvious.

Among military historians this is not an enormous issue, since ‘John Keegan’s work is Ardant du Picq warmed over and applied in three case studies’ is a broadly known fact, right up next to ‘S.L.A. Marshall‘s work is shoddy where it isn’t outright fabrication, but he happens to be right.’ But nearly no hoplite scholars are trained as military historians and so while Keegan’s influence on VDH and WWoW is sometimes noted, Ardant du Picq’s influence on Keegan, so far as I can tell, never is13 including by Victor Davis Hanson who does not appear himself to be aware of the theorist on whom his approach relies.14 Consequently, while we’ve been going on about ‘Prussians’ this whole time, there is a contemporary and very significant Frenchman providing some key foundation work that almost no one in this debate15 seems to be aware of. This is a yet greater problem because some of the insights in Battle Studies would be – as we’ll see in later parts of this series – quite useful to apply to these very debates!

In any case hoplite scholars all need to go read Battle Studies if they have not and start including it in their historiographies and thinking.

To the degree that WWoW is making a new argument, it is an argument not about tactics or the emergence of the phalanx but about agriculture. Whereas previous scholars had argued that what would cause a defender to be willing to meet an attacker in a devastating clash of phalanxes was the threat of agricultural devastation, VDH argues that this threat was very limited: it simply wasn’t possible for these armies to do much devastating. Consequently, hoplites marshaled out not so much to protect fields as for civic pride and ideals, to oppose the insulting notion that an enemy might march uncontested through their lands. For what it is worth, I find Hanson’s view of the impact of agricultural disruption, focused on the impact of burned crops or cut down trees, a bit too capital focused – the viewpoint of a farmer who might always have had recourse to a grocery store and a checking account should a harvest fail. But as we’ve seen, that is not how ancient farmers lived so an army need not destroy farmland to pose a threat, they merely needed to disrupt agricultural activities (and forage off of the locals doing it) to pose a significant economic threat.

Equally important for VDH’s own model of thinking here (and his subsequent politics) is his stress on something we might call (he does not) the “yeoman hoplite.” What I mean by that is an assumption that the great strength of numbers of a hoplite army is drawn from a broad freeholding farmer class, composed mostly of men who work on their own quite small farms with fairly limited means. These households, it is assumed, would have made up most of the population (we’ll come back to the implications of this assumption) and so apart from large cities that had an urban poor class (like Athens) or under-developed hinterlands (like Achaea or Aitolia), the hoplites would represent not an elite or a gentry but a sort of ‘middle class’ in the American sense – the big bulk of households with property. This is not an immediately insane assumption – this does seem to be how the Roman army of the Middle Republic was structured – but it is a big assumption which we’ll see challenged in a minute. That said it fits broadly with VDH’s view that the ideal society is something like an ethnically homogeneous agrarian state of citizen-farmer-soldiers (which then shows up in his politics, which we will not deal with here or in the comments).

That said a lot of the influence of WWoW lies in how vividly it evokes the orthodox vision of the experience of hoplite battle and in particular the physical pressing ‘rugby scrum’ that it imagined for the concept of othismos referenced by ancient scholars. One frankly wonders if the nature of othismos would have such a central place in the hoplite debates that followed if it wasn’t such a central, evocative park of VDH’s book, even though as you can see above it is really at best quite a peripheral part of the concept of hoplites.

What then follows, of course , is the grand reaction to hoplite orthodoxy, a sort of Hoplite Reformation working in the groundwork laid in part by Snodgrass (both in his evidence but also his approach – these scholars are using more archaeological and especially representational evidence). Like the 16th century Reformation, the scope of this response to hoplite orthodoxy widened rapidly: what had been largely a chronological dispute between the immediate adoption of the orthodox and the ‘gradualist’ arguments of Snodgrass and others (some of our heterodox folks will end up even more gradualist than he), rapidly expanded into the parallel vision above, with different assumptions on tactics and also critically social role and status.

This substantial expansion of the argument begins with key articles by George Cawkwell (“Orthodoxy and Hoplites” Classical Quarterly 39.2 (1989)) and Peter Krentz (“The Nature of Hoplite Battle” Classical Antiquity 4.1 (1985)), both of which called into question the basic tactical assumptions around the othismos. These arguments get quite technical, but the main thrust, especially for Krentz, was that the evidence, which had always been interpreted within the pre-existing model (what Konijnendijk would call the ‘Prussian’ model) was, in fact, ambiguous. Was there artwork that showed hoplites packed tightly together? Sure, but also artwork that didn’t and both are hard to interpret. Did Thucydides describe a ‘shields-together’ (synaspismos) formation – sure, but there’s no reason to suppose Thucydides’ fifth-century synaspismos worked the same way as Polybius’ second century or Asclepiodotus’ first century understanding of term. Othismos can mean a physical pushing, but it can also be metaphorical, and so on.

In short, Krentz was showing that the orthodox tactical vision was not required by the sources.

However as noted above, hoplite orthodoxy was a complete mental model for hoplite warfare, composed of a bunch of interlocking assumptions, chronological, tactical and social. Thus what the assault on hoplite orthodoxy required as a complete competing model which was in turn supplied by Hans van Wees’ Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities (2004), which is at this point the ur-text for hoplite heterodoxy. Notably, where WWoW is a Face of Battle-style experiential book, Myths and Realities is developmental in its focus, because where VDH is proposing an almost eternal, ideal form of hoplite battle, van Wees is suggesting significant development, with the classic form emerging only in the 500s if even then (thus taking an even more gradualist view than Snodgrass).

Van Wees incorporates and expands on Krentz’ vision of a hoplite battle as a “multiplicity of individual combats,” rather than organized shoving: hoplites broke into a run at perhaps 200m but then slowed and did not crash into each other at all. Instead they stopped eis doru (‘at spear’s reach,’ a phrase from Xenophon) pulsing forward and back to stab at enemies or evade blows. Eventually morale pressure – not physical pressure – is what destroys the phalanx’s cohesion and it is these forward ‘pushes’ (into the ‘no man’s land’ of a spear-thrust’s length between the lines) that are the othismoi, ‘presses, pushes’ of our sources.16

That style of combat could, in turn, emerge much more gradually. Van Wees argues that we can see the origins of the phalanx as early as Homer (writing c. 750), but in a form so hybridized as to not even remotely resemble the orthodox model. Instead, he argues that cavalry and light infantry – archers, javelin men, etc. – were not excluded from the phalanx to make a single body of close-order heavy infantry until very late (he argues this mostly using Archaic artwork showing hoplites alongside archers and such). Instead this Archaic combat involves sometimes lines and masses of men, but frequently in more fluid combat; van Wees tries to generalize from patterns of warfare recorded in the historical period from highland Papua New Guinea.17 Cheaper, more lightly armored infantry thus persist quite a lot longer in van Wees’ model, through essentially the whole of the Archaic which, if you are watching closely, obliterates almost entirely the long period of ‘pure’ Archaic hoplite warfare that the orthodox model assumes both in its assumptions about the economic and social role of hoplites and also the ‘fall of Man’ vision of tactical change in the 400s. Instead, the ‘oops, all heavy infantry’ hoplite army, if it ever existed (more on that in a moment) in van Wees’ model is a relatively brief apparition of the 500s which is largely gone by the end of the 400s. The Peloponnesian War is thus not the end of a long tradition of ‘pure’ hoplite battle, but rather just one more episode in the continuous change and evolution of Greek warfare that began at least as early as the mid-8th century.

Van Wees also revisits the social standing of the men that make up hoplites and attacks the ‘yeoman farmer’ vision of VDH. Instead, van Wees crunches the numbers on the wealth requirements for hoplites and notes that while poorer men might serve, it sure seems like the typical man of the hoplite class (those with the wealth to be required to serve) was actually quite wealthy, with farms probably 20+ acres in size, far from the tiny 3-7 acre farms a typical peasant might have; these households will have almost certainly included a fair bit of enslaved labor and many of them may have had enough land not to work much of it personally (making some of these fellows more gentry than peasant). More ‘working class’ hoplites must often have served (especially in the Classical period), but van Wees supposes their farms to have been typically 10-15 acres or more, which is still quite big compared to typical peasant farms, putting these ‘working class’ hoplites closer to ‘rich peasants.’ These might be joined by even poorer men with incomplete panoplies (perhaps in the rear ranks) who still desired the social status of one who fights in the infantry-line, but there’s a clear class divide here. Van Wees thus imagines the hoplites thus not as a broad cross-cut of a yeoman-society, but in fact a narrower agricultural elite, perhaps a quarter, third or at most half of the free male population.

To give a sense of what a difference that makes remember that VDH’s model is, in some ways, thinking in terms of – and I should be clear he never frames it this way – as “what if Greek poleis mobilized basically like the Roman Republic.” And the Roman Republic probably kept something on the order of two-thirds of its adult male population (free and non-free) or about 80% of its free adult male population on the muster roles. By contrast, in van Wees’ vision, your typical polis might be mandating service from maybe a third of its free male population. That is an enormous difference in social involvement in this kind of warfare, which has huge implications for how we understand the polis (which we’ll get to later).

The battle lines drawn, the two sides advanced and…

The Stalled othismos

…stalled out.

So to summarize: hoplite orthodoxy initially formed form its Prussian Foundations from the mid-1800s to the first decade of the 1900s, before jumping the language barrier into English Orthodoxy in the 1910s (from which point onward, the debate will remain ‘Anglophone’ – most of the scholars writing on it do so in English) and the implications of hoplite-orthodoxy are worked out from the 1910s to the 1960s. It is as that point that we see the first objections to orthodoxy relating to its chronology (Cracks in the Armor) in the 1960s and 1970s, which in turn triggers Victor Davis Hanson’s Restatement of Orthodoxy in the 1980s and 1990s, which in turn is answered by the Hoplite Reformation led by Peter Krentz and Hans van Wees (inter alia) which begins as early as the 1980s but really breaks through in the 2000s and represents the preponderance of the scholarship from 2000 to the present.

This brings us to the current phase, which one is tempted to call counter-reformation but really feels like Stagnation.

Hoplite-orthodox replies appeared to van Wees’ model. Notable among these are some of the chapters from Kagan and Viggiano, Men of Bronze (2013), particularly Viggiano’s “The Hoplite Revolution and the Rise of the Polis” and VDH’s “The Hoplite Narrative.” Adam Schwartz also produced a monograph length response, Reinstating the Hoplite (2013) in the same year. Both sets of works, to my mind, suffer from a problem of inflexibility, refusing to give ground in places where the heterodox crowd clearly has a point and instead basically just restating the orthodox position rather than defending it or revising it.18 That problem – where hoplite-orthodoxy scholars end up mostly just restating old positions – is a product of the fact that hoplite orthodoxy is a 175-year-old thesis that has had its implications thoroughly (perhaps too thoroughly) worked out. If one is not prepared to give ground, there is nothing much left to do but to restate the old positions, which certainly isn’t going to convince anyone new.

It is also, I should note, a problem of people. The key hoplite-orthodox figures – VDH most notably – have not trained graduate students and so there is no young-and-hungry up-and-coming generation of hoplite-orthodox scholars to argue with the heterodox (whereas van Wees, along with Krentz and others, have trained another generation of hoplite-heterodox scholars, who now have no interlocutors!).

Meanwhile, on the heterodox side, scholars are left to sort out the implications of their new model, but of course those are the implications of a new model whose acceptance is not universal: if you do not hold the heterodox view on hoplites, then the question of “what does the heterodox view imply for [society/tactics/warfare/training/etc]” is not a very interesting one. That said it is undeniable that the weight of activity since 2000 has been on the side of heterodoxy: these fellows publish more and have more to say, in part because they have a whole new theory to work out and in part because they are still trying to convince everyone else.

Notable in these ‘working out’ efforts are works like F. Echeverria’s “Taktike techne: the neglected element in Classical ‘Hoplite’ Battles'” Ancient Society 41 (2011) and R. Konijnendijk, Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History (2018), both of which aim to grind away the notion of limited and ritualistic warfare in favor of Greek polities trying to win within the available framework, albeit – as Konijnendijk stresses – with armies composed of largely untrained and undrilled soldiers and amateur generals.19 Further works by van Wees and Peter Krentz (particularly companion chapters, such as the former in the Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Warfare and the later in the Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece) have also continued to flow forth. I should note that what I have offered here is hardly a comprehensive review of either ‘camp’ – I have had to leave key works out for space and this is particularly true for the heterodox side because they have published quite a bit more in the last three decades.

The problem has become, frankly, that without a strong but actually novel restatement of an orthodox – or at least anti-heterodox – hoplite position since 2013, the hoplite-heterodox scholars find themselves with no one to argue against (VDH in particular has essentially declared victory and then quit the field and is so unavailable as an interlocutor), but at the same time, no one has really moved in fifteen years at least. Meanwhile, there is the question of the audience, because of course most ancient historians do not work on hoplites: this debate is relevant to basically anyone working on Greece or Rome (who must thus teach ancient Mediterranean world surveys in which these questions – particularly the social/political ones – matter a lot), but of course very few of those folks work on hoplites.

If the audience had decisively shifted, we could simply pronounce at this point one side or the other the ‘winner’ (for now, at least) – the way we can say with some certainty that the low-counters ‘won’ the Roman demography debate (or at least the high-counters lost) and that the modernists have, with reservations ‘won’ the Roman economy debate (or at least the hard-primitivists have lost). But my sense is that this shift in the communis opinio (‘the common opinion’) has not really happened in a durable way.

I hesitate to bring up Everett Wheeler here because I know that his often sharp and acerbic writing has left quite a few folks in this debate more than a little sore (and not unjustifiably so), but I think he serves a useful bellwether for how scholars of ancient warfare outside of the two hoplite camps have received the arguments, albeit less vehemently in all cases. As we noted when we chatted Roman strategy, few alive know more about ancient warfare and Wheeler, writing very bluntly, has at times almost played ‘referee’ in these debates.20 And on the one hand, Wheeler is quick to point out that the heterodox camp has revealed serious deficiencies in the orthodox model: the cumbersome hoplite will not do, the idea that head-on-head no-trickery-or-tactics battles were normal rather than ideal cannot stand, the evidence for the early Archaic is too ambiguous and complex for the simplistic orthodox developmental model and so on.21 At the same time, Wheeler is venomously dismissive of some of the heterodox methods (particularly van Wees’ reasoning from warfare in Papua New Guinea) and repeatedly notes that the existence of exceptions does not imply the absence of rules pushed for by the heterodox camp when it comes to tactics and trickery.22 In both cases, he often critiques both camps for being excessively rigid and dogmatic, too secure in their rightness to accept that their opponents might have a point on this or that thing. Of course given the time and effort he has also put into insulting everyone involved, were he to offer a synthesis one cannot imagine it would be greeted with friendly eyes.

To my mind – and I too am essentially a bystander in this argument – the current place the debate has settled is not ideal, because it has not resolved, it has merely stopped. My vague sense is that more than a few academic bystanders are slipping back into orthodox positions mostly out of habit, which is not good because some of those positions really have been quite significantly undermined – a sort of thoughtless ‘counter-reformation of inertia,’ which is not a good outcome given the significance this debate has for how we understand the polis itself.

My own view is that a synthesis is required. This is not my specialty, so I am not going to be the one to write that book, but for the next post, I am going to outline why I think this argument remains significant and the grounds where I think synthesis – a blending of the camps – is possible.

  1. To be fair, I would probably by a full set of mid-republic legionary kit first.
  2. Thuc. 7.75.5 is sometimes also offered as an example of hoplon meaning ‘shield’ but it is hard to see how ὑπὸ τοῖς ὅπλοις, “under the equipment[s]” can be taken to mean ‘under their shields’ given that there is no space under an aspis to carry anything: the shield takes up the hand and the elbow and is dished downward. If you want to carry something with it, you must carry upon it. Instead I’d hazard ‘under their arms’ here might mean something like ‘in a bag, hanging down from the haft of a spear’ (cf. the Roman sarcina) or perhaps carried in the hands in a bundle along with tools and weapons (some translators read the phrase as ‘while under arms’ but that doesn’t seem to be the sense of the Greek at all to me).
  3. Likewise Latin’s acies is also metaphorical: it means ‘edge’ or ‘point’ – something sharp. So it means ‘battle line’ or ‘battle formation’ in the sense that it signifies the sharp, dangerous leading edge of the army.
  4. Or even, ‘push’ as in ‘push of pike’ though hoplites do not have pikes. Still, I think the comparison is useful, as I’ll discuss below.
  5. I should also note that I asked Konijnendijk to give me a quick ‘gut check’ on some of my assertions here, particularly those outlining the two ‘camps’ above. All errors, of course, remain mine.
  6. Also important here are Edmund Lammert, Hans Droysen (son of Johann Gustav Droysen, of whom we have already spoken) Johannes Kromayer and Georg Veith.
  7. For what it is worth, it has always seemed strange to me that historians frequently present arguments about the seasonality of warfare with phrases like ‘back for the harvest’ or ‘campaigning season,’ but rarely feel the need to actually stop and work out, based on the agricultural calendar, when that is. It is not always clear to me that American or North-European scholars have a good grasp on the Mediterranean agricultural calendar when making these pronouncements (in practice it certainly seems to me that the ‘campaigning season’ in many cases is not about being ‘back for the harvest’ but about not having an army moving in the fields except in seasons where forage is available for animals and the local peasants have grain to steal).
  8. VD Hansen, “The modern historiography of ancient warfare” Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare, vol. 1, 3-21
  9. One may leave to the reader the task of inferring why the modern scholar perhaps most prepared to admit that influence is Victor “Western Way of War” Davis Hansen.
  10. In particular, H.L. Lorimer, “The Hoplite Phalanx with Special Reference to the Poems of Archilochus and Tyrtaeus,” ABSA 1947; F.E. Adcock, The Greek and Macedonian Art of War (1957) and A. Andrewes, The Greek Tyrants (1956).[/efn-note] It is worth stressing then that the argument about hoplites is also an argument about the causes and nature of the polis, and thus cuts to some of the core questions of ancient Greek history, since the polis is such a unusual and striking political creature. The long half-life of this phase really extends into the 1970s (after the beginning of the next phase) as the orthodoxy developed in the German-language scholarship remains dominant.
  11. Failing to engage meaningfully with his interlocutors is a recurrent problem in VDH’s scholarship, though hardly the only one.
  12. As a review by Hans van Wees (soon to be prominent in our tale) in Classical Review 47.1 (1997) noted. In my own project I’ve engaged a fair with with Jarva’s work and my somewhat harsh judgement on it here comes from that experience: Jarva is straining to get where WWoW requires he go. By way of example in estimating the weight of a bronze cuirass, he assembles a sample of about a half dozen preserved cuirasses, the heaviest of which is 3.85kg and thereby concludes that bronze cuirasses were generally 4-8kg, a range which contains none of his evidence, because he needs this armor to be heavy. He puts this to corrosion, but these are bronze cuirasses, so under the right conditions, corrosion is going to be truly minimal – to give a sense of how minimal, we have a handful of shield covers from this period that are mostly intact (note: not entirely intact by any means!) which were originally probably roughly 0.25mm thick. If bronze corrosion was significant enough to more than halve the weight of 2mm thick cuirasses, it would be more than enough to reduce those thin, fragile, almost foil-thick shield covers to dust centuries ago. He openly reports “archaic armourers were mostly satisfied with a thickness of less than 1mm” but because he needs armor to be heavy, assumes an average thickness of 1-2mm, again a range which contains almost none of his evidence. The problem for our purposes is that subsequent scholars rely on his estimates, most notably Schwartz (2009) – see below – and Jarva’s estimates are wild. For what it is worth, the heaviest extent Greek bronze cuirass I know of was from the Guttman Collection and massed 4,135g in its modern condition and was estimated to have been c. 5.5kg original. Most current examples instead mass between 2.5 and 4kg and probably originally massed perhaps 3-4.5kg (we’re mostly account for damage more than corrosion here), with something like 3.5kg probably being typical. For reference that’s about the same range, roughly, as a late medieval plate cuirass, though such a cuirass would have very often been worn over a mail shirt that might have been anywhere from 5-10kg more (probably on the lower side if worn with a plate harness). A Roman’s lorica hamata would have been modestly but meaningfully heavier than a hoplite’s armor and no one doubts the Romans could fight in open order and move around. If the hoplite-immobility argument is to survive – and I am not convinced it should – it must survive on the aspis, not the armor.
  13. His work is unmentioned and uncited in any of the historiographies I used putting this post together, in fact.
  14. Battle Studies is not, so far as I can tell, ever cited in WWoW, for instance and I suppose it would odd if it was, because Ardant du Picq’s own work would suggest most of WWoW‘s orthodox model was nonsense.
  15. The very obvious exception is E.L. Wheeler, who has been noting this in his footnotes for at least two decades
  16. Note that while our sources do sometimes use the word othismos to describe the meeting of infantry or ‘pushes’ in an engagement, it is not a super-common word, nor is it a technical term – given its prominence in the debate, you’d be forgiven for assuming our ancient sources describe every hoplite battle using the word, whereas it is actually much rarer than that. For comparison, the Perseus database – which admittedly, isn’t all of the Greek texts, but it is a lot of them – figures it has about 60 instances of the word total, along with a couple dozen uses of similar or derivative words. For comparison, it has 1,089 instances of hoplite (not counting derivatives), 903 instances of phalanx (likewise, not counting derivatives), and 20,000+ instances of the word polis. So othismos is not a rare term (although not all of those 60 uses are military and even fewer are unambiguously about hoplite phalanxes) but it is also not a super-common every-day commonplace term.
  17. For reasons we will get to next time, I think ‘reasoning from other historical examples’ is a good instinct, but that the highlands of Papua New Guinea was very much the wrong choice for comparison.
  18. The closest one gets is the combined Viggiano and Hans van Wees chapter on arms and armor in Men of Bronze which basically ends up concluding that the evidence is ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations (that sound you don’t hear is neither author moving an inch from their previous irreconcilable positions).
  19. Note also on this topic the earlier J. Dayton, The Athletes of War (2005).
  20. Notably in E. Wheeler, “Land Battles” in in The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare (2007) and “Greece: Mad Hatters and March Hares” in Recent Directions in the Military History of the Ancient World (2011).
  21. Wheeler’s review of Men of Bronze (2013) in The Historian 77.2 (2015), for instance dismisses VDH’s defense of orthodoxy in that volume as a “disappointing defense” noting of his arguments “such appeals to authority are invalid in scholarly discussions.” Wheeler is generally negative on the volume (which features both sides but is tilted in favor of the orthodox), terming it a “dialogue of the deaf.”
  22. If you are picking up that Wheeler can be, in my view, excessively sharp in his critiques, going beyond academic disagreement and straying into unprofessional personal attacks, that would be accurate.

Published by Bret Devereaux

Published

264 thoughts on “Collections: Hoplite Wars, Part I: The Othismos over Othismos”

  1. “Straitjacket” not “straight-jacket.” Remember, Jesus was talking about the strait and narrow, not the straight and narrow.

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  2. I remember there was a discussion a few years ago on r/askhistorians a few years ago about the phrase “hoplite exceptionalism”- basically what made a Greek hoplite different from any other part time soldier with a shield, spear and maybe helmet or torso armor, such as the Anglo-Saxon Fyrd or countless other examples.

    I don’t think there was a good answer on a fundamental difference

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    1. My first answer: Why would you expect them to be different? The Classical Greeks aren’t unusually successful like Hellenistic or Roman armies were, so there’s no reason to assume a priori that their equipment or organization or social context were different from other soldiers.

      My second answer: They’re different because they live in Greek poleis, occupying a distinct place in a distinctive society. If there is a meaningful difference between a Classical phalanx and a Germanic shield-wall, it probably has more to do with social context than equipment or organization.

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      1. Is there even that much difference in the social organisation? The old Greek poleis were ruled by kings who governed in accordance with unwritten or just codified traditional law. What major difference is there between a Germanic or Celtic petty chief ruling their tribe from a central village and a Greek basileus ruling his polis? Or Theoderic and Agamemnon?

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        1. As I understand it, by the time we have clear evidence for hoplite-phalanx warfare (600 BC or later) many Greek poleis were indeed not ruled by kings, or had various power-sharing structures in which an oligarchic council or semi-popular assembly were heavily involved. Institutions such as sortition (where political positions were filled literally at random from the citizen body, as though by drawing straws) were far from unheard of. This might lead to some differences, though I am not qualified to speak with authority here.

          I suggest that one direction we might look in for differences between the styles of warfare are in generalship and the legitimacy of generalship. Quite a few Greek city-states elected their strategos, whereas in almost any society ruled more directly and formally by kings and prominent nobles it is customary that the nobles and by extension the king will lead their troops personally. While obviously nobles needed to exercise political skill to manage their retinues of fighting men, there is a difference between that and the specific methods by which an elected general may manage an army that consists in large part of the same people who voted for him… and some who voted against him.

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        2. Yes. Kingship is classically three (plus one) things rolled together: chief priest, chief judge, chief general, and to the extent the concept exists in the society in question, chief of the “executive branch” officials.

          Determinedly republican (or at least antimonarchical) poleis make a point to separate these functions. They make priesthoods into elected offices; interestingly, often some of these priestly offices inherit the title of “basileus” (also compare the Roman rex(!) sacrorum and the more famous pontifex maximus). They decide their lawsuits by juries. They elect their generals. They elect (or sometimes randomize) executive officials. Where they had a tradition to describe years by the reign of the king, they usually pick an executive official to designate the year by (the eponymous archon for poleis; the Romans use the both consuls).

          In the case of Agamemnon, add in the further twist — and its implications — that he was wanax of a Bronze-age Achaea (rendered as Ahhiyawa in Hittite documents). In particular, its military relied heavily on charioteers, much as peer empires of the period did. This Wiki article uses the Hurrian word, but I think “hereditary(!) warrior-nobility” with some seriously expensive kit (such as the Dendra panoply) can be translated as …knight.

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        3. Keep in mind Agamemnon wasn’t an Archaic Greek ruler but around/before LBAC, not relevant in hoplite context.

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          1. Yes, but in this case the question is “how is the social structure of one place where guys fight with spears in a shield-wall that different from another place where guys do the same thing,” so all sorts of comparisons become a little more applicable, arguably.

      2. “Why would you expect them to be different?”

        From where I’m sitting, the answer seems to be ‘you wouldn’t expect them to be different, but there sure are a _lot_ of people expending a _lot_ of effort trying to suggest that they are. Typically as a means to prove some broader exceptionalist argument about Western Civilisation in one form or other’.

        Though I must admit that’s more of a commentary on popular discourse around hoplites than the academic (though it at least seems like the orthodox academic position isn’t completely clear of this).

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    2. I am thinking here about the most technical part of the issue here: the panoply. The point is that it cannot have been useless in non-phalanx combat, because it would not have been a useful investment. Ancient Greek city-states were not so effective states that a man would own arms only for the protection of the state together with his fellow soldiers. No, you would probably wanted to have a set of arms that you could use to defend yourself or your village in a minor (e.g. a dozen people or less per side) quarrel about women, cattle, or grazing rights. On the other hand, you would also want to have arms that would be useful in an actual war. (For example, the old Roman law had no public enforcement. After getting a judgement, you, your patron, your clients and slaves were authorised to go collect the judgement from the losing party, with force, if necessary.)

      I think that the Archaic Greek shield must have been useful in such minor quarrels. Otherwise, people would not have born those bulky shields depicted already in the Archaic pottery.

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      1. I don’t know how far I’d take that line of reasoning. First, one of the core functions of even decentralized city-state government is to prevent internal disputes at the household level from spiraling out of control into violent feuds. The typical polis would almost certainly take a very dim view of twenty or so of its citizens fighting a small pitched battle over women, cattle, grazing rights, and so forth.

        Rome in particular had specific laws against carrying arms and shedding blood (particularly with edged weapons) within the ritually defined boundaries of Rome itself, The reason that a Roman court judgment authorized you to collect penalties from the losing party was precisely because without such authorization, any such fighting would be very much illegal. And the other side of that coin is that the judgment itself more or less ensures that even if the losing party fights and wins the immediate battle, they will only lose harder in the long run, since fighting to put themselves above the law will be both very unpopular and almost certainly illegal.

        Now, the broader conclusion that the equipment of a hoplite panoply was very unlikely to be truly useless as a weapon of self-defense or for use in a small group to fight a smaller kind of conflict… That conclusion has some merit. But we probably shouldn’t imagine small scale ‘feuding’ warfare against immediate neighbors as the normal application of hoplite panoplies, especially as we move into the period where phalanx warfare becomes best attested and the polis system is well established.

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        1. I completely agree with you about the whole point. There is really relatively little need for the panoply of the classic era to be effective for single combat or skirmishes. The final development, the sarissa-wielding Macedonian phalanx, was definitely a product of a centralised government. Nobody would grap a sarissa to murder his neighbour in a petty squabble.

          However, the development of this kit must have included a stage where the panoply had a clear use case also for private violence. Even Rome, with the prohibition of going armed inside pomerium, had most of its area outside the pomerium.

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          1. HEMA practitioner here, and I can tell you that a large shield and spear combination is *far* from useless in a one-on-one confrontation. Spear, shield and sword was probably the single most common weapon kit for a warrior in any region for any historical time period prior to firearms.

          2. Another HEMA practitioner here, and I confirm that spear, shield and sword is *probably* the best combination in a one-on-one confrontation.

          3. “Nobody would grap a sarissa to murder his neighbour in a petty squabble.”

            Alexander killed his friend Cleitus with a sarissa in a drunken squabble.

          4. Not a HEMA practitioner, but I’ve watched a few videos of re-enactors fighting in one-on-one duels in full hoplite panoply.

            They seem to be able to acquit themselves just fine. Aspis and all. Personally, I’m of the view that this should stick the nail in the coffin of the ‘immobile hoplite’ argument instantly.

          5. On the suggestion that Alexander did in fact grab a sarissa to murder his buddy in a petty quarrel: we don’t strictly know. Arrian gives two accounts of the murder weapon: one is that it was a λόγχη (generally here translated as javelin), the other that it was a sarissa. Arrian doesn’t say which he found more believable.

            However, that he included mention of the sarissa suggests to me that it did not strike him as an immediately implausible personal-quarrel weapon. It doesn’t strike me as implausible either. Certainly, at times in human history murder has been done with pikes, outside of any formation combat. Sarissas may have been optimal for formations and not for duels or brawls, but unwieldy deadly weapons are still deadly weapons.

          6. Plutarch’s Life of Alexander is a century and a half before Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander, and he says it’s a spear taken from a bodyguard. The actual word used is αἰχμήν, which literally means spear-point, but is the generic term for a spear, lance, or javelin. In context, I find it very unlikely for it to have been a sarissa, because they were indoors and Alexander’s bodyguards were hypaspistai, who carried dorata not sarissae.

          7. @Lys – yeah, I checked Plutarch’s terminology as well before making my comment, but I decided not to mention him. I think Arrian is better for the two points I was trying to make, despite being later than Plutarch.

            First, Arrian is the only source for the murder weapon’s being a sarissa, so when pointing out that we don’t -know- it was a sarissa, the point is adequately made by pointing out that Arrian includes that as one of two possibilities. Plutarch as you note does not know, or at least does not say, what kind of spear was used.

            The second point, about whether a long pike is even a -plausible- weapon for quarreling and murder, is I think better served by Arrian than Plutarch. Saying that a pike doesn’t seem to have struck Arrian as a completely implausible quarrel/murder weapon invites the reader to infer that I think Arrian’s judgment in the matter is worth something. I’m happier inviting the reader to think that about soldier-writer Arrian than about lifelong-civilian Plutarch. Plutarch on other occasions gave clearly wrong, confused information about military gear (recall for example that Bret pointed out some of Plutarch’s misconceptions about Roman military gear in the blog on the Marian reforms). In the event it is moot because Plutarch did not say what kind of spear it was, but if he -had- thought a sarissa was plausible, I would not take his opinion on the matter as being worth as much.

            (Incidentally, if anyone cares what the two major Latin sources on the murder say, Curtius says hasta, which is about as unspecific as Plutarch; Justin, a summarist whose account is briefer and less detailed, calls it telum)

          8. On the “shield, spear, and sword” part, I’m here to remind everyone that the initial panoply was two spears and stayed that way for several centuries; the single spear becomes popular in the latter half of the Archaic and only ubiquitous in the Classical. This is extremely in keeping with many other “shield, spear, and sword” cases through history, including the Early Modern rotella and partisan fighters that the HEMAists here would be most familiar with.

        2. “No, you would probably wanted to have a set of arms that you could use to defend yourself or your village in a minor (e.g. a dozen people or less per side) quarrel about women, cattle, or grazing rights.”
          “First, one of the core functions of even decentralized city-state government is to prevent internal disputes at the household level from spiraling out of control into violent feuds. The typical polis would almost certainly take a very dim view of twenty or so of its citizens fighting a small pitched battle over women, cattle, grazing rights, and so forth.”

          The two foundational cases of Greek law which a large reaction of later litigants were aware of were:
          Perses v. Hesiodos (of Ascra);
          Telemachos v. The Suitors (of Ithaca).
          In case of Perses v. Hesiodos, Perses sued his (elder?) brother Hesiodos for unfair division of inheritance – and won.
          Hesiodos complied with the judgment – and resorted to sniping at the winner, publishing an epos where he said that Perses was likely to waste his winnings unless he followed wise advice proffered by Hesiodos, and had won the case by bribing bribe-eating kings (plural) at the forum of Ascra.
          In case of Telemachos v. The Suitors, 108 upper class men had shown up at the home of a rich family of Penelope and her then 17 year old son Telemachos to ask for her hand – and had stayed. While they brought her some gifts, it was apparently far from enough to cover the value of food they demanded. 3 years later the now 20 year old son expressly asked his guests to leave and wait for her answer in their own homes – and the suitors directly refused.
          When Telemachos requested to evict his guests (book 2 of Illias), it turned out that the city of Ithaka had no public authority. When King Odysseus had departed 20 years before, apparently no regent or council had been left behind. Yes, there was Mentor:
          “among them rose Mentor, who was a comrade of noble Odysseus. To him, on departing with his ships, Odysseus had given all his house in charge, that it should obey the old man and that he should keep all things safe.”
          But if you consider “mentoring” anyone, think how useless Mentor was:
          “[242] Then Leocritus, son of Euenor, answered him:“Mentor, thou mischief-maker, thou wanderer in thy wits, what hast thou said, bidding men make us cease? Nay, it were a hard thing to fight about a feast with men that moreover outnumber you. For if Ithacan Odysseus himself were to come and be eager at heart to drive out from his hall the lordly wooers who are feasting in his house, then should his wife have no joy at his coming, though sorely she longed for him, but right here would he meet a shameful death, if he fought with men that outnumbered him. Thou hast not spoken aright. But come now, ye people, scatter, each one of you to his own lands. As for this fellow, Mentor and Halitherses will speed his journey, for they are friends of his father’s house from of old. But methinks he will long abide here and get his tidings in Ithaca, and never accomplish this journey.”
          [257] So he spoke, and hastily broke up the assembly. They then scattered, each one to his own house; and the wooers went to the house of divine Odysseus.”
          The popular assembly of Ithaca never met in 20 years, there was no council either, nor any magistrates, and Mentor enjoyed no recognition as public authority. The popular assembly was dissolved by Leocritus without any formal decision – it did not formally judge FOR the suitors either.

          In the event, the 108 suitors (and 13 slaves) were killed by 4 armed men – Telemachos, his father and 2 of their slaves they had armed. When some of the relatives of the suitors wanted revenge for massacre of their relatives, they were confronted by precisely a dozen armed men – 3 free men (2 of them late Kings of Ithaca) and 9 armed slaves – and lost.

          What arms, specifically, did Odysseus, his son, father and their slaves bear to slaughter the suitors and one suitor´s father? Were they “hoplites”?

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          1. I think it would be rather misleading to treat the explicitly fictional case of Odysseus and the slaughter of the suitors as a particularly relevant example here. We have no reason to think that the event ever actually occurred in real life, even as a less-romanticized and less dramatic version of some comparatively more mundane event.

            One cannot take the existence of a story set in a particular time and place (in this case, Dark Age or Mycenean Greece) as clear-cut evidence for how specific things were factually done during that period. Especially not when the story itself is full of examples of events that are very clearly written with the intent of giving the story a moral (Odysseus’s crew eating the cattle of Apollo, or Odysseus himself taunting Polyphemus), such that this event can easily be interpreted in much the same light.

    3. I suppose the true answer would be that he was an ancient Greek, and therefore a person who the average Westerner, and therefore the average Western academic, holds in higher regard than a Dark Age (sorry Early Medieval) Anglo-Saxon, and far higher than the typical armed wealthy peasant.

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      1. @ad9,

        Not disagreeing with you, but this has never made any sense to me. If I was, say, English (in the ethnic, not civic sense, i mean) I would absolutely hold the Anglo-Saxons in higher regard than Athenian or Spartan hoplites, since they’re actually my direct ancestors- any connexion I might have with the Greeks is much more tenuous (and as Bret noted, shared with tons of other people of various races, religiouns and languages).

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        1. If I was, say, English (in the ethnic, not civic sense, i mean) I would absolutely hold the Anglo-Saxons in higher regard than Athenian or Spartan hoplites, since they’re actually my direct ancestors- any connexion I might have with the Greeks is much more tenuous

          But this is not how the actual English thought (pre about 1970), as vast amounts of their writing attests. They absolutely respected and identified with the Greeks, and still more so the Romans, far more than the Anglo-Saxons or early Celtic Britons. They taught their children Latin and Greek, not Old English. They made statues of their kings and generals wearing togas and wrote inscriptions on them in Latin. They wrote novels and children’s books and poetry that were sympathetic to the point of view of Romans occupying Britain – not to the Britons, far less to the Saxon invaders. The mythical founding hero of the country, Arthur, is an inheritor to the Roman army and in the earliest versions of his story he’s a former commander of auxiliary cavalry, fighting to defend civilisation – Roman civilisation – after the legions leave and the Anglo-Saxons start to invade.

          They saw the classical civilisations as ancestral in an important way to their own, in a way that Anglo-Saxon societies were not, regardless of any supposed genetic link (and in any case most “ethnically English” people, whatever that means, are mostly Celtic, with only a small amount of Anglo-Saxon).

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          1. I should add that they literally invented stories about how the founder of Britain was a descendant of Aeneas (and therefore a Roman avant la lettre) called Brutus, and the original name of London was Trinovantium, New Troy.

          2. Oh yes, I’m not denying that they thought this way, just saying that I don’t personally relate to it.

    4. As a Greek I always found that extremely funny because, to this day, we still have professional hoplites; it is literally just what you call people who join the armed forces. That’s about it.

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      1. That is a fascinating (and extremely funny) thing to learn.

        In English, presumably for exactly this reason, we don’t translate the French word “legionnaire” for a member of the Foreign Legion, because “legionary” is strongly associated with the Romans and it would sound weird to talk about legionaries parachuting into Indochina. But I will be referring to all modern Greek soldiers as “hoplites” from now on.

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  3. I hope I am not stepping over Professor Devereaux’s command that we will not talk about VDH’s politics, but how common are historians with deeply unpleasant views? I feel like whenever I read a historiography of a topic, or listen to a podcast that goes into historiography, there is an aside that one particular historian is the sort of person you do not want to sit next to at a conference, and you really really do not want that sort of person sitting next to a person of a different skin color. My model here is William Dunning, who was a horribly unpleasant person, racist and tremendously important to the historiography of Reconstruction and (I would argue) tremendously important to racial issues in the United States, in a very bad way.

    But I don’t remember any professor like that in undergrad. My college history department had a number of conservative professors, but they were the types who were focused on economic history. I would not consider any of them racist or even race-focused in the sense Grundy or Dunning would be race-focused. Of course this could be my naivete or ignorance. I can see how a hypothetical St. Helena person who is convinced of the racial superiority of the St. Helenans would be drawn to history as a way of researching and publicizing the superiority of the St. Helenans, so maybe history is a particular draw to racist people. Is that actually true in practice? Or were a significant number of history professors in 1900 racist, because a significant number of people in 1900 were racist, and if you mention a history professor from 1900 then chances are that professor was racist?

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    1. alot of it is probably a who has the wealth and time to devote themselves to it question historically which is going to draw form certain circles.

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    2. My impression as a non-historian is that history as a field has moved sharply to the left over the last century.

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    3. There was a non-trivial leftward shift in the history profession that took place from the 1930s to the 1990s which is notable and took a discipline that had been perhaps somewhat right of center to being visibly left of center. That said, conservative historians do exist – fewer in number these days, perhaps – especially in economic, political and military history. That said I am very concerned that the current jobs crisis in history – since 2008 – will mean a further leftward shift as with fewer jobs it becomes easier for center-right historians to find themselves walled out completely.

      It is also the case – and I know a fair number of examples personally – that the current moment in American politics has left a number of historians who would have, in 2004 or 1994, placed themselves on the right instead finding themselves on the ‘left’ in the sense that they are voting against the current iteration of the GOP, though their own positions and views have not changed.

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    4. >Or were a significant number of history professors in 1900 racist, because a significant number of people in 1900 were racist, and if you mention a history professor from 1900 then chances are that professor was racist?

      Yes. Racism was common and socially acceptable in the early twentieth century and you will find notable people of that period with shocking views in every field once you start looking. Same thing with eugenics.

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    5. I don’t think there are more historians with deeply unpleasant views than there are in any profession.

      But history is an overtly political subject; it’s a lot easier for an astronomer or IT technician or whatever to discuss their work without revealing their beliefs about (picking what I hope is a non-VDH example) the divine right of kings or whatever.

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      1. I’d put it even more strongly: Because the right-wing beliefs are about how humans and human society “ought” to be, it’s kind of impossible to make historical theories without also taking a position on these matters.
        In a leftist example, Bret’s series of articles of “Death and the Peasant” assumes a certain equality: That it fundamentally doesn’t matter whether the peasant lives in Europe or America, whether they are in 300 BC or 1000 AD, whether their skin is lighter or darker, but that because of the constraints of plants, seasons and sunlight their lives are close to interchangeable. That is a position that would for certain not fly with a Southern Planter or any historian that wants to return to that Antebellum South political and societal order.

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        1. And to say what you did not: this assumption of equality is not necessarily correct! It has long been observed from the skeletons they left in their graves, the elites of agricultural societies tended to be straightforwardly taller than poor peasants, because their childhood diets included more protein (especially as meat and dairy) and fewer instances of outright deprivation. Partly as a consequence of this better nutrition, and partly as a consequence of other (sometimes almost accidental) habits, e.g. in the American South something as mundane as wearing shoes outdoors, they also suffered fewer microbial infections (not just viruses and bacteria; the Dixie example would be hookworm). And then we get to the truly “random” examples, such as chronic iodine deficiency (goiter).

          The effects of these differences would not limit themselves to that which is observable on the corpse. We very much can — and should — consider how these factors impacted these people’s mental capacities.

          And then we come to the really thorny issue, namely that their cultures — in particular, class-dependent cultures, which is a phenomenon we continue to have today — interacted with everything else. A few examples we have already seen on this blog: aristocrats thinking that the morally right ways to acquire and hold wealth are to inherit and/or conquer by force of arms land and/or human beings, as opposed to industry and trade, which are ungentlemanly. Or everyone, from aristocrats to peasants, considering merchants a subtype of vagabond, because they negotiate to get selfishly good deals, rather than being generous with favors, as a member of the community is expected to be. Harder to grasp than these, both culture and deliberate education (of the kind that only aristocrats could pay for) can also instill general habits of the mind — some of which may be more useful in the specific kind of society these people live in — which is to say, there are better and worse ways to be. Cultures, including class-cultures, are not always airy veils draped over a frame of economic facts, sometimes they serve functional purposes, for instance they inculcate virtues (or vices) in their children. (The phenomenon was very much realized at the time; among the weird and wonderfully random stuff that sometimes survives, we have a Roman Empire-era joke-book (in Greek: the Philogelos), much of which consists of jokes at the expense of the scholastikos.)

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          1. The assumption of equality in that series isn’t the one you’re (I think) talking about – it’s not across social classes, even informal ones, but within one broadly taken class of free-ish poor peasant. It’s not exactly accurate but that’s not because it’s a reasoning error but because it’s the nature of a simplification to smooth over differences. When you want to look at it deeper, the relevant questions are how often and how much the lives of specific poor peasants differ from this simplification. The series’ comments pointed out some examples.

    7. I don’t think it’s naievete, but the way most people in academia act as scholars can be very different from how they act as teachers, even to the point of teaching students things that in their professional work they would argue against (to at least some degree). So the person you interact with as an undergrad my be an entirely different persona than the one you would see in what they write or how they act at conferences. (I have no idea about him, but Everett Wheeler may be encouraging and gentle with undergraduates.)

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      1. For a non-academic example, Gordon Ramsey.

        Very nice with amateurs. Very nice with kids. Very nice with people who are trying.

        Not very nice with professionals who aren’t doing a good job.

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    8. You have to keep in mind that by going into historiography of any discipline you end up going backwards in time and are thus more likely to encounter people with what we currently consider despicable opinions but back then might be widely held or merely unpleasant.

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  4. If the heterodox side has been training grad students and the orthodox side hasn’t been, then isn’t it inevitable that the heterodox will “win” by default in a few decades?

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    1. The thing is, the heterodox folks only ‘win’ if they convince the people who *don’t* study hoplites to adopt their position in things like textbooks. And, talking to some of them, they’re frustrated because they struggle to do that when they have no one to argue with.

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      1. Well, Marxist economists, anti-evolutionists and Jesus mythicists have the same problem. Nobody engages with them much and they don’t influence what is taught to undergraduates.

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        1. But this groups differ from heterodox hoplite scholars in that they don’t include almost all young academics in their field.

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      2. Why do you need to argue against somebody to make a point or support a model? You just need hypotheses and evidence. I assume the heterodox position makes predictions that archaeology can test?

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        1. Argument (or debate) is a form of performance that exists to persuade an audience. The conceit that a purest form of argument exists with just two interlocutors in a vacuum, persuading one another, is a myth that serves to bolster the power of argument to persuade the audience. Similarly, anything else (evidence, testing and whatnot) that happens without the audience present is only meaningful later when it reaches an audience, such as that which will show up to watch an argument.

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        2. that’s not really how history works—theories aren’t empirically evaluated, because they only rarely can be. we explicitly know that things existed which we have no physical evidence of, and know that what physical evidence we do have is only a tiny fraction of that which existed. archaeology can disprove or adjust theories, but theories can’t make predictions verified by archaeology because it is impossible to tell the difference between “we didn’t find this because it didn’t exist”, “we didn’t find this because none survive”, and “we didn’t find this because we are unlucky.” archaeology can support a theory, but it cannot prove it, because we are still reliant on textual sources to understand the context of the artifact. if we found a fully panoply of hoplite equipment from 750, this wouldn’t disprove heterodoxy or prove orthodoxy, both could integrate this into a revised version of their position.

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      3. The form of the argument is precisely the inverse of the content of the argument, here, right? By which I mean, it would be only too obvious if the side championed by the “the Western way of war” guy had trouble turning their tactical victories into strategic outcomes. But no, it is the heterodox who sweep the field with superior (intellectual) firepower.

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      4. Surely in that case the people they need to argue with are the textbook-writers?

        Or write the textbooks/ popularizations themselves?

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        1. That’s actually a good point, is it considered a wast of an academic’s time to write a scathing rebuttal of a bad textbook? If so, we should add that to the pile of “extremely bad incentives in academia”

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          1. My little sister has been asked to review elementary school science textbooks, and also highschool level texts, her university produced it’s own intro physics text. So, at least some academics do write about textbooks and get at least some attention paid to their reviews.

    1. Especially in somewhere like ancient Greece, where there was no overarching political unit that could enforce a kind of stability. At least to my amateur’s sense of how things likely worked, you probably had a fair degree of nonconformity even in the fighting forces of any given polis, nevermind all of Greece for centuries.

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      1. I agree. Without some really strong central power enforcing uniformity I have a really hard time imagining that no one innovated, especially in a field where the consequence could be your own death and the loss of both personal and state (or polis I guess) power. Sure cultural and societal incentives could make me value winning the “right” way over winning the “wrong” way but unless conflict was really ritualized to an absurd degree I don’t see how it could make someone value losing “right” way over winning the “wrong” way. I don’t think it’s overly presentist to think that historical people would also choose a less prestigious victory, where you don’t get a song written about it and maybe have to endure some tut-tutting, over a loss where you’re risking the lives of your brothers and sons and neighbours and your own social/political standing.

        It’s hard to imagine that much time going by without a reasonable number of leaders thinking something like “hmm would I have a better chance at winning if I hid some light troops with javelins in that orchard to attack the enemy flank?” or “I don’t like the odds I’m going to be facing tomorrow, maybe we should try sneaking up on their camp tonight.” For a less tactical example why would a leader choose to field 1000 heavy infantry instead of 1000 heavy infantry plus another 2000 light troops and cavalry in any contest where the stakes warranted violence in the first place?

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        1. “For a less tactical example why would a leader choose to field 1000 heavy infantry instead of 1000 heavy infantry plus another 2000 light troops and cavalry in any contest where the stakes warranted violence in the first place?”

          If raising those troops meant that he might have a threat to his power after the battle, he might well prioritize keeping his own hide intact over his city’s interests.

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    2. The just-completed essay series on “Life, Work, Death and the Peasant” was about the major features of life that were true of most people in agricultural societies over a period of thousands of years and multiple civilizations. 300 years of Greek history is a tiny and unchanging period in comparison.

      OTOH, a simplified model that includes only the unchanging features will, and is intended to, ignore everything that changes. And those things that change might be very important!

      It might be quite right to work with a simplified model, but you should remember that it IS a simplified model.

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      1. Yes, and in that series there were already major differences discussed between societies, about marriage and fecundity patterns. Early Modern Northern Europe was a society with mid-20s average marriage age for women, a significant share of never-married women, neolocal household formation, weak extended family networks, and weak horizontal networks between peasants. Toward the end of the Early Modern era, peasants became more recognizable as something like homesteaders, living in a village but having a contiguous piece of land to farm. A 21c American or European farmer would be able to recognize many modern trappings in 1800 (while also recognizing lack of combine harvesters, industrial fertilizers, universal-or-even-common secondary education, etc.), but not so much in 1600.

        But then the system of 1600 was hardly steady over the previous centuries. The exact origins of the features of Early Modern European family life above are uncertain but they didn’t all spring to existence at once in the Early Middle Ages. For example, as I pointed out in comments in one of the posts then, Latin kinship is descriptive (“Sudanese”), and etymological dictionaries place the origin of the modern Romance coverterms for uncles and aunts, without distinctions between paternal and maternal ones (“Eskimo”), in the Late Middle Ages. The late-late marriage pattern goes back to the 15th century. The breaking of clan power by kings and the church happened earlier, early in the High Middle Ages or even in the Carolingian Empire, and thereafter peasants relied on vertical networks with the lord, including serfdom, and not on extended families.

        Now, you can still extract commonalities to 18th-century France and mid-Republican Rome, but they’re going to be generalities like “living standards are mildly above subsistence” or “most spending or work in lieu of a money economy went to food and secondarily clothes” or “villages had big men in unequal relationships with the peasants.” In military history, these generalities are things like “people fight and expect to take casualties, the winner taking fewer than the loser.” You can’t really go beyond that, hence the older series of posts mocking the universal soldier archetype in Pressfield. The orthodox model goes beyond that and posits unchanging tactics and social construction of the soldiery over 300+ years.

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        1. I’m thinking about how the Roman legion as described by polybius is quite different than the legion as described by Caesar a few hundred years later.

          But it we didn’t have literary sources describing military operations and instead had to rely on artwork, monuments, inscriptions, and archaeological finds, how much of a difference would we have noticed?

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  6. As I understand it, it was a very standard feature of classical Greek warfare that lines of battle shifted to the left during a fight, with the respective left wing eventually being able to outflank the opposing right wing. Breaks in the line didn’t happen with armies of anything like similar capabilities. I don’t see how these are possible with anything other than fairly close formations. Plus the Greeks seemed to think this was utterly normal (and were shocked when the Thebans broke the rules at Leuctra) which implies it had been going on this way for a while.

    Has anybody ever tried recreating Greek battles? Actual evidence would be useful here. I have to say the hoplite shield looks far too big, heavy, and hard to manipulate (being strapped to the upper forearm) to be much use in 1 on 1. Way back when I was peripherally associated with the Society for Creative Anachronism nobody wanted that kind of shield, and theirs were typically wood (thus lighter) at that.

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    1. The tendency of shield walls to drift left is attested from other periods. It was a thing in Viking warfare for instance, along with seeking to take the enemy at ‘open shields’) ie on their right flank.

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    2. I’m not sure that the drift to the left is a consequence of a close formation. The way I picture the fight, every combatant has a big shield on his left arm and a weapon on his right hand. In order to attack, I think he will move to the enemy’s unprotected flank. So, he will drift to his left and the enemy’s right. If our attacker’s fellow tries to cover his (now) exposed right side, he will follow him to the left. Hence the drift of the whole group.
      The attacked enemy might try to protect himself by drifting to the right, availing himself of the cover of his fellow’s shield. However, I see this as less probable; I think he will either recoil, cover himself behind his own shield or (most likely) do both. So, his own group will also tend to drift to the left.
      If those two combatants were alone, each moving to his left, they would tend to turn in circles. In a battle line, though, that would expose them to other enemies. That’s another reason for the attacked one to recoil slightly to his left and stay (more or less) aligned with his companions.
      If I understand it all correctly, these maneuvers can be the result both of a close and a (relatively) loose formation.
      In fact, I drift;) towards the idea that the attacker will favor a looser formation because it gives the attacker an easier stance and more options to use his weapon. It would make sense for the defender to favor a closer formation, but then he and his companions would be at a distinct morale disadvantage: adopting the closer formation would mean feeling like prey and not as hunters.

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      1. Also, unless the defender greatly outnumbers the attacker or has a chokepoint on their side, adopting a closer formation than the attacker will result in the attacker’s line overlapping the defender’s line on both flanks. This is, as I understand it, nearly always the trigger for immediate collapse and military disaster, so armies would seek to avoid such an outcome at nearly any cost.

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        1. It’s not quite this simple. Just being out-widthed a little bit is kinda problematic but basically fine, especially because your line doesn’t exist in isolation – cavalry and lighter troops help hold the wings together.

          Having a substantial unopposed contingent of enemy shock infantry which is able to drive through those lighter flanking troops and roll up the flank of your heavy line is a problem, but being a bit narrower won’t necessarily generate that.

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          1. Yeah, but that’s not really incompatible with my point. Being out-widthed by 5% or whatever is probably not going to be a big problem, but being out-widthed by 50% is very likely to create exactly the scenario you describe (the flanks of the enemy heavy infantry chop wedges through the joints between your heavy infantry and your light troops, encircling your heavies and driving off your lights).

            Slight variations in spacing are possible, but everyone faces the same tension between “we need to have enough linear frontage that the enemy can’t encircle our phalanx easily” and “denser formations are generally more resilient up to a point.”

            Also, it’s almost certainly not practical to subtly alter your spacing on the eve of battle in response to relatively small differences in numerical strength or terrain. We can imagine a computer game where you tell your hoplites to stand 85 cm apart rather than 94 cm apart or whatever, but in real life they’re just going to do what they do, which will usually be shaped by overall practice, regardless of whether they are on the offense or defense or good terrain or bad terrain or whatever.

    3. I thought the formation shifted to its right, per Thucydides, as each man tried to shelter his unprotected right side behind his neighbor’s shield.

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      1. Yes the drift was to the right.

        As to how common it was – there is just one reference to it (in Thucydides) – though he does say that it is what usually happened. So whether it was an essential element of hoplite battle is debatable.

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    4. I wonder how relevant the “lines shift left” actually was. I can certainly see leaders who had any previous experience saying to their juniors “If you don’t counteract it, your troops will shift left”.

      But that no one came up with anything to counteract it seems unlikely.

      We may know about these mostly due to leaders who messed up and didn’t account for it.

      After all, Custer is mostly famous for messing up and getting killed.

      As for SCA fighting, there are a lot of rules that make it not really all that good for historical simulation. They’re not re-enacting specific battles; it’s mostly a one-on-one tournament sport. Even the larger battles use the same rules, modified to account for not being as near to the sidelines as usual.

      Most of the fighters also don’t have nearly as much experience as the fighters they’re supposedly simulating would have had, especially with any sort of formations.

      The fighter being simulated has (or at least it was when I was in) an open face helmet and a mail shirt. I.e. 1066-era Norman or thereabouts. Possibly even less armor; it has been more than 20 years so some of the details have slipped my mind.

      Yes, there are some fighters with full white harness. But they’re supposed to simulate injury and death when they take a blow that someone with the lesser equipment would have been injured/killed by.

      Reply

      1. > Most of the fighters also don’t have nearly as much experience as the fighters they’re supposedly simulating would have had, especially with any sort of formations.

        On the contrary. Someone in the SCA who is going to a couple of wars a year and fighting in a couple of battles at each is almost certainly doing a lot _more_ formation fighting than the average Greek hoplite.

        Reply

    5. There are a number of videos of re-enactors in full hoplite panoply engaging in 1-on-1 combat. They seem to acquit themselves perfectly fine, aspis and all. Here’s some links for the folks I can remember:

      https://www.instagram.com/p/DMNC1Q1MDVz/
      https://www.instagram.com/p/DMPp3FoolCa/
      https://www.instagram.com/p/DMKgM74slF0/

      As far as I’m concerned this should put the nail in the coffin of the ‘immobile hoplite’ quite comprehensively, whether it’s been published in an academic article or not.

      Reply

    6. Lines shift to the right, not the left. Every time I have led an advance of hoplites in formation as the right front ranker, dozens of times, I have to do 2 point sighting to stay on a line of travel and end up pushing the men to the left of me who crowd towards me. Fraser back in the 1940s described why, and it is obvious when you are in it, you have to twist your torso to the right to keep your aspis in front of you. Try walking in that position with your eyes closed and see how you drift. If the men all sighted along a line, they would not, but they don’t really focus on the distance, often just what they can trip over.

      Reply

  7. “Thus there is an expectation that victory in a pitched battle entitled the winner to dictate a limited peace to the loser, but that ‘absolute’ war goals were avoided and instead communities might expect to replay the same basic battle multiple times over decades while never seeking to entirely destroy each other.”

    This reminds me of John Christopher’s “Sword of the Spirits” trilogy, where the cities in a post-apocalyptic England compete this way. Every summer the Prince of a city leads his troops out to fight one of the neighbors, and the winner gets a few villages in between the cities from the losers.

    Then the protagonist’s father starts outright conquering other cities, which Isn’t Done, and that leads to all sorts of problems.

    Reply

    1. I find this view of war, in any period, to be deeply unconvincing. You might as well agree to a symbolic football match. The point about winning a war is not that it “entitles” you to dictate terms up to some point. Winning a war *enables* you to dictate terms, up to a point.

      As the master tells us: “War therefore is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.”

      But between near-equals, it is going to be difficult for either party to impose their will on the other, over any but smallest issues. Between far-from-equals it will usually be obvious in advance who will win, and the party that will predictably have to obey the others will, might as well do so without fighting a war first. This combination makes dramatic, decisive wars rare.

      A dramatic, decisive war will be a surprise to the loser, if no one else. But surprising things should be expected to be rare and unpredictable.

      Reply

      1. Yes – but the broad ideology of rule affects what you can demand. An Islamic ruler could simply incorporate a defeated state, as could a Chinese ruler in one of the many periods of Chinese division. The classical Greeks held the polis as the main legitimate form of government, so extinguishing a polis was rare and often the polis was resurrected (cf Athens and Megara). Western European kingdoms were also resilient to defeat – one could take the crown but the underlying institutions and attachments remained – the victor ended up with a better hat collection but the same obligations to nobles and local law as the defeated.

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        1. And yet people who fought West Europeans – including each other – seem to have seen those West Europeans as fighting to impose their will upon another.

          Ask Atahualpa if he thought Pizzaro was trying to impose his will upon people.

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          1. Yes, but “fighting to impose your will on your opponent” is a fairly broad-strokes depiction with a lot of wiggle room. If you come from a culture where the outcomes of wars are strongly limited by custom or by the inability of any one fighting polity to overcome another reliably, your “will,” the list of things you actually intend to force your enemy to accept, will often be constrained by those same customs.

            If the general pattern of warfare is that you will fight a few skirmishes in the open field and then both sides negotiate peace for a decade or so, then when the warlord says “I am fighting to impose my will on the enemy,” his ‘will’ is probably something like “avenge the death of that one guy, steal some cattle, and secure rights to that really nice salt outcropping on the border between our territory.”

            If the general pattern of warfare is more totalizing and decisive, then when he says “I am fighting to impose my will on the enemy,” his ‘will’ is more likely to be “The enemy king and notables are going to have their heads go up on a pole, our side is taking every scrap of valuable cash and loot they have, and the inhabitants of that city over there will count themselves lucky if our side doesn’t sell them into slavery.”

            The boundary line between these kinds of conflict, however, often turns out to have a lot more to do with what the combatants can do to each other than with anything else.

          2. The constraint applied within Europe, where the common ideology of rule limited how far one could go, one developed roughly from 1100 or so. Same for the classical Greeks, who saw non-Greeks as fair game.

          3. Replying to both the above: Some time after Pizzaro, the Spanish launched the Enterprize of England. The goal of this operation was to conquer England (and Ireland), execute its ruling monarch for treason and re-establish Catholicism in England, by burning if necessary.

            In what way could Philip II’s goal have been *less* limited? His problem was that he didn’t have the strength to impose such an extreme goal.

            Pizzaro, on the other hand, had found a place previously out of contact with the civilizations of Eurasia, which meant there was some likelihood a of a wide discrepancy of strength which would allow the victor to impose an extreme goal.

          4. to ad9: Had Phillip succeeded, he would be king of England in right of his wife – a claim that had some support in England itself. England would be Catholic, as say Bohemia became after a similar intervention. As king, he would take the usual coronation oath, hold parliaments, bicker with the (purged) nobility, possibly face a revolt if he tried to bring in too many Spanish etc. In other words, there would still be an England, as there was still a Bohemia or Hungary or Croatia or Scotland or Sweden after a fusion of crowns. Contrast that with say, Vijayanagar or Bijapur or Seljuk Rum, which simply vanish from the map.

          5. @PeterT,

            The Islamic rulers who conquered e.g. Bijapur and Vijayanagar had some strict limitations on what they could accomplish as well. To state the most obvious, unlike the Spanish in Peru or for that matter the Habsburgs in Bohemia, they weren’t able to effectively impose their religion.

          6. Peter T: “Had Phillip succeeded, he would be king of England in right of his wife – a claim that had some support in England itself.”

            I am confused by this – Philip II’s wife, Bloody Mary, was dead by 1588 and her sister Elizabeth had inherited the crown. Did Philip really argue that he should have inherited instead through marriage? Were there really people in England who thought that this should have happened? Had there been any examples ever in the history of England, or indeed of Europe, of a king consort becoming king regnant after the death of the queen regnant?

          7. ajay – I’ll correct myself. Philip’s rule in England (he was joint monarch with Mary) lapsed with her death. In the war of the Armada he was acting on a brief from the pope, authorising him to place whom he pleased on the throne (so long as Catholic). Catholics saw Elizabeth as illegitimate both in her birth and her religion. The point is that a successful conquest would not allow him to extinguish England, or incorporate it as a province of his empire.

          8. “he was acting on a brief from the pope, authorising him to place whom he pleased on the throne (so long as Catholic).”

            Peter T, according to this argument, Philip II could indeed have placed himself on the English throne. And his goal certainly included executing the existing inhabitant of the throne. If we are still calling this a “limited war” and that “victory in a pitched battle entitled the winner to dictate a limited peace to the loser”, the word “limited” seems to convey no useful meaning.

            It’s certainly a lot simpler to say that the difference between Pizzaro’s conquest attempt and Philip II’s, is that Pizzaro succeeded.

            Or if I stay with England I could point to Edwards I’s conquest of Wales, his attempted conquest of Scotland, Henry VIII’s expulsion on the Irish Earls, and the civil wars of Charles I, which killed perhaps a tenth the population of England, a third that of Ireland, got him executed, and still didn’t resolve the issue.

            If we call all that limited war, the word limited isn’t doing anything useful.

          9. ad 9 – there’s ‘limited in means’ and ‘limited in ends’. Limits on means in war tend to degrade rapidly as the participants invest more in winning (or in avoiding losing). They also rely on some basic sympathy between the participants (so elites vs peasants or colonisers vs natives or ‘us true believers vs infidels’ are all unlikely to be models of restraint).

            My point is that limited in ends is often dictated by the wider political system – the common conception of the basis of political power. It tends to a free-for-all where there is no such common conception.

            Incidentally, Pizarro and Cortes first sought to legitimise their conquests in the European manner, by marrying native elites and taking their place at the top of the local hierarchy. The rapid collapse of indigenous society derailed that.

          10. To reply to Ajay, it actually wasn’t uncommon for husbands of ruling women to claim that their rights and properties had passed to the husband with the marriage. For instance, there are several cases of Countesses of Flanders, Holland and Brabant fighting their husbands, or being reduced to a purely ceremonial role. Henry III imprisoned Eleanor of Aquitaine for most of his reign and controlled Aquitaine through his own men. A century after this William III insisted and received the ‘crown matrimonial’, just as Philip had, which made him equal and even superior to his wife, but he successfully argued for the stipulation that his reign would continue after his wife’s death. Mary Queen of Scots had her husband and first cousin Lord Darnley killed for a number of reasons, not least that he was demanding the Crown Matrimonial, which would make him independent of her, and had killed her private secretary – he was threatening her government.
            Joanna I of Naples married her cousin, also an Angevin, and had him killed to secure her grip on the government.

            All that said, Philip did not base his claim to the throne on the crown matrimonial per se – his grant explicitly lapsed with Mary’s death.

            He was waging war on a heretic whose subjects had been released from their allegiance to her by the Pope. He had a number of arguments, vengeance for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, defence of the Catholic faith, punishing her support of rebels in the Netherlands etc. If all had gone well he probably would have placed his daughter Isabella Clara Eugenia on the throne. Philip did in fact have a rather weak claim to the throne in his own right – if one adopted a semi-salic rule of succession, he was the heir to the House of Lancaster. This wasn’t taken seriously by anyone, but it would probably have been enough together with the Papal edict for him to place his daughter on that throne if all had gone well.

          11. Count @ November 20, 2025 at 6:34 am:

            “If all had gone well he probably would have placed his daughter Isabella Clara Eugenia on the throne.”

            This is what Harry Turtledove had happen in “Ruled Britannia” his alternate history novel about Shakespeare and Lope de Vega in Spanish-occupied England.

          12. “the difference between Pizzaro’s conquest attempt and Philip II’s, is that Pizzaro succeeded”

            Even if Philip II had succeeded, the English population would still have been there, speaking English, their culture and population intact. The combined impact of disease and Spanish superiority in material culture produced a dramatically different result in the New World.

            And BTW, the Armada is one of those situations (like Midway) that exemplify the theory that “the battle is won or lost before it is fought.” (Not necessarily always true.) I think most historians agree that Philip had little chance of even embarking Parma’s army, much less conquering England with it.

      2. There were a lot of “ritual” or “honorable” wars in past societies. The point is not to avoid wars or make wars useless, but to minimize unnecessary destruction. In such societies, when one side had demonstrate that they are stronger, it would be better for both side to agree on a peace term, rather escalate the war into a war of destruction.

        Reply

      3. “I find this view of war, in any period, to be deeply unconvincing. You might as well agree to a symbolic football match. The point about winning a war is not that it “entitles” you to dictate terms up to some point. Winning a war *enables* you to dictate terms, up to a point.”

        A purely symbolic war does seem weird to us, but even industrial wars generally don’t end with the complete destruction of one side’s ability to resist – it ends when one side has demonstrated that it could do so if it wanted, and the other side agreeing. Germany could have continued fighting into 1919; they could have waged guerrilla war against the invading allies well into the 1920s (at terrible human cost and with no hope of winning, of course).

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        1. If people are going to give a world war as an example of a “symbolic” war, I wonder what the distinction is with a “non-symbolic” war. And what difference it makes, whether the pre-Classical Greeks fought one kind or the other.

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          1. I don’t think ajay argued that WW1 was a “symbolic” war, just not a war of total destruction.
            A war of destruction would be like what Nazi Germany (or to some extends, the Mongols) tried to do: a complete subjugation/destruction of the enemy, instead of “hey let’s be friendly again and rebuild our economy”.

          2. “If people are going to give a world war as an example of a “symbolic” war, I wonder what the distinction is with a “non-symbolic” war. And what difference it makes, whether the pre-Classical Greeks fought one kind or the other.”

            That isn’t what I said.

  8. I can’t really comment on the broader implications of the hoplite debate, but I have a background in recreations of spear, sword and shield combat in formations using HEMA rules, and I think I can make a comment on that. Here it is:

    If you are close enough to use your shield to push your opponent backwards, you are close enough to reach around their shield with your spear, sword or dagger and strike at their head, arms or torso.

    Naturally, a man wearing armour will be *somewhat* resistant to such strikes, but this is arguably a contest that greatly limits the defensive options available to a hoplite.

    The shield is not available as a defensive object because it is occupied in the act of pushing. Thus, the hoplite must rely on his armour which, in this period, was not particularly heavy. I can readily believe that a bronze helmet or linen cuirass would resist *most* strikes, but the man’s face and arms are partly exposed and an experienced opponent will know he should target them.

    The extremely close distance also prevents the hoplite from detecting an incoming attack and using his shield or weapon to block it, or using his legs to move out of reach.

    Thus, if two masses of men get this close to each other, they will inflict substantial casualties on one another, assuming a basic level of martial competence. Even on the way into this distance, there will be many opportunities to attack with the spear or sword, as both can be used from much further away than pushing distance.

    It is possible (and I have seen it done) for a formation with several advantages in physical strength and defensive equipment to overwhelm an opposing force very quickly by driving their spears into the enemy front rank and either killing the men there or physically driving them back into the second rank, thus throwing the enemy into chaos. I haven’t seen this work very often, however, and it may be an artifact of the use of “safe” weapons making combatants much braver than they would be in real life.

    In general, I think it’s much more likely that an even modestly competent formation would advance to just beyond the reach of their spears and then work to suppress the enemy’s weapons while striking out as the opportunity presented. Doing this successfully, you could inflict casualties on the enemy faster than new men could step in to replace them, thus forcing the survivors back until the enemy formation lost cohesion and broke into a disorganized retreat.

    If you did somehow get into close (I e. body to body) contact with the enemy, it would be very bloody and the winner would be the side that switched from spears to swords or daggers the fastest.

    Reply

    1. This tracks with my experiences with SCA and HEMA adjacent Fencing. When you do a mass combat event, people tend to line up, and then advance till they get just outside of easy weapon range. And then you get this sort of forwards and backwards movement as people move into and out of the danger zone to make attacks and parry incoming jabs and similar.

      I would expect that the rugby Othismos absolutely happened, but I don’t think it would be the whole of it. Forcing a terrifying, violent, even more close close quarters event in the line of battle could absolutely make the other side ripple backwards, leading to a breakthrough or a hole, or even just a local victory. But I would expect that would be extreme end of the bell curve, the other end of the curve being staying more than 10 feet apart and using ranged weapons. And then the middle of the curve being fighting within spear’s length but not being shield to shield with the opposing side.

      Especially with most Hoplites being amateurs you could imagine all the ends of the curve happening simultaneously at different points of the line. Over there everyone is content to stay well back, but there’s lot of spear throwing, rock throwing, etc. Over here you have a large amount of people stabbing with spears and moving forward and back, but never really risking it all. And then at one point some NCO equivalent (Insert peasant with largest farm here) gets all his local people hyped up to force the issue and they push through the spear skirmishing zone to try and force the issue to a conclusion. Maybe that works and maybe it doesn’t, but that moment of close as possible contact is super scary and likely very violent and that would be hard to sustain, so if doesn’t prove decisive you could see a reversion to something a little less immediately lethal.

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      1. Something like this just seems the most plausible. Firstly, it explains why the casualty rates are so low.

        Secondly, it explains how a battle could last for a few hours even though a person can only fight intensively for a few minutes before exhaustion: most of the time when formations are in contact is actually spent just outside fighting-for-your-life range. Ie, my spear-tip to your spear-tip range, rather than my spear-tip to your face range.

        Thirdly, it explains how battle lines could move long distances over the course of a battle. While both sides ripple forward and back in small groups by a pace or two; one side will surge forward more often than not, while the other will step out of the intense engagement more often. I imagine the result being a bit like the tide coming in – individual wavelets go in and out at different times along the beach, but the total movement is inexorable in one direction.

        This leaves many questions open: How many men were there in these localised pushes? How far ahead did they surge? What did the rear ranks do? How rigid was your place in the formation?

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        1. My guess would be, loosely gesturing:
          – The first rank is a rather rich guy, 30 acre farm, heavy armor (bronze cuirass) and a bronze-faced shield. And bronze greaves. He doesn’t get his own hands dirty with soil, sharecroppers and slaves do all farm-related manual labor for him.
          – The second rank is a still quite rich guy, 20 acre farm, heavy-ish armor (leather backing with bronze scales covering much of the front), leather-faced shield with a bronze rim. Rich, yes, but he puts his own back into the work alongside sharecroppers and a slave.
          – Ranks 3-5 are varieties of “yeoman farmer” on 3-10 acres each, with spear, leather-faced shield, but armor correspondingly shading from “medium” (a belt of bronze scales on the leather cuirass) through “light” (just leather, or perhaps textile) to “no”. Two of them don’t actually have a sauroter on the butts of their spears. One looks like a time-traveler from the future of Greece because he has a very open helmet (couldn’t afford one in the fancy Corinthian style, sorry!) and for some reason a flat center-boss shield that after the Galatian invasion would be called “a door” (butcher the word Tür until it fits into the Greek language (and alphabet), and you get thureos). Another didn’t bring a sword (whether kopis or xiphos) to the battlefield, but his eating-knife. He does actually have a sword, but he also has what the ancient Greeks definitely didn’t call ADHD, and thus left it at home.
          – Ranks 6 & 7, one a free citizen with an insubstantial farm of his own, the other a resident noncitizen (a metic), both are sharecropping on the fields of the guys in the first two ranks, equipped as light infantry (peltast), hurling a variety of slingstones, javelins, and insults at the enemy over the heads of ranks 1-5. The slinger (his equipment being particularly compact and light) is to whom the first-ranker entrusted his spare spear (in case the starting one should break during the fight).
          – Rank 8 is the slave of the guy in the first rank, on the march he carried his master’s baggage. On the battlefield he isn’t actually equipped as a combatant, instead he brought a goatskin of water (some 20 litres?) to refresh the people fighting in the baking heat of Greece all day and consequently sweating like pigs.
          – The guy in the second rank also had a slave carry his baggage. That slave is back in the camp, and if the fight isn’t decided by midday, will bring a “very fast food” meal to our guys, assuming he can find where they are on the battlefield.

          While the more heavily equipped people expected to do proportionately more fighting, they couldn’t just stand in the front rank indefinitely — both due to exhaustion (heat!) and wounds — so they would sometimes “tag out”, or perhaps the less equipped asked(?) for an opportunity to exploit an opening, or to show off, or something. (That guy with the center-boss shield is aggressive about exploiting opportunities when they present themselves, the Romans would commend his virtus.) After swapping back and taking a drink (or for the slave’s owner, the closest thing to a — regrettably not cold, but indeed quite warm — shower the ancient battlefield could offer) and/or some expedient wound care, they would rejoin the fray. Their heavily-armored presence at the front was important, not just socially, but militarily: the chance that a lightly or unarmored guy suddenly receives a heavy wound and collapses, possibly causing a cascading failure in the line, is higher. And the enemy knows this, therefore they have every reason to be more aggressive when a lightly-equipped guy is in the front rank! Presumably if both would get taken out of action but a neighboring file had both of theirs in good order, they could substitute sideways, because although people under great stress are in some ways quite dumb, they aren’t that dumb.

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          1. I’m confused by “butcher the word Tür until it fits into the Greek language (and alphabet), and you get θῠρεός”. Is this to imply you think θῠρεός is a Germanic loanword? Because that would certainly be a courageous hypothesis; Tür exhibits two sound changes (devoicing of the initial consonant and fronting of the vowel) which are both recent and exclusive to High German. At the time the word θῠρεός was coined the word ancestral to Tür was pronounced *durz. As such, for the loan from Germanic to Greek you need to somehow evidence a voiced unaspirated consonant becoming an unvoiced aspirated one (it’s θῠ́ρᾱ, not δῠ́ρᾱ!) whereas if you assume θῠ́ρᾱ comes from the PIE collective noun *dʰuréh₂ you only need to drop one feature (voicing) and get aspiration for free.

          2. “Ranks 6 & 7…equipped as light infantry (peltast), hurling a variety of slingstones, javelins, and insults at the enemy over the heads of ranks 1-5”

            I’m not sure how feasible it would be to hurl a javelin over the heads of 5 men to hit an opponent (I kind of doubt it), but I’m almost certain it would not be feasible with a sling. My general impression is that missile infantry shooting/throwing over the heads of melee infantry happened very rarely, if ever. There’s a reason skirmishers were generally deployed in front of the main line.

          3. @Ketsuban: I would expect it to have been a loanword from the (presumably Celtic) language spoken by the Galatians, given that the Greeks borrowed the physical article described by the word from them. I just couldn’t refrain from noting the similarity to the modern word.

            @Ben L: Archers, absolutely, that’s why I didn’t list them. And yes, all these missile-throwing light infantry may very well decide to only shoot when there is a lull in the melee action, the lines separate a bit and they can “rotate” to the front. However, I think javelins have a short enough range (enough curvature in their trajectory) that throwing at a mass over the head of friendlies is not implausible. (You can certainly move back a bit further behind the last melee line, if you need to.) Slingers, meanwhile — if throwing overhead, that is — have to throw downward from the release point, which is above head height (by an almost egregious extent, if they happen to use a staff sling), so I expect an experienced slinger would be repeatable enough to neither overshoot the enemy nor hit a friendly in the back of the head.

            Additionally, just as spearmen don’t just duel with the fellow opposite them, but often stab the guy next to (or even two away from) him — and they try to rake down stabs aimed at the guy next to them, etc. — the missile troops may very well shoot not along the file, but at an angle across the battle line, if they find it advantageous to increase the range and to impact the target from the side.

          4. @Basil Marte: Maybe. My question is: would it be repeatable enough for the least-accurate slinger in the group to do it consistently during the stress of battle? Because I’d think it’d take only a few instances of someone accidentally braining their social superior from behind for everyone to agree it’s a bad idea.

    2. I have way not as much experience as you seem to have, but I agree that the “Rugby Scrum” part of the orthodox view seems to be one of the sillier parts.

      At the same time the “multiplicity of individual combats” of the heterodox view, seems likewise silly. At least the way it is usually presented, as individual fighters stepping into distance to strike. Doing that in front of an enemy spear formation is just a way to get stabed to death fast.

      Reply

      1. It must have been hard either way. Still… the “scrum” idea demands of one or both sides to walk all the way through the enemy’s killing zone. Supposing both weapons are roughly the same length, moving into and out of that killing range offers more possibilities of thrust and parry. So, maybe a little less silly 🙂

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      2. Yeah, I’m not sure what they mean by “multiplicity of individual combats” but I would say that fighting in formation is very different to fighting individually.

        The main consideration is that you almost never get hit by the person directly in front of you – whom you can see very well, and whose attacks you can usually counter – but rather by the people to his left or right.

        There are also things you can do to distract the guy in front of you so your buddies on your left or right can plug him with a spear. I suspect that units with lots of experience fighting together would have become very good at these little cooperative plays, and probably would have been really hard to deal with for less experienced opponents.

        It’s actually a lot like how pawns in chess can only capture diagonally!

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      3. I don’t think van Wees was suggesting that individual hoplites would charge out against an entire formed line, simply that a hoplite combat was not a coordinated, formed push, but instead is better seen as individual hoplites in the front rank focussing their attention on the enemy immediately in front. In a context where, as van Wees asserts, hoplites fought in quite loose formations, there’s a logical consistency here.

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        1. I understand that he does not mean a headlong charge. But even taking an halfstep to the front, and attacking the man in front of you, opens you up to the man to his left, his right, and direct behind him.

          That’s what I mean with “multiplicity of individual combats” is silly. The guy directly in front is never the biggest thread to someone in a battle line, nor is he his biggest target.

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          1. It only opens you up if you assume
            a) those other guys are close enough to put you in their spear range by doing so (but if everyone’s spears are of similar length, then simple trigonometry would suggest otherwise), and
            b) they would be willing to turn towards you and expose their own flanks and give an opening to your allies beside you.

          2. @jmsalkeld1: Did you read Frank’s post, regarding his personal experience participating in recreations of these kinds of battles?

          3. > a) those other guys are close enough to put you in their spear range by doing so (but if everyone’s spears are of similar length, then simple trigonometry would suggest otherwise),

            No to a) because to strike at the person in front of him the attacker needs to advance his arm. Creating an target closer to the enemey.
            No to b) Because when person wears a shield in their left, and a weapon in their right, they can attack the person on their front right, while keeping the shield pointed at the man to their front covering the same angles as when they do not attack.

            I do not have expirence at HEMA and reenactment events like McRetso, but I was whacked in the hands and forearms often enough at LARP events to know that “Just whait for the person on your right, to be attacked by the person in front of them, and then hit the attacker” simply works.

          4. Re: Demarquis: I did, but I have to state my scepticism of the idea that participation in deliberately nonlethal medieval-style tournament fighting as someone who has actually trained in the use of a weapon tells us very much about the mentalities of amateur hoplites fighting to the death.

            Re: Dark_Tigger: Again, the fundamental point here is that nobody is per se asserting that you have individual warriors charging against formed lines completely in isolation, simply that the mindset of the hoplite was to fight as a single soldier against the man in front of him, and that this pattern would replicate across all men in the formation. What is the proposed alternative here?

          5. @jmsalkeld1 While I agree that one must take care when comparing non-lethal recreational combat as indicative of lethal real-world battlefield situations, the assumption is that the folks in the former are _more_ tolerant of risk than the latter.

            If someone is pitching ‘maybe hoplites did a thing’ and re-enactors routinely say ‘we don’t do that because it’s a surefire way to get mock-stabbed’ I’m inclined to think people who genuinely would be stabbed during the course of a battle _would not be doing that thing_.

            And to be clear, I find the ‘hoplite orthodoxy’ argument profoundly uncompelling, so it’s not that I’m partisan against the heterodox position and am arguing from that standpoint.

          6. @Ynneadwraith

            Thank you for saying it much more clearly than I ever could.

            People form up in battle lines because it _works_. Just like people wearing armor, do so because it works. And it works because the person on your side is keeping you alive, with their shield and with their weapon.

            Going in in a line so thin it does not do that, or fighting in a way that does not take advantage of that, makes as much sense as a low-necked breastplate.

            I am not even saying this is what the heterodox view is arguing. But I am saying that is how it is represented.

          7. @jmsalkeld1 So, a thought has just occurred to me about how to improve the veracity of modern re-enactment in replicating the threat environment of ancient warfare. You’re never going to get there 100% (at least, not without some severe legal violations), but there are certainly ways to up people’s motivation.

            Surviving members of the winning team take home £100,000 each (or some other life-changing amount of money). Dead combatants get nothing. Surviving losing combatants get £5000 (to provide a bit of motivation to cut and run).

            Tweak the ratios however you please, but if jeopardy is what is missing from the equation then game shows have quite neatly solved that in a modern environment.

            Now, if we can just get someone to gift us £1m we might be onto something.

    3. Pike formations did get tangled up and the press too thick to use their weapons. They could switch to swords, and the men with two-handers and halberds would come in to loosen the pack.

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    4. The objection to that part of orthodoxy is much simpler IMO. Do you know what happens if you get two groups of people, each 4+ ranks deep, and tell everyone to push the person in front of them as hard as they can? Everyone dies of asphyxiation except a lucky few at the back. That’s what happens when crowds go out of control (eg, in football stadiums), and its why attempts to recreate that theory of othismos last seconds before they’re stopped.

      Even if the front ranks were pushing with their shields, they wouldn’t be pushed themselves by their comrades behind them. Imagine trying to push a car, would appreciate a friend shoving you in the back? Being pushed yourself does *not* make it easier for you to push in front. At best it’s a distraction, but more likely it makes you lose your balance or, at worse, means that you get picked up and crushed against the thing you were trying to push without adding any extra force yourself.

      A scrum works because it’s a small group of people (5 in two ranks) who are very intimately linked together, and has a referee to make sure both teams collaborate in setting it up properly. And even then it virtually never lasts 10s, usually it fails in the first few attempts.

      That doesn’t mean phalanxes had to fight at spear range. Could be at sword range. Could be at shield-on-shield range at times. Could even be at javelin range, with only momentary closures to melee. Could be a fluid change between all of those depending on circumstances. But physically pushing as a monolithic mass is preposterous.

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      1. The asphyxiation argument is answered by recent orthodoxists such as Paul Bardunias (another non-academic-historian, so perhaps he doesn’t count) who argues that the shape of the aspis was specifically designed to prevent asphyxiation in a press. I’m not remotely convinced by his arguments, but that objection has at least been answered.

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        1. I’m not sure I’d call Bardunias an orthodoxist. My reading of what he’s written (and an email exchange) leaves me with the impression that he’s a hybridist when it comes to the mechanics of battle, and sides more with the heterodox school of thought when it comes to Greek society.

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          1. The domed shape of the shield combined with the wide, flat rim allow the chest to expand while crushed together. Bardunias and some volunteers have actually tested this, and they report it works fine. In comparison, one experimental with rotellas (fairly small, shallowly dished shields) resulted in the experiment having to be stopped due to asphyxiation concerns after the first test.

        3. That’s an incredibly weak counter argument. Even if they don’t die from asphyxiation, the objection remains. If you’re forced into the hollow of your shield to maintain a little breathing room, then you’re obviously not in a good position to do any sort of fighting, pushing, or physical activity.

          Any decent push comes from anchoring your feet in the ground and using them (plus your core) to exert a force forward. Being pushed yourself from the back would ruin your ability to do this. Human beings aren’t simple springs; pushing is not a transitive force that can add up through a queue of people.

          Honestly, this is a simple thing to test. It doesn’t need debating, it’s an empirical fact. Get a man on a field with an aspis, and see how hard he can he can push (eg, by mounting a weighing scale sideways). Then do the same thing with a file of 5 people, each of whom is pushing against the person in front of them. See who achieved the greatest force.

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          1. To be fair, Bardunias has done these tests, and written them up in his published work (and at the risk of sounding snarky, it is worth reading the literature before opining on it). More men can exert more force, up to a point (there are diminishing returns as you add more people).

            Of course showing something is physically possible is not the same as showing it ever actually happened, and I’m not convinced that pushing tests against a fixed point (a tree!) are a model for any sort of real combat.

          2. Fair, I’ll check out Bardunias. The experiments I had read about (Mathew Sears is the name I can see from my desk, but there are others) gave precisely the result I mentioned.

          3. @Richard Do you have a reference for those tests? I’ve managed to dig out a couple of articles by Bardunias, and I think I understand his theory. But I haven’t seen those tests you mention.

            Still, the theory seems plausible. It’s not so much people pushing (my assumption, and that of orthodoxy), as them leaning. This lets their collective weight add up once the crowd is compressed enough that the force is (essentially) transferred through incompressible bone rather than muscle. Seems like a truly terrible way to fight, but I concede that it’s not totally implausible.

          4. (I don’t seem able to replay to the later post). The experiment is described in Bardunias and Ray, Hoplites at War, though I’m away from my desk at present to see precisely where or where else.

            I suspect that the fact that different experiments give different results tells us something about the value of these sorts of experiments…

          5. We’re at maximum comment depth I guess.

            Thanks, I’ll try to get my hand on a copy of that (and of your book too). I think those tests are useful at answering very specific questions and ruling out specific answers. But not as a blanket “that’s how they must have done it”.

      2. Another point about ‘physically pushing as a monolithic mass [being] preposterous’ is that, presumably at some point during the circa 300 years that the Greeks were supposedly doing this, some of them would have to fight someone who _wasn’t another Greek_.

        Even if you say ‘the folks on the borders fought differently’ you’d end up in an untenable position where the overwhelming majority of Greeks fought in this ‘rugby-scrum’ style ritualised battle. They would thus gain considerable experience in this rugby-scrum type battle (allowing them to outcompete the border folks who would gain experience both in ‘rugby scrum’ and ‘however the celts do it’).

        So you would have a thin border of actually effective combat-poleis being effectively squeezed into nonexistence by a practically-non-combat ritual-poleis who would likely melt in the face of the first semi-serious celtic tribe that meandered on through the Greek mainland (because everyone there knew how to push better than they knew how to fight). Or, you would have combat-poleis maintaining knowledge of how to fight to actually kill people, have the experience of knowing how to fight to actually kill people, have knowledge that their immediate neighbours largely do not know how to fight to kill people…and not taking advantage of that. For 300 years.

        I’m not saying that ritualised warfare cannot possibly exist (we know it does and did), but that such _thoroughly_ ritualised warfare as the basic cultural expectation of how to fight at a point in time where warfare was endemic (and the migration of different peoples outside of this ritualised tradition was common) lasted for _300 years_ seems extremely unlikely to me.

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      3. I actually think only the first rank would push, and the ranks behind would stand and stab over the heads of the first rank.

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    5. Absolutely.
      Anyone who things hoplite battles were literal shoving matches is utterly delusional.
      Likewise, “limited, ritualized warfare” isn’t really a thing.

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      1. Limited ritualized warfare is absolutely a thing in many parts of the world historically- i have no idea if it was a thing in Greece.

        Ritualized combat is even common in other animal species so it would be really strange if it was *not* a thing in humans.

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        1. Ritualised warfare is a thing…though I’ve never come across an instance where the _method_ of combat during ritualised warfare wasn’t very similar to the method of combat in traditional warfare in that same society.

          Nahua flower wars utilised the same combat methods as traditional nahua warfare. Quechuan Tinku involves literal fistfights. The Yanomami are sometimes described as having ritual warfare that escalates through distinct stages, though note that the last two stages before raiding takes place are ‘club fighting duels’ and ‘spear throwing duels’ which are the same core methods of Yanomami non-ritualised warfare.

          Perhaps this is simply an issue of me not being well-read enough (which may well be the case), but I don’t know of a single instance of ‘ritualised warfare’ that uses methods largely divorced from that culture’s primary means of non-ritual warfare (i.e. pushing-matches in a culture that fights using spears) without a higher power restricting the combatants to non-combat means.

          Probably made a meal out of that last sentence, but hopefully it parses!

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        2. I think it’s worth distinguishing between limited ritualized *combat* and limited ritualized *warfare*. I’m reading War in Human Civilization now, and one thing that Gat notes is that battles between hunter-gatherers were heavily ritualized, with generally low casualties. However, this does not imply that war among hunter-gatherers was “limited”; in fact, they often had per-capita fatality rates rivalling those of the worst wars between agrarian states. The difference was that most of the actual killing was done in raids and ambushes, not battles.

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    6. What you described is essentially what we have done in recreating othismos. It happens after a period of spear fighting when your are either disarmed by your spear breaking or just overmatched by your foe. The only safe thing to do is move withing the measure of the enemy spear, because your own men behind you are in the way of moving back out of it. You move to a new measure that of your very short sword and get shield on shield. If your opponent does not drop the spear and move to the sword, you win. If he does, then you are not free to perforated him. Instead you both rapidly bind your weapons and those around you move quickly to sword measure. Surprisingly, this is no more deadly than spear fencing in tests.

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  9. “One may leave to the reader the task of inferring why the modern scholar perhaps most prepared to admit that influence is Victor “Western Way of War” Davis Hansen.”

    There are several options, ranging from “also racist” to “capable of admitting that someone who has views he disagrees with can still be good at their job.”

    I bring this up only to say that the unwillingness to admit the latter is a problem I’ve noticed with commenters on history, particularly in places like Quora, where people will call you a Lost Causer if you push back against the idea that Lee was an incompetent boob who got lucky for a year, and actual Lost Causers will throw a conniption fit if you point out that Grant was actually really good at campaigning and strategizing.

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    1. In this case, though, I think there’s a very… suspicious… continuity between the notion that the Greek, in his heart, lusts for a tight formation of spearmen because of his Greek genes, and the notion that people who have been in a tight formation of spearmen will, because of that experience, automatically reject collective ownership of the means of production (and that this influence is somehow heritable or contagious, since the things VDH identifies as essentially “Western” haven’t died out in the centuries since the last plausible vestiges of hoplite warfare became obsolete).

      I’m not saying VDH believes in a sort of Lamarckian Grundyism, but it would explain a lot.

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      1. “notion that people who have been in a tight formation of spearmen will, because of that experience, automatically reject collective ownership of the means of production (and that this influence is somehow heritable or contagious, since the things VDH identifies as essentially “Western” haven’t died out in the centuries since the last plausible vestiges of hoplite warfare became obsolete”

        I’d have to go back and look at it, but I don’t think Hansen thinks that the “tight formation of spearmen” is the crucial factor–if you asked him, he would probably claim that the longbowmen heavily influenced the political development of England, for example.

        I will also note that in OGH’s discussion of the Roman military system, I got the distinct impression that there was a symbiosis between how said system developed and how the Romans saw themselves, and which is the chicken and which is the egg is a question lost in the mists of time.

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    2. You can go see the “politics” section of his wikipedia page to find out which one it is, instead of speculating which one it might be.

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      1. Funny to see this on a blog where at least one post describes factual inaccuracies in a Wikipedia article (Marian reforms).

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  10. I’m American, and I have no idea what a rugby scrum looks like, apart from what I can guess from reading this post.

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    1. They occur in modern forms in two variants of Rugby Football, commonly referred to as Rugby Union and Rugby League.

      However, my limited understanding is that in League the scrums are universally non-contested, and so give a poor picture of what is being referenced here, so I would focus on Union.

      In Union, the scrum is formed of eight men from each side, arranged in two rows of three, between which is a single row of two. The front row is formed of two props on either side of the hooker, whose job in the scrum is to hook the ball back after it’s been fed in. Behind them are two locks. The back row is formed of two flankers and the Number 8 in the middle.

      The scrum forms up with both sets of forwards facing each other, and set themselves up so as to form a tunnel between the two teams. The middle and back rows slot their heads between the players in front of them, the front rows alternate heads with the opposing front row. When the ball is fed into the tunnel, each side starts pushing the other as hard as they can. (The ball usually ends up under the feet of the back row of the side putting the ball in.) The scrum ends when either the ball leaves the scrum legally, or the referee blows for either a free kick or a penalty (he can also order the scrum to be reset, but this merely causes the whole thing to start again rather than ending it).

      Occasionally, Union scrums are uncontested. This will be as a result of injuries and/or cards, when one or both teams are unable to field trained forwards for each of the three front row positions. This is relatively rare.

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        1. Having never played or read rugby, I thought it was fairly clear.

          It goes :

          F 8 F
          L L
          vvP H P vv
          X
          ^^P H P^^
          L L
          F 8 F

          ^/v indicate direction of advance.

          The ball gets tossed at the X. (A smaller space than this diagram would indicate.)

          The hooker (H) is the guy on your side that’s supposed to try and get control of the ball to move it backward to his own team. Props (P) are propping up the whole structure against the other team, because everyone on your side is physically interlocked pushing forward and their side is doing the same. Locks are connecting the front rank to the rear, where Flanks and “8” are providing more force, and…

          Oh, heck with it. I’ll admit I cheated a bit:
          https://youtube.com/shorts/ceuV2pKEAaI?si=AZEx_ucDOs6My9Xk

          Note how it hilariously explodes into a pile once the forces lose symmetry.

          I have to assume that the Orthodox side is referring more to how close together they are rather than the means of fighting, because in that kind of mess a spear would be a hindrance; or an uncontrolled threat when it springs back from pressure and jams into someone. I guess it could be every shield is interlocked that way, but since it occupies an area in the middle of your body it’d hinder your ability to stab (even over-arm). …Which would explain low casualties, but since they’re willing to advance into contact to kill each other, you’d think their battles weren’t overly casualty averse and they’d adopt something with more killing power to win.

          (I guess the advancement of Helenist pikes could be on that count.)

          On the other (Heterodox) hand, a line of spaced 1v1s also doesn’t make a lot of sense with the size of shield and a spear. If you were interested in squaring off with one person the design is wasting plenty of weight off to the wings (or the left wing, anyway), and you’d be better off with a smaller (see: heaters, kite, round) or more rectangular shield (see: scutum). Meanwhile, the spear doesn’t require a lot of lateral space to use (small adjustments of angle at the grip become larger distances at the point, there’s not much purpose in slashing or chopping), so you should be able to pack them (hoplites) fairly tight.

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          1. I think what I’d expect to see isn’t a line of idealized “1v1” matches (our guy A fights their a, our guy B fights their b, and so on), as cases where small groups try to work up their courage to collectively act aggressively, with some degree of shared protection on the flanks (you cover me from being stabbed in the side using your big shield, and I will seek an opportunity to stab with my spear while likewise covered under my own big shield).

            The point distinguishing this from a ‘scrum’ or even ‘push of pike’ as usually understood is that each individual retains some degree of freedom of movement and a certain amount of individual agency as to whether to engage or not.

            To borrow a Greek term I hope I’m using correctly, it doesn’t take much arete to be one of 500 guys in a big rectangular block pushing forward against an enemy block of 500 enemy guys; if I’m in the front rank in that situation I hardly even have a choice about what to do, I’m just gonna get squeezed between the lines until someone dies.

            But if the lines are a bit looser and I have the realistic option of “back up a step out of the enemy’s speartip range,” then suddenly the model of me trying to show heroic valor on the front lines makes a lot more sense.

    2. Nothing like a hoplite battle actually. The players bind together with their arms then crouch and drive rather than stand and push.

      A maul might be a slightly better analogy than a scrum, but I wouldn’t say it resembles a hoplite battle in any way.

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    3. It’s an organised shoving-match that takes place at certain junctures in a rugby game. The idea being that you have the seven biggest players one one team and the seven biggest players on the other locking up tightly, the ball being put in under their feet and then they literally try and push each other off the ball whilst also kicking the ball backwards and feeding it back to the rest of the team. The members of the pack tend to be very, very big people, generally looking like they were welded together on the Toulon or Sunderland shipyards, disqualified from the practice of Sumo for being too heckin’ big, trained by engaging in boxing matches with kangaroos, or are in fact lost Maori or Brythonic demi-gods etc. depending on nationality.

      As someone who was made to play in the scrum a few times at school by psychopathic Games Masters, I can say it is a very intense (and to my memory, deeply unpleasant) place to be, and if we had weapons and were actually intending to kill each other everyone would be very dead very quickly. Even as it is, it is dangerous: if it collapses, necks can be broken.

      Another thing I would say which makes it seem very unlikely as a model for hoplite fighting is that it is very orchestrated. Everyone has to line up , link arms, slot into place and let the other team take their weight to begin the shoving, which I’m not sure would be really feasible in combat.

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    6. This is definitely the sort of thing where a single 30-second YouTube video will prove more enlightening than 1000 words of text. Here’s one:

      https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wHleFlHg8UE

      Though, I must admit that having looked for one the selection of videos on YT is extremely misleading. It seems to be flooded with videos of ‘dominant’ scrums where one side successfully pushes the other side off the ball. I have watched _a lot_ of rugby and maybe seen that twice. Overwhelmingly, what happens is that the scrum makes contact and within a couple of seconds the front ranks are forced down and the whole thing needs to set up again. Or, more commonly even than that, the guy chucking the ball in literally just throws it to his team and they get it out of the back (my understanding is they’re supposed to throw it down the middle, but almost never do).

      Other times the centre rows get lifted up, or the scrum turns and one side collapses. I’ve very, very rarely seen them go on for more than 10-20 seconds or so.

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  11. >”Or even, ‘push’ as in ‘push of pike’ though hoplites do not have pikes. Still, I think the comparison is useful, as I’ll discuss below.”

    Eh? I’m a bit confused here since the English literature the term derives from push here is used to mean thrust with Smythe practically spelling it out with his decrying of “pushing and foyning”. Even as late Gibbon this was still a common use of the word.

    For some reason push of pike seems to be imagined as some sort of shoving contest (like with the wikipedia article) with either two possible points of entry as best I can tell, some odd cross pollination with the orthodox othismos crowd or with the safetied version of fighting modern reenactors do (which wikipedia cites in its article) which comes back to the same rugby scrum origin.

    There is the term “pell mell” but this refers to the two sides engaged in hand to hand fighting with shorter weapons with much made of whether to include row x^th armed with shorter polearms and greatswords which would be more handy in such a melee. Simultaneously due to lacking shields and large amounts of armour there’s little to stop the use of daggers (another thing argued over by period sources) from being thrust into an opponent unlike a hoplite who’s large aspis and helmet could protect them from being stabbed in the face or neck.

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    1. I agree that Smythe is clearly that the push of pike is simply heated foyning, but I find his other mode of combat, recommended against foes who are more skilled with the pike, where the front rank can no longer cock back their pikes for a subsequent strike because they are too close. Here we read of the use of shorter swords and daggers. This type of bi-phasic battle, spear fighting, then close in sword fighting is what we see by the end of the 5thC- where spears become longer and rear-balanced and swords are often seen to be daggers. If you are shield to shield in a knife fight and the guy behind you helps you not get pushed backward, you are in othismos as the rest of the ranks are dragged in. In testing this, a knife fight in a mosh pit, we were surprised that you don’t really leave the mortal coil at a faster rate than in spear fencing because it is pretty easy to bind up your foe’s sword.

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  12. Considering what he’s said about domains I am sufficiently informed about, I’m inclined to support the ‘heterodox’ view, simply because VD Hansen is on the other side.

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    1. I fear that an important part of why we do not see an good synthesis or “neo orthodox” view in the hoplite debate, is that a lot of people do not want to be seen on the side of many of the people on the orthodox side.

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      1. Assuming our gracious host presented the two sides evenhandedly, what exactly would be kept from the orthodox side?
        – As others explained at length, the shoving match idea is risible.
        – “Ritual warfare”, “little in the way of raiding and sieges” — (most) Greek poleis had walls, and not as movie props. They expected to need those walls “for real” to repel raids and withstand sieges (or at least keep the opponents honest about it). On the other hand, the Greek armies with their dearth of officer corps or practice were notably rubbish at siegeworks, or even logistics endurance (to attempt to starve out defenders instead), thus it’s little wonder victorious sieges (i.e. sieges worth writing about) were rare.
        – That in a society where people individually procured their equipment, a “standardized” novel form of kit, and the doctrine on how to use it, and a new type of social structure (!!!) in which this mode of fighting is embedded, each of them depending on both of the others, all synchronously sprung into existence, as Pallas Athene sprung forth from Zeus’ head, is obvious nonsense.

        I suppose what remains is that — exactly because warfare was a serious, potentially existential-for-the-polis matter (contra the orthodox position) — the poleis mobilized as much of their manpower as they could. Landownership was unequal, thus (scraping the serial numbers off the Roman census) the particularly rich would be cavalry (as Plato describes himself serving), the normal rich would be Pedites I heavily armored hoplites (as Plato mentions Socrates serving), VDH’s yeoman farmers would bring whatever pared-down version of the kit they could afford (spear, shield, helmet, probably a sword, but maybe no body armor at all if their budget doesn’t extend that far — look to various Gauls, including the thureophoroi), the poor (perhaps entirely landless sharecropper citizen, perhaps resident noncitizen metic, perhaps second deployed member of a household) as light infantry peltastai.

        And that because a “proper” full mobilization means moving out with a hefty chunk of the military-age manpower, you don’t want to do this during peak agricultural labor time (when you bring in the vintage — this is Greece, you buy cereals via maritime trade — I’m joking). During the harvest, only the leisured rich (equites and some segment of pedites-1) are available.

        And that the Peloponnesian wars were different — the belligerents were early-stage expansionist military-tributary empires (they caught the contagion from the Achaemenids) with extensively monetized economies rather than low-trade city-states or alliances thereof — and consequently longer and with more (read: basically any) mercenaries deployed. I suppose the quasi-professionals could also develop a base of expertise for sieges. (Or you could just rely on the fact that now armies are drawn from a resource base of more cities, while the cities’ fortifications …aren’t, thus as a matter of force economics sieges become defeat-in-detail favoring the besieger? Maybe?)

        And that, in a non-synchronous way, this broad mobilization regime would shape the social structure.
        “Oh, you kaloi kagathoi want us poors to fight for (ahem! alongside…) you, because the inter-polity competition heated up? Sure, let’s talk about that — what do we get in exchange? Maybe the abolition of debt bondage? (Somebody said secessio plebis?) And, you know, now that we invested a meaningful chunk of our net worth in the soldierly kit — the means of production of violence — technically, we could turn it on you…”
        It would stand to reason that the ownership of arms, especially of the type that counts in the collective bargaining deal that was struck, would become designating for the citizen class in a changing social order. (Gauls definitely did the “vote in the public assembly by showing weapons” deal and more beside.)

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        1. If I understand it correctly (and I’m not sure I do), perhaps it’s that the heterodox argument takes it a bit _too_ far in terms of both the military tactics and societal implications (or, perhaps, the most hardline heterodox folks do).

          The aspis _was_ a weird shield. The polis _was_ a weird political arrangement. What’s the point in having a weird shield and weird political arrangement if you’re going to use them to produce something that’s a carbon-copy of the stuff that everyone else is doing? Or, rather, causally the other way around. The shield and political structure _emerge_ from something different, rather than being intentionally created as a disruption to the norm.

          To be clear, I’m profoundly unconvinced by the orthodox argument. I’m also much more convinced by the heterodox argument, so I’m not some sort of fence-sitter. But I’d need to understand specifically what is meant by ‘a multiplicity of individual combats’ before deciding whether the heterodox argument is close to the complete picture. If it means ‘they were fighting like most other spearmen did, co-ordinating with their compatriots but not literally pressed shoulder-to-shoulder so they’re pushing as a single mass’ then that’s a-ok. If they meant ‘it’s a bunch of duels that just so happen to be occurring next to one another in a long line’ then I have some reservations about the longevity of that.

          To also be clear, I’m not saying that it’s impossible for the Greeks to have been given the same pressures as most other agrarian iron age cultures and just have come up with a slightly different panoply and political tradition just due to chance coincidences. In fact, that’s pretty much what I actually believe (the tube and yoke cuirass is also a weird one, so perhaps the Greeks just had a particularly insular arms tradition that liked to do things their own way even if it achieved the same end). But I can see where some people might need persuading on that.

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        2. The heart of the orthodox argument, as I learned it from Donald Kagan, is not the pushing match, but that a style of warfare that involves a large percentage of the adult males, all of them armed to an approximately equal and relatively low standard, makes said men entitled, both in their own minds and those of their social superiors, to equal political rights. (The social superiors, not having chariots, need enthusiastic or at least willing foot soldiers to preserve their polity, without which they are superior to no one.) Hence the distinctive culture of the Greek polis, with no kings and substantial political participation by a high percentage of citizens.

          Another major component of the orthodox view is that hoplite warfare was a relatively low casualty affair, which permitted it to continue for several centuries. Bret himself noted that the warfare of the Plains Indians, who had newly acquired horses and rifles, was too high casualty to be sustainable. No doubt, had the white man not swept all the contenders aside, a new equilibrium would have been established. I’m not sure why the idea that societies must, one way or another, find sustainable methods of warfare is particularly risible.

          Regarding the relatively equal equipment, recall that Bret some time ago pointed out that the needs of men fighting with edged weapons impose relatively equivalent requirements across individuals and cultures. So everyone prioritizes a shield and a helmet, then (with slight variations) greaves and a breastplate. Maybe some of the breastplates extend down the back, maybe some are only leather or heavy cloth, but so what?

          Interestingly, where VDH broke with the orthodoxy which prevailed before his time–which is when I, perhaps alone in this group, studied ancient history–is in his contention that hoplite warfare was essentially motivated by honor more than economics, because, VDH argues, growing wheat cannot readily be ignited, and the wood of olive trees is too hard for casual marauders to chop them down. Kagan, in contrast, taught that the threat of agricultural destruction impelled a city under attack to sally and meet the invaders. Devereaux seems to want to reinstate the pre-VDH orthodoxy on this point.

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          1. “a style of warfare that involves a large percentage of the adult males, all of them armed to an approximately equal and relatively low standard, makes said men entitled…”
            The rest of the logic is fine (I reproduced something like it in the last paragraph of my above post), but surely this premise is untenable? We know very well that some hoplites had a very high standard of equipment (bronze-lined shield! bronze cuirass!). Either all hoplites were equipped to a similar (high) standard, in which case they couldn’t have been a large percentage of adult males (…not simultaneously, anyway; theoretically they could have done the fyrd/select-levy/Roman thing, where at some point everyone serves, but half a dozen poor households share one expensive mail/bronze set of armor between them, and at any one time only one man from them is in the army — unless as peltastai, which the orthodox minimize) or else hoplites were equipped rather unevenly.

            “hoplite warfare was a relatively low casualty affair…”
            Yes, it’s just another shieldwall, so it’s only as bloody as the other shieldwalls. But then there’s nothing “ritual warfare” about it. For that to be the case, you need a superseding step of escalation too bloody for either party to resort to (e.g. voting -/-> civil war), i.e. the ancient Greeks would have needed to be able to nuke each other or something, and then decide to only stab each other with pointy sticks instead. (Kind of like what’s happening on the border of India and China.) But we know very well that “unrestricted” warfare in the centuries afterward was exactly what the heterodox assume the hoplites were doing.
            (Incidentally, why should warfare — of all things — necessarily be sustainable? We have the word debellatio.)

        3. Azar Gat noted that most city states in mainland Greece weren’t walled until the 5th century BC, when the orthodox camp claims the traditional mode of warfare was breaking down. Then again, Gat clearly seems to be in the orthodox camp (he cites VDH multiple times in War in Human Civilization), so I don’t know how credible you’d consider him on this point.

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          1. That would be very interesting and weird! Palisades are ubiquitous even around neolithic villages. I almost want to say that it is the absence of walls that requires explanation, namely a lack of raiding/sieging as a threat. As exactly Azar Gat put it, until the tipping point between the ACW and WW1, military activity done competently was profitable for the winning side, thus there has always been an ample supply of “military entrepreneurs”. The things that may obviate the need for walls are: an imperial Pax, or being the local best-by-far of whatever is the relevant form of military (land army in the boasts of Sparta, navy for the cities of the Minoan empire). Clearly neither would apply for the numerous independent (fiercely so!) poleis of Archaic Greece.

          2. Archaeology has now turned up walls around Knossos, and ancient writers not that place like Athens were distant enough from the coast to provide respite from raids. I’m sceptical of Gat’s claim.

          3. @Basil Marte: On re-reading the relevant section of War in Human Civilization (Chapter 10, pages 629-651, for the interested), I see that Gat actually entirely agrees with you that the idea of “ritual” warfare is dumb. His whole point about fortifications was to argue against the idea that most pre-Columbian American cities lacking walls implied that pre-Columbian America was peaceful.

            His argument was that the primary threat to early states was raiders, against which concentrating many people and their movable property in one place already provided a decent amount of protection. And they would have a central fortified location (in the Greek case, the acropolis) where people could withdraw to if things got really bad. It was only later, when the treat environment changed so that it was actually feasible for an enemy to take a city by force, that most cities built circuit walls.

            So all this suggests a model of warfare where raids are common, but sieges are rare (and the latter due to lack of state capacity, not any restraint on the part of the combatants).

            I should also note that Gat was talking specifically about stone circuit walls, and probably wasn’t ruling out the existence of other kinds of fortifications that would be harder to see archeologically (indeed, he notes that many pre-Columbian American cities had earthen fortifications, even if most lacked full circuit walls).

    2. The eternal plague of academia: taking the side one considers proper rather than the side one considers true (not necessarily opposite sides but it’s about the journey, not the destination). More visible today but just as present historically. After all, academics are just as human as everyone else.

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  13. This week’s post, interesting in its own right, also has me very excited for when Prof. Devereaux gets around to the combat model of Dune, which I believe he has vaguely promised. I’ve always particularly enjoyed the pedant’s exercises in treating fictional texts like historical sources, and he’s already laid good groundwork for this one with the Mirage series.

    It also makes me laugh to imagine a vicious hypothetical academic debate about the maximum velocity to penetrate a Holtzman shield or what proportion of Fremen males were actually sandworm riders.

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    1. Oh man I can’t wait for that. Especially if it’s bookDune in addition to filmDune as the film makes some departures that rather mess with the delicate equilibrium of the proposed arms system. Specifically the bombs that are able to slo-mo creep through the shields of the grounded Atreides ships during the Harkonnen ambush before detonating. If you have that, the whole use of infantry is rather obsoleted.

      My understanding is that infantry combat is predominant in House warfare because ranged combat is rendered ineffective due to shields. So if you have ranged weapons that are capable of defeating a shield and blowing up a ship of significant size…what’s the point in all the hand-to-hand fighty stuff?

      I know the slo-mo creep thing sort of has a precedent in dart guns, but those are explicitly the weapons of assassins and not something that’s a viable small arm in a battlefield context, let alone the equivalent of long-range artillery.

      Made for a pretty scene though. I’ll grant them that.

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  14. This is not my specialty, but I am struggling to see either tactical system fully making sense. If it was truly a fairly physical push, a scrum, I don’t see much gain for training at all, and yet we have the myth of spartan excellence in the phalanx. While it seems clear, as you have written about before, that that was not overly accurate, it also seems clear that it was believed. But if this was the system of battle, I don’t see how you could meaningfully see one group as better at it. On the other hand, in the other system of push mentioned, I don’t see why Epaminondas at the Battle of Leuctra would have added so much depth to his left wing, which seems to fit better with the Orthodox system of battle. And then again, a scrum seems to make the use of long spears much less useful than a shorter sword you could get under a shield. I’m sure I’m missing things the historians have discussed, but I am certainly unconvinced by either side on that front.

    On the other side of things though, I find the idea of any kind of warfare developing practically fully formed unlikely, to say the least. Regardless of anything else the orthodox side may have something to say on, I think the evidence would need to be a lot more clear than has been stated here for me to approach that side of thinking. As I say it’s not my specialty, but in areas I am experienced in, I have always seen variable levels of graduation, often quite intricate.

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    1. This is an interesting pointer because neither Spartan nor any hoplite training really seemed to include skill at arms (unlike Roman training) – it was all fitness, motivation and basic manoeuvre as a block., based on some stuff that Dr Konijnendijk kindly pointed me toward. That seems to argue more for a scrum-based approach where all that stuff would help

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      1. Motivation and basic manoeuvre can do a lot. One common observation in Icelandic sagas that the determined side came to the thing in a body and ‘marched so close together and so swiftly that any who came in their way risked a bad fall’. People moving in unison at you is scary – as C18 generals knew (bayonet charges either faltered before contact or the enemy gave way).

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    2. “yet we have the myth of spartan excellence in the phalanx. While it seems clear, as you have written about before, that that was not overly accurate,”

      That gets…complicated. If you look at the “This Isn’t Sparta” series and look at OGH’s list of battles fought by Sparta where he arrives at his (accurate) conclusion that the Spartans have an average win/loss record over the course of their history, you’ll note that there are three “eras” for the Spartans.

      Pre-Peloponnesian Wars Sparta wins or fights to a draw the vast majority of the time; during the Peloponnesian Wars, they win the majority of the time but less lopsidedly so; then after the Peloponnesian Wars, they win a couple of battles, lose to Thebes, and then never win another battle.

      Coincidentally, if you read the rest of the series and the timing of events like the big earthquake that ends up economically wrecking a lot of people, this correlates with a decline in the number of Spartiates–i.e., the guys available to fight in the phalanx–due to combat losses and economic factors causing people to have to drop out of the “mess,” and the remaining Spartiates drinking their own ink and refusing to bolster their numbers, instead choosing to hoard power amongst those who already held it. And, let’s face it, numbers do matter.

      The Spartans are overrated, but it’s a stretch to say that their rep was completely unwarranted, at least before Thebes kicked their behinds.

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      1. Ok, what do you make of this as a hypothesis: Spartan success was in part caused by equipment superiority. We know that Sparta was plonked on and dominated the most fertile, and hence wealthy, part of the central Greek word (i.e.excluding Magna Graeca and the West coast of Anatolia), and was designed to funnel wealth up to the Spartiates aristocracy. Therefore the Spartiates were able to afford substantially better kit than their competitors – more metal cuirasses and better helmets, better swords possibly (the argument all falls apart if there is archaeological evidence to the contrary here, of course. But I would ask: do we have much real evidence here?). This partially explains the run of victories in the Archaic and early Classical period. Then the oliganthropia kicks in and the aristocracy fails to replace itself, putting more and more reliance on perioikoi and helots in the phalanx – who are poorer and thus with less equipment.

        I don’t think this is a full explanation but do you think it is reasonable as a contributory factor?

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        2. Sparta is not in the most fertile part of Greece.

          The most fertile parts of Greece are and were Thessaly, the large flat lands south of Mount Olympus, and the large flat lands North of Olympus in Central Macedonia.

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    3. As I recall, VDH’s analysis is that: (i) in the initial contact, spears were broken or embedded in victims, (ii) then came the close contact and sword fighting, and (iii) it was in the latter that the Spartans excelled.

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    4. For Leuktra, the answer is actually embedded quite firmly in the ‘heterodox’ narrative: battles were won by morale effect. A very deep phalanx both strengthens the morale of the front rank – or at least physically compels it to remain in the fight – while also impressing on the enemy the quantity of opposing forces who might have to be overcome.

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    5. It seems to me that the purely orthodox model, combined with the general consensus that the ‘typical’ classical phalanx would be (as I recall) about eight ranks deep, would also tend to make adding more ranks to the left wing of your army (or any other part) useless.

      Biomechanically speaking, if two big blocks of men in rows eight deep are shoving each other as hard as they can, the men in the middle will get crushed to death. Asphyxiation or stumbling and being trampled on are fairly likely outcomes when caught between the pressure of a literal ton of humans at your back and a literal ton of humans in front of you. Adding eight more rows to your own side won’t really change that outcome, even if it makes it more likely that some of the men on your side are still alive and more or less intact when the pushing ends.

      Greater depth arguably makes more sense if we posit a bit of maneuvering room, so that there can be a filtration of exhausted men off the front line back through the rear ranks of the phalanx without fatally compromising the shield wall, but I don’t think we have much evidence that the phalanx could do that the way the Roman legions seem to have done.

      On the other hand, almost regardless of consequences, a double-thickness line would tend to confer some sense of morale and confidence to the front-rankers, which may be all that’s necessary in the heterodox model where the breakup of the front line is largely a function of morale, not brute pushing strength.

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      1. We have done this many times with large groups of hoplite reenactors and no one was crushed, even when our force meter measured about half a ton on their backs. The reason is that the aspis arches over your diaphragm and protects it from compression. With the aspis rim on your clavicle and left shoulder above and thigh below, you can stand for long periods in safety under extreme pressure. There are reasons to doubt othismos, but asphyxia is not one of them. Part of the problem is that the Orthodox has no idea what it is talking about when describing how crowds push.

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    6. Describing it as a scrum is not accurate. It’s not that units physically push each other. The goal isn’t to physically push someone–after a certain point you simply won’t be able to, the masses involved are simply too high to bulldoze. And any unit, however compact, can be compressed far more easily than it can be pushed (sometimes by compressing the individuals). So if you were going to physically push your way through, you’d go maybe two ranks in.

      The goal is to disrupt the formation. A shield wall in good order is going NOWHERE. There are ways to prevent being knocked over, and you have all those sharp pointy things with which to harass people getting too close to you. Disrupt that formation, however, and suddenly the equation changes. In two ways. First, you open new lines of attack–a shield covers not just you, but several people, and if it’s pulled out of alignment those people are vulnerable. Second, if the disruption is great enough you break the unit’s fighting spirit. Fear overcomes them. They run, and you slaughter them (remember that most people aren’t killed in the fighting, but rather in the route). Doesn’t take as many as you think; I’ve read that the percent of people killed in order to cause a route was in the single or VERY low double digits (which is one of the biggest dangers in using reenactment to test theories about historic combat).

      Training absolutely benefits this. Doesn’t take a lot of training, but knowing how to move your body to delivery and receive a charge make a world of difference. Also, unit cohesion requires training. Remember, these guys were fighting on the very edge of overwhelming terror, and if they gave in they disrupted the formation and people died. Knowing your shieldbrothers were there to protect you–knowing how they moved, what they’d do, what you needed to do, etc.–were as much a part of their protection as helms and shields were. Both require training.

      As for academics, the only ones I’ve spoken with that have any clue what happens at the point where shock-weapon-focused armies collide are those who’ve done some sort of reenactment. This stuff is incredibly complicated and chaotic and brief (units would only be in direct contact during a push for a few minutes at most, you simply can’t fight that hard longer than that), and frankly no one’s going to write about it, not coherently anyway. The most accurate part of “300” is parts of the fight going slow-motion, and how do you describe that to people? Further, who’d want to? We as a culture are interested in minutia and accurate descriptions of things, but people in the past weren’t. I’m not saying that personal valor is irrelevant; what I’m saying is that the precise movements used during a shield charge by the rank-and-file soldiers wasn’t something that was of interest to the writers who’s works survive.

      As for deep ranks, it can change the nature of the engagement. I was taught that you had 3 kill zones in front of your shield wall–spear, polearm, and sword (referring to who could reach the person). Outside a push you generally want to stay outside spear range. If you’re in a push, the spears hit first, then the polearms, then the guys with shields use their swords. As you’re coming in you’re using your spears not only to harass my guys, but to pull their shields out of alignment. If you hit a shield wall you bounce off it (and it hurts). If you can pull the shields down for the length of time it takes to get your next line of attack to bear (a few seconds at most), those shieldmen become speed bumps. And the whole time your shieldmen are protecting you, preventing mine from doing the same (hopefully for you). Having a bunch of ranks of people with spears changes the specific kill zones, but not the principle–you have defense-in-depth on the level of the unit. And while you’re right that the front rank guys’ spears are useless after the first initial push, they carried swords. Drop the spear, pull your sword, and you’ve created that last kill zone (among other things, but this is a long enough post).

      8 ranks deep is probably to rotate people out between pulses. At a certain size spears become hard to handle effectively. But there’s something to be said about knowing you’ve got a mass of people behind you–it’s REALLY hard to run away if you’re in the middle of a giant mass all moving in one direction, even if you really, really want to. And there will inevitably be attrition in those kill zones (that’s what they’re for).

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  15. Lots of interesting stuff to ponder in this posting!
    I keep wondering if so much of archaic Greek warfare *was* sort of stylized, like a medieval joust tournament, and maybe only a few unlucky fellows got killed, or some of the routing army was pursued and cut down — and then things were overturned by something like the Lycurgus Spartan system. when one poleis reorganized into an efficient military state and was able to fight conclusive battles and subjugate a lot of territory, as the Spartans did. This reminds me of Shaka, and what he accomplished with the Zulu nation. He turned the norms of war on their head, introduced new weapons and tactics, and suddenly, the New Model Zulu armies were unstoppable. Is this how Sparta managed to conquer Messenia, and make its mark on the wider Greek world? By mastering phalanx warfare, marching in step, methodical advance on the battlefield, and scattering less-disciplined mobs of citizen-farmers?

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    1. Just about the oldest data point we have on how the ancient Greeks spoke and thought about warfare is Homer and the Iliad in particular. It seems clear that any conflicts the Iliad purports to depict long predate the emergence of hoplite-phalanx warfare. We cannot reasonably take the Iliad as an accurate account of early Greek warfare, but it may well reflect the ideas and expectations that its contemporary audience (probably the big men and notables of the Greek Dark Ages as an oral tradition, and likewise the big men and nobles of the Archaic Period as it became formalized as a written document) had for how warfare should look.

      In the Iliad we see a lot of single combats, formal or semi-formal challenges, and if I recall correctly not a lot of indications of anything like a scrum.

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    2. It is a hypothesis, but considering how the conquest of the Messenians is dated, this would faintly point in the orthodoxy’s direction (with a relatively fast adoption of the Spartan approach by other Poleis to not suffer the same fate).

      Not in terms of all the gritty details of the push, nor the near-exclusivity of the hoplite on the battlefield, but in terms of an early emergence of hoplite warfare, which doesn’t appear to be archaeologically supported.

      Sparta (alongside Athens) being the closest thing archaic Greece had to a territorial state and wielding its resource advantage to a reasonable extent (albeit without being able to fully integrate its conquests and thus stymieing its own growth) is probably the safer explanation.

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  16. I see you don’t reference Richard Taylor (me), The Greek Hoplite Phalanx (2021) – which is a shame (I would say that!) but I do think you might find it interesting. Naturally it has not made much impact in academia, as nothing from (technically) outside academia ever could, but I think it does cover all the arguments made here, especially the linguistic ones (e.g. use of ‘othismos’ and ‘otheo’ – there are two (2) usages of ‘othismos’ in contemporary authors referring to hoplite battle of which one (1) refers to hoplites v. hoplites).

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    1. I just wanted to say that I really liked your book! It’s nice to have a solid, up to date work that I (a non-specialist who nonetheless reads a lot of academic literature on the subject) can recommend to non-specialists to give them a solid introduction to both the generalities and the historiography.

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  17. I’m interested in your thoughts on the anthropological models and New Guinea in particular, because I do think that that it’s a fairly appropriate analogy based on Archaic poetry outside of the Iliad, as well as within it. Not an exact 1:1 match, but sufficiently close for inferences to be drawn. There’s also Thucydides’ description of the Illyrian mode of combat which, again, has resonances with Archaic poetry in particular.

    Looking forward to the second part!

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    2. “NO historiographical debates are EVER characterised by over-correction: a counter-argument to Bosh (2025)” , comment by ajay Coll. Un. Ped., 2025.

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    3. There’s no debate in academia that isn’t characterized by this. To give an example from my own field: As soon as it became widely accepted that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, EVERY large-ish scale extinction event was explained by an asteroid hitting the planet. Frankly it became as ridiculous as the idea that asteroids can’t hit the Earth. There’s also a debate in the Desert Southwest as to whether or not every sedimentary feature can be attributed to lakes–with some going so far as to argue for a very small number of lakes. Or look at the Birds Are Not Dinosaurs folks (BANDits in common parlance), something stemming from Richard Owen (who dishonestly argued that pterosaurs aren’t birds, so dinosaurs can’t be). The whole phyletic gradualism vs punctuated equilibrium thing was this. And so on.

      Eventually it straightens out. Folks who haven’t staked their reputation on a particular side being right look at both sides, find the wheat and the chafe, discard the latter, and we move forward. It can take time, however. Remember, academics are relatively highly intelligent, deeply passionate people devoted to a very narrow range of interests–nerds, in other words. (I say this affectionately.) The diction is different, but in terms of tactics these debates are on par with what you think nerd arguments are going to be like. At least, they have been since they took away our ability to use explosives against each other.

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    1. One of the funniest aspects of the academic literature is a series of papers loudly asserting that Herodotus must have been wrong about this. As I argued in a paper in Societies at War: Proceedings of the 10th Symposium of the Melammu Project, Victor Davis Hanson framed the topic in a way which was convenient to classical philologists, and let them avoid learning what they would have had to learn to take a more comparative, archaeological, and world-historical approach. In the debate about early Greek warfare up to 2013, archaeology was treated as an auxilliary science of history, and mined for data to support theories created by classicists and ancient historians. Hanson’s premise of Greek exceptionalism and the primacy of (late) written sources over (contemporary) archaeology was generally accepted by participants in the debate until around 2013.

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  20. Collecting some comparison quotes here…
    “Hoplites were drawn from a broad ‘yeoman farmer’ middle-class (like Rome’s heavy infantry in the Middle Republic) and thus the bulk of citizens were required to serve as hoplites.
    (There’s a corollary here that I’ve noted before: that the population of Greek poleis may thus be estimated from the number of hoplites they field.)”
    “The hoplite class was much smaller than the orthodox suppose, consisting in the main of ‘rich peasants’ and rentier-elites, rather than ‘yeoman farmers,’ and as such made up a much smaller proportion of the citizen population, perhaps around a quarter or a third of all adult citizen males in the Classical period, rather than nearly all (and even fewer in the Archaic period).”
    “Equally important for VDH’s own model of thinking here (and his subsequent politics) is his stress on something we might call (he does not) the “yeoman hoplite.” What I mean by that is an assumption that the great strength of numbers of a hoplite army is drawn from a broad freeholding farmer class, composed mostly of men who work on their own quite small farms with fairly limited means. These households, it is assumed, would have made up most of the population (we’ll come back to the implications of this assumption) and so apart from large cities that had an urban poor class (like Athens) or under-developed hinterlands (like Achaea or Aitolia), the hoplites would represent not an elite or a gentry but a sort of ‘middle class’ in the American sense – the big bulk of households with property. This is not an immediately insane assumption – this does seem to be how the Roman army of the Middle Republic was structured”
    “Van Wees also revisits the social standing of the men that make up hoplites and attacks the ‘yeoman farmer’ vision of VDH. Instead, van Wees crunches the numbers on the wealth requirements for hoplites and notes that while poorer men might serve, it sure seems like the typical man of the hoplite class (those with the wealth to be required to serve) was actually what we might term a ‘rich peasant’ – a landholder not with a tiny 3-7 acre farm but one with 10-15 acres or more, whose household almost certainly included enslaved labor. These might be joined by poorer men with incomplete panoplies (perhaps in the rear ranks) who still desired the social status of one who fights in the infantry-line, but there’s a clear class divide here. The hoplite class is thus not a broad cross-cut of a yeoman-society, but in fact a narrower agricultural elite, perhaps a quarter, third or at most half of the free male population.

    To give a sense of what a difference that makes remember that VDH’s model is, in some ways, thinking in terms of – and I should be clear he never frames it this way – as “what if Greek poleis mobilized basically like the Roman Republic.” And the Roman Republic probably kept something on the order of two-thirds of its adult male population (free and non-free) or about 80% of its free adult male population on the muster roles. By contrast, in van Wees’ vision, your typical polis might be mandating service from maybe a third of its free male population. That is an enormous difference in social involvement in this kind of warfare, which has huge implications for how we understand the polis (which we’ll get to later).”

    Where do van Wees´ wealth requirements for “hoplites” come from?
    And what is the supporting evidence for a large class of citizens who were exempt from military service?

    About Romans: we know that there were proletarians – but not their numbers.
    We know there were fifth class citizens, and something of their numbers… but only votes. 30 votes out of 170 of infantry.
    And there were velites. Who were 1/7 of Roman infantry (60 men in a cohort of 420).
    Something I realized…
    The poor may have been underrepresented in the elections compared to their true numbers (the proletarians surely were with 1 vote out of 193) but they are unlikely to have been overrepresented. Thus the true number of fifth class citizens in Roman society must have been at least 3/17 but may have been bigger.
    Yet the velites were just 1/7 of the army.
    Did fifth class citizens fight exactly as velites?

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    1. “Where do van Wees´ wealth requirements for “hoplites” come from?”

      He calculates this in his chapter ‘The Myth of the Middle-Class Army: Military and Social Status in Ancient Athens’ in “War as a Cultural and Social Force: Essays on Warfare in Antiquity”, eds. Bekker-Nielsen, T. and Hannestad, L., Copenhagen (p45-71)

      The long and the short of it is that the so-called “hoplite class” – the zeugitai – were classed as having an annual income of 200-299 medimnoi of grain (wheat or barley) or liquids (oil or wine). Van Wees points out that, even in the worst case (where the farmer needed to reserve 1/3 of his harvest as seed for the next year), this could support 9-12 adult men, or 10-15 men, women and children.

      He then looks at scholarship on ancient agriculture (for instance, Thomas Gallant’s “Risk and Survival in Ancient Greece”) and works through the evidence for the ration of grain:wine:oil to calculate the minimum size for a zeugitai farm, which comes out around 7.4 hectares (18.3 acres) without fallow and 12.7ha (31.4a) with biennial fallow. He suggests that, if only a quarter of farmers actually practiced biennial fallow and the rest instead used more intensive methods of cultivation (as some have suggested), the “average” farm would have been 8.7ha (21.5ha).

      Of course, if the farmer dedicated himself entirely to a cash crop of wine, for instance, this could be as low as 3ha (7.4a), as Van Wees himself notes, but it has to be kept in mind that the typical subsistence farm was probably 3-6ha (7.4-14.8a, see Gallant, p82-87), so 3ha of wine alone was still a sizeable chunk of land.

      The thetes, the working/small farmer class, seem to have had 40-60 plethra (3.6-5.5ha/9-14a) of land which, as Gallant has demonstrated (p82-87) is both in line with calculations and pre-fertiliser evidence of Mediterranean agriculture. Van Wees uses what available legal evidence from Classical Athens is available to argue that the average value for a plethra of land was 50 drachmas, or 2000-3000 for a “family farm”.

      Where Brett’s simplification of Van Wees’ argument (completely understandable) falls down is not quite accurately rendering Van Wees’ specific argument here for someone not familiar with the literature. Vans Wees’ argument is that those *required to serve* were the elite – about 5000 if we assume that there were 60 000 adult male citizens. This consists of 1000 Hippeis (Thucydides mentions 1200 cavalrymen being on the lists), 1000 Pentakosiomedimnoi (the highest class, van Wees gets the numbers from the demographics needed to supply the men for the offices only Pentakosiomedimnoi were eligible for) and 3000 Zeugitai (I think he gets this from working back from the Five Thousand – a brief oligarchic coup during the Peloponnesian war – although he’s not clear on this).

      The rest – out of a maximum of about 24 000 hoplites, although van Wees uses 18 000 for the sake of argument – would have been the thêtes, who were subsistence farmers and craftsmen. He therefore argues that, at a minimum (40k adult male citizens) just over half of the hoplites were thêtes. If the definition of zeugitai had been reduced to 150 medimnoi by 431 BC, as he suggests, then the proportion of thêtes drops to 33% under the 40k citizen scenario. Of course, under the very plausible scenario of there being 60k adult male citizens, the thêtes would have made up at least 61% of the hoplite forces.

      Van Wee’s point here is that, even under the circumstances most favourable to the idea of the “middle class farmer” concept espoused by the orthodoxy, significant numbers of the lower classes were still required in order to make up the numbers. Under the worst case scenarios for the orthodoxy, the vast majority were actually the slightly-above subsistence class. Instead, he argues that only the wealthy minority had an *obligation* to serve; the poorer members of society could, and did, volunteer for service, but were under no obligation to do so. There are numerous references to select forces being drawn from “the list”, including in circumstances such as Potidaea where the hoplites are explicitly assumed to be bringing along a slave/personal servant.

      This is relevant because political power was largely held by the wealthy. For instance, even the zeugitai were excluded from Archonship under 457 BC and none of the major offices were ever formally opened to the thêtes. So, while the thêtes were able to vote, they were (theoretically) excluded entirely from the higher offices of power and as much as 70% of the fighting population were excluded anything beyond voting and serving on the jury.

      The orthodox position holds that the need for a close ordered, densely packed formation, combined with the majority of it being from the middle-class resulted in the development of democratic institutions and the enfranchisement of the lower classes. Van Wees and other members of the heterodoxy argue that the development was much slower and not caused by the equipment but by a gradually increasing need for numbers on the battlefield that resulted in increased social mobility – but not political equality – in the lower classes.

      There’s a lot more to the argument, like surveys of pottery sherds in fields showing farmers moving from more centralised farms to more decentralised ones relatively late compared to traditional narratives, but that’s a very basic summary.

      TL:DR Van Wees argues that only a wealthy minority were obligated to serve and that, while those who volunteered might have been at or just above subsistence like the traditional narrative suggests, this happened later than expected and did not confer the degree of political enfranchisement that orthodox scholars believe.

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      1. I do note that the greek poleis at least in the clasiscal age *did* make use of their lighter troops, they just tend to not talk about them unless they do something really exceptional. So “hoplites” are probably not all of the actual army (even ignoring stuff like support personnel)

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      2. “Vans Wees’ argument is that those *required to serve* were the elite – about 5000 if we assume that there were 60 000 adult male citizens. ”
        “The rest – out of a maximum of about 24 000 hoplites, although van Wees uses 18 000 for the sake of argument – would have been the thêtes, who were subsistence farmers and craftsmen. He therefore argues that, at a minimum (40k adult male citizens) just over half of the hoplites were thêtes.”
        “Of course, under the very plausible scenario of there being 60k adult male citizens, the thêtes would have made up at least 61% of the hoplite forces.”
        “Instead, he argues that only the wealthy minority had an *obligation* to serve; the poorer members of society could, and did, volunteer for service, but were under no obligation to do so.”
        “So, while the thêtes were able to vote, they were (theoretically) excluded entirely from the higher offices of power and as much as 70% of the fighting population were excluded anything beyond voting and serving on the jury.”
        “TL:DR Van Wees argues that only a wealthy minority were obligated to serve and that, while those who volunteered might have been at or just above subsistence like the traditional narrative suggests”

        Is there any evidence to the effect that the majority of the lightly armed poor who clearly fought beside or behind the rich did so as “volunteers”? Rather than being also obliged to serve?
        Compare the Roman fifth class citizens who clearly were on muster lists… how often they were called up compared to upper classes is another matter.

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        1. I really recommend reading Richard Taylor’s “The Greek Hoplite Phalanx”, which is an excellent introduction to the debate as well as what’s come out of it.

          Re: obligation to serve, it’s very clear from the sources that, at least in Athens, only the zeugetai and above were obligated to serve. This was explicit in Solon’s classes, where the thetês were considered the “poor” and not expected to serve, and we still see it down to the time of Thucydides, where the Five Thousand were those who could hopla – a full panoply – despite there being double the number of hoplites available. Added to this is a sense in the sources that “the list” was both a record of those obligated to serve and a somewhat select group, and you can see the shape of how full political enfranchisement related to obligation to serve.

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          1. Agree with Hergrim here, but I want to also just add – and we’re going to come back to this – I think it is an enormous mistake which has badly directed this debate for more than a century to reason from the Roman Republic when thinking about Greece.

            The Roman system was unusual and we know it was unusual because in 212 the Roman Republic mobilized approximately 185,000 men, something no Greek polis could do, something no alliance of Greek poleis could do, something that even if you pooled every polis in mainland Greece you could not do.

            So just be really careful reasoning from Rome’s 4th or 5th class of pedites to hoplites or Greek light infantry because the one thing we know is that these military systems, by the time we can see them clearly, are very different.

          2. “I think it is an enormous mistake which has badly directed this debate for more than a century to reason from the Roman Republic when thinking about Greece.

            The Roman system was unusual and we know it was unusual because in 212 the Roman Republic mobilized approximately 185,000 men, something no Greek polis could do, something no alliance of Greek poleis could do, something that even if you pooled every polis in mainland Greece you could not do.

            So just be really careful reasoning from Rome’s 4th or 5th class of pedites to hoplites or Greek light infantry because the one thing we know is that these military systems, by the time we can see them clearly, are very different.”

            How do we know it?
            The Roman Republic´s Ager Romanus, by 212, was also vast territorially, both in extent (detached pieces from Calabria to across Po) and total area, the way no Greek polis was – not Athens nor Sparta. Seleucid kingdom was bigger but the Greeks there were regarded as separate poleis.
            So the question is: did Rome in 212 manage to mobilize a vast army because Rome mobilized a large fraction of the men of the society compared to Greece? Or was it purely because even the whole mainland Greece, south of Macedonia and Epeiros that did not have proper polis society, was a small and largely mountainous peninsula which had total population rather less than what Rome had united by 212 in Italian peninsula? Did the Greek city-states at emergencies/short term campaigns like Persian wars or acute parts of Peloponnesian wars mobilize much smaller fraction of population than Roman Republic, or similar fraction of population that was much smaller in the first place?

          3. ” it’s very clear from the sources that, at least in Athens, only the zeugetai and above were obligated to serve.”

            I don’t think is is all that clear. I’ll admit it is in say van Wees construction. And also that the Solon’s class had any real military relevance or were important in the late 5th century or 4th at Athens. Off the top of my head certainly none of VJ Rosivach, V Gabrielsen, J Gallego, and G. Mavrogoradtos would agree with your statement. Rosivach most vocally.

            “and we still see it down to the time of Thucydides, where the Five Thousand”

            It interesting you raise them since they explicitly never mention Solon’s system and seem rather more concerned with running things oddly enough just about how the Democracy ran its actual tax system,

            “Added to this is a sense in the sources that “the list” was both a record of those obligated to serve and a somewhat select group”

            Again according to van Wees.

          4. The Roman system itself is unclear. There are basically two sources, fairly divergent from each other, and reasonably short as to be worth quoting in full. Livius and Polybius.
            Livius 1:43, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/From_the_Founding_of_the_City/Book_1#43
            “Those whose property amounted to, or exceeded 100,000 lbs. weight of copper were formed into eighty centuries, forty of juniors and forty of seniors.[12] These were called the First Class. The seniors were to defend the City, the juniors to serve in the field. The armour which they were to provide themselves with comprised helmet, round shield, greaves, and coat of mail, all of brass; these were to protect the person. Their offensive weapons were spear and sword. To this class were joined two centuries of carpenters whose duty it was to work the engines of war; they were without arms. The Second Class consisted of those whose property amounted to between 75,000 and 100,000 lbs. weight of copper; they were formed, seniors and juniors together, into twenty centuries. Their regulation arms were the same as those of the First Class, except that they had an oblong wooden shield instead of the round brazen one and no coat of mail. The Third Class he formed of those whose property fell as low as 50,000 lbs.; these also consisted of twenty centuries, similarly divided into seniors and juniors. The only difference in the armour was that they did not wear greaves. In the Fourth Class were those whose property did not fall below 25,000 lbs. They also formed twenty centuries; their only arms were a spear and a javelin. The Fifth Class was larger it formed thirty centuries. They carried slings and stones, and they included the supernumeraries, the horn-blowers, and the trumpeters, who formed three centuries. This Fifth Class was assessed at 11,000 lbs. The rest of the population whose property fell below this were formed into one century and were exempt from military service.”
            Polybius, 6:21-23, https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/historians/polyb/polybius5.html
            “When they come to the rendezvous, they choose the youngest and poorest to form the velites; the next to them are made hastati; those in the prime of life principes; and the oldest of all triarii, these being the names among the Romans of the four classes in each legion distinct in age and equipment. They divide them so that the senior men known as triarii number six hundred, the principes twelve hundred, the hastati twelve hundred, the rest, consisting of the youngest, being velites. If the legion consists of more than four thousand men, they divide accordingly, except as regards the triarii, the number of whom is always the same.

            22 The youngest soldiers or velites are ordered to carry a sword, javelins, and a target (parma). The target is strongly made and sufficiently large to afford protection, being circular and measuring three feet in diameter. They also wear a plain helmet, and sometimes cover it with a wolf’s skin or something similar both to protect and to act as a distinguishing mark by which their officers can recognize them and judge if they fight pluckily or not. The wooden shaft of the javelin measures about two cubits in length and is about a finger’s breadth in thickness; its head is a span long hammered out to such a fine edge that it is necessarily bent by the first impact, and the enemy is unable to return it. If this were not so, the missile would be available for both sides.

            23 The next in seniority called hastati are ordered to wear a complete panoply. The Roman panoply consists firstly of a shield (scutum), the convex surface of which measures two and a half feet in width and four feet in length, the thickness at the rim being a palm’s breadth. It is made of two planks glued together, the outer surface being then covered first with canvas and then with calf-skin. Its upper and lower rims are strengthened by an iron edging which protects it from descending blows and from injury when rested on the ground. It also has an iron boss (umbo) fixed to it which turns aside the most formidable blows of stones, pikes, and heavy missiles in general. Besides the shield they also carry a sword, hanging on the right thigh and called a Spanish sword. This is excellent for thrusting, and both of its edges cut effectually, as the blade is very strong and firm. In addition they have two pila, a brass helmet, and greaves. The pila are of two sorts — stout and fine. Of the stout ones some are round and a palm’s length in diameter and others are a palm square. Fine pila, which they carry in addition to the stout ones, are like moderate-sized hunting-spears, the length of the haft in all cases being about three cubits. Each is fitted with a barbed iron head of the same length as the haft. This they attach so securely to the haft, carrying the attachment halfway up the latter and fixing it with numerous rivets, that in action the iron will break sooner than become detached, although its thickness at the bottom where it comes in contact with the wood is a finger’s breadth and a half; such great care do they take about attaching it firmly. Finally they wear as an ornament a circle of feathers with three upright purple or black feathers about a cubit in height, the addition of which on the head surmounting their other arms is to make every man look twice his real height, and to give him a fine appearance, such as will strike terror into the enemy. The common soldiers wear in addition a breastplate of brass a span square, which they place in front of the heart and call the heart-protector (pectorale), this completing their accoutrements; but those who are rated above ten thousand drachmas wear instead of this a coat of chain-mail (lorica). The principes and triarii are armed in the same manner except that instead of the pila the triarii carry long spears (hastae).”
            Note the differences.
            For the proletarians… Livius says they were completely free of service – Polybius, that all of them serve in navy (above my quote, in .19)
            For fifth class citizens, Livius says they had only slings and stones, and fourth class just spears and javelins – but no defensive arms. Whereas Polybius describes even the velites as wearing at a minimum a “target” that looks like a sizable shield, and a “simple” helmet. And everyone in legions wore breastplates (brass!) except the rich who wore chainmail.

      3. “70% of the fighting population were excluded anything beyond voting and serving on the jury.”

        You do realize that rather is a significant hole in van Wees theory. And that its worse when you factor in the metics and the navy.

        “Instead, he argues that only the wealthy minority had an *obligation* to serve; the poorer members of society could, and did, volunteer for service, but were under no obligation to do so. There are numerous references to select forces being drawn from “the list”, including in circumstances such as Potidaea where the hoplites are explicitly assumed to be bringing along a slave/personal servant.”

        Overall if by numerous you really just one Thucydides 6.43 on which Van Wees is making carry a lot weight. And notably what Thucydides choose to say or not say. However notable he never links ek katalogou to the zeugitai

        “even the zeugitai were excluded from Archonship under 457 BC and none of the major offices were ever formally opened to the thêtes”

        On the first point – that would be 30 years after the post was reduced to being handed out by lot. On the second how do mean ‘major offices’? The the Board of generals for example was not limited to the top two classes. And besides when do suppose nobody bothered answering yes or rather provided a disqualifying answer to being a thetes or zuegitai? Mavrogordatos is likely closest to the mark in seeing the designation just sort of inherited superfluous baggage for much of the democracy (and even the during the oligarchical interregnums.

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  21. I think it would be hard for “Peter Krentz (“The Nature of Hoplite Battle” Classical Antiquity 4.1 (1985))” to be a reaction to “Victor Davis Hansen and his Western Way of War (1989, henceforth WWoW)”. For that matter it would even be hard for “George Cawkwell (“Orthodoxy and Hoplites” Classical Quarterly 39.2 (1989))” to be a reaction either, though more possible.

    I am assuming no time machines are involved.

    Admittedly Cawkwell and Krentz are articles. So Cawkwell might have been able to write his as a response and get it published in the same year as Hansen’s book gets published. But Krentz is 4 years too early.

    Or perhaps Hansen sent out snippets well beforehand to them for comment? This is pre-internet for pretty much anyone not in the IT field, so we’re likely talking about actual paper letters for this to occur. Not sure how likely this was.

    There sure was a reaction, but I don’t think these particular articles were part of that.

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    1. True – I attended a seminar on hoplite battles with George Cawkwell in (I forget exactly) 1986 or 1987, when nobody had ever heard of VDH. George was responding to the orthodox view, but not to VDH’s restatementof it.

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    2. Krentz was replying to theories about combat mechanics in particular, which had been established before the First World War (thus the name “orthodoxy”). Then at about the same time Victor Davis Hanson wrote up his take on those old theories. At the time it was rare for academics to write books about ancient warfare, so many researchers leaned on Hanson’s book as a clear explanation of the mainstream view.

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      1. Krentz would then not be replying or reacting to VDH’s book.

        My point was that this would only have happened from 1990 or so. The reaction *to the book* would not have included that article.

        I suppose Krentz could be a very clear statement of the ‘heterodox’ position, and so he chose it for that as an exemplar. But then saying it’s a reaction is confusing things.

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        1. Exactly, so our generous host said that Krentz and Cawkwell replied to the English orthodoxy, not to a book which had not yet been published.

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        2. It looks like the paragraph which mentions Cawkwell 1989 is clear whereas the paragraph which begins “to summarize” is fuzzy on the diff between the English orthodoxy in general and Hanson’s 1989 statement thereof. It’s good to know that there had already been widespread debate about combat mechanics, and IIRC the papers by Cawkwell and Krentz were framed within this debate. It took a few years to establish that the whole English orthodoxy might be flawed.

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  22. Although it’s not my field, I’ve read extensively on the hoplite debate: what I find most surprising is a total unfamiliarity, on the orthodox side, on anything that even remotely involves the practical use of the hoplite panoply.
    They don’t just consistently overestimate its weight, sometimes in a ridicolous manner (the biggest number I’ve seen is 70 kg, repeatedly found in Sergio Valzania, “Brodo nero – Educazione spartana, 2016”; I have no idea how he reached that number, I can only posit that he somehow confused pounds and kilos), but also claim that with a 20/30/40 kg panoply it’s impossible to fight in any but a static phalanx formation, something which is easily disproved by any medieval/HEMA reenactor.
    Generically speaking VDH, Schwartz and Viggiano are such a literally goldmine of BS nuggets that I wonder whether they’ve ever held a shield themselves or tried to wear a cuirass…

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    1. To explain for those confused as to why 70kg is a ridiculous amount of armour for a hoplite to wear, the global average weight for an adult male human is 62kg. Even assuming ancient Greeks were closer to the average male in the modern US , that would be 90kg.

      I am fairly sure that making soldiers carry literally their own weight just in armour and weaponry would soon see them objecting violently. (and for that matter, I highly doubt they would be able to move at all. (To put it in context, the equipment a US soldier carries into battle- including body armour- is 45kg from what I can tell.

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      1. To make a comparison, a late medieval/Renaissance man at arms would be bear around the same weight: my own replica of a late medieval harness (1460-1485 ca) is 30-40 kg, depending on which pieces I choose to wear and not counting weapons.

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      2. Former Infantryman and later tanker here. The short answer is it varies wildly, based on terrain, the kind of fight you’re in for, etc.

        The longer answer is:

        Sometimes you might be on a ruck march in garrison and you’re “only” carrying 35 pounds. Other times, you’ve got considerably more weight to move around. And it’s a very different story moving cross-terrain under load than it is to be on a hardball road. Once (this was a training exercise in the field, to be clear) I had my IOTV with my plates, my weapon, magazines, MRE, helmet, NODs, the ammo belts for the 240, the tripod for the 240 and the spare barrel.

        Weapons platoon and mortar crews (depending on caliber) also have to carry their equipment plus the mounts/baseplates wherever they’re needed.

        It hurt just taking a knee and then standing up. And that was without having my ruck on me. There’s a reason dudes in combat arms are broken in their 20s. One medical practitioner stated he hadn’t seen injuries like that outside of a professional sports team.

        Hell, there was a Drill Sergeant who had to have shoulder surgery for his arthritis . . . at the ripe old age of 30.

        A Dutch doctor did a survey of NATO tank crews and found that the loaders consistently reported shoulder injuries and the tank commanders most often came away with back and knee problems.

        There were reports of soldiers patrolling in Afghanistan with around 200 pounds of gear on them. Other times, they might pack extra ammunition and extra water, maybe an MRE in their cargo pocket and be expected to rest/work on the ground.

        Incidentally, this was also the around time that Field Grade officers and SNCOs, especially Sergeants Major, started complaining about soldiers spending too much time in the gym lifting weights and not going on the distance runs so beloved by that particular part of the Army.

        Vehicle crews might have it slightly “easier” in that regard but everything on a Bradley or a tank is heavy and probably doesn’t want to cooperate with you.

        To top it off, most soldiers in the field (and in garrison) are also performing these kinds of jobs, while running very short on sleep. I can remember seeing the sun come up and go down three times in a row and not sleeping at all. Or if you do get some sleep, it’s not consecutive. And I was far from the only one.

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      3. This paper might be helpful https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258883795_The_History_of_the_Soldier's_Load

        finds that 55% of body weight for a marching load, and about 30% for a fighting load, is typical across history – as soon as science makes one bit of kit lighter, command loads you up with more of the other stuff to make up for it.

        Recent overloading as described below is largely the result of perverse incentives: US and UK commanders were penalised heavily for friendly combat casualties, while bearing no professional consequences whatsoever for high rates of non-combat musculoskeletal injuries, or indeed for losing wars. The result is an army made up of very heavily armoured, ineffective soldiers with chronic joint pain.

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        1. Although I broadly agree with the article, some of the numbers given there are a bit sketchy: for example, it claims that a hoplite spear only weighed 0.1 kg, which is patently absurd (I think it’s misquoting VDH). Again, the author states that a Byzantine mail shirt weighed 16 kg, which I suppose would be possible if you’re wearing two of them at the same time; he cites John Haldon, whose estimate for a mail shirt is 14 kg which is still unrealistic (and who also claims that a light shield weighed 5.5 kg, which isn’t light at all).

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    2. Very few historians have ever worn reconstructed panoply, let alone tried to fight in it. I have made a side career out of demonstrating that many of the statements they assure us are the only way things could have been are woefully incorrect. Some of the crazier notions, like hoplites fighting at 2m frontage or Van Wee’s notion of using the bottom edge of the aspis to strike, can be shown unlikely in just a few minutes with group of hoplite reenactors. There are so many aspects of hoplite combat that require you to look beyond your intuition and analogy.

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    1. Yeah, I had to laugh when I read the very second paragraph explaining already how just one blogpost “ain’t gonna cut it”. As someone whose professional (and other) texts also tend to end up much longer than originally intended, I feel a deep personal kinship with OGH 🙂

      Not complaining though, the first part was an amazing read, the type where you can enter with very little previous knowledge and exit feeling completely up to speed. Looking forward to the continuation – and also OGH’s proposal on synthesis.

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  24. Thinking of some of the series this blog has done on how stuff gets made, is there a back-of-envelope idea of how many man-hours of labor it would take to make a hoplite’s kit using the technology of the time and how often it would need replacement? Seems like that would be yet another way to approach the question of what social classes could be part of the hoplites.

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    1. As a Greek, I’ve sometimes half-jokingly wondered if there is a link between the idea that the ancient Greeks were “racially predisposed” to hoplite warfare and Jakob Philipp von Fallmerayer’s thesis that the modern Greeks are not the descendants of the ancient Greeks, but Hellenized Slavs.

      Essentially I imagine German philhellenes arriving in Greece in the 1820s, thinking that the Greek independence fighters, as descendants of hoplites, would have a natural affinity for close-order drill, then being disappointed when they turned out to be essentially bandits who didn’t like the idea of standing in neat lines to be shot at when they could snipe at the Turks from behind a convenient boulder.

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    2. Nobody can even agree on what “hoplite kit” is. Just the apsis and spear? Is the helmet and cuirass also needed? Greeves? Does it all have to be metal, or does textile count? Depending on your definition you can 10x the cost of it.

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  25. Hmm, so our estimate for Homer’s written epics is “c. 750 BC,” eh? Is that with the asterisk “large parts of the written work of Homer are probably derived from oral traditions that may be a few centuries older,” or is this no longer generally held to be the case among scholars?

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    1. This is a quite complex debate, but recent scholars have in fact pushed the dating further forwards in time; the classicist Peter Gainsford (partly based on evidence from van Wees, as it happens) strongly argues for a date of composition in the 600s BC

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      1. Well, there’s the separate questions of “what is the dating of the written composition” and “are there older oral history fragments in there?”

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        1. That is true, and in fact Gainsford does discuss that in some detail (see especially the post “The dates of Homer” on his blog KiwiHellenist which separates composition, fixation, and dissemination).

          He argues though that the epics largely reflect the world of Archaic period Greece and that most of the earlier (and supposedly Bronze Age) elements may be false archaisms. Van Wees comes in as he shows strong parallels between warfare in the Iliad and that of his reconstruction of the 600s BC

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  26. I was convinced by Walzer’s “Just and Unjust Wars” that in a multi-polar world like Archaic Greece, there was a need for contending cities to find out which would win a war to the death without actually fighting to the death. I.e. if Athens and Sparta fight in a way which kills a big percentage of their armies, Thebes and Elis will instantly invade and conquer them. So the “ritual” element is not religion or honor, but an attempt to have a form of combat which lets you know who won, but doesn’t kill significant numbers of participants.

    So a “push of war” might be the means.

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  27. War is by its nature absolute, so any assertion of its being ritualized and limited and rules-based always seems extremely dubitable to me. Still, it’s not totally impossible.

    But who in their right mind ever believed that “othismos” meant a literal shoving match? Like, do these people have any idea what war is? It’s people trying to kill each-other with sharp pointy things. You don’t let a man who’s trying to kill you with sharp pointy things get close to you if you can help it.

    One does wonder how the orthodox view survived at all, especially the English variant.

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    1. Historically, war is most often not absolute, but fought for limited aims (e.g., the capture of Silesia, not the destruction of the Hapsburg Empire) and with a clear mutual understanding of what the rules are concerning topics such as treatment of women and prisoners, truces, treatment of enemy property, etc.

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      1. In the same way the Second World War was fought over the fate of the Danzig corridor, and the First World War was fought over, IIRC, history textbooks in Serbian schools?

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        1. No, in the same way that the Prussians did not seek to dictate the post-war French regime after the Franco-Prussian War, or the British in the Crimean War did not seek the overthrow of the Tsar. Hitler, however, did seek to destroy the Polish state as part of a major reordering of Europe and the Allies did seek the destruction of the Nazi regime.

          The Austrians admittedly did seek to enforce major policy changes on Serbia. But forcing policy changes, not amounting to elimination of the state, on a very minor power can still be considered a limited aim, one which probably would have been achieved had other powers not sleepwalked into a continental or even global war.

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    3. “War is by its nature absolute, so any assertion of its being ritualized and limited and rules-based always seems extremely dubitable to me.”

      War is extremely rules-based and limited in the modern world! Look at all the taboos around “don’t shoot prisoners” and “don’t fire on buildings marked with the Red Cross” and so on!

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      1. At this point one thinks irresistibly about all those accounts of the Russians torturing and killing prisoners and deliberately bombing hospitals in Ukraine and Syria.

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        1. Though even bad-faith actors generally are not acting in an unlimited manner (though eg some of the theaters of WWII get pretty close). Russia is not nuking Ukraine. Most Ukrainian POWs don’t get executed. Of course that isn’t just the pure goodness of Putin’s heart. For instance if you killed all POWs, you wouldn’t have anyone to swap for captured Russians. But there are plenty of social contexts in history in which prisoner swaps are rare or non-existent. Even violators of norms are often still shaped by them.

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        2. Does one really do that? Why? Is one under the impression that “look this person has broken the rule” is proof that the rule does not exist? Does one also think that there is no such thing as a speed limit in the UK because one saw someone driving at 75mph on a motorway?

          That would be a very strange thing for one to do.

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    4. “War is by its nature absolute, so any assertion of its being ritualized and limited and rules-based always seems extremely dubitable to me.”

      There are cultures around today that engage in ritual competitions instead of combat. Africa and the more remote parts of Australia–areas where resources are very limited, it must be admitted–spring to mind.

      For that matter, much of the Cold War was ritualized and limited and rules-based–we intentionally engaged in war games and the like in place of full-scale global combat, because the consequences of NATO and the USSR engaging in combat would have been the end of civilization. For one thing, it’s cheaper–if I withdraw troops from my boarder because you demonstrated, via war games, that you’d win, we both avoid a lot of dead soldiers AND our soldiers retain their training.

      Sieges were often this as well. The army needed to be large enough to actually win should there be a fight, but at various points in history siege methods were so superior to anti-siege methods that opposing a siege was suicidally stupid. There were often gestures made towards defense–enough to satisfy one’s superiors that one had done one’s best–but in the end, the conclusion was foregone.

      I would say that MOST war in history has been ritualized and limited and rules-based–for every minute of combat you have a week of marching. The goal is to demonstrate strength to the point where only the suicidally stupid or total morons would actually engage in combat. Remember, the goal of war is not mindless slaughter, it’s to achieve some aim, and that holds true at all levels. Achieving that aim by scaring the enemy into submission is often cheaper than killing them (though it must be remembered that this is not universally true).

      “You don’t let a man who’s trying to kill you with sharp pointy things get close to you if you can help it.”

      First, this is a VERY modern take on combat. It’s based on the prevalence of firearms, where you can reach out and touch someone without them being able to do the same to you. Back in the age of shock weapons you only had a sharp pointy thing too, and the only way for you to use your sharp pointy things was to get within range of THEIR sharp pointy things. So combat inherently came with risks. The truism in sword-fighting is you can’t attack without opening yourself up to some extent. So you necessarily have to take risks. Otherwise we’re back to ritual demonstrations or First Systems Warfare, because no one will get within striking distance.

      Second, you can’t simply stop someone who wants to stab you. I’ve seen any number of people who think “Bigger is better”, right up until they get absolutely destroyed. There are ways to by which you can defend yourself against my sharp pointy thing long enough to insert your sharp pointy thing somewhere I really don’t want it to be, regardless of how much I try to avoid that situation. Personal favorite move is to block the first shot with your shield (I am a reactive fighter in general) and let the contact between shield and shaft guide you in for the kill. You have near-total control over their spear that way. It’s a risk–they may hit you–but not a huge one. (The bigger risk is if they know how to use the shaft for leverage, at which point you get a lesson in flying in armor. Landing’s fun.) There are a bunch more techniques, though; see literally any combat manual from the age of shock weapons.

      Also remember armor. The point of armor is to stop your sharp pointy thing from damaging me. The risks associated with being stabbed may not be all that great–if you stab me in armor all you’ll do is blunt your spear. If you do hit me, well, you cut my arm. Annoying, but it’s going to take a while before I bleed out and I may not feel it until then. Again, modern takes on combat–where bullets can indeed pierce armor–are not great for modeling ancient combat.

      Reply

      1. “Sieges were often this as well. The army needed to be large enough to actually win should there be a fight, but at various points in history siege methods were so superior to anti-siege methods that opposing a siege was suicidally stupid. There were often gestures made towards defense–enough to satisfy one’s superiors that one had done one’s best–but in the end, the conclusion was foregone. ”

        Err what kind of sieges where and when and for what reason? Seems to me you are maybe conflating forts vs cites or towns. Those former might well surrender with just some pro forma skirmishing or defense, the latter however often chose defense even hopeless defense (and who assumes that from the onset all the time?) and why not what was the point off building defenses?

        “I would say that MOST war in history has been ritualized and limited and rules-based”

        That strikes me as wide of the mark. Care to refine that somewhat.

        Reply

        1. The commenter may be thinking of C18 sieges of towns, where formal siege tactics were predictable and difficult to oppose (open first trench line, sap forward, open second line, sap forward, open third line, emplace battery, create breach …). The defence was about creating delay. So the convention was that the defence could honourably surrender once the breach was practicable. They were usually allowed to leave with their personal arms.

          Reply

          1. Notably the other side was that if you did *not* surrender you would be subject to sack. So there was a twofold incentive do so.

        2. “Err what kind of sieges where and when and for what reason?”

          I mean, that’s rather the critical issue, isn’t it? Siege tactics changed over time and at different geographies, meaning that sometimes the attacker had an overwhelming advantage and sometimes the defender did. Someone investing a castle in the 1300s was in for a bad time. But, on the other hand, a town being invaded by Rome not only had little real hope of success (barring an army coming to save them), but also had to deal with the fact that the city would become a complete hellscape with the officers waiting three days before even trying to mitigate it.

          That’s why I said “at various points in history”. It’s a complicated subject, but there were times when the ability to overcome defenses sufficiently outmatched the ability to defend that the only options the soon-to-be-besieged army realistically had were capitulation or total destruction.

          “…and why not what was the point off building defenses?”

          Smaller-scale threats. Bandits, outlaws, even wild animals. Pigs in particular could be a real problem. Plus there could be cultural reasons–social or even legal (“those within the walls of the city” sorts of laws). It’s a grave error to believe that the only threats cities faced in the past were from armies, and it’s an equal error to assume that ancient governments exerted control over geographic areas the same way we do. See the life of St. Moses the Black (my favorite saint these days) for example.

          But there’s also what Peter T said. You don’t necessarily need to win; you just need to not lose long enough for a relief army to show up. If you can, it’s worth the risk (sometimes). If not, the mere presence of siege engines is sufficient to warrant surrender.

          “Care to refine that somewhat.”

          A huge part of war in the past was demonstrating strength rather than actually attacking. You didn’t need to actually attack the enemy to deny them room to maneuver, you merely needed to be sufficiently strong and in the proper places to force the enemy to deal with you.

          For example, blockades. Could the French have broken out of the British blockades in the Napoleonic Wars? Yes, obviously–obvious because it happened, several times, with forces strong enough to shift the balance of power in entire theaters (Villeneuve’s escape and the French squadron at Mauritius for example). But the British squadrons didn’t need to actually fight the French to keep them in place most of the time. They merely needed to demonstrate that they were strong enough to make breaking out too great a risk.

          Another example is the trenches in WWI. One reason they had trenches is to present sufficient force to make attacking tricky–an area without trenches would be an open invitation to attack. For every attack there were weeks of much lower levels of activity, or even inactivity (or, on one memorable occasion, football). You had to have sufficient people there to present a realistic threat, but most of the trench network on a given day didn’t see a lot of combat. The point was to prevent the enemy from engaging in combat by presenting a strong enough front to make attacking a bad option. Posturing, in other words. Posturing with teeth, sure, but posturing.

          This is the entire premise of the Cold War. Much–certainly not all, but much–of the activity was weapons tests, weapons construction, and war games. If it had gone beyond that civilization would have ended, which neither side wanted. So they were satisfied with, again, posturing. Both sides knew the other had Second Strike Capability, which was sufficient to drive strategy for several generations without ever being used.

          As I said above, for every minute of battle you had long, long stretches of marching and maneuvering. Part of the point of that was to get people to the battle in a pre-combustion-engine era, but part was also pushing the enemy to where you wanted them. Simply existing in the same region was often enough to limit enemy maneuver options or even make a defeat inevitable.

          For example, Sherman’s march to the Sea in the Civil War did some disruption of military supplies, but ultimately was not an attack against any sort of armed force. It was, to be brutally honest, a terror campaign designed to force the Confederate Army to take the actions Grant wanted them to.

          Reply

      2. “I would say that MOST war in history has been ritualized and limited and rules-based–for every minute of combat you have a week of marching.”

        Were the Peloponnesian War, the Punic Wars, the Napoleonic Wars or the Taiping revolt “ritualized, limited and rules-based”?

        After all, the soldiers in those wars all spent far more time marching than shooting or stabbing each other. If the answer is “Yes”, I don’t think it tells us very much about pre-classical Greek warfare to say it was “ritualized, limited and rules-based”. If “No”, then I don’t know what you mean by the term “ritualized, limited and rules-based”.

        How is “ritualized” war meant to be different from non-ritualized war?

        Reply

        1. Perhaps there is a reason why you note exactly the first theee wars: each of them represented a clear break with the past. Peloponnesian war was even started with irregularly heavy reprisal against Mytilene, which defined the later course of action. Thucydides makes it quite clear that Mytilene was a breakdown of norms. The Sack of Magdebug in the early phase of Thirty Years’ War is a good parallel, representing breakdown of previous norms and descent into much deeper violence.

          The Punic Wars developed into a war of extermination, but only slowly: Gaius Lutatius Catulus tried to end the First Punic war with a rather limited peace, and even a generation later, Cato the Elder needed to work really heavily to get the Romans to approve the final destruction of Carthago.

          Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were very different from the 18th century style of warfare exactly because they represented a breakdown of norms. The aims of war became much more total, as both sides imposed their desired social systems in the areas they conquered. In fact, this is exactly why Bernadotte, whom Ajay and I discussed last week, could become a king: the decades of warfare had really loosened a lot of norms. However, the breakdown of such norms didn’t mean that they didn’t exist previously.

          I really don’t know about the Taiping Rebellion so much that I could meaningfully commence on it.

          Reply

          1. And indeed, between the Thirty Years War (the last of the major wars of religion) and the Napoleonic Wars (the first revolutionary war), Europe experienced a large number of wars fought for limited aims and in accordance with traditional and established practices and rules. We call them “minor wars”: the War of the Spanish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years War etc. And again, between 1815 and 1914, with the proponents of established order back in control, Europe again experienced “limited, ritualized” wars: the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, etc. The unlimited, or at least less limited, wars are historical anomalies which occur at infrequent intervals.

          2. I really don’t know about the Taiping Rebellion so much that I could meaningfully commence on it.

            I don’t know a *ton* about it, or China/East Asia in general, but as far as I know it was an ideological war, like the French Revolutionary wars or the Thirty Years’ War or for that matter like the Russian Civil War or the Vietnam War or the Central American civil wars of the last century, so you’d expect it to be a bloody, total-war type of affair, which it was.

        2. “How is “ritualized” war meant to be different from non-ritualized war?”

          There are two fundamental problems with this comment. First, it presupposes that these are two distinct things. Second, it presupposes that the answer is consistent.

          Regarding the first problem, the issue you will run into is that outside some very, very extreme cases (genocide on the one hand, purely ritualized non-combat on the other) what you’ll find is a mixture of the two. 99% of the time blockading Brest the British Royal Navy didn’t have to fight, they just had to go exist in the area. But they did occasionally fight. The precise point at which posturing becomes actual violence isn’t going to be something one can define, because the instant one can do so one’s enemies will use that to destroy you. War is anti-inductive, and while there are certain principles and common concepts there’s a lot that isn’t going to be definable because you have sentient beings actively trying to ensure it’s not definable.

          As for the second, culture is going to play a HUGE role in this. Take the Battle of Helm’s Deep–fictional, but it’s Tolkien, the principles are based on reality. The enemies of Rohan weren’t routed because they were being murdered en mass; they were routed because 1) a heroic person wielding an ancient sword spoke with them (note the ritual here), 2) the sudden appearance of a bunch of trees, and 3) someone blowing a horn. (The army appearing at their rear was more or less irrelevant to the orcs’ state of mind.) Except for the unexpected landscaping, this is all cultural. Someone showing up in Ukraine with a sword, however old, simply isn’t going to do much. You can say “Because we have better weapons and armor!” but I’ll reply “Yes, exactly.” The sword and the horn were symbolic, and our culture lacks those symbols.

          But note that we don’t lack symbols as such. Russia’s push to Kyiv early in the war is another example of this. It was a lot of fighting, sure, but ultimately the goal was symbolic and ritualistic. Kyiv falling would have been a disastrous morale blow to Ukraine–possibly a fatal one–even if the government survived. The line “I don’t need a ride, I need ammunition” had no battlefield significance, but as a symbol was profoundly powerful. That line is probably responsible for as much foreign aid as anything else–it was an example of heroic bravery by our lights, and had real-world consequences, despite not blowing anything up.

          Another example is the movement of an aircraft carrier group to Israel when the current round of hostilities started. The point of the move wasn’t to provide firepower–Israel pretty obviously doesn’t care what the USA thinks right now–but to signal to the international community where the USA’s allegiances are. Sure, for that symbol to work it has to have teeth, but if they have to do much shooting they’ve screwed up rather badly. The point is the symbolic nature of the move, not the actual firepower.

          So put simply, ritualized and non-ritualized aren’t opposites. They’re intermingled elements of any strategy, campaign, battle, maneuver, or individual action.

          Reply

  28. When I reviewed The Other Greeks, AFAIK the most Hanson could bring himself to claim was that hoplites might have been “half to a third” of the free male population (pp. 207, 208, 459 et passim). On what basis do you think he got as high as 80%?

    Wish I could afford the time for a more extensive reply.

    Reply

    1. I’d need to check TOG (free male population *of Greece* or *of the poleis*? I am talking about 25% of the free population of a typical polis, even before we account for folks living outside of the poleis who don’t fight as hoplites), but that approach is 1) explicit in Beloch’s demographic figures which remain broadly accepted and 2) implicit in VDH’s presentation of the role of civic militarism in his broader writing.

      Reply

      1. Half to a third of free men within any one polis. The phrase “near-majority” comes up at some point. Much of The Other Greeks is devoted to arguing that rule by a landed minority is a good thing as long as the minority is not too small (Hanson seems to think the Spartiates were too few).

        Reply

  29. Trying again as my previous attempt failed some sort of “nonce” test (?!):

    I have two intuitive queries about the orthodox model:

    1) These guys teach at colleges, right? As a gut check on their intuition that 8kg of armor is just too much to deal with (despite soldiers fighting in heavier kit in better documented times), it never occurred to them to borrow some weight vests from the athletic department and pay some soccer players to do jumping jacks in them?

    2) How does the “ceremonial, low casualty” vision of hoplite conflict deal with Greek resistance to Persian invasion? Does it presume the Persians were also happy to fight in ritualized rugby scrums?

    Reply

    1. “As a gut check on their intuition that 8kg of armor is just too much to deal with (despite soldiers fighting in heavier kit in better documented times), it never occurred to them to borrow some weight vests from the athletic department and pay some soccer players to do jumping jacks in them?”

      It apparently never occurred to them to literally just google for the thousands upon thousands of video clips of people fighting just a-ok in armour panoplies ranging from 8-40kg (including the very same hoplite panoplies they’re talking about!).

      Here’s some as a starter for 10 (albeit at the lighter end of the panoply scale):

      https://www.instagram.com/p/DMNC1Q1MDVz/
      https://www.instagram.com/p/DMPp3FoolCa/
      https://www.instagram.com/p/DMKgM74slF0/

      “How does the “ceremonial, low casualty” vision of hoplite conflict deal with Greek resistance to Persian invasion? Does it presume the Persians were also happy to fight in ritualized rugby scrums?”

      Or, for that matter, the Celts. Or the Illyrians. Or the Thracians. Or the Scythians. Or the Phoenicians. Or the Sicilians. Or the Sardinians. Or the Colchians. Or the Phrygians. Or the Samnites. Or the Iberians. Or the Ligurians. Or the Libyans. Or the Egyptians. Or any of the countless other peoples the Greeks came into greater or lesser conflict with during the Archaic period (remember, this was the period when all of those colonies were popping up across the Med, meaning the Greeks came into contact with _a lot_ of different military traditions during this time).

      That’s saying nothing of the Greeks’ reputation as effective mercenaries, which could hardly be accomplished through the majority of your fighting population gaining experience primarily in a method of fighting that literally no-one else uses and would be deeply ineffective against anyone you try to use it against.

      That isn’t to say that ritualised warfare can’t coexist within a broader tradition of ‘traditional’ warfare (e.g. we see this in Nahua flower wars which are reserved solely for other Nahua states)…but it seems highly implausible for this to be the _primary_ method of warfare (note that in the Nahua example, the ritual warfare element was a limited part of a much broader tradition…and the ritual element involved much the same sort of fighting).

      Reply

  30. I’ve played rugby and I don’t think the scrum idea makes much sense. In a proper scrum both sides grip one another and the opposing scrum tightly, they need to get low to properly apply force and this is more important for the back ranks, and it is a technical movement that needs training. Without these elements the scrum will collapse and everyone will end up on the ground. I don’t think men with a spear and shield facing off against other armed men could do it without falling over, let alone an entire line of men.

    Reply

  31. I will continue to argue that your notion of shield wall formation does not reflect how shields work in combat.

    The issue is WHEN in combat. I’ve been in both extremely loose and extremely tight formations in reenactment combat; they’re different tools for different times. The thing you have to remember about battle is that even well-trained, strong men will wear out in about five minutes, and how battles progress reflects that.

    If you want to inflict maximum pain, you go tight. You need very, very little room to thrust a spear into someone, and standing shoulder-to-shoulder means you can physically punch through a line (or steam-roll them), or stop someone trying to punch through your line. Please don’t tell me this doesn’t work, I’ve been on both sides of it, as victor and loser. Done right, it works–even in reenactment settings you can do a lot of damage (my shoulder will never be the same). I’ve swung a sword while my shield-brothers were so close we maneuvered by physical contact rather than orders, hard enough to put a good dent into a 12 gauge steel helm, and I’ve got my share of dents to show my opponents were no less able to deal damage. Spears are much easier in those conditions.

    The enemy, of course, will close ranks to receive the charge. Or even worse, open ranks to receive it. Learned that lesson the hard way–thought I was doing good, breaking through the line, until I ended up flying backwards and taking about three polearms to the face and chest. The difference between “broken line” and “kill pocket” is how well the enemy receives you.

    (As for training, it doesn’t take as much as you’d think. Consistently training for about 30 minutes a week for a few months is enough to do the simple maneuvers, and build up to some more complicated ones. My unit was small, but we were able to pull off some pretty complex stunts, like rapidly reversing our direction. Partially it’s about building muscle memory; more importantly, it’s about building trust that your shield-brother will do what he’s supposed to do.)

    The issue is, as I said above, you can do that for about five minutes. After that, you’re spent for a while. So what happens is these close-ordered attacks occur in pulses. In between pulses the two sides are going to be further apart, and in those situations a looser order is more practical. You want folks to be able to rotate in and out, you want to be able to respond to attacks from unexpected quarters (MUCH harder to do when you’re so close you can barely move), you want to be able to send skirmishers and sling-users and archers out front to harass the enemy. Plus, you don’t necessarily want the enemy to know where you’re going to push hardest until right before you do. All of that requires a looser order with larger areas between people. Not huge areas–you don’t want weak points–but enough room to move about more freely.

    This model matches what I’ve read in historical and Tolkien’s works on attacks. You have a lot of people doing a lot of nothing, or doing a lot of maneuvering, with occasional bursts of extremely high-intensity fighting. Then you go back into a looser formation so you can catch your breath.

    Reply

  32. Sir, sir! Great post, really enjoyed it, but much more importantly, have you seen the Nova Roma game coming from the creators of Kings and Castles? I really hope you do an analysis of the realism of the simulation, particularly the new “flowing water” mechanics to see if they imitate well the natural forces that create cities.

    Reply
  33. Pingback: Four Theses on the Hoplite Wars – Book and Sword

  34. Not an historian but this idea of burly free western farmers that makes agreement to buy an extensive kit of clothes to push against each other during the summer is kind of quirky… Not only it smells of “Fremen’s Mirage” but Greeks had sports to cover for the same “manly need”, all the same sweat and testosterone minus the clothes. If warfare was so ritualistic and “show offy” what was the need to invent the Olympics?

    Reply

    1. ritualistic wars are still wars, where people get killed.
      Yes it would be ideal if we can solve our political differences through sport games if possible. But in case one side disagree with the result, having an army in armors is still better than a group of naked athletes.

      Reply

  35. There is no stagnation in hoplite debate, experiements are created on both sides (sadly heretics are less known on YT and not all kind of experiments being conducted, yet. There is only great laziness and ethnocentrism, You should find Greek, Italian, French, Turkish sources. Maybe look for the Russian opinions. I know Nefedkin is still researching and writting about ancient warfare. Then You’ll find there are other possibilities than look on two camps. It’s ridiculous I always thougt academic world is international not Anglo-Saxon.

    Reply
  37. Pingback: Collections: Hoplite Wars, Part II: Hoplite Equipment, Hoplight or Hopheavy? – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

  38. A note on rugby scrums style battles as low casualty warfare: a men’s rugby scrum has eight men on each side and could not realistically have more. Pack weights (the weight of the eight men put together) are currently hovering around 900kgs but maxed out in the 2010s at around a metric ton each. A ton of pressure on the front and back simultaneously is dangerous. Players are not allowed to play in the front row of a scrum without specific training and back and neck injuries are a huge threat for front rowers. There’s a great scrum in the Women’s World Cup Final between England and Canada where England and the Canadian second row are both moving forwards and one of the Canadian front row is lifted fully off her feet into the air by the forces involved and women’s packs tend to weigh in at a mere 650ish kgs.

    A battle made up of thousands of men pushing on each other would not be a low casualty one. The main mechanism of death would be crushing and we would have heard about it.

    Reply

  39. This may be late and I can’t get a reply to appear directly in the comments here it would make much sense. So @Bret Devereaux:

    “The Roman system was unusual and we know it was unusual because in 212 the Roman Republic mobilized approximately 185,000 men, something no Greek polis could do, something no alliance of Greek poleis could do, something that even if you pooled every polis in mainland Greece you could not do.”

    This strikes me as not an apples to apples comparison. If you are comparing Rome to a Polis it seems correct to use Rome when it was just a city state and at best in a time where it was simply consolidating its near about, circa 500 BC or there about. If just Greek Polis that are engaged in hegominc expansion the comparison still seems forced. On the eve of the Peloponnese war the the Athenian experiment with Arche is really only 20 years old and if you want to force it to 477 BC you still don’t have 50 years. At 212 BC you are more than a century after 338 BC for Rome where it was perhaps more comparable to Sparta or Athens in 433 BC. Sparta is probably finalized in its scope of maximum hegemony at that time. Well sans either massive internal reforms that it resisted/had no desire for or the option of being a Persia lackey (which was not stable) it really had no growth capacity. This is of course a stark contrast to Rome of circa 338 BC. Athens is an unfinished question I think. Had Pericles opted for the clearly better choice of backing Corinth (I would argue clear now and than as well and seemingly it was to demos as well) Its not clear to me Athens might not have found some way to coalesce the Arche into some into some larger state formation. (I realize Scheidel disagrees and I grant the democracy in particular was a hurdle Rome never had to deal with).

    Reply

  40. I am of course biased, but Roel and I specifically sought a way past the impasse between the Orthodox and Heretic positions. (As a proud Heretic, I prefer this to heterodox) Please see: Konijnendijk, Roel / Bardunias, Paul M. (2022) “The Face of Battle at Plataiai.” In Andreas Konecny and Nicholas Sekunda (eds.), The Battle of Plataiai, 479 BC (Phoibos Verlag: Vienna, 2022) pp. 211-242

    https://www.academia.edu/77994737/The_Face_of_Battle_at_Plataiai

    or watch this:

    https://youtu.be/Sjypd4iSTnw?si=E1qQMFtqHLYMmMAd

    When we understand that the classical phalanx and the Archaic hoplite formation are just flavors of shield-wall and eliminate some of the assertions on both sides that can be demonstrated to be unlikely through testing on large groups of men in recreated panoply, the mechanics of combat are not all that different between the two.

    Reply

      1. Thank you. I am greatly enjoying this series. I have a pair of chapters coming out that expand on this. I’ll let you know when the books are published and I get copies. One of them specifically focuses on taking statements made by historians and testing them. It has been instrumental in allowing me to weave a synthetic narrative from what works from both sides. So much of the intuitive understanding of hoplite combat fails when tested. Othismos was completely misunderstood by its proponents, which facilitated it being written off by its opponents. It is nothing like a rugby scrum. More like a knife fight in a mosh pit where crowd on crowd pushing could emerge sometimes. And no, you do not get crushed to death. We have done this many times with opposing crowds of men and no one was crushed due to their aspides.

        Reply

  41. “To my mind – and I too am essentially a bystander in this argument – the current place the debate has settled is not ideal, because it has not resolved, it has merely stopped.”

    The debates are ongoing, they’ve just moved on from academic-historian circles; the community of reenactors, experimental archaeologists and living-historians has been hashing this out for the last decade or two, but largely gets ignored in academic circles for not having the proper paper-credentials. Even academics like Dr. Paul Bardunias, who comes at the topic from the inter-disciplinary angle of studying swarm-behavior and applying that study to the battlefield, get written off for having a PhD that isn’t explicitly a history degree, i.e. “he’s just that bug-guy who likes larping in his backyard”.

    There are some academics starting to pay attention to it, Roel actually even came out and joined us at an event in Greece in the summer of 2024, but what we’ve largely concluded through reconstructions and testing is that both the old orthodox and new heretic models are deeply flawed. The heterodox argument did a great job picking apart flaws in the orthodox theory, but inserted in its place some equally absurd and unrealistic alternatives. We’ve generally come to our own synthesis which has some aspects from both. Very few academics seem willing to even hear us out though, and often dismiss us as soon as they see their own views being criticized by someone ‘below’ them.

    Reply
  42. Pingback: Collections: Hoplite Wars, Part IIIa: An Archaic Phalanx? – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

  43. You wrote: “the evidence might well suggest (indeed, I’d argue it does) that on some points, we ought to be ‘mixing and matching’ or ‘splitting the difference’ Indeed, this is, in my view, some of the most fertile ground for productive synthesis: these ‘schools’ do not need to remain ‘pure.’ “

    In my work as a scientific editor, I spend a surprising amount of time teaching my authors that the “scientific binary” — the belief that the answer is always A or B, and never A+B — is generally inappropriate. On the contrary, if two schools of thought both have compelling evidence to support them, the real answer is likely to be “a mixture of both”. Think of it as looking at the two sides of a coin: if you only look at one side, you only see half of the picture. There’s a formal name for this: a dialectic (thesis/antithesis/synthesis). As you note at the end of your essay, synthesis is what’s required here.

    Interestingly, the debate over gradual vs. sudden adoption of new strategy and tactics sounds a lot like the old debate in ecology about gradual evolution versus Niles Eldridge’s and Steven Jay Gould’s punctuated equilibrium (sudden bursts of change that disrupt the slower, steadier pattern of change). My take is that both forms of evolution undoubtedly coexist, possibly in different places at the same time, and perhaps that’s what happened with the hoplites. One can imagine a a literal survival of the fittest form of social evolution: warriors survived because their preferred approach made them more likely to survive (simple bad or good luck also undoubtedly played a role), and others who wanted to survive emulated them. The more successful the idea, the farther and faster the emulation would spread.

    Reply

    1. I am a biologist, and as Patrick can attest to, I have been running experiments on these guy at hoplite reenactment gatherings for a decade now. My guinea pigs, or better Myrmidons as I am an entomologist, have been so great to work with. Experimentation requires reduction into elements to the point that it can sometimes no longer be obvious what question I am asking and the need to keep them naive means that they are often in the dark, but have been such good sports. As Patrick noted, we reenactors are largely beyond this debate because we have seen what works and what doesn’t. I have been advising history graduate students behind the scenes for years, so this is slowly filtering out to them. At the end of the day the historians will always be the final arbiter on these issues, I see our role as providing context in the form of a true understanding of what happens on battlefields.

      There are so many concepts from biology that can be applied to hoplite study as long as you account for the non-genetic inheritance. I constantly think in terms of homology and homoplaisy, or apomorphy and plesiomorphy. So many of the biggest sticking points between the two sides disappear when you understand how groups can be self-organized (which is my real field). We need more hard scientists interested in ancient warfare.

      Reply
  44. Pingback: Collections: Hoplite Wars, Part IIIb: A Phalanx By Any Other Name – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
  45. Pingback: Intermission: Battle Pulses – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
  46. Pingback: Battle Pulses – A Assortment of Unmitigated Pedantry - intotunes.com

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