This is the third part of our four-part series (I, II) discussing the debates surrounding ancient Greek hoplites and the formation in which they (mostly?) fought, the phalanx. Last week, we looked at how the equipment which defined the hoplite – hoplite (ὁπλίτης), after all, means ‘equipped man’) – and how it weighs in on the debate.
And what I expressed last time is that I found the ‘strong’ versions of both the orthodox and heterodox arguments uncompelling. The notion that the hoplite was effectively an ultra-encumbered turtle who couldn’t fight outside of a close huddle simply doesn’t stand up when comparing hoplite equipment – heavy, but not extremely so, somewhat constrained, but not particularly so – to other historical heavy infantry equipment. At the same time, the heterodox vision, where hoplites are as at home in open-order or fluid skirmishing as they are in the confines of a shield wall doesn’t hold up either. You can fight that way with hoplite equipment, but the panoply is terribly adapted for it while being very well adapted for the context of a shield wall, suggesting to me that this was always its primary intended purpose (albeit with a meaningful amount of flexibility built in).
We’re now going to carry those observations forward to discuss tactics. To the degree that the board public understands the hoplite debates, they understand it as a debate over tactics and often reduce it to the question, “did they shove?” But there are quite a few more tactical questions here than simply the question of the nature of the othismos. As with some of the previous questions, a lot of these questions are linked but weakly so, meaning it is possible to a degree to ‘mix and match’ without adopting a position that is incoherent. So we’ll begin by outlining what I view as the main differences here and also some of the significant elements of those positions I see as meaningfully unsatisfactory.
As we’ll see chronology also matters here: while the orthodox school generally imagines hoplite warfare to have emerged all at once (a position we’ve already seen can no longer be sustained given the archaeological evidence), reached tactical maturity in the phalanx relatively quickly and then remained rigid and relatively unchanged until the end of the fifth century, the heterodox school instead argues for a lot more chronological change.
Now, I wanted to do the discussion of tactics in a single post so that we could get into some of the interesting implications for polis society more quickly, but there really are too many moving parts and I realized – at the point where I had run out of most of the week, written 7,000 words and barely gotten through the Archaic – that this post needed to be split. The split is, as a result, horribly awkward.
This week, we’re going to look at the ‘strong’ orthodox hoplite model (and dismiss it) and then at parts of the ‘strong’ heterodox model (which we’ll also find unsatisfying, but not entirely without value), before finally working through what a ‘proto-phalanx‘ of the late 600s or 500s might have looked like, thinking in terms of comparative models and what little evidence we have.
Then next week we’ll turn to the ‘mature’ phalanx of the classical period, looking at how we might imagine it functions – tactics, ‘standard’ depth, role of supporting arms, etc. – along with the broader question of defining what exactly the phalanx is (and why I think a more flexible definition is more useful).
Since we’re leaving the definitional work to next week we’re going to avoid calling much of anything a ‘phalanx’ this week, even though these two posts are fundamentally about the phalanx. One of the things I view as a real problem in this debate are the hard definitional boundaries imposed by both sides, which derive from an overly rigid vision – Konijnendijk’s ‘Prussians’ again – of how the phalanx functioned. The problem is that while the orthodox insist that anything called a phalanx must fit that rigid (and as we’ll see, quite implausible) model, heterodox scholars often insist that anything that does not fit the model is not a phalanx in order to push the date for ‘the phalanx’ back. In my view it is well past time to let the evidence lead the definition rather than the other way around – the phalanx is what the phalanx does, not how we define it – so we’ll lead with the evidence and revisit the definitional scrum only at the end.
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Let Us Shove Off
As we’ve noted – nearly ad nauseam at this point – the orthodox and heterodox ‘camps’ differ both in their understanding of the chronology by which something called ‘the phalanx’ developed, but also their sense of the mechanics of what something called ‘the phalanx’ was and how it functioned. I think both tactical models are substantially flawed. I should note while putting this together Paul Bardunais linked his own synthesis (presented here in video form) which I hadn’t seen developed in full. It is not exactly my synthesis, but it is actually pretty close (I think it is a perfectly good, defensible, plausible model, which is more than I can say for the ‘strong’ models we’re about to discuss) as we’ll see and it is good to see someone working on a synthesis position.
One crucial difference between the orthodox and heterodox models of hoplite warfare is that orthodoxy generally imagines a tactically stable (or stagnant) phalanx: it doesn’t change after emerging and rapidly reaching ‘mature’ form. By contrast, the heterodox model assumes significant development over time. Now I do want to treat the evidence for tactics in the Archaic and Classical periods separately, because as we’ve already seen, I think the heterodox school is fundamentally correct in assuming meaningful change over time, but first I think it is worthwhile to dispense with the orthodox tactical vision, at least in its narrowest form. We ought to do that in the beginning because – since the orthodox view is that the phalanx is tactically stagnant – this model is supposed to be valid in every period. So rather than repeat myself, we can deal with it once here.
The modern version of orthodox hoplite tactics comes directly from The Western Way of War and so that is the ‘strong’ version of the model I will focus on here. The orthodox vision is that in a phalanx formation, hoplites were densely spaced (file widths of 45-60cm, shoulder-to-shoulder), they advanced at a run and then collided at speed with the two formations smashing together at full tilt. Then, the orthodox suppose the othismos was a kind of rugby-scrum style shoving match where the formations tried to push through each other (while also striking over and beneath shields) and as gaps and tears formed in the line from this pushing action, one phalanx would fall apart. Such fighting naturally fully excluded light infantry and cavalry. Moreover, as we’ve seen chronologically, the orthodox camp argues this form of warfare developed swiftly in the 8th and early 7th century and remained pure and unchanged from then to the late fifth century, a long period of relatively static hoplite warfare.
That vision exists within a sort of assumed framework, particularly among earlier scholars, as Roel Konijnendijk notes in his book,1 that derives more from early modern gunpowder warfare than from ancient warfare: there is an assumption of rigid command and control, supported by both training in arms (that is practice with weapons as opposed to just fitness training) and drill (that is, practice moving in unison) of a sort that is, bluntly put, not really attested in our sources until the late Classical period (if even then). Victor Davis Hansen’s work, coming later out of the Face of Battle school instead emphasizes the amateur citizen-soldier nature of hoplites (and thus doesn’t really assume lots of drill or practice) but keeps the rigid tactical system.
This vision is, frankly, nuts. No other shield wall behaves this way, shoving in a mass rugby scrum. It is physically possible – these presses have been demonstrated, it will not necessarily crush the men in the middle – but it cuts against human psychology in combat (humans tend not to want to stay in the ‘danger zone’ of enemy weapons – called ‘measure’ – for very long) and more important against the sort of casualty figures we get, which suggest losses for victors in hoplite battles could be relatively low and thus most casualties occurred after the rout.2 If this kind of shoving were normal, we’d expect knives and daggers, not spears, to be the weapon of choice (and I should note that while Greek swords are generally on the short side, a xiphos is not a knife or a dagger) and one man with a knife pressed at the front could make a terrible mess very quickly as he can easily stab over the shields of his enemies into the neck from the side where even the Corinthian helmet offers less than perfect protection. Indeed, notably, something like a combat dagger isn’t even a standard element of the hoplite’s kit (rare to see them in artwork) and won’t be a standard piece of equipment in the Eastern Mediterranean until the early Roman imperial period (by which point the Romans have fallen in love with a devilish dagger from Spain they call a pugio).3
Crucially, as heterodox scholars have been pointing out for decades now, nothing in the source tradition requires us to interpret othismos (a term that is not used in every or even most hoplite battles!) this literally: plenty of cultures describe ‘presses’ and ‘pushes’ of infantry that are not literal shoving. At no point does any source clearly describe the othismos as literal shoving; instead it is used to mean what we might term ‘coming into contact’ or ‘shock’ (e.g. Hdt. 7.225.1, 9.62.2, Xen. Anab. 5.2.17, etc.etc.), that is, two formations moving into melee range, or in the sense of a given ‘push’ of effort to achieve victory – we use the same phrase metaphorically of infantry assaults with guns that don’t involve anyone getting within 50 yards of a shoving match. While we start to see lines of men in Greek artwork, seemingly in close-order, as early as the 650s, we never see obvious scenes of mass shoving or even a lot of ‘combat grappling’ (it is hard to grapple with one hand secure in a two-point grip on a shield).4 It is striking that the orthodox school in its modern incarnation is thus arguing that the primary mode of high-status Greek hoplite warfare – the supposed shoving othismos – is both the core of experience of battle in the late Archaic and Classical Greek world and also never depicted in artwork, not even once. That is simply, to me, an unsustainable reading of the evidence.
I am struck that early modern European artwork furnishes more examples of nearly-scrum-like engagements (see below) involved in the push-of-pike, but even in the most chaotic push-of-pike scenes, soldiers are not shoving but instead have recourse to draw their swords (generally the katzbalger, which at 70-80cm is not very much larger than a xiphos or kopis) and cut with them.
One may well imagine that two shield walls coming together may have created a temporary press similar to crowd collapses or rushes that happen sometimes at overcrowded concerts and similar crowded spaces, but there’s no sign this was the intended goal. As we’ll see in a moment, I suspect rival hoplite formations probably did often collide at some speed (though not perhaps intentionally), but if they did, I would expect them to ‘accordion’ back out rather than for the men in the rear to press their friends into the points of enemy spears. Crowd crushes happen because the psychological pressure is urging people in the back to push forward but in combat the psychological pressure is urging everyone to move away from the enemy.
Given how speculative and awkward the ‘shoving’ othismos is (as opposed, as we’ll see, to othismos-as-pulse) it is a bit frustrating that it persists in many reenactment circles, presumably because – as Roel Konijnendijk once suggested to me – it is a reasonably ‘safe’ way to do a hoplite reenactment as opposed to, you know, jabbing sharp weapons at people.
Problems pile up for the orthodox model from there. The very tight shoulder-to-shoulder spacing seems quite clearly to be a product of reasoning from modern musket formations; no shock formation I know of was ever this dense (including early modern pike formations). As we’ll see in a moment, I don’t think the spacing was loose generally (> 100cm file width), but I also do not think it was ultra-tight generally (< 60cm). Since we’re not shoving, after all, we need some space to actually use our shield and weapon (though nowhere near as much space as some heterodox scholars imagine, more on that next week).
Meanwhile, the developmental timeline does not work either: hoplite equipment didn’t emerge suddenly and so the ‘mature’ all-hoplite phalanx couldn’t have done so either. Moreover, as the heterodox will frequently note, light troops and cavalry continue to appear frequently in Archaic artwork and battle scenes, often intermingled with hoplites, suggesting they still have a battlefield role. Tyrtaeus, writing in the mid-7th century describes “You light-armed men, wherever you can aim/from the shield-cover, pelt them with great rocks/and hurl at them your smooth-shaped javelins” (Fr. 11 West, trans. West), which sure implies that the light-armed have a job to do even c. 650 or so and that it involves being at least in the same zip-code as the shield wall of hoplites (since they are aiming “from the shield-cover”). And of course throwing javelins and rocks would hardly be feasible if the two opposing lines were locked in contact in a shoving match, as you’d end up hitting your own fellows as often as the enemy. So this orthodox vision will not do, especially for the Archaic.
So what will work?
The Archaic Phalanx Did Not Pine For the Fjords
Having beaten up quite a lot on the orthodox vision, I think we must now turn and beat up a bit on the heterodox vision, particularly the version developed by Hans van Wees. Now here I want to note that while the orthodox school has effectively a single vision of hoplite combat, the heterodox school can sometimes contain multitudes and so not every ‘heterodox’ scholar shares Hans van Wees’ combat model. However it is also the case that Hans van Wees is also pretty much the only scholar in print to lay out a complete model, so we have to deal with it.
And I want to begin with a fairly big reasoning problem involving some dead birds. Hans van Wees, it must be noted, is coming at the question of Greek warfare chronologically from the ‘other side’ in that his work before Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities (2004) was focused on war and violence in Homer, so he is advancing forward from the early archaic towards the classical rather than reasoning backwards from the classical towards the archaic.
Van Wees presents in Greek Warfare and again in his chapter in Men of Bronze (2013) warfare among the Dani people of the highlands of Western Papua New Guinea as a kind of ‘key’ to understand Homeric warfare and thus early hoplite warfare. He cites for this Gardner and Heider, Gardens of War: life and death in the New Guinea Stone Age (1968), the print publication of this research, but most people, if they are aware of this work will be aware of it through the famous and foundational documentary film made during that research, Dead Birds (1963), also made by Robert Gardner. The film presents an idealized vision of a single battle among the Dani people, a people living with stone-age technology (no metal working) in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, though the footage is actually a pastiche of several battles fitted together. That said, Dead Birds is essentially the only footage we have of a society waging a real life-and-death battle with contact weapons.
This is an important piece of scholarship and a crucial tool in our understanding of warfare in the past and I have been on and on so far about how I think the study of hoplite warfare would benefit from comparative evidence so you may be expecting me to praise the use of this material as a tool for understanding Greek warfare, but I cannot.
Van Wees clearly reads this warfare – and perhaps, though he does not cite it, watches the film – and sees in it things Homer is describing (remember, he is coming at this originally as a Homerist): initially massed ranks that break up into no-order open skirmishes, spear-throwing, front line fighters advancing and retreating and so on.5 The failure here is not the effort to use comparative evidence (that’s a good instinct) but the failure to ask if the comparandum – the thing being compared6 – is a good match for warfare in the Greek archaic?
And the answer just has to be ‘no, obviously not.’ They don’t have helmets, or shields, or armor, or shields, or clothing, or shields, or iron-tipped spears, or shields, or swords of any kind OR SHIELDS.
Because it pretty clearly isn’t. In this documented last phase of Dani warfare (they don’t do these battles anymore), the Dani still had an effectively stone-age level of technology, compared to iron-age Greeks. I cannot stress this enough: that is a very big difference, an enormous gap in weapons and armor capabilities which in turn comes with enormous implications for tactics. Metal – be it bronze or iron (much less steel) – is so much better a material for weapons that it significantly alters battlefield dynamics.
The Dani fight not only unarmored, but almost entirely nude and do not generally use shields in contrast to armored Greeks and Homeric heroes whose armor ‘clatters’ (ἀρᾰβεῖν, ‘to rattle, clang, clatter’ (of armor)) to the ground when slain and who regularly bear shields. In part, this is because Dani weapons are much less lethal than iron-age weapons, a point that jumps out if one actually watches Dead Birds. These men are trying to kill each other (and to not be killed) but fighting at distance it takes a lot of luck for their weapons to actually inflict lethal harm (and indeed, the casualties for these battles are very low). An arrow with a bone tip, or a spear that is merely a sharpened wooden stake can only be so sharp. Multiple individuals in Dead Birds are hit by arrows or javelins which simply do not penetrate to lethal depth (though one man does eventually die of a wound) despite striking the target. Remember these are unarmored, nude combatants who have been hit directly with a weapon. The contrast with what a sharp, iron-tipped broadhead arrow launched from a war bow can do against an unarmored target is quite stark; ancient and medieval artwork regularly show combatants with arrows transfixed in their bodies – all the way through and out the other side. As is typical with ‘first system‘ warfare, the high casualty bursts in Dani warfare come not from battles, which are generally symbolic affairs, but from ambushes and raids.
But even Homer’s heroes are clearly practicing ‘second system‘ warfare: they are laying siege to a large fortified city, with an army that Homer clearly understands to includes tens of thousands of warriors (Homer’s Catalog of Ships, 2.494-756 describes the Greeks as bringing a total of 1,186 ships; if taken literally it might imply an army of c. 150,000 though of course this is all subject to heroic exaggeration). Those warriors wield weapons – typically described by Homer as bronze, though iron is known to him – and wear body armor, helmets and carry large shields. As van Wees notes (op. cit., 166), the most prominent weapon in early Archaic artwork is actually the sword (spears are very common too), a weapon which the Dani did not have and were not capable of manufacturing with any material available to them. Homer’s own world is part of a broader military system that by 750 BC includes large, sophisticated professional armies in the Middle East (the Neo-Assyrians), employing complex siege craft (indeed, more complex than what the Greeks will have for centuries) and increasingly true cavalry. Homer seems to be blending a vague memory of late bronze age warfare (chariots! bronze weapons!) with early iron age warfare on the edge of ‘civilization.’7
So while in absolute chronology the Dani are c. 2,700 years in Homer’s future, in a kind of relative developmental chronology, their warfare is at least two thousand years in Homer’s past (taking the Greek bronze age to start very roughly at c. 3200). We might as well be trying to use footage of Roman warfare as the key to understanding the World Wars. Sure, humans and human psychology doesn’t change, so there may be some valuable insights (and indeed there are some about human psychology in combat which are useful in pushing back against the orthodox model) but we would need to be alert to everything that is different, which is a lot.
Approaching Archaic warfare through the lens of Homer, the Dani and Dead Birds sets van Wees’ entire foundation askew. That doesn’t mean everything in his model is wrong, but it throws a lot of things off.
In particular, the van Wees model of archaic hoplite warfare runs thusly: hoplites emerge in the context of a kind of warfare that looks a lot like the way the Dani fight: extended skirmishes with missiles, with individual warriors occasionally running forward to take more risk (and be more lethal) doing battle at closer range, sometimes with javelins, sometimes with contact weapons (swords and spears). This is, for van Wees, the environment in which the hoplite emerges. Hoplites initially show up carrying two spears (one for throwing), which to van Wees suggests continued participation in the skirmish (see my doubt below) rather than being pure ‘shock’ specialists. For much of the archaic, in van Wees’ model, hoplites continue to fight in open order or even no order at all, with unarmored skirmishers – poorer Greeks – mixed in with them, taking cover behind the shields of hoplites in an intermixed and largely unorganized formation.
Over time, the hoplite grows gradually in importance, with other warriors not vanishing from artwork or literature (Tyrtaeus, importantly) but being less prominent, but those lights remain scattered ‘here and there’ amidst the hoplites even well into the sixth century, with light infantry prominent on the battlefield even to the Persian Wars at the end of the archaic. Van Wees admits no regular formation for hoplites prior to the first explicit mention of such in text in 426 (Aristophanes, Babylonians, F. 72) and contends that intervals less than six feet (180cm!) would have been unworkable even in the classical period (op. cit. 185).
For van Wees, these formations do not rush into a collision and then the ‘shoving-match’ othismos, but rather charge to release the psychological pressure of the fear of battle (thus the Spartans, better disciplined, walking into contact)8 but then slow down to a stop eis doru (‘into spear’s reach’) to then jab with spears at each other with overhead strikes. Formation collapse is thus not a result of shoving, but rather the line of hoplites collapses due to psychological pressure and casualties (more the former than the latter).
And I should be clear at the outset: some of this is workable. But a lot of it is not.
As we’ve already seen, I think the idea that the hoplite panoply emerged for open-order skirmishing is simply not tenable: no one commits to open order or no-order skirmishing wearing heavy armor and using a large round shield (instead, globally, the most common ‘kit’ for this kind of fighting in metal-working societies is little or no armor, but relatively large oblong shields that can provide full coverage for the body from missiles). Van Wees insists that a hoplite could advance and retreat just as well wearing their heavier equipment as a light infantryman (op. cit., 171) and that is just…obviously not true. The man in 4-8kg of equipment (a ‘light’) is obviously going to be able to run down the man in 18kg of equipment (the hoplite). That is a real liability in a ‘Dead Birds‘ combat scenario because the ‘front’ moves so far forward and so far back: either side often mounts sudden advances which send the other side scurrying backwards – but if you are wearing 2-3 times as much kit as your mates, when your line scurries backwards to get out of range (and those lights aren’t sticking around for you, they’re unarmored and so in real danger of being instantly killed by close range javelin or arrow shots) you are going to fall behind and those enemy lights are going to catch you and all of the armor in the world isn’t going to save you in a fight outnumbered four-to-one.
And I think here is a good time to stop and talk about how hard it can be to interpret artwork and we can take for our example one of the most important pieces of evidence in all of this, the hoplite artwork on the Chigi Vase (c. 645 BC).
And the thing is almost every aspect of that evidence – which seems clear at first glance – is open to multiple interpretations, especially in the context of a two-decade old fight where no one wants to admit they might have been wrong. We can begin with the weapons: while orthodox scholars will point to a dense formation of hoplite-armed heavy infantry (with no light infantry in sight!) Hans van Wees and other heterodox scholars point to the fact that each hoplite here carries two spears, potentially with throwing loops and suggest that this two-spear configuration (which fades out by the end of the 600s) is indicative of hoplites still skirmishing.
And I want to stop for a minute and examine that point because I think it is suggestive of one of the problems I keep coming back to in these debates, because “having a throwing spear alongside a thrusting spear means you probably skirmish” is a position that cannot survive a working knowledge of ancient Mediterranean warfare much less warfare generally. After all, Roman heavy infantry famously carry two javelins (the pilum) and yet are very clearly shock heavy infantry.9 Likewise, in Spain among both Iberians and Celtiberians, a javelin (frequently of the soliferreum type, sometimes of other types) was a standard weapon to pair with the ubiquitous thrusting spear; we very frequently find them in pairs in grave deposits suggesting they were basically always carried one-and-one, yet Fernando Quesada Sanz has spent the last two decades arguing – persuasively – that Iberian and Celtiberian warriors fought frequently as ‘line infantry’ in a sort of shield wall.10 Likewise, we know that in certain periods, Gallic infantry carried javelins and no one would accuse the Gauls of generally operating like skirmish infantry. More broadly, history is full of examples of shock infantry that expected to shoot a single volley at close range right before closing into combat, be that Roman volley-and-charge with pila in the third century BC or post-gunpowder shock tactics like with the 17th century Highland Charge or the contemporary Swedish Gå–På (“go on”). It is significant that these hoplites still carry a throwing spear, but it absolutely does not make them skirmishers.
But the heterodox folks are right that there is a lot of interpretive difficulty here. Van Wees (op. cit.) wants to read the image as representing a single moment of combat, with some men fighting in the front, others holding back and still more gearing up in the ‘everyone do their own things’ Dead Birds style of battle, but of course one could just as easily read the image as chronological, showing the battle line forming up, then marching into battle (it’s a pity we don’t have more of the other side). On the other hand is the question of what to do with the fact that each battle line is shown in two ranks, one separated by a flutist, the other just by an open interval. The orthodox reading is that this is an indication of formation depth, a crucial component in their definition of the phalanx, whereas the heterodox note that there’s a separation here, no sign of shoving and so perhaps the second rank is well behind the first, a distant reserve. Everett Wheeler, in exasperation, pointed out once that contact infantry basically never fight without depth in just a single thin line and I tend to think he is right about that objection, but there is certainly no shoving othismos here.11 In terms of spacing, I read these soldiers are tightly spaced, indicating a close-order formation, but the heterodox will dismiss such closeness as artistic license, noting that soldiers are often drawn more tightly packed in artwork than they would have been in reality.
We might note that what we see here looks somewhat similar to something like the Bayeux Tapestry, which we know to depict a shield wall, but of course a chasm of time and art style separates the two, so this is hardly decisive.
For my own part, my reading of the Chigi Vase is closer to the orthodox one: those men are in close order and the second rank of each formation does imply depth even if the artist has created some space for us to see the flutist. I think what is being expressed here is a chronological sequence, showing the formation forming up, then advancing and finally coming into contact, likely showing us the moment of volley before the charge. In this sense it is actually similar to the chronological scroll of the Bayeux Tapestry, where many scenes ‘blend’ into each other. The fact that the opposing formation is also shown at least two depth suggests to me that depth – not a sequence of two widely separated lines – is intended. We’ll come back to definitions next week, but I would call the thing on the Chigi Vase a ‘phalanx’ of a sort (we’re going to see my definition of ‘phalanx’ is a bit broader than some). But as you can see everyone has their own interpretation and the chances of convincing anyone of anything – something that seems promising when you first look at it – are slim.
At the same time van Wees is fundamentally right about some things. Light infantry with bows and javelins do not go away in Archaic artwork, though they do diminish over time, from being perhaps half of all depicted figures in the early Archaic to only showing up infrequently in ones and twos by the end. That might indicate an actual reduction in their numbers, but a even a fairly casual reading of Herodotus suggests otherwise: they’re still there, but they’ve become less politically and socially important and so are less frequently depicted or described. So we need a model of archaic battle which allows for both hoplites and light infantry with ranged weapons to share the battlefield; the ‘all hoplite’ Archaic phalanx of the orthodox school will not do with the evidence.
Towards Better Models
Instead, we need to think with iron-age comparanda about how heavy infantry work in concert with lighter ranged infantry. One possible comparison, contemporary to the Greek archaic, is the warfare system dominant in the Near East at the time: Neo-Assyrian infantry working in matched pairs of shield-bearing contact infantry (with spears) and foot archers. As best we can tell (our evidence is not fantastic) these fellows were expected to set up relatively static battlefield formations, with the shield-bearers providing both protection from ranged attack (with their large but thin shields) and also from sudden cavalry or contact infantry attack (with their spears). The archers could then safely develop ‘fire.’12 This has the advantage of being contemporary and there are lines in Tyrtaeus and artwork that support the idea of light infantry sheltering behind the shields of hoplites (van Wees, op. cit., 166-77 assembles the relevant examples). But that Neo-Assyrian paired infantry was also, from what we know, a quite well organized, professional standing infantry force which is not very much like our hoplites and the status distinction ran the other way (it was archery, not contact warfare, which seems to have been the higher status way to fight) and nothing gives us the sense that hoplites are fighting with lights in something like assigned pairs save perhaps some hint for the Spartans towards the end of the Persian Wars (op. cit. 182) and even then it is hardly strong evidence. I think we need to be aware that this combat model was, certainly by the late archaic if not earlier, available to the Greeks (at least some of them), but I do not think it was how they organized.
Another potential comparandum here is the early medieval shield walls I’ve alluded to before. I thought I would have to write a whole big paragraph about this, but actually Paul Bardunais walked through exactly this comparison and reconstruction, using a lot of knowledge gleaned from reenactment and safe combat sparring experiments and I don’t think I can improve very much on it. He presents this ‘hybrid’ shield wall as having a few ranks of heavy infantry, in relatively close order (we’ll get to intervals blow) at the front forming a protective wall, with light infantry skirmishers deployed behind. They might equally be able – with some difficulty – to filter through the ranks (since ‘close order’ does not mean ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’) so your skirmishers could move out in advance to screen the shield wall or drop back behind it if pressed. In this system, the shield wall becomes a kind of ‘base’ from which skirmishers can operate and since, as noted, hoplites are still often carrying a throwing spear of their own, it can also project some amount of ranged threat.
I think this is a workable mental model, though it seems like it may need a bit of modification to fully fit the evidence. I want to be clear that isn’t me saying it is wrong. Greek artists in the archaic tend to show skirmishers intermixed with hoplites when they show them, but it is really tricky to know how to gauge that. As you are presumably seeing from the artwork I’m showing here, going from a stylized 2D representation of a formation to understanding the actual formation is tricky and artists often have to distort, compressing intervals (very frequent in medieval artwork where formations we know were not shoulder-to-shoulder get compressed until they look it, cf. also the Columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius for the same effect), removing depth (so showing only a single rank) and so on. Likewise, my reading of Tyrtaeus’ description of hoplites in battle suggests that while there are certainly light infantrymen running about, there is an offensiveness to the ideal hoplite, who doesn’t just stand under ranged fire but gets in close to the enemy that speaks to me of something closer to what Bardunais terms a ‘bludgeon’ shield wall (which he associated with the classical period).
By fierce deeds let him teach himself to fight,
and not stand out of fire – he has a shield –
but get in close, engage and stab with lance
or sword, and strike his adversary down.
Plant foot by foeman’s foot, press shield on shield,
thrust helm at helm and tangle plume with plume,
opposing breast to breast: that’s how you fight,
with the long lance or sword-grip in your hand.
– Tyrtaeus fr. 11 West (trans. M.L. West)
I might suggest a third comparative model: warfare in pre-gunpowder coastal West Africa, within the range of the tsetse fly. While north of this region, in the Sahel (too dry for the tsetse fly), warfare was dominated by cavalry, the tsetse fly’s sleeping sickness is lethal to horses and so warfare further south along the coast (along the Gulf of Guinea, down through to the Congo River) was an infantry affair. Armies here consisted of two kinds of troops, a broad (lower status) militia force which composed the bulk of the army and were armed as relatively light skirmishers and then a ‘core’ of better trained professional warriors maintained by local kings who formed the backbone of the army and were better equipped (notably including large shields, although not much body armor). A battle between two armies might begin with the engagement of skirmishers, intended to soften up the enemy force (and perhaps screen the higher status warriors). But at the right moment those higher status warriors with their large shields and contact weapons would charge forward in a dense mass, ideally scattering the enemy (who would have their own ‘base’ of heavier warriors too), thus winning the victory. Here the battlefield is open enough for the skirmishing troops to work in and around the ‘heavies’ who initially function as a defensive bulwark to the army but then at the right moment are deployed offensively.13
Now I want to immediately caveat this model (I’ve spent so much time harrying van Wees for not doing so, I can hardly not do so myself), there are some major differences. The first is armor: this West African system had large shields (generally oblong, more useful against missiles, rather than round) but not much body armor and that’s a really big difference. They do have iron weapons, so those shields are necessary to limit the lethality of the skirmish and that professional core of contact infantry might wield deadly iron swords and iron-tipped spears (just like early hoplites). However, whereas warfare in Greece (and much of Eurasia) was about control of land, warfare in this part of West Africa was frequently about control of people (really, control of laborers) and as a result there is an emphasis in the local kit on capture weapons like clubs, not because these guys are primitive, but because they want to take enemies alive as captives. Those are some pretty meaningful differences and so I am by no means suggesting sub-Sahelian West African pre-gunpowder warfare as a 1-to-1 of early Archaic hoplite warfare: instead it is just another tool we can use to think about how people might combine light infantry and something like a shield wall.
But you can see how this model might work, especially if we work in elements of Bardunais’ model as well. Towards the close of the 8th century, the wealthier Greeks begin to start equipping themselves as ‘specialist’ contact infantry (albeit still carrying perhaps a single throwing weapon), probably suggesting that ‘contact infantry’ (as distinct from skirmisher) was a role that had already existed and was generally the higher status role (as, frankly, Homer clearly seems to think). Fairly quickly these fellows end up grouped together rather than mixed up indiscriminately with the skirmishers, either in a single block as the core of the army (the ‘West African’ model) or as a line in the front of it (the ‘Early Medieval’ model), but still working hand in glove with the skirmishers. As these fellows group up, the equipment that makes the most sense in that context – what will eventually be the hoplite kit – begins to predominate.
By the late 600s, we see the last of the throwing spears carried by hoplites in artwork drop away, which suggests that these fellows are now exclusively contact infantry. That in turn suggests to me that ‘shock action’ has likely been the decisive part of the fight – or at least perceived as such – for some time. As noted above, I suspect that one retained throwing spear was not for the skirmish, but rather for volley-and-charge tactics. Instead I suspect this body of heavy infantry has been, probably for most of the 600s, been being used a bit like those West African troops: screened by the skirmishers, providing protection to them but then being expected to close, hurl spears and engage for a decisive shock action. The decline of throwing spears may indicate that the pre-shock skirmish phase is starting to be truncated to the point that it is no longer even useful to carry a second spear you aren’t going to get a chance to throw at a good target. That ‘at a good target’ may be operative: another hoplite in a shield wall is not all that vulnerable to a single thrown spear, but a skirmishing ‘light’ might be – as the pre-shock skirmish phase gets shorter and more and more focus goes into the direct clash of hoplites, that might lead to the diminished use of a simple throwing spear.14 Light infantry is still doing things, but their diminished place in artwork may represent their increasingly subordinate role, that by c. 600 or perhaps 550, an ‘offensive shield wall’ composed of hoplites is understood to be the decisive component of battle (albeit screened and supported by ‘lights’).
That model of Archaic warfare puts me more or less in the middle between the ‘strong’ gradualism of van Wees et al. and the ‘strong’ orthodox position, but I think it best fits the evidence we have.
But that leaves a fairly big pair of questions, because you’ll notice in all of this I have avoided using a very important word: the phalanx. We need to push into the classical period – where our sources at last get decent – and ask what is a phalanx and how does it function? Which is where we will turn next week.
- Classical Greek Tactics (2017)
- On which, see Krentz, “Casualties in Hoplite Battles” GRBS 26.1 (1985).
- Which is not the gladius Hispaniensis, to be clear. The Romans pilfer two weapons from Spain.
- Note: we’re talking about grappling involving armed and armored hoplites, obviously the Greeks had contact fighting sports, which is not quite the same.
- E.g. Greek Warfare (2004), 153 which directly equates a description of Dani warfare with lines from the Iliad. He doesn’t quite declare, in Schliemann-esque terms, “I have seen the face of Agamemnon!” but it is clear that Dani warfare feels revelatory for van Wees.
- Literally “the thing which must be compared” – Latin students, what form is that?
- For what it is worth, I tend to agree with Anthony Snodgrass that, pace van Wees, warfare in Homer isn’t really historically recoverable. Efforts by van Wees, for instance, to salvage Homer’s descriptions of how chariots are used really don’t convince when placed beside the evidence for the use of chariots in the bronze age Near East – my view is that Homer knows his heroes are supposed to have chariots, but since chariots are no longer used in warfare in his day, he has no idea what for.
- I would note that the Romans, better disciplined than the Spartans by a country mile, sometimes walked into contact, but frequently charged and the Roman word for battle lines coming together was concursus, “a running together” implying charge-to-contact was typical. So a one-to-one correlation of discipline and walking into contact seems untenable.
- And yes, there is Zhmodikov, “Roman Republican Heavy Infantrymen in Battle (IV-II Centuries B.C.), Historia 49 (2000), which advances what amounts to a ‘hoplite heterodox’ argument about Roman heavy infantry arguing that they mostly skirmished but there is a reason this view is primarily cited in order to dismiss it. On this point, see M.J. Taylor, “Roman Infantry Tactics in the Mid-republic: A Reassessment” Historia 63 (2014), which renders significant parts of Zhmodikov’s assumptions non-operative, or J.F. Slavik, “Pilum and Telum: The Roman Infantryman’s Style of Combat in the Middle Republic” CJ 113 (2018), which is a direct assault on Zhmodikov. Cf. also Koon, Infantry Combat in Livy’s Battle Narratives (2010), which is somewhat more open to Zhmodikov (but not entirely so) and B. Campbell, “Arms and Armor” in The Oxford Handbook on Warfare in the Classical World (2013), which is very much not.
- You can see these arguments summed up in his excellent F. Quesada Sanz, Weapons, Warriors & Battles of Ancient Iberia (2023), trans. E. Clowes and P.S. Harding-Vera but he has been arguing this for a while – it might be fine in 2004 not to have been aware of those arguments, but in 2013, less so.
- Wheeler, “Land Battles” in The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare (2008), 192-3. Note that Wheeler is not claiming a shoving othismos and is quick in that passage to offer that more than just depth is required for a phalanx – there must be a cohesion to the mass as well. Wheeler is neither a orthodox nor a heretic but seems to dislike both sides equally.
- In this case, a technical term in military science, so I am going to use it even though ‘fire’ is somewhat anachronistic for non-gunpowder weapons.
- There is a basic description of this form of warfare in W.E. Lee, Waging War (2016), 265-68. For more detail, see J.K. Thornton, Warfare in Atlantic Africa: 1500-1800 (1999).
- By contrast, of course, the Romans instead adopt in the pilum a heavy javelin that is probably a dedicated anti-heavy-infantry weapon, with both armor-piercing and shield-piercing capabilities, at the cost of being quite heavy and expensive – the weight seemingly being such that to keep the pilum, their infantry must discard the thrusting spear (the hasta) and rely fully on their swords in contact.
“and how it weighs on the debate.”
I had to interrupt my reading immediately to post this “I see what you did there” nod of approval.
You’ve got an extra footnote 1 which was copied over from last week and links back to it.
“in the Sahel (too try for the tsetse fly),”
ITYM “dry”
Fixed
My appreciative comment in response to the pun in the opening paragraph (which has not yet become visible to me, so I cannot respond to it directly) overlooked the accidental duplication of “on” — possibly “and how it weighs *in* on the debate.” was meant instead?
More typos:
“fundamnetally”
“when the show them” (they)
a comma missing after the closing parenthesis of the part following “compressing intervals”
“too try for the tsetse fly” (dry — for a white guy)
“originally form the Kongo people” (from)
“a perhaps a”
“the diminished of the use”
Minor wording problems:
To the degree that the board public understands the hoplite debates,
I think you mean “broad” ? Or are we expected to pay rent for the time spent in your blog now?
these two posts are fundamnetally about the phalanx.
“fundamentally”
opposing formation is also shown at least two depth
“at least two deep” or maybe “depth of two”
lead to the diminished of the use of a simple throwing spear
“diminished use of”
The last time I was this early Greeks were still primarily skirmishers.
Repeating the comment about heroes.
You´re taking it for granted that a man bearing 18 kg of armour will be outran by everyone on either side bearing 8 kg.
But men in society are not equal in their physical abilities.
A farming community contains a large number of men who work full time harvesting, sowing and ploughing – which require endurance but do not specifically require sprint speed, and who can afford neither the leisure for sports training nor the good food for that.
And then there may be a modest number of men who CAN afford the leisure for sports training, including sprint speed, and the good food for it.
They may use it to achieve high absolute speeds. Stadion race was the first and ever the main subject of Olympic Games, and the First Olympiad (776 BC) predates Argos Panoply (720 BC), invention of aspis (750 BC), introduction of metal helmets (sometime between aspis and Argos Panoply), the Epics (probably after 700 BC…). Whereas hoplitodromos as specific standardized contest was introduced in 520 BC.
But would it not make sense for a trained athlete who CAN sprint considerably faster than an untrained peasant while equally unloaded or equally loaded, to instead apply the sprint training to run at equal speed while carrying a heavier load than the peasant?
The epics, like the big deal about Achilleus´ armour, his fleet-footedness et cetera suggest that this is what being a hero is all about. Use superior sprint training thanks to being able to afford the leisure and the food (and some divine ancestry) in order to be able to carry a heavier armour (and be able to afford it, and make it nonfunctionally fancier besides). Then sprint out to perform feats of arms… and when tired of the sprint, wounded, confronted by an enemy hero or excessive bunch of enemy rank and file, sprint back to the protection of own rank and file.
If 18 kg vs. 8 kg is too much, what WOULD be a reasonable weight of armour for a sprint-trained athlete to match rather than exceed the speed of an untrained peasant?
What would the armour of a heavy-sprinter infantryman look like, in terms of choice of coverage? How should it compare to the armour of an infantryman who plans on staying inside his shieldwall and not sprinting out?
“But would it not make sense for a trained athlete who CAN sprint considerably faster than an untrained peasant while equally unloaded or equally loaded, to instead apply the sprint training to run at equal speed while carrying a heavier load than the peasant?”
Having pointed out that m’Devereaux is taking for granted that the person in 18kg is usually about as fit as the person in 18kg, you yourself appear to be taking for granted that they are not.
“there may be…CAN…may use…would it not make sense…CAN…”
What evidence suggests that the men who could afford heavy armor were “sprint-trained athlete[s]”?
What evidence establishes that sprint-trained athletes can move in 18kg of armor at the same speed and for the same duration as unencumbered people who are not sprint-trained athletes? Doesn’t even have to be archaic evidence; spend a year training sprinting and then give us a youtube video where you wear armor and outpace an unencumbered J. Rando Tradesperson over the course of an hour in both HIIT and standard distance running.
I am skeptical that comments in epics about Achilles amount to meaningful evidence that men who owned heavy armor were commonly sprint-trained athletes. Or were trained athletes. Or were trained. Or were athletes.
I interpret chorned argument a bit differently from you, but it could be my own bias creeping in, so I don’t want to put words into anyone else’s mouth, but consider this. Bret writes “if you are wearing 2-3 times as much kit as your mates, when your line scurries backwards to get out of range (and those lights aren’t sticking around for you, they’re unarmored and so in real danger of being instantly killed by close range javelin or arrow shots) you are going to fall behind and those enemy lights are going to catch you and all of the armor in the world isn’t going to save you in a fight outnumbered four-to-one.” But what if you’re the fastest guy in the army – and _somebody_ has to be? Maybe you can put on a little more armor, a helmet, say, and now you’re one of the slowest guys, but you can still keep up with the main body. If a slower member tried this he’d fall behind and die, but you can still manage to keep up okay. The protection might be worth it now. But now the next fastest guy can put on a helmet and so on. It’s a way a gradual transition from everyone is naked to everyone has heavy armor can happen.
I don’t think it’s a question of whether a hero CAN sprint in armour, but rather why would they?
As was discussed a fortnight ago about weight of armour, people, not even exceptional athletes, can do all kinds of physical activities in armour. Almost always they don’t, because running in armour is harder and more tiring. It does a man-at-arms no good to run down a lightly armoured skirmisher if that leaves them exhausted for the rest of the battle.
Could Greek hoplites run in armour? Certainly. They are said to have done so at the battle of Marathon, presumably to reduce the time spent under Persian archery fire. But this is classic hoplite warfare, not archaic, so staying in formation is expected. There’s no point in being able to run faster than the average.
Could heroic Greek hoplites run in armour? Yes but why would they? Being fleet-footed doesn’t make Achilles a hero, it’s just something nice to say about him. What makes Achilles a hero is being able to kill guys like Hector, who are well armed and armoured and skilful. They’re not running away from you.
So while a wanna-be Greek hero could go in for sprint training in armour, it’s not going to win them praise and renown. Imagine the campfire after the glorious battle of whatnot:
“I slew their champion, the warrior with the red helmet crest and the great axe!”
(Cheers, quaffing of drinks.)
“I fought sword to sword with the king, whose armour ’twas said no blade could pierce, for a full hour, before I prevailed!”
(Cheers, quaffing, everyone is too polite to mention it was just five minutes.)
“I ran down and slew ten skirmishers!”
(Dead silence.)
“Two of them were really fast! You lot couldn’t have caught any of them!”
(Still dead silence.)
I think a hero is going to spend their time practising with sword and spear and shield, not sprinting. Being able to kill some guy with a cheap tunic and couple of javelins isn’t worth the effort. (And the “yeah, he tore a hamstring chasing a peltast and got shot in the back while he was trying to hobble back to us” isn’t exactly the kind of death a hero aspires to either.)
While I do not support the notion that hoplites ran around in rarified clouds of skirmishers, honestly behooves me to bring up the fact that young Spartan hoplites regularly outpaced peltasts and for a time Xenophon tells us that peltasts were afraid to go near Spartan lines.
Plus the Greeks had a words for the type and tactic; ekdromoi and ekdrome.
I am not at all surprised that young men from the upper classes, raised with more protein in their diet and not doing hard manual labour in the fields most days, are better runners on average than the lower class peltasts.
If there was one thing you could convince me the agoge was actually good at teaching, it would be how to run.
“Could heroic Greek hoplites run in armour? Yes but why would they? Being fleet-footed doesn’t make Achilles a hero, it’s just something nice to say about him. What makes Achilles a hero is being able to kill guys like Hector, who are well armed and armoured and skilful. They’re not running away from you.”
Um. Hector VERY EXPLICITLY was running away from Achilles.
https://johnstoniatexts.x10host.com/homer/iliad22.htm
“like a blazing fire or rising sun. At that moment, 170
as he watched, Hector began to shake in fear.
His courage gone, he could no longer stand there.
Terrified, he started running, leaving the gate.
Peleus’ son went after him, sure of his speed on foot.
Just as a mountain falcon, the fastest creature
of all the ones which fly, swoops down easily
on a trembling pigeon as it darts off in fear, [140]
the hawk speeding after it with piercing cries,
heart driving it to seize the prey—in just that way
Achilles in his fury raced ahead. Hector ran 180
under the walls of Troy, limbs working feverishly.
They ran on past the lookout and the wind-swept fig tree,
some distance from the wall, along the wagon track.”
Considering the fashion in which the heroes used to run ahead of their rank and file… what was the point of wearing the fancy but necessarily heavy armour if lighter loaded rank and file enemies could outrun the hero and swarm him?
I see the option – because the hero is a trained athlete in contrast to the rank and file, and is therefore able to run at equal speed with heavier load.
Hector and the other Trojans are NOT fleeing from Achilles because of his high knee lifts and optimal stride length and foot placement. The ability to chase down a fleeing foe doesn’t matter if you can’t make them flee in the first place. A would-be hero who emphasises sprint training has got his priorities wrong.
Scene: the battlefield outside the walls of Troy. You, Greek hero, have spent the past five years training to **sprint** in armour with spear, sword, and shield. You easily outpace the other challengers and reach Hector first.
Hector has spent the past five years training to **fight** in armour with spear, sword, and shield. You’re really good at running, he’s really good at killing people. The combat is brief and ends with you being fatally stabbed. Hector, at least in the poems, makes some remark about sending a hare to face a lion and takes a few steps sideways so he and the next hero don’t have to worry about tripping over your corpse.
I’m not saying that Greek heavy infantry never ran, or that their equipment stopped them from running. Running is good exercise, it’s part of all kinds of modern training programs, it would be for Greeks. But I don’t think it’s important in analysing how hoplites fought.
In fairness, “I slew ten skirmishers” probably would get some measure of respect. Because that’s a hell of a feat when they’re all fully capable of running for their lives and, granted that they are not armored or well equipped for close combat, are still armed. It sounds less badass when you don’t have any intuitive sense of just how difficult it would be to accomplish that, but the audience you’re talking about would. It might not be top-of-the-list, but it’d be respected.
Also in fairness, the lone hoplite charing behind ten skrimishers, probably would not boast at the fire, since he slew one maybe two, and the rest peppered him with spears and stones from eight directions.
Charing behind an enemy skrimisher, is a good way, to get stabbed in the back, even when you are faster than him.
It might get some, but the respect is mostly whether you supported the team, i.e. the phalanx.
Which generally means killing the other heavily armored guy, the one with a fearsome reputation, because he’s the one that will be killing a lot of you otherwise.
If you’re a hoplite with a full kit, you probably kill any peltast that can’t get out of the way. But chasing after them? No.
The peltasts probably don’t have any recognizable device, so you can’t say “I killed x, who had killed y of us.” So you don’t get any points for the other guy’s reputation.
Also they don’t have any arms you can loot. A sling? Some stones?
“What makes Achilles a hero is being able to kill guys like Hector, who are well armed and armoured and skilful. They’re not running away from you.”
According to our primary source, Hector does in fact run away from Achillies.
“Achilles came up to him as it were Mars himself, plumed lord of battle. From his right shoulder he brandished his terrible spear of Pelian ash, and the bronze gleamed around him like flashing fire or the rays of the rising sun. Fear fell upon Hector as he beheld him, and he dared not stay longer where he was but fled in dismay from before the gates, while Achilles darted after him at his utmost speed. … even so did Achilles make straight for Hector with all his might, while Hector fled under the Trojan wall as fast as his limbs could take him.”
Remember that warfare in most times and places is a numbers game. The more requirements you place on a class of warriors (be able to run in 36 lbs of armor as fast as an untrained unemcumbered person) while certainly possible, will reduce the number of such warriors that can show up in battle, and thus constrain how they can be used. Shield wall tactics, if that is what early Hoplites were using, implies a certain minimum number of citizens to make up said wall, esp. if they are employing multiple ranks. So while possible, it seems intuitively unlikely.
Putting aside the other comments, which are well taken, I’d also like to add that I think your argument about relative fitness / athletic ability lends itself to exceptions on the battlefield rather than broad-based trends. Based on my read of Dr Devereaux’s other writings, I’d bet most hoplites were land-owning farmers who worked alongside slave and other laborers- rather than a leisure class (like spartiates – indeed, Spartan society is pretty ‘weird’ compared to other polis), who could focus on athletic training. So, Dr Devereaux’s point about light infantry running down a hoplite probably occurred more frequently than an athletic hoplite successfully sprinting away.
If I remember correctly, it was shown by Hans van Wees that in order to be rich enough to figure as a zeugite in Athens (ie. the class that had to fight as hoplites), you had to be a substantial landowner; cfr. Hans van Wees, The Myth of the Middle-Class Army: Military and Social Status in Ancient Athens, in War as a Cultural and Social Force (Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen and Lise Hannestad, 2001).
Chorned, I’m fairly sure the reason the Iliad cites “fleet-footed Achilles” is that the Iliad uses a lot of what in Greek poetry are called ‘epithets,’ and one of the big reasons they did it was just to make the rhyme scheme work out. Homer famously uses the phrase “wine-dark sea” a lot, and that isn’t usually interpreted to suggest that the Aegean Sea of his time was literally wine-colored, or even literally as dark as wine.
Over the centuries during which prosperous Greeks fought in panoply, either in a phalanx or in more flexible formations, I am sure that out of the probably hundreds of thousands of individual fighting men who fought this way, some thousands of them had excellent physical conditioning. And that some of those men put that conditioning to good use on the battlefield in one way or another, by performing feats that would be hard for someone with inferior conditioning to match.
On the other hand, this doesn’t necessarily tell us much about the overall dynamics of phalanx warfare, not least because rich men do not strictly have a monopoly on “do a lot of running.” And because if I recall correctly, we know very specifically that there were sources in the time period deriding the kind of reckless ferocity that would involve a single man breaking ranks to chase down a single enemy.
The first time i saw the Sea of Marmara I was struck by how dark it appeared, and the justness of Homer’s epithet. At least to me, brought up by the blue Pacific.
As someone who grew up by the North Atlantic, my only problem with ‘wine-dark’ has ever been that it’s the wrong colour. The sea is dark, and full of terrors.
“Chorned, I’m fairly sure the reason the Iliad cites “fleet-footed Achilles” is that the Iliad uses a lot of what in Greek poetry are called ‘epithets,’ and one of the big reasons they did it was just to make the rhyme scheme work out.”
And yet Achilles has famous race scenes running in armour. Notably the famous race in book 22, pursuing Hector.
Which does not, in fact, show Achilles as particularly fleet-footed! Achilles chased Hector three circuits around walls of Troy and failed to catch Hector – it was only when Hector was deceived by Athena appearing as Deiphobus coming to help him that Hector decided to stop and fight. But in the preceding battle scene, other warriors were scared of Achilles catching them from behind as they fled.
Hector and Achilles were both wearing Achilles´ armour too (Hector the set captured from Patroclus).
“On the other hand, this doesn’t necessarily tell us much about the overall dynamics of phalanx warfare, not least because rich men do not strictly have a monopoly on “do a lot of running.” And because if I recall correctly, we know very specifically that there were sources in the time period deriding the kind of reckless ferocity that would involve a single man breaking ranks to chase down a single enemy.”
In WHICH time period?
I recall such sources as well!
But we have the sources from early 7th century that praise the heroes sprinting ahead of their army or staying behind their army for single combat. Illiad which is extant, and surely the Epic Cycle which is not.
My suspicion is that it represents a DEVELOPMENT of hoplite tactics and social attitudes over time. In early 7th century, men who left ranks to fight in single combat were praised as heroes and regarded as the most prestigious part of the army, though they were surely a small part of army. In later periods, there were still some men who followed the example of epic heroes to break ranks and fight ahead of ranks in armour – but now they were derided. There were still also people who were assigned skirmishing tasks… but now it was the lightly armed men who were regarded as low prestige part, not as heroes.
I see a couple of reasons why heroes as armoured sprinters may have lost the military importance and social approval they so obviously once had.
One possibility is the development of the phalanx. The body of moderately armoured men got more effective and the shield wall was impermeable to enemy heroes.
And another possibility is introduction of ridable horses. A rich man could achieve more mobility by buying a mount than by exercising to run. How would fleet-footed Achilles have fared if a bunch of Trojan knights had sallied forth riding horses and trying to skewer him on their lances?
But since the heroes were apparently a going concern into early 7th century (the writing of Illiad), it follows that the development of Greek armour happened in times of heroes. It is important to watch out which pieces of armour were designed for shieldwall soldiers all along, which were meant for heroes, and which were initially designed for heroes and only later repurposed for shieldwall soldiers. Early shieldwalls had to cooperate with heroes – indeed, often be led by heroes. Later shieldwalls dropped heroes.
I’m quite interested by the idea that this represents a development in hoplite tactics and expectations, especially when you consider that our understanding is that the Homeric epics were likely widely known among the Greek population.
Because clearly, if they felt the need to moralise about not running out in front of the ranks to do something heroic…it was likely a problem of enough regularity or severity that they felt the need to moralise about it.
I.e. ‘We have a bunch of young hotheads who keep running out the front of our phalanx pretending to be Achilles and getting killed, so we need to do something societally to stop that’…or ‘there was this one time when one guy thought he’d be as heroic as Achilles and ran out in front of the phalanx which caused the whole thing to collapse and everyone died, so we need to do something societally to stop that’.
I just find it an interesting potential social dynamic where the heroic narratives of warfare people digested while growing up presented a mismatch to the realities of warfare in the ‘real world’, producing a social dynamic attempting to mitigate that.
It’s a bit like folks joining the army today expecting it to be like Call of Duty and needing to be disabused of that notion fairly rigorously.
“I’m quite interested by the idea that this represents a development in hoplite tactics and expectations, especially when you consider that our understanding is that the Homeric epics were likely widely known among the Greek population.”
Sure. The Homeric epics we have – plus a bunch of similar stuff we don´t have but know about. Illiad has Achilles – and a lot of secondary named characters who also are described as performing their own feats. Then there is the Epic Cycle we know of and don´t have – but Greeks had. And then there were the local heroes – Pausanias reports graves of various local heroes scattered around Greece. The locals surely had tales to tell of them even if the tale was not told around Greece – every region of Greece would have had some tales of their own in addition to the panhellenic ones.
“I just find it an interesting potential social dynamic where the heroic narratives of warfare people digested while growing up presented a mismatch to the realities of warfare in the ‘real world’, producing a social dynamic attempting to mitigate that.”
It was not just Greece, and not just narratives.
For narrative exempla from Brett´s topic – Roman Republic…
The First Consul, L. Junius Brutus, led his army against the Last King L. Tarquinius Superbus, in Silva Arsia on 28 February, 509 – and led his army on horseback while the King stayed on foot. Brutus engaged the commander of the Royalist cavalry, Arruns Tarquinius, in single combat – and they speared each other to death.
Shortly before Second Punic War, consul Marcellus accepted a challenge of single combat with King Viridomarus of Gaesatae – and won. And was awarded an award called spolia opima, which was regarded as much more valuable than a triumph.
Marcellus kept being a hero… in other words, taking personal risks while in charge of armies beside himself. In his fifth consulate, he went on a reconnaissance mission with a modest cavalry escort – that got himself AND his colleague killed.
Already a century before Marcellus, another Roman general had executed his own son for being a hero and defeating enemies against orders.
In addition to narratives, epics and exempla that glorify individual feats of arms, one part of problem in adopting collective tactics is customs of rewards that reward again individual feats of arms, such as spolia opima. Standing firm in a phalanx and hacking enemies into minced meat in anonymous manner gets you no head!
@chornedsnorkack True, though the interesting point of difference for me between the Roman and the Greek conceptualisation of this stuff was that it was encouraged for Romans to dart out in front of the line under specific circumstances, unlike the Greeks. From what I understand, those included ‘to strike an enemy’ and ‘to rescue a fallen comrade’ (I remember there being three, but can’t remember the last one!).
This is still applying some degree of social control over when it is or isn’t appropriate to leave a formation, but it does differ markedly in approach to the Greek one (which is effectively ‘Thou Shalt Not Leave’).
I’m sure there’s a lot of nuances to the Roman example when it actually hits day to day practice (i.e. there will be judgement calls about whether trying and failing to strike an enemy by leaving a formation was appropriate or not), but it’s clear that there are appropriate times when you can do it in the Roman model, but not in the Greek.
Metre, not rhyme-scheme. And the use of epithets still conveys meaning – they’re stock descriptors, not random noises.
I have spent a lot of time in kit around the relevant weight trying to chase down skirmishers in simulated battles. I mean, sure, you can do it sometimes, but is it the good/right thing to do? Individual stamina and sprint speed aside, the lighter equipped little bastards (yes, we heavy types learned to loath skirmishers, in a way that I think the higher status hoplites would agree with) do have an advantage and do run faster relatively to weight.
The most likely result of you chasing a light armed trooper is that if you’re still fast enough to catch him, not all of your mates will be. And suddenly you’re isolated and breathing heavily and heating up and the light bastard suddenly has friends and now you want to back up, but you can’t turn your back on them and what do you know, now you’re running backwards and the little bastards are running forwards again and they’re circling you and WHERE are your own light armed and *thunk* shit you’re dead.
What we eventually came up with was a model which closely mirrored one proposed in the blog post – heavy armed as a base or line for the skirmishers to work around. The did successfully skirmish in broken terrain with small numbers of heavy armed accompanied by lights. The lights could swarm ahead and if the enemy pushed, they fell back towards the heavies and used them as over and road block. We called it “elephants and ants” and it worked quite well against both enemy heavies and lights. Combined arms even at a small scale did work and had an advantage versus opponents who could not do this.
I’m not sure why nobody is noting this, but Homeric — read, early Archaic — nobles aren’t running around the battlefield. They’re riding on chariots. The chariot takes them within a stone’s throw of the enemy and they jump out and fight, then when they tire or face local disadvantage they run back a few stones’ throws into the chariot parked waiting for them and zip off.
All of this is veridical because it is blatantly evidenced in the archeology, which depicts warriors on chariots with frequency, and we know of exactly the same thing taking place elsewhere, ex. Caesar on the Britons:
Their manner of fighting from chariots is as follows. First of all they drive in all directions and hurl missiles, and so by the mere terror that the teams inspire and by the noise of the wheels they generally throw ranks into confusion. When they have worked their way in between the troops of cavalry, they leap down from the chariots and fight on foot. Meanwhile the charioteers retire gradually from the combat, and dispose the chariots in such fashion that, if the warriors are hard pressed by the host of the enemy, they may have a ready means of retirement to their own side. Thus they show in action the mobility of cavalry and the stability of infantry;
The one catch is that by the time the epics were written its possible this was a slightly archaizing theme, harkening back to the last century’s warfare, because through the 7th century the chariot fell out of use in favour of riding the horses directly. Instead of warrior and chariot driver, there now emerged what one vase terms the hippobatas ‘horse-fighter’ and hippostrophos ‘horse-turner’, the latter of which rode along beside the noble and kept his horse in check while he jumped down to fight.
What differentiated these from true cavalry as popularized in the Classical is that the hippobatas carried a shield; before the spread of the tree’d saddle some centuries later, the resultant loss of a free hand for control and stabilization seems to have been too prejudicial for horseback fighting, and so the Archaic horseman dismounted to strike his blows.
In summation, the bronze panoply of the Archaic hoplite lends itself oddly to both light and heavy infantry usage, because it was not developed for infantry. Over the course of the Archaic — and probably starting very early in that period, going by some passages in Homer — its elements were democratized to broader bodies of true heavy infantry footsoldiers, and eventually adapted to that new context: linen supplemented bronze, the heavy closed helms receded, and the two versatile spears gave way to a specialized thrusting one. The aristocracy, increasingly marginal, stuck to their bronze cuirasses but now, ditching the shield, kept to horseback.
Having read your arguments, I think I’m broadly in agreement with you, but I do think you dismiss the New Guinea evidence a little too lightly (Van Wees, for instance, uses more than one work on New Guinea warriors in Myths and Realities). It might not be entirely fit for purpose, but it is more than just a single example from a single tribe.
Beyond this, I think that the so-called Anglo-Saxon shield wall is fairly Van Wees Homeric, despite Bardunias’ arguments to the contrary.
Before I get into that, the Skjaldborg is a 13th century term which primarily occurs in Snorri Sturluson, where he uses it as a bodyguard or defensive testudo like formation in contrast to the more general “formation” that is used by the actually active combatants. Based on skaldic poetry “hamalt fylkja” (mistranslated as “wedge” due to a 19th century dictionary using a 14th century text, leading to Vikings forming wedges on the sides of the ships in modern translations) is the more proper term, with actual connotations of overlapping shields, but it’s hard to say from the very limited evidence how common it was as an offensive formation.
Additionally, the “fulcrum” of Maurice is not a three tiered formation – that’s a strictly defensive anti-cavalry formation – and the two tiered formation may not be as tight as the text may imply, given that apparently the soldiers tighten up rim-to-boss twice during the approach and I can’t see how it can move forwards and have the front two ranks throw their spears while one has his shield rim down around his ankles and the other is resting his rim on then first rank’s shield boss, and both ranks are squeezed into a space of about 45cm per man.
Anyway, back to the so-called Anglo-Saxon shield wall. It’s probably most famous from the poem The Battle of Maldon, where it doesn’t actually get used at all (the closest is “bordweall”). This is entirely an issue, as Anglo-Saxon poetry shares similarities with contemporary Scandinavian poetry in using kennings for a lot of things, but I think it’s important to keep in mind that when reading translations a lot of assumptions from the translators go into interpreting the original text.
So, Byrhtnoth forms his warriors up into a “war hedge” (wihagan) and battle begins: “they let fly from their hands spears file-hardened,
the spears grimly ground down, bows were busy—
shields were peppered with points. ”
There close combat after this section, Wulfmær dying by the sword and Eadweard killing with it, and so far it seems to be in line with yours and Paul Bardunias’ take on things.
But then we get to lines 130-184 where, in my reading, we have a small cluster of men on either side coming together to fight between the lines in close combat. Both sides advance on the other, fighting with spears and, where appropriate, throwing them, before it comes down to fighting with the sword.
This strikes me as fairly Homeric and what I think Van Wees is trying to visualise through the framework of New Guinea: small knots of champions and sometimes individuals who advance, fight until either one or both sides retreat back to the main line due to deaths, wounds or exhaustion. It also seems to fit Thucydides’ description of Illyrian combat in 4.126-7, despite them (as far as I can find) often using the aspis.
Argh, I lost my train of thought right at the end. I meant to add that these small scale “heroic” duels would be followed by a massed attack if one side hadn’t panicked due to a leader dying or similar reason. Massed combat still happened, it just wasn’t the primary mode of how the battle started. Although HvW doesn’t mention it, even in New Guinea there would be times when close quarters combat ensued (see Artifact 2006.12.1.44.1 from the Peabody collection – https://collections.peabody.harvard.edu/objects/details/636619?ctx=6a6e9d55fcdfd3661cb7dd691ec8c02964c3af67&idx=0, for example).
I think you put too much emphasis on overlapping shields. Hemicylindrical shields like the scutum and Assyrian shields are not easily overlapped, yet suffice to form a wall. Macedonian peltae were likely not overlapped as well. The function of a shield-wall does not require overlapped shields, or even shields at all if armored men are mutually supporting.
I think Maurice describes the tiered Folkum unpacking to advance. I am not sure what the second rank is doing with their shields, but I would never fight in close with anyone’s shield over my head.
As for sallies of small groups at Maldon, that is exactly what I describe for the Bastion function of a shield-wall. I think the fact that Tyrtaeus indicates the choice to close with the foes suggests such sallies.
“I think you put too much emphasis on overlapping shields. Hemicylindrical shields like the scutum and Assyrian shields are not easily overlapped, yet suffice to form a wall. Macedonian peltae were likely not overlapped as well. The function of a shield-wall does not require overlapped shields, or even shields at all if armored men are mutually supporting.”
I do agree that overlapping shields are not necessary for a shield wall, but it *is* what shield walls are most often described as, so I always feel the need to get it out of the way, especially when terms like skjaldborg that, in the context they were written down, refer to overlapping shields.
But what *is* a shield wall? You mention the scutum, but each Roman soldier occupied at least 4.5ft (going with Michael J. Taylor’s theory) or else 6ft (the plain reading of Polybius, which also allows them to easily close up to a 3ft close order if needed). Are they in a shield wall when spaced out, or only when closed up for an assault during a siege or to repel cavalry? Can we really call a pike formation a shield wall if they happen to have shields?
***
“I think Maurice describes the tiered Folkum unpacking to advance. I am not sure what the second rank is doing with their shields, but I would never fight in close with anyone’s shield over my head.”
The three tiered foulkon is a purely defensive anti-cavalry measure, but he two tiered foulkon isused for the advance:
Rance’s translation of 12.B.16.30–38:
“They advance in a fulcum, whenever, as the battle lines are coming close together, both ours and the enemy’s, the archery is about to commence, and those arrayed in the front line are not wearing mail coats or greaves. He [the herald] orders, “ad fulco.” And those arrayed right at the very front mass their shields together until they come shield-boss to shield-boss, completely covering their stomachs almost to their shins. The men standing just behind them, raising their shields and resting them on the shield-bosses of those in front, cover their chests and faces, and in this way they engage.”
Maurice never explicitly says what happens when they get into throwing range of the enemy, but I take this passage (from Dennis’ translation) to imply that the two-tiered formation was meant to stay together until very close to the enemy:
“The men to the rear keep their heads covered with their shields and with their lances support those in the front. Obviously, it is essential for the soldiers in the first line to keep themselves protected until they come to blows with the enemy. Other- wise, they might be hit by enemy arrows, especially if they do not have coats of mail or greaves.”
I suspect, despite the clear language of a rim to boss formation with the second rank getting in on the action, that the two tiered formation was more rim to rim, with the second rank using their shields more as “umbrellas” for the first rank. That allows the front rank to retain the ability to throw darts or javelins, as implied in the text.
***
“As for sallies of small groups at Maldon, that is exactly what I describe for the Bastion function of a shield-wall. I think the fact that Tyrtaeus indicates the choice to close with the foes suggests such sallies.”
I’ll give you the Bastion function, but I’m eternally uncertain about whether this should be seen as a close order bastion or a loose order bastion, which is why I prefer not to refer to it as a shieldwall when possible. Shieldwall has definite connotations in both modern imagination and modern scholarship.
I do play fast and loose with the concept of a shield-wall. To me the function is more important than the appearance. Men at arms without shields formed close enough to cut down angles of attack to men beside them fulfill this function to me. If you stand together with a bunch of heavily armored and or shielded men and “tank” as the kids say, you are in a shield-wall.
Perhaps the most important thing to do here is separate what happens at missile range from what happens in close combat. You need to be close to provide mutual support against missile because they come in from a wider range of angles and far more frequently usually than strikes in close. There will inevitably be an SCA member here who will object that he regularly stabs guys 4 placed to the left or avoids the guy in front of him to target the dudes behind him. All I will say to the that is try it with sharp spears. The comical windmilling strikes disappear when you are faced with immanent death. You turtle and strike at a much lower rate.
Taylor has a great image in Visual Evidence of Roman Tactics. Figure 6 shows men shield to shield in densatis scutis or close order moving to opened order by simply moving every other man a step ahead. I find this elegant because so many seem mentally bound to frontage being a box of equal sides rather than side to side and for and aft with separate measures. You can be in synaspismos and have 2-3 meters between ranks, which is what it looks like when ranks like this charge at the run.
In terms of hoplites, I believe they stood with their shields either rim to rim, ~90cm, or slightly overlapped, ~72cm, when receiving missiles, but I cannot tell you if they fought with their aspides overlapped or not overlapped in the same frontage when at spear range. To a great extent this is a non-controversy because you can easily move from one to the other. In addition, we know the frontage at missile range if i tell you they stood rim to rim, but not the frontage they end up at after a charge- they always condense and clump, never fan out.
The biggest reason that I advocate, and we generally form in reenactment, at 72cm is that it allows group movement to be coordinated. As long as you all stay in contact with your right forearms on the backs of the aspis to your right, you will move with the grace of a flock of birds and not fall apart.
I think we’re mostly in agreement, I’m just always going to be in disagreement about the definition of a shield wall. Not so much because I think you’re wrong about the concept, but because both the general public and most academics have a very particular view on what the definition is, and can easily mistake something that *is* a strong defensive/offensive line but isn’t a dense formation of overlapping or at least rim to rim shields.
I’m reminded of the “tank alignment chart” meme. Doctrinal purist, design anarchist: a minefield is a shield wall.
“…but I do think you dismiss the New Guinea evidence a little too lightly (Van Wees, for instance, uses more than one work on New Guinea warriors in Myths and Realities). It might not be entirely fit for purpose, but it is more than just a single example from a single tribe.”
I don’t know that increasing the quantity and quality of the wrong information is a positive point toward an argument; ex.,
You’re facing a problem in Statistics, and someone brings in Geometry work, then adds more, more advanced, Geometry to back up their calculation. Yeah, it’s complex, and correct (as in, the calculation provides the result it should). And it is a type of Mathematics, but it’s not the RIGHT Maths, so the result is tangential or misleading, at best.
It’s actually very important to note that Van Wees used multiple sources with regards to New Guinea, because not all peoples there fought like the Dani and not all. He draws on Mervin J Meggitt’s “Blood is Their Argument: Warfare Among the Mae Enga” as an example of warfare in which a minority of shieldbears take pride in forming a close order line while the “archers” flow around them to throw spears or shoot over and around the shieldbearers, until the two lines come together (which is fairly rare). He also uses Paula Brown’s “The Chimbu”, which includes an account from the 1930s of a battle in which combat revolved around a small group of spearmen on either side who attempted to open up their opponents for the archers to wound, at which point they all rush to try and kill the wounded man.
Which is important, because one of Brett’s criticisms is that the Dani don’t use shields, and here we have two (actually three, because he also draws on Andrew Strathern’s translation/transcription of Ongka’s autobiography) instances where New Guinea warriors used large shields and, where necessary, close order formations while much skirmishing was down by both the shieldbearers and the archers around them. You can also look at how similar these instances of warfare are to that of the Bagobo in the Philippines, who also used substantial shields, armour and steel weapons (see here: https://acoup.blog/2025/12/05/collections-hoplite-wars-part-iiia-an-archaic-phalanx/#comment-94141)
This is much closer to Homeric warfare in that almost all men have shields, but we still see the same kind of skirmishing, close combat averse fighting styles that we do in New Guinea. It’s just that they’re modified by culture and technology, much as how Hans van Wees uses the New Guinea examples as a base model, but modifies them to take into account the written Greek accounts, the artistic evidence and the archaeology. He, at no point, suggests that the warfare is 1:1 between Dark Age Greece and 20th century New Guinea, just that there is a lot of rhyming going on.
But both of your examples of shield bearers fit far better with our host description, don’t they? Close order meele troops as the center of a skrimishers.
The whole argument is, that Hoplites are troops of this type, that became more and more important, as their gear made them less and less vulnerable to skrimishers.
They fit HvW’s conception: small groups who go forward and engage in high intensity warfare, opening with thrown spears before closing for a brief fight – either to finish off a wounded enemy or to gain their body – or falling back. Light troops are sometimes mixed in with these hoplites going forward, and are sometimes just back supporting in the lines. See p154-158 of “Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities”. In terms of Bardunias, HvW imagines a “Bastion” formation, but not one where troops come around the side or through gaps, but where portions of the line go forward or retreat. We’ve come to an agreement on in these comments that the Anglo-Saxon army in “The Battle of Maldon” operates in this fashion.
Brett, in comparison, argues that the Archaic phalanx was “something closer to what Bardunais terms a ‘bludgeon’ shield wall” and similar to his view on West African warfare (see elsewhere in the comments for an alternate view):
“Towards the close of the 8th century, the wealthier Greeks begin to start equipping themselves as ‘specialist’ contact infantry (albeit still carrying perhaps a single throwing weapon), probably suggesting that ‘contact infantry’ (as distinct from skirmisher) was a role that had already existed and was generally the higher status role (as, frankly, Homer clearly seems to think). Fairly quickly these fellows end up grouped together rather than mixed up indiscriminately with the skirmishers, either in a single block as the core of the army (the ‘West African’ model) or as a line in the front of it (the ‘Early Medieval’ model), but still working hand in glove with the skirmishers. As these fellows group up, the equipment that makes the most sense in that context – what will eventually be the hoplite kit – begins to predominate.”
Brett has the whole of the “contact infantry” form a solid line that only advances when it comes down to a final decision, whereas HvW imagines them as going forward in small clusters to fight with the enemy, and sometimes a massed full line assault occurring.
Thanks for the reference. Just to clarify, in my scheme, all hoplites are shock troops, they simply engage in spear throwing and standing as a shield-wall during the opening phase of battle. Battles usually would have culminated in a general advance to spear range in order to use their one retained spear. I identify three functions of shield-walls in general that cover their historical usage: a Barricade screening missile troops behind them (think Acheamenid Sparabara), a Bastion from which skirmishers advance and retire (Roman Triarii may be a fossil of this), and a Bludgeon that directly fights with hand weapons. Yes, I needed a “B” word. Most shield-walls combine all functions (Sparabara could fight as well if not better as hoplites man for man). Archaic hoplites are an example of an undifferentiated shield-wall that is a balance of functions, but that does not mean they could not skip the missile phase completely at times. “Not many bows will be bent” is Archilochos perhaps describing such a battle.
Also, hoplites did fight with knives. When you are aspis on aspis, you are at the measure of a knife. During the period of time when hoplites were regularly forming in ridiculous depth of ranks, 16-50, we also see very small swords in art. Xenophon describes the swords stuck in the bodies of the fallen in the aftermath of the battle of Koronea as ἐγχειρίδια or daggers. Xenophon’s Agesilaus 2.14 is one of the passages that really reads like a crowd-crush perhaps because their spears had broken: “Now that the fighting was at an end, a weird spectacle met the eye, as one surveyed the scene of the conflict — the earth stained with blood, friend and foe lying dead side by side, shields smashed to pieces, spears snapped in two, daggers bared of their sheaths, some on the ground, some embedded in the bodies, some yet gripped by the hand.”
I think skipping the missile phase is understandable, but surely throwing javelins above the heads of the front ranks during the melee phase would be still effective? I think that’s the way the Roman fought, and maybe the Greek fought that way too (as well as poking their spears above the heads of the front ranks).
This is one of those things that seems like it should be done until you try it. All thrown missiles require some arched trajectory from the thrower to the target. The faster the missile, the longer this arc must be. So missiles that rely on speed to do damage are useless when the ranks come together. Archers for example would have to shoot almost straight up in the air to have their missiles come down on ranks of the enemy when their own front ranks are fighting them. Javelins are generally light enough that you would need to throw them very low over the heads of the men in front of you to have any hope of hitting the men in front of them. After a few guys get hit in the back of the head, they would be pretty much against this tactic, but also you would have to toss them over rather than really throw them and the damage would be minimal. The high crests on helmets pretty much rule this out in any case. But a missile that relies on mass rather than speed can be used in formation. This is why we see hoplites themselves tossing rocks over the heads of the men in front (there are lots of rocks on the ground in Greece). So rather than carry missiles to battle and rely on specialized troops, the rear rank hoplites could just do this, and famously this is how they killed the Persian general at Plataiai.
As for using spears from the rear ranks, yes, this is the primary reason we see multiple ranks. When I first started testing elements of hoplite battle with HEMA combatants I assumed, based on some written evidence, that the first two ranks could fight with their spears, but testing showed the third rank to be really effective at sniping targets by sliding the spear through their hands in their strikes for additional range. This is almost like a throw, just caught before it leaves the hand. Past rank three they can’t reach and probably can’t target very well, and when spears became longer and rear balanced the third rank became ineffective because they were already held so near the back that there was no more room to slide for range. But the best thing about being in a phalanx is when the spears come down around you like a cage. Spears around you block a lot of shots you would take.
Intuition has been a real problem in the study of hoplites. Both sides of the debate have made pronouncements that are wrong because they were simply thought experiments with no practical experience.
> Intuition has been a real problem in the study of hoplites. Both sides of the debate have made pronouncements that are wrong because they were simply thought experiments with no practical experience.
I noticed that a few weeks ago under the first post of this series. When somebody told me, that a thing I regularly do (and have done to me) in a LARP shieldwall, is “geometrical impossible”. Polearms in a shieldwall are hellish.
Very interesting clarification and framework. Could you elaborate on what you mean by a shield wall in this context? As other comment threads have shown above, the usage is so varied that it’s almost meaningless is not explicitly defined every time it’s used.
An additional nitpick:
“Van Wees admits no regular formation for hoplites prior to the first explicit mention of such in text in 426 (Aristophanes, Babylonians, F. 72) and contends that intervals less than six feet (180cm!) would have been unworkable even in the classical period (op. cit. 185).”
This is incorrect, as Van Wees implicitly accepts a regular formation of hoplites prior to 426: “it implies familiarity with a practice of officers instructing their men before battle to form up in files of a certain length”. His point is not that regular formations didn’t exist, just that this is the first time there is mention of it, demonstrating a change at some point since the Persian Wars. His thesis is that the segregation of phalanx began about 500 BC, which led to increased cohesion and control, but that was not yet complete by 480 BC (p177-183). The changes that happen in the next fifty years are undocumented, but were complete and familiar to a general audience by 426 BC.
His argument that intervals less than six feet were “hardly…much less than six feet” is not because a tighter formation would have been “unworkable”, but because he was using evidence from Roman era historians that suggest the Macedonian phalanx was tighter than the Classical hoplite phalanx and that the Classical formation had more in common with Polybius’ description of Roman infantry combat than the Macedonian phalanx.
This isn’t really a particularly sound evidence base, and I don’t hold with it, but I’m also not sure than Van Wees himself holds to it anymore, given that Krentz has himself abandoned it (The Battle of Marathon, p51, 142)
Thanks for continuing this series. Brief thoughts.
Re: “that Roman volley-and-charge with pila in the third century BC.” I think it was Phil Sabin and Adrian Goldsworthy who originally laid out the evidence that Republican Roman battles were not a “volley and charge” out of the Plains of Abraham but alternations of few minutes of intense close-ranged fighting, then a longer period of standing off, shouting, throwing things, and working up courage to close in again. This argument convinced me when I read it, I take the view that Republican Romans were more “heavy skirmishers” than shoulder-to-shoulder single-shot weapons like fifteenth-century mounted men-at-arms.
Here is what I had to say on professionalism and the Neo-Assyrian army in Armed Force in the Teispid-Achaemenid Empire (Franz Steiner, 2020) p. 73:
In his study of conscription in the Assyrian empire, J.N. Postgate suggested that soldiers could be roughly divided into three types. First were ‘professionals’ who served for a long time and relied on pay or land grants to earn their living. These seem to have made up the kiṣir šarrūti. Next were men obliged to serve for a fixed period as ṣāb šarri “king’s troop.” These probably made up the majority of soldiers at any one time. The troops “of the reserve” (ša kutalli) may have been conscripts who were allowed to wait at home instead of joining the army immediately. Third were
soldiers called up in an emergency for a particular campaign. Assyrian texts imply that most men could be called up in an emergency, although the sources are vague about the details.
In other words, most Assyrian soldiers are a lot like most of Philip’s Macedonian soldiers, or Roman Republican soldiers. They are conscripted for a season or a few seasons, learn to be soldiers, then go home to their farms or their shops until they are called up again. If King Agesilaus called an assembly in the City of Assur, most of the Assyrians would leave when he said “the bakers can go, the coppersmiths may go, the oxdrivers may go” leaving the Royal Corps (kiṣir šarrūti) as the only men who had no profession but war.
Re: “nothing gives us the sense that hoplites are fighting with lights in something like assigned pairs” The Hellenistic tacticians are also explicit that you can pair a file of light-armed with each file of armed men, and I strongly suspect that their ancestors include material on Greek-style hoplites as well as the Macedonian phalanx. If archaic Greek armies were like the Ten Thousand, the main social groups were people who shared a fire and a meal, and those would have included lightly-armed men as well as a few splendid men of bronze. It would have been natural for those teams to work together in combat (separating out all the armed men, all the archers, or all the horsemen is the sort of thing that generals and tactical theorists like and which is hard to achieve in a fierce society like Archaic Greece).
I yield on all questions of Neo-Assyrians to you.
On the Romans, I think the weight of the evidence very strongly suggests volley-and-charge, not ‘heavy skirmishers.’ Particularly the way the Romans interact with Macedonian sarisa formations (and how Polybius, who saw them fight, understands them to do so) – they’re not backing off from the pikes, but clearly attempting to push into the pike formation, their forward motion sometimes checked by sarissai in contact with shields. We have examples of Romans closing to melee so fast they don’t have time to throw their pila – not something you’d do if that was the primary weapon! – and so on.
Some element of battle ‘pulses’ – basically just the idea that you can only fight in close combat for so long – have survived, but the communis opinio remains volley-and-charge so far as I can tell, because that’s simply what the sources indicate. Note for instance Milne, Inside the Roman Legions (2024), which accepts pulses of perhaps 15-30 minutes, but assumes the form of the pulse is volley-and-charge and pila were an optional component of an attack but gladii were not. Michael Taylor also, I think, has a large project on Roman tactics and remains, when last I chatted with him about it, decisively volley-and-charge.
You have certainly met more of the principles than I have in person. From reading the research literature, I thought the communis opinio on Republican Roman combat was the Goldsworthy, Sabin, and Zhmodikov view of a few minutes of close-ranged fighting alternating with tens of minutes of shouting and throwing things with the lines a pilum-cast apart. The distinctive feature of this view is that most of the time the initial close fighting does not end the battle, just causes one side to retreat a few tens of metres and lose some people and equipment. Whereas when a Napoleonic battalion charges with the bayonet (or seventeenth-century Highlanders fire and charge with the broadsword and targe), either it or the unit it is charging are about to be removed from the action, and in the “rugby scrum” model a clash between two phalanxes also ends with one side leaving the field.
I don’t think fights against Macedonian phalanxes affect this theory, because those phalanxes refused to disengage (and at Magnesia the Roman infantry refused to engage with them too). Its a theory about battles between nations from the Western Mediterranean.
The Romans of course used volley and charge, sometimes. They tell us so, explicitly, in the primary surces.
But other times, they also did indeed hang at distance and exchange missiles for quite long periods of time. Julius Caesar tells us that the Battle of Ilerda went on for some hours, and the missiles were almost exhausted, before the issue was decided with swords:
“The fight had now lasted five hours without intermission, when our men, oppressed by the multitude of the enemy, and having spent all their darts, attacked the mountain sword in hand, and overthrowing such as opposed them, obliged the rest to betake themselves to flight.”
Caes. Civ. 1.46, via Perseus Digital Library.
According to what we have from the primary sources, sometimes the Romans seem to go directly to the sword charge without a volley, sometimes they volley and charge, sometimes they hang at distance and exchange missiles for apparently quite a long time. The Roman soldier was a pretty flexible and pragmatic chap, I think, and wasn’t overly doctrinaire about this matter.
We also know full well that soldiers in this time would retrieve spent missiles like javelins and throw them back at the enemy. Caesar tells us that the Gauls did this, and Polybius tells us that the Romans took special cares with the javelins of the velites couldn’t be re-used against them.
It also seems to be implied in the sources that a battle might consist of one attack, or potentially of several, and sometimes the two sides might contest the battlefield for some time before a battle-winning rout occurred, or that one side might gradually give way for potentially considerable distances before being defeated. Caesar tells us of his legionaries driving enemies off certain localities or pushing them all the way back to their camp while the Gauls or Germans remain actively fighting. Even if we assume that the Romans can rotate their front line troops out of contact, I don’t see how you can reconcile all of this with “single volley, then sword-fighting, strictly” as a model.
The narratives of the ancient battlefield that survive from the Greeks and Romans imply that there must be a “no man’s land” between the lines at least some of the time, potentially much of the time. If the lines were pressed together or even merely in hand to hand combat distance, then Caesar would have had no space to advance to the front and encourage his centurions, as he did at the Sabis, nor could the centurions and front-fighters have taken any heed to his encouragement as they would be actively fighting for their lives at that time.
The existence of that no man’s land to me supports a “pulse” model of Roman infantry combat, which could feature many different tactics used by our Romans in different situations.
Typo in the text for last image “but was likely originally FORM the Kongo people.”
Fixed
Tangential to the Greeks, but the part about New Guinea and the dramatic lethality increase that metal weapons involve puts Mesopotamian warfare in an interesting context.
By the time of Akkade (circa 2300 BC), Mesopotamian armies used leather, sometimes copper helmets, flint- copper- and bronze tipped spears and axes, copper- or bronze daggers (no swords yet), flint tipped arrows.
They were a thousand years into the bronze age, but there still wasn’t a lot of bronze to go around.
The temple inventories don’t mention shields, though they’re plentiful in art. Armour is present, though only textile armour.
The armies of Akkade (‘The First Empire’), yet alone its citystate predecessors were certainly not gleaming in the sunlight with their arms and armour. They were crawling out of the neolithic, but to a very large parts, its armies were still equipped with neo- to chalcolithic weapons. Presumably, then, they also fought like that.
But here is where the level of organisation starts playing a role. Akkadian (or as a technonically and organisationally match, Incan) weapons were still largely, though not entirely, stone age weapons, but they belonged to states with armies. And as soon as a neolithic to early bronze age (weapons still mostly neolithic) society creates a state and armies, (textile) armour and shields appear.
I’d wager that it’s not /just/ the type of weapons that determines lethality, but also the scale and level of organisation that applies them. A neolithic state is deadlier than a neolithic tribe, basically.
In particular, a non-state society has small armies, thus there is room for men — fighting as skirmishers — to use mobility for protection from threats (read: running away). Whereas a state both fields more men, and has greater ability to punish them for running away; thus it becomes necessary to be able to “tank” missile fire.
Yeah, from watching Dead Birds it seems like the Dani absolutely *could* use shields and probably even make armour of some sort if they wanted to, but that they simply find their ability to dodge, duck or run away to be much more valuable than whatever protection such things might afford them.
But as you say, if the army sizes were multiplied, or if they were put in a position where they couldn’t easily spread out and/or retreat, I bet they would want shields.
This is my first time commenting, and I have been a fan of the blog for quite a while. This series has been great so far. However, I need to comment on the use of African warfare as an example, because while it could be very useful as a comparison I think there are poor choices here both in the choice of example and evidence.
First, the image. It is labeled as a warrior fighting in Brazil, originally from Kongo. I don’t know where this is coming from, because it is a reelaboration (the shield is added later, and the style is cartoonish instead of realistic) of a beautiful painting by Albert Eckhout of a man from Denkyira, in modern Ghana. This is an Akan warrior with its typical akrafena sword. This painting is very valuable because it is the oldest depiction of an akrafena that is actually meant for war (later examples became pageantry objects as they were completely displaced by guns as weapons, and they are still used today by the Akan courts in Ghana) in the period before warfare in the Gold Coast was compleely transformed by guns.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albert_Eckhout_painting.jpg
We have a nice description of how this warfare was waged by Brun, summarized in Warfare in Atlantic Africa (p.60-61). You have swordsmen with shields and javelins as the frontline (armoured with textile or metal armours) with archers in the back providing support and a loose rear of poorly armed individuals:
“When the army arrived at a place where a pitched battle could be offered because there was open space near settlements or that naturally occurred in the forest, they would quickly deploy from their loose marching order to a battle order, in a formation that would be five ranks deep. They closed up well, according to Brun,observing in 1618–19, with shield-carrying heavy infantry armed also with swords and javelins in the front, and archers behind them, who loosed their arrows upwards in order to have them rain down on opponents. Farther back the armies had groups of people armed with swords like choppers,often commoners or slaves, but without the defensive armour that the front ranks held. Combat was then joined as the ranks advanced, first throwing most or all of their javelins at their enemies (as the archers continued their high arc of supporting volleys) and then closing in for hand-to-hand combat with swords, protected by their shields. A melée rapidly ensued which, like all such hand-to-hand combat, lasted for a short time before one side or the other broke”
This isn’t too much like hoplites, even in the Archaic, except in a very loose sense due to the use of swords as a primary weapon.
Then the text of the post seems to recall warfare in Angola as waged by Kongo. Angolan forces were structured around light infantry that was universally armed with bows and axes. Kongo developed a shock core of noble troops fighting with sword and shield, that acted as a decisive reserve. However, the only other polity to have an equivalent unit was Portuguese Angola (in which the ethnic Portuguese and mestizos acted in such a fashion, except also using guns and cannon), with neither Loango, Ndongo or the Imbangala having these heavy infantry shieldbearers. Indeed, its main competitor was the light shock infantry of the Imbangala fashion, completely unarmored and armed mostly with axes, fighting in a loose order where athleticity and skill were paramount.
This does not seem at all like what was going on in Ancient Greece either.
I’d say the best models are two different traditions more to the north. On the one hand, we have the Azande kingdoms of the 19th century. Zande warriors were unarmored, but used large and robust wicker shields that covered a whole man along with thrusting spears and swords (and both javelins and the very cool throwing knives). The warring Zande kings gathered relatively large hosts, with the largest being 20.000 men at most. These acted much more like hoplites, with a bunch of caveats, although they act in a sort of heterodox school way (without the armor). Quoting Evans-Pritchard on Azande warfare:
“The companies advanced in file, abakumba and riflemen leading, and then extended company by company when in contact with the enemy, but though the extension was in company, formation the men of adjacent companies tended to get mixed up once the fighting began. Each side had its centre and two wings ; and the aim was to get round or push back the enemy’s flanks and then to assail the centre from all sides. It would seem that the decisive action was between the wings of the armies, for if a wing gave ground the centre was enveloped. However, I was told that since the aim was to get the enemy to withdraw so that victory might be claimed with as little loss on your side as possible you usually avoided complete encirclement (kenge aboro). for if the enemy was unable to withdraw they would, seeing that there was no hope, sell their lifes as dearly as they could. You therefore left a gap in their rear. Moreover, there was a further convention, that fighting should begin about 4:00 pm, so that those who were getting the worse of it could withdraw under cover of darkness. This convention was, however, often not observed.
A battle consisted of individual combats between warriors on either side all along the line and at short range, usually only a few yards separating the combatants, for the spear had to pierce a man’s shield before it could pierce the man. The throwing-knife doubtless carried further, though it may not have been so effective a weapon because it probably met with greater resistance from the texture of the shield. I fancy that its effect was as much psychological as physical. I used to practice with it often when I was among the Azande and I learnt to throw it with considerable force and accuracy. When correctly thrown one of its several blades was certain to strike the objective squarely, and the sight of the blades circling towards one in the air must have been frightening. The Zande shield, however, protected two-thirds of the body, and when a man crouched behind it, as he did if a spear or knife was aimed high, his body was fully covered. If the missile came at him low he jumped into the air with remarkable agility to let it pass under him. I have not, of course, myself seen a Zande battle, but men have demonstrated to me with old shields or ones I had made for me how they moved in fighting, and it was a most impressive display in the art of self-defence, in the movements of the body to give the fullest protection of the shield and in the manipulation of the shield to take the spear or throwing-knife obliquely. The hurling of weapons and the taking of them on the shield were accompanied by shouting the names of the kings of the parties involved. When the combatants had exhausted most of their weapons they withdrew to a safe distance where they challenged and insulted each other, as Schweinfurth noted was customary”
Then, lastly, we have the medieval way of war in the sphere of Mali. Most scholarship, like Thornton, portray these as cavalry based armies, but I don’t think it is quite right except for Songhay. Cavalry was certainly very important both militarily and politically, but the bulk of Malian armies was infantry and that’s where they seem to be better at, with large sections of the empire lacking meaningful access to horses due to the tse-tse fly. We don´t know exactly when this way of war appeared, and perhaps it was during the period of interstate competition between Ghana, Kawkaw and Awdhagust, but it seems to go where the Malians go and replace local systems. In fact, we actually see this process in action in 16th century Sierra Leone. So it is fair to call it the Mande way of war.
Much like the Neo-Assyrians, the infantry seems based on the cooperation of spearmen with large wicker shields (and large adargas in the regions roughly north of the Gambia) and archers within the same units, likely integrated at the equivalent of company level. These fought in good order but not shoulder to shoulder, with the archers providing support fire for the spearmen, before closing in for a decisive melee (where everyone seems to participate, but the shieldbearers likely had a dominant role). An incident with Wolof slaves in the Caribbean in the early 1500’s shows that bunching up to a very close order (like a synaspismos) against cavalry was a rather standard response, probably with the spearmen tasked with repelling the horses while the archers take potshots at the enemy.
I think the incident with the self-liberating Wolofs on Hispaniola is here (English and Spanish) https://www.bookandsword.com/2023/06/30/from-the-notebook-cavalry-charging-infantry/ The Routledge Warfare in History series was very important for world military history.
Yes, it is exactly that one.
That series is indeed very important. In this case, Thornton offers the (relatively) modern synthesis on warfare in Africa, dealing with panoplies, tactics, social military organization. It was very important, because the previous monographs on the topic focus just on one area and are really showing their age (e.g. Smaldone’s Warfare in the Sokoto Caliphate from 2017). However, Thornton’s main expertise lies in Angola, and that’s where the exploration of the evidence is stronger.
For the Sahel and Senegambia, particularly towards the earlier frame of the period covered in the book before large states mostly collapsed around 1600 (which really was a continuation of the warfare in the medieval period in many ways), the account is more standard, a compilation of existing literature, but I feel that there is so much that is unsaid. This is mainly because there is a change, and armies in say 1650 were generally of a different nature than those in 1450 in the some similar ways than one could compare the Franks in 600 to the army of Valens. This change is tied to a deeper reestructuration of the political and economic threads of West Africa, intrinsically linked.
For example, there is strong evidence that among other things Malian armies built fortified camps on a regular pattern after marching. This, among other things, suggest a level of sophistication that is quite high, with disciplined forces in a coherent sysem of warfare. Thornton does mention it in passing in a short paragraph, but does not pick upon its true meaning in conjunction with the rest of the evidence. And this level of sophistication is not present in what is later the bulk of the analysis (1600-1800) in polities heir to this heritage like Kaabu.
Ultimately, what we would need is a true military historian looking at the collective evidence and working out a model in a wider universal comparative framework.
I appreciate the source specifically mentioning that archers loosed their arrows at a high arc from behind the frontline combatants, which is something often derided as silly, since they can’t see shit and thus can’t aim that way (on this blog, even).
Oddly, this doesn’t make it not silly in these respects – they can indeed not see shit and thus can’t aim.
But it’s food for thought that poorly aimed, high-arcing missile fire was still used and thus had a purpose (the purpose being, presumably, to cause a degree of disruption upon the advancing line without being so close the archers end up being cut down on the spot).
By firing that way, even if the archers couldn’t ensure a hit, they were likely pressuring those warriors to raise their shields, which could expose them to other forms of attack.
I’m pretty sure I could “see” a hostile grouping of enemies to my front even if a friendly grouping was screening them directly. Think of being in any large gathering, it’s seldom you can’t perceive figures ahead, receding into the distance or until blocked by a change in terrain or obstacle. If I’m a skirmisher, I don’t need to see individuals or have a direct line of sight — it would be sufficient to see that a large band of adversaries was just *over there*, beyond who I could tell were friends, and cast a shot toward that unit, over the heads of intervening figures.
Another point is that the notion that warfare in West Africa emphazised capture of slaves and thus capture weapons were favored is also rather flawed. I need to preface by stating that there are regional differences at play and there are different modes of warfare that intersect and are applied in different times.
Clubs and non-lethal weapons are almost never the primary secondary weapon. Among the Mandinka of the Gambia, Bainuks, and other peoples in that particular area, there were wooden clubs in use, that were also used as throwing weapons (as referenced by 16th century sources like Almada), and wooden clubs are also referenced by earlier Arabic sources of the region (when refering to more southern pagan peoples than the Soninke or Songhay at Kawkaw they were trading with). Incapacitating people is one of their functions (“they throw at them at their legs”) but killing is also emphazised (“they strike their enemies on the head with these clubs, killing them” or “use them to strike them on the head, to knock their brains out”). However, these clubs coexisted with swords, spears and bows.
Later on, when the Atlantic slave trade is in full swing and slaving becomes more intense on the coast, they had basically dissapeared and sabers became the universal sidearm to guns. So the weapons are not necessarily designed for capture.
Warfare could be waged in three ways in the Atlantic slavery world, post 1550 (and much more intensely post 1600). Individual raids not sanctioned by the ruler, carried out by small units of frontier warriors of their own volition. Frontier raids sanctioned by the ruler, carried out by a more serious force. And finally, central expeditions with political aims or a major raid on enemy territory, with the ruler or a representitative at its head and mobilising a substantial force. Of these, the capture of slaves was a central aim in the first two, while the third usually followed a political/strategical aim tied for example to the capture of a city or the vassalization of a polity. Slaves were also captured, but they were a byproduct of warfare. In all these cases the weapons used and the combat were fully lethal in intent. Battles were fought to kill or incapacitate the enemy force, they were not flower wars. In the same way that the Romans captured massive amounts of slaves, and its capture was certainly an expected result, but nobody would claim that they used capture weapons to accomplish it, the same could be said of West African polities. Many captives were simply the agricultural population of the enemy, rounded up and translocated, or captured surviving enemies after an engagement.
The capture of slaves was a central aim of warfare (indeed, apart of slave trade many social forms of organization of that period needed slaves to self replicate, like the Bambara ton-djon), but it does not follow that non-lethal weapons were used to achieve that aim.
Thank you for the really interesting primer about West African military history- its an area that I feel like those of us in America are often insufficiently aware of!
To be fair, my understanding of the current thinking around nahua ‘flower wars’ is that there is at least a significant camp that don’t think they were all that ‘designed for capture’ either.
Or, rather, that they absolutely were conducted with an express intention to procure captives, but that as in the cases you mention the overwhelming majority of the fighting was still ‘fought to kill’ in much the same manner as conventional Mesoamerican warfare.
There’s also been a reappraisal of how they functioned in a strategic context as well. They’re often pitched in the popular consciousness as a wholly ritual affair to procure captives for religious purposes. However, from a geopolitical standpoint, what they achieve is leveraging the significant ‘idle military nobility’ (i.e. the members of the Mexica warrior societies and their comparators) to apply pressure against rival polities in the off-season from traditional warfare. It appears that they used these flower wars tactically in order to weaken polities that they were not confident of being able to beat outright in traditional warfare (as in the Tlaxcallans when Cortez arrived), to be followed by a traditional engagement as and when that weakening had had its effect.
I’m far from an expert myself in this, but my amateur understanding runs as far as ‘flower wars may not be as simplistic as most people understand’, which is hardly surprising.
Yeah, I agree with this. At least that was the understanding I got from “Vencer o Morir: Una Historia Militar de la conquista de Mexico” (To Win or to Die: A Military History of the conquest of Mexico), a recent monograph on the Spanish conquest.
I was leveraging the popular conception of flower wars, rather than the more nuanced modern view
However, from a geopolitical standpoint, what they achieve is leveraging the significant ‘idle military nobility’ (i.e. the members of the Mexica warrior societies and their comparators) to apply pressure against rival polities in the off-season from traditional warfare.
In that sense some resemblances could perhaps be seen with medieval Western European crusades.
It’s so cool to see this open question investigated in real time! (Histography in action?) Especially with some of the other pros chiming in already in the comments. I’ve been fascinated with the classical world and hoplite warfare in particular since picking up Hanson’s The Other Greeks on a whim in a used bookstore, and this series has been a gold mine of updated references. Thank you so much for your work on this blog!
Watching Dead Birds, I actually don’t think we’re seeing a qualitatively different way of fighting than what is described in the later example from West Africa; rather, I think they are employing the same broad tactical concept but adapting it to available weaponry and – crucially – the level of crowding on the battlefield.
So, in the Guinea/Congo example, you have (to vastly simplify things) skirmishers who probe the enemy and shock troops who hit them.
With the Dani, you have… skirmishers to probe the enemy and shock troops to hit them, I would argue. The main difference – other than the materials used for weapons – is that the Dani armies are small enough that the men can spread out and fight at very wide intervals without running out of room.
I would say, the Dani prefer to use their mobility for protection rather than a shield. This is partly because of the stone-age weapons, but also because they simply can; Dani warriors seem to do quite well darting left and right, ducking behind vegetation and opening the distance when they feel threatened. When one side senses an opening, the main body of men have the mobility to quickly rush forward to overwhelm isolated skirmishers or enemy warriors otherwise caught flat footed.
And this seems to work very well for them, but there are a few cases in the film where you can see this system breaking down a bit. An opportunistic rush by Side A may cause Side B’s skirmishers to withdraw as the main body of Side B’s warriors are still advancing, forcing them to compress their formation.
Because the Dani lack shields, a compressed formation is actually really bad for them; standing too close together makes them easier targets for enemy spears and arrows, and limits their ability to dodge or seek cover. Fortunately, once the warriors realize what is happening, they are usually able to fall back and space out again before taking too many hits.
But now imagine if they couldn’t do that. Say the Dani armies grew twice as big, or maybe three times as big, but were forced to fight on the same ground. Or perhaps there was less room for them to retreat. Now, I bet you would get these kind of involuntary compressions *much* more often, and they would last longer.
A Dani probably wouldn’t want to carry a shield if he had the space to take full advantage of his mobility, but take that space away and I bet he would change his mind! So, as armies get larger and battlefields get more crowded, I think you would start to see warriors around the middle of the army – the ones most likely to get into these crowded clusters – starting to carry shields and wearing rudimentary armour, even as the skirmishers out front stay light to preserve their mobility.
Then, of course, you would probably start seeing tactics develop to take advantage of a more tightly concentrated formation, socioeconomic implications for who carries the shields in the main force and who skirmishes out front, etc. But really, the point I want to make is that the heavier equipment probably first comes about because circumstances prevent the fighters from being as mobile as they would otherwise want to be.
Another culture that I would point to as analog is the combat of Moros and Bagabos of the Philippines. Not so much because of the way they fight, because I can find little reliable information, but because their shields, called Taming, are as close to the aspis as you will find. They have a double grip with the arm cuff in the shield’s center like the aspis’s porpax. They also wore armor of many layers of linen and carried swords much like the kopis. One of the few accounts I can find supports the notion that men equipped like this could, as we are told by R.F. Cummings in the 1913 war with the USA: “An attack is usually initiated by the throwing of spears, then, if the enemy is at a disadvantage or confused, they rush into close combat (with swords)” The main difference I see is that hoplites retained a spear as main weapon, unlike later Hastatii, while this indicates going in with the sword. Pretty much the only objection that i have to what you wrote above is the notion of a volley as they close. I think that too organized for early hoplites (though perhaps not for small groups pf them). But consider that the two lines may have been very close before the terminal charge and this “throw until they look unsteady” may have essentially been the same thing. Instead of advance, throw, disorder, attack, it is stand around while others throw, throw yourself, they look disordered, charge. One of the main focuses of my work in history, because it is what my day job is all about, is how order can arise from seeming disorder. Often they can look very similar when you see the rules behind each.
More accounts of Filipino warfare:
From “The Bontoc Igorot”, by Albert Ernest Jenks (1905). Not the Moros or Bagobos, but still useful as a comparison to Filipino peoples who used more armour:
“Men go to war armed with a wooden shield, a steel battle-ax, and one to three steel or wooden spears. It is a man’s agility and skill in keeping his shield between himself and the enemy that preserves his life. Their battles are full of quick, incessant springing motion. There are sudden rushes and retreats, sneaking flank movements to cut an enemy off. The body is always in hand, always in motion, that it may respond instantly to every necessity. Spears are thrown with greatest accuracy and fatality up to 30 feet, and after the spears are discharged the contest, if continued, is at arms’ length with the battle-axes. In such warfare no attitude or position can safely be maintained except for the shortest possible time.
Challenges and bluffs are sung out from either side, and these bluffs are usually “called.” In the last Bontoc-Tulubin foray a fine, strapping Tulubin warrior sung out that he wanted to fight ten men—he was taken at his word so suddenly that his head was a Bontoc prize before his friends could rally to assist him.
…
Rocks are often thrown in battle, and not infrequently a man’s leg is broken or he is knocked senseless by a rock, whereupon he loses his head to the enemy, unless immediately assisted by his friends. ”
***
From “The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao”, by Faye-Cooper Cole (1913)
“The offensive weapons used by the Bagobo are spears, knives (Fig. 15 and Plate XXXII), and at times bows and arrows (Fig. 17). For defense they carry shields, either round or oblong (Figs. 31-32), and cover the body with so many strips of hemp cloth that a knife thrust is warded off. Turning his body sideways to the enemy, the warrior crouches behind his shield, keeping up a continuous capering, rushing forward or dancing backward, seeking for an opening but seldom coming to close quarters. Arrows and spears are glanced off with the shield. An attack is usually initiated by the throwing of spears, then, if the enemy is at a disadvantage or confused, the warriors rush in to close combat. For this purpose they rely entirely on their knives, and as fencers they are unexcelled. They are but indifferent shots with the bow and arrow, and that weapon is but little used in actual combat. It has been frequently stated that these arrows are poisoned but I was unable to discover a single specimen so prepared. When hard-pressed, or when a camp must be made in dangerous territory, sharpened bamboo sticks—sogiang—are stuck into the ground with their points directed toward the enemy. These must be carefully gathered up by the pursuers, who otherwise run the risk of having the knife-like blades driven into their feet. Old warriors state that in former years they not only covered the upper part of the body with hemp cloth but wound over this long decorated strips called gindua; they also tell of coats of mail made of carabao horn or rattan. None of these outfits exist in the territory today, but it is not at all improbable that they were formerly in use, for the long decorated bands are still found among the Bukidnon of the North, with whom some trade is carried on; and a few coats of mail are to be seen among the neighboring Moro.”
Thank you for posting this. I think this is pretty much all we have in English. I live in hope that someone will read this who has access to indigenous sources in Tagalog or other local languages.
No problem! Glad to have added to the available source list.
Regarding Footnote 7, I couldn’t help but think about the classic Warhammer 40k Meme about the role of sabers in tank warfare: https://imgur.com/gallery/drive-me-closer-i-want-to-hit-them-with-sword-PzlsQC3
“Instead of advance, throw, disorder, attack, it is stand around while others throw, throw yourself, they look disordered, charge”
Does this imply an alternative possibility of “others throw, throw yourself, they dont look very disordered, don’t charge”? Are there any accounts like that?
Short answer is that we have no way of knowing because we don’t have anything close to reliable battle descriptions from this early date, but there are some hints. In general “do they look disordered?” is perhaps what is governing the length of battles. There are sliding scales of whipping up your own fervor and them seeming to falter, when both are high, you go. Where we may see this is in the writing of Tyrtaeus. He spends a lot of time singing for the men to get close.
For example: “let him learn how to fight by doing doughty deeds, and not stand shield in hand beyond the missiles. Nay, let each man close the foe, and with his own long spear, or else with his sword, wound and take an enemy, and setting foot beside foot, resting shield against shield, crest beside crest, helm beside helm, fight his man breast to breast with sword or long spear in hand”
The old Heterodox took this to mean he was telling men who wandered around on the edge of the battlefield to come back to the battle. I think he is telling them to stop standing in the shield-wall just outside of missile range and fighting a missile duel in pulses and just get on with it and close with the foe like we know you are going to do at the end. There must have been morale value in charging first. So that is a long way of answering your question, that at least Tyrtaeus thought you could just stand there and never get up the courage to charge.
A quick remark that has nothing to do with the article but rather with the personal information at the start of it: You mention that you mostly shifted over to Bluesky, but the sidebar still links your Twitter profile. You might want to change that.
One detail I feel I am still missing is whether there is any sense of continuity between Mycenean and Archaic warfare. On one hand, if Mycenean warfare contained shieldwalled infantry action next to more media-friendly heroic chariot riders, and on the other, if hoplites really arose from a mass of skirmishers without as much as an inspiration from tales of old times.
To be fair, the question of ‘what was Mycenaean warfare like’ is likely one of those interconnected complexities that’s both influenced by and influences our idea of what Archaic-period Greek warfare was like.
Was it that there was a continued trajectory from ‘Mycenaean shield walls with prestige charioteer-elite-skirmisher/duellists’ through ‘Greek shield walls with prestige foot-slogging skirmisher/duellists because no-one could afford chariots anymore’ to ‘Greek prestige shield walls with foot-slogging poor skirmishers’.
Or was there a breakdown in Mycenaean shield walls alongside the breakdown of the charioteer-elite, being replaced by a mob of skirmishers before shield walls gradually make a resurgence (likely gradually during the Archaic with various iterations of panoplies, judging by the archaeological evidence). And if so, did people do so after some vague remembrance of the fighting their ancestors supposedly did (remembered correctly or incorrectly).
Or have we got a skewed perspective of what Mycenaean warfare was like as well?
I would be really interested if there are any accessible overviews of what we know about Mycenaean warfare in general.
Yes, several: a chapter in Josho Brouwers’ Henchmen of Ares, a chapter in Philio de Souza, ed., The Ancient World At War, or somewhat older and denser Robert Drews’ End of the Bronze Age.
Not exactly an accessible overview, but a couple of sparring videos of folks in Mycenaean gear:
https://www.instagram.com/p/C4SgMfgMWoK/?img_index=2
https://www.instagram.com/p/C7WDQIqsL09/?img_index=2
https://www.instagram.com/p/C6RygJmM-DM/?img_index=2
https://www.instagram.com/p/C_xmxXptK5V/
Perhaps a little on the meta side, but I have to ask: Are you doing serious original scholarship here? That is to say, might professional historians find the arguments presented in this context persuasive? Am I witnessing, not history, but historiography in the making?
Dr. Devereaux’s done a few series like this, and as a rule his goal seems to be to summarize the debate and at most present his own opinion as aggregated from what the existing experts in the field are saying. I get the impression that he’s not saying anything that an expert in the forefront of the field wouldn’t already know about if they cared to know.
Which doesn’t mean the blog posts are unimportant, because they are MUCH more accessible to the lay audience than the typical serious historical discourse on phalanx warfare or whatever Dr. Devereaux talks about in a given month.
There’s a fair number of college-age people out there who are interested in history but who’s mental picture of a phalanx is straight out of Hanson’s The Western Way of War simply because they don’t know any better and a lot of the popular publicizations show phalanxes fighting exactly that way or assert that such fighting was the norm. A work like this helps push back against that general condition of ignorance of where the historians actually are and what they are saying, even if it’s unlikely to change a lot of historians’ minds.
At least one other historian has noted that the comparison between the agoge and child soldier indoctrination is something that could be argued academically.
The tangent that the West Africa model include the use of capture weapons and emphasis on captives is interesting, since in pop history memory most people probably associate capture oriented warfare with the Aztecs who need captives for human sacrifices. I wonder what kind of economic and ecological condition lead the West African kingdoms to emphasize control and even capture of laborers over land. Is the land just that plentiful enough that manpower is short? Is there any good books or articles on this? I am assuming since it is already applied pre-gunpowder, the Atlantic slave trade isn’t a factor in this.
I seem to remember reading that slavery was unusually prominent in West Africa even before Europeans became involved (with wealth being measured in slaves and similar), which may be one cause.
“I wonder what kind of economic and ecological condition lead the West African kingdoms to emphasize control and even capture of laborers over land.”
I was about to ask the same question – and also note that Greek and Eurasian warfare wasn’t just about control of land per se, it was about control of the productive capacity of land, ie the farmers that lived on it. If you conquer a chunk of someone else’s territory in Eurasian war, you don’t generally drive out or enslave all the inhabitants. You leave the farmers and so on where they are, maybe you settle a few of your own people there as overlords/garrison, maybe you enslave some of the defeated army, and you inform the farmers of the new taxpaying arrangements. Otherwise, what’s the point?
But, if this is accurate, a West African victory is not followed by the victorious king saying “well, my newly conquered subjects, I am your king and the taxes go to me now” – instead he’s saying “I am your king and you lot are all coming home with me to work on my land now”. In other words, the West African king is not land-constrained, he’s manpower-constrained. He has estates that are lying fallow for lack of labour, not landless second sons in need of manors of their own.
Is this right, and if so why?
Oh man, this is digging up some really vaguely remembered points so please take this more as a platform to start googling from rather than any sort of authoritative statement, but I remember reading that there’s something different about a number of sub-Saharan agricultural, environmental and social systems compared to European ones that leads to a prioritisation of labour over land in terms of what is the most critical resource.
I vaguely remember there being something to do with the tsetse fly making holding livestock to manure fields being effectively non-viable, meaning that the way of increasing agricultural surplus is more directly tied to the amount of labour you can apply to the land (though that being part of a suite of differences that produced the effect, rather than a sole cause). I think sleeping sickness also had quite a considerable effect on human population numbers as well, though I do remember reading something about the prevalence of tsetse across sub-Saharan Africa being a relatively recent phenomenon (i.e. post slavery-induced-depopulation).
I’m not aware of how robust these concepts are, and a load of vaguely remembered half-ideas, but it’s a starter for 10 at least.
Not a historian or an expert on any part of Africa, but, as I understand it, subsaharan demographics were heavily influenced by malaria.
Remember that a substantial fraction of your population carrying the Sickle Cell Anemia gene was a net positive for a population in malarial areas, because at 50% allele frequency, only a quarter of your population dies of malaria while another quarter dies of anemia and half lives, which is better than more than half dieing of malaria (actual frequencies were almost certainly less than 50% and varied by location, but I have no idea of the actual values).
But the sort of fatality rate that makes this a common gene means that population recovery from losses is going to be quite slow. A few bad years or an invasion will leave excess land for a long time to come.
I am assuming since it is already applied pre-gunpowder, the Atlantic slave trade isn’t a factor in this.
I mean, the trans-Saharan slave trade was going on a long time before gunpowder, so I’m sure a lot of the demand for slaves was driven by that.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the land/labor ratio was generally higher in sub-Saharan Africa than elsewhere though. People evolved in Africa and the disease/pathogen burden is higher there, so if population was controlled by disease pressure rather than by food scarcity, you’d expect land to be in higher supply.
“People evolved in Africa and the disease/pathogen burden is higher there, so if population was controlled by disease pressure rather than by food scarcity, you’d expect land to be in higher supply.”
Seems to me, though, that West Africans have been in West Africa a long time, long enough for their population to reach a steady state, and whatever the disease burden is, it must lead to TFR being either less than or greater than replacement. And pre-Atlantic-slavery West Africa presumably doesn’t have much immigration or emigration. So if TFR is less than replacement then there shouldn’t be any West Africans at all, and if it’s greater than replacement then there should be as many as the land can support. No?
Unless, I suppose, the disease burden works to constrain not population, but population density at some level below that of the carrying capacity of the land…
Does the fact that reenactors must place a high emphasis on safety amount to a hard limit on the knowledge that can be gleaned from reenactments and experimental archeology to help answer questions like this?
To an extent, yes, if we did not care about wounds we would learn more and faster. But the way around it is to reduce hoplite combat to basic elements and test which paradigm they follow. For example. I was able to attend large gatherings of hoplite reenactors on a number of occasions and have them push against each other in ranks. For these tests I has a force meter affixed to a shield in the front rank. The question we asked was not “did othismos occur”, we cannot answer that without a time machine, but rather to take the details that both sides of the debate have assured us must be true and see if that is the case with our ersatz hoplites (men in the best panoply we can recreate). Some said men could not generate force in such a crown, others said that the men would get squashed, still others assured us that men could not both push and fight or debated the best way to push. We have largely answered all of these objections and demonstrated counter-intuitive details like pushing is not as effective as leaning, charging does not add ‘momentum to the push, and the reason why 50 ranks of men don’t just push 12 from the field immediately. To this day I cannot say with certainty othismos was real, and we certainty were never doing the exact same thing the Greeks did, but by reducing the question to just one element, pushing, I was able to counter just about every major objection to it’s existence. This leaves the questioner essentially saying “I just don’t believe they did it”, to which I have no answer, because they are entitled not to.
This same thing goes with weapons use. For safety we have to reduce the questions, even about sharp weapons. Sharps handle very differently from padded weapons, and many of the things you will see in mock combat, such as hitting shields hard with spears to move them out of the way, cannot be done with sharps or you get stuck and lose your weapon. I just wrote a chapter on many of these details and things we learned. For example the Xiphos has an often very wide cross guard and a curved section of the blade that blends from sword to guard. Both of these features are important in carrying and moving spears out of the way to close with enemy hoplites.
The limit is less our need for safety and more a requirement for greater creativity in asking the right questions.
I’m wary about generalizing from the Dani to “Stone Age warfare” and the upgrade metal represents because the Dani didn’t use *stone*, their points were bone & wood. This may be due to the local geography, but I’m sure it’s also due to New Guinea having no native large mammals. Arrows & spears developed for killing large mammals for food will NOT leave only minor injuries when turned on humans (just another large mammal).
The Aztecs had a true Stone Age army, in that their weapons got their edges/points from stone, especially obsidian, and they *definitely* used shields & armor. Inka arms were a combination of stones and some metal, probably not as deadly as some of the Aztec weapons but how do you judge?
I actually came to post a similar, more extreme point. Before I get to that, about a decade ago, NOVA did a program on the Inca, where they made the strong assertion that Pizarro won by treachery, not by superior weapons. Long story short, as with the Aztecs, the Inca were conquerors who were hated by their rivals. Just as Cortez made common cause with the Aztec’s foes and later turned on his erstwhile allies, Pizarro did the same in the Andes. The Inca were overwhelmed by numbers, and the story of Spaniard’s superior technology (and the outlawing of natives carrying steel weapons) was purportedly in service of this ruse. Pizarro’s allies, at least, sued in Spanish courts, although they apparently lost, but left a record.
Anway, the more extreme version of stone age second system warfare: Hawai’i. There’s pretty good evidence that, with over a half million people, social castes, and god-emperors, the kingdom was a full fledged civilization that finished coming together during the European age of exploration, so Cook and his successors actually recorded the end parts of the civilization rising. And the Hawaiians recorded their history too, as soon as they were literate (see Kirch’s Shark Going Inland Is My Chief for details).
Hawaiian battles were very definitely second system, involving naval actions, interisland invasions with thousands of warriors, sieges of forts, men using pikes in formation…and all of the spears had wooden points. Some clubs did have shark’s teeth, and some clubs had stone heads, and they made some use of swordfish bills and stingray spine when they had them. And yes, some steel weapons and a couple of small cannon they got from the whites.
The point here is that second system warfare can be fought with extremely simple weapons, if that’s all the local tech base will support. The Hawaiians made sophisticated use of the materials they had, but their material base was pretty slim.
Conversely, some SWAT teams form doorknocker squads with a wheeled shield that’s proof against rifle bullets. The shield operator takes the lead, while the rest of the squad lines up behind him. So even with high tech weapons, having heavy infantry protect a bunch of warriors toting missile weapons still has uses. In this case, in police raids, which would be, erm, first system warfare?
While Cortes and Pizarro made effective use of native allies and treachery, the technological superiority was real. In Mexico the Tlaxcalans and other non-Aztec locals attacked the isolated Spanish force on a few occasions, each time vastly outnumbering them, and were regularly defeated.
The native allies switched sides because the Spanish had demonstrated that they were going to win, and this was their best chance at payback.
The comparison that comes to mind here is not police raids on buildings but police operations in public order situations. Riot control.
Do we know how heavily-armoured men with big shields and melee weapons behave in actual combat, not re-enactment? How their confrontations with crowds of unarmoured skirmishers with missile weapons go? Maybe we do, from watching it on TV!
Agree with @Doctor Science about arrows and especially spears being more lethal when the wielders are big game hunters.
The Aztec stone edged weapons came up against Spanish steel armour in the early 16th C and were massively less effective. Obsidian edged swords could kill an unarmoured horse with one blow, but against mail or plate the edges broke and the only value was the impact as a large wooden club, which could crack ribs or concuss a Spaniard but not kill them. Spanish infantry fighting their way into the Mexican capital (and out, and in again) suffered a lot of wounds but not many dead.
The Inca didn’t do any better with missiles or melee, and switched to using captured Spanish pikes and guns in the 1530s.
Thank you for the info about the first contact between Spanish & “Stone Age” troops in the Western Hemisphere, I know more about the epidemiological results than the tactical ones.
Conversely, I’m now realizing that hunting deer-sized prey with stone-tipped weapons is MUCH more difficult than I was imagining–my ideas have been based on modern bow-hunting scaled down, but I wasn’t properly taking account of how much more effective steel arrowheads are. And then when you scale up to bear (do they EVER get hunted?!?), aurochs, bison, mammoth, you can see how hunting them *has* be a group activity organizing around trapping or driving the animals so they can be speared or axed.
Bears do get hunted but as a hunting challenge or for pelts. Look up bear spears. It’s a lousy food source both in terms of meat/lard quantity (fat bears are very seasonal), taste and how much bear-fighting you have to do to get it, so it’s only hunted for meat if the are no better options. Imagine showing off as the guy that killed a bear though!
See the great Primo Levi story “Bear Meat” – it’s about climbing, not about bears, but apparently if you’ve been absolutely in the shit in Piedmont, just having a completely miserable time, the Piedmontese will say you’ve been “eating bear meat”.
A modest caution, not really to counter the point but just to caveat it, is that accounts of armor saving the life of its wearer against New World weapons isn’t a unique thing that only could have happened in New World vs Old World clashes; it needs to be balanced against the fact that good armor could perform similar feats, saving its wearer’s life, against Old World weapons too.
There are a fair few Old World battles in which a well armored force is reported to have suffered lots of wounded but relatively few dead against opponents using technologically comparable weapons. Our host has commented on several such many-wounded-very-low-KIA battles – see for example his remarks on the Macedonian defeat against the Romans at https://acoup.blog/2024/04/26/collections-phalanxs-twilight-legions-triumph-part-ivc-perseus/
A well armored force suffering many wounded, few KIA is not something that can only happen because of a technological disparity and therefore it shouldn’t be assigned -too- much weight in proving how enormous that disparity must have been.
Very true, but the effectiveness of European armour against central/south American weaponry is exceptional, and was noted as such by contemporary Spaniards. I don’t have my books readily available, so this is from memory, but the Spaniards in Mexico basically NEVER took heavy casualties, even when they were fighting hand to hand and considerably outnumbered. In some of the battles the locals had a numerical superiority of ten to one or more, and the Spaniards still won with minimal casualties.
There were comparable battles in Europe where heavily armoured troops took few casualties, and where a small force routed a much larger, but in the New World it just kept happening over and over again. Simplest explanation would be that the armour worked.
New Guinea doesn’t have native large mammals, but it does have very large flightless birds (cassowaries): the females are about human-sized, the males a little smaller, and both are potentially dangerous to humans. There are also introduced large mammals (wild boars and deer).
“Arrows & spears developed for killing large mammals for food will NOT leave only minor injuries when turned on humans (just another large mammal).”
Someone actually made such an argument? That’s…..a unique way of looking at the worlds, I suppose…..
I’ve studied the Quaternary megafauna of the US Desert Southwest, which are broadly similar to much of the Pleistocene megafauna (there are multiple names for the same time period). The thing to remember is that 1) humans evolved to hunt large animals, and 2) by “large” I mean things as big as or bigger than cars. These include mammoths and mastodons, giant ground sloths, camels, horses, and a bunch of others. The predators include things with teeth as long as knives, and cave bears (remember that bears were so terrifying that we don’t actually know what the original Indo-European name for them was). Oh, and some of these had osteoderms, which are bones in the skin that act as a sort of natural armor. Bear in mind, we have evidence of these interactions–not just humans living along side them, but evidence that they interacted–including some pretty spectacular ones. They don’t even have to be made of stone. I’ve seen a bone spear stuck in a mammoth rib, for example. I use it to pick on archeologists–do us paleo folks get it, or do the archeologists? Answer: We get the rib, the archeologists get the spear and the hole. (It’s a joke.)
We are not talking fuzzy bunnies or cute little piggies. We’re talking legitimate monsters. And humans killed them. Routinely. Using wood, bone, and stone tools.
The idea that something that can burry itself in a mammoth bone or killing a horse would only leave minor injuries in a human is simply stupid in the face of such evidence. There’s no other way to put it. The amount of force necessary to pierce an elephant hair and hide, through the fat and muscle, and into the bone hard enough to get stuck as FAR more than is necessary to, say, pierce a human belly. In all probability it’s enough to break human ribs and damage organs underneath. And people capable of injuring a mammoth with a bone spear were clearly capable of killing a human with the same weapon.
That’s without getting into the nature of the weapons. A simple thought experiment is sufficient: The simplest weapon ever is a stick. Can you kill someone by hitting them with a stick? Yes, absolutely, there’s ample evidence of this. A bit of shaping, of course, helps (that is, after all, what a mace essentially is–a club with spiky bits). Adding anything sharp would only increase the lethality–even if, or maybe especially if, bits broke off when you whacked someone with them. This pretty much puts this entire line of argument to rest.
Anyone who would make such an argument has abandoned any pretense at credibility with regard to stone age humans. I can’t say that humans DID turn their weapons on each other–I’m cynical enough to believe they did, but I’m not an anthropologist. But that they COULD is a matter that is definitively answered by physical evidence.
> remember that bears were so terrifying that we don’t actually know what the original Indo-European name for them was
I suspect this factoid may have arrived to you via a game of telephone. The Proto-Indo-European word for “bear” is uncontroversially reconstructed (from evidence including Greek ἄρκτος, Sanskrit ṛ́kṣa and Hittite ḫartággaš) as *h₂ŕ̥tḱos. In some branches (notably Germanic, Baltic and Slavic) this root has been replaced, but there’s no evidence for this lexical replacement being specifically taboo avoidance (although Old Irish math, etymologically “the good one”, might be).
I am waiting for the first official mention of the battle of Sphacteria (drink!) as an example of how hoplites were unable to contend with skirmisher troops in an irregular sort of combat. This would seem to demonstrate a flaw in the conventional heterodox viewpoint?
Sphacteria is not a great example because of the terrain issues and the fact that the hoplites had nowhere to go. Demosthenes learned these tactics by getting his ass handed to him in Acarnania by light troops with a terrain advantage. We know how hoplites delt with skirmishers in the open, they formed square and just marched away or got clever and attacked them in mutually supporting columns (Orthoi lochoi) to move rapidly and catch the skirmisher between them. Spartans also sent out runners to, the youngest age classes of hoplites, who were swift enough to catch the peltasts. This all worked very well.
The telling encounter is Lechaion, where a Spartan unit was decimated by peltasts. Many hold this up to show the vulnerability of hoplites to peltasts, but that is not the take home message. This battle was not about peltasts defeating hoplites, but about the proper use of combined arms vs the failure to do so. The reason that the hoplites were unable to do the things they would normally have done to evade the peltasts is that the Athenians also had a fully functional hoplite phalanx on the battlefield. It stood there and threatened a charge if the hoplites tried any fancy maneuvers and seems to have shut down the cavalry that were with the Spartans that should have delt with the peltasts in the usual cascading charge of troop types we see from this era. But horse feared getting caught by formed hoplites like nothing else. The combination of hoplites and horse was not up to the challenge of hoplites and peltasts. In the end it was a charge of the hoplites that finished them.
No because hoplites a century or two earlier were very different. In 530 BCE, an army would generally be some men of bronze with their hanger-on archers and slingers and men with just some kind of shield and two spears, and the men of bronze usually had two spears and sometimes horses. The large bodies of just men with one spear and a shield in Thucydides don’t seem to have existed a hundred years earlier, outside of special challenges like the Combat of the Thirty during the Hundred Years’ War. Whereas Thucydides’ Spartans are just spear-and-shield men, early hoplites had spears to throw, sometimes rode chariots or horses, and brought buddies with bows and arrows who were their personal buddies not the city’s archers under the control of the city’s general. This became very clear as soon as people asked what the art and archaeology from Archaic Greece show us rather than what writers after 430 BCE tell us about the old days when men were men.
I think some first nations groups in the Americas had wooden armour that would be worn by prime aged physically fit men, with younger boys filing in behind and using ranged thrown weapons to inflict casualties on the other side.
Europeans recorded this happening between villages and then it immediately stopping the minute guns where introduced.
I thought this model of armoured champions at the head of a group of slingers or javelin men, protecting the less equipped members and occasionally trying to take on the opposing champion was what was implied by the heterodox claims.
If the phalanxes didn’t shove, how did Epaminondas’s reforms work? How did the deeper Theban phalanx beat the Spartans? It must have done so quickly, before the long Spartan line could envelop the shorter Theban line on the other flank. It’s hard to see how more men behind you helps if there isn’t a shoving match
Attrition is the other theory; a pair of opposing soldiers exhaust/kill each other and are replaced by the ranks behind as the battle moves over them. Even in low-lethality versions of the press, the first time a last-ranker gets tired on one side, that’s a breach and it’s almost over.
It’s worth remembering that very deep infantry formations show up for aggressive maneuver throughout history. Swiss halberd and pike blocks are 40 or 50 or even 70 men square, and were renowned for charging and taking the fight directly to their opponents. Or even later, Napoleon’s French were renowned for attacking in column when they wanted to close to melee and drive off the enemy.
That early modern pike clashes could at times come to extremely close quarters, to the point of requiring daggers even, seems to be pretty well attested. Robert Barret, writing in 1598, claimed that something similar to a crowd press could be fairly normal:
“For who doth not know that if the enemy be like to be victor, the armed pikes will yeeld backward as they feele themselues distressed, so as when the pikes are in such maner crashed and clustred together, that they can no longer charge and push with their pikes, then will the throng or presse in the center be so great, that the halberds and bils shall haue little roome to strike; nay short swords will hardly haue rome at that instant either to thrust or to strike. I would thinke daggers would do more execution at that time, and in that presse vntill one side fall to flight”
Here he was arguing against the traditional practice of placing halberds and other short polearms in the middle of pike squares to fight in the “pell mell”, wasn’t actually that useful. And this might be part of the reason that the placement of those weapons for that purpose largely declines and then disappears during the 17th century.
As for how combatants were able to get that close to each other, armor probably did play a big role. 16th century military theorists almost universally emphasized the importance for pikemen to be well armored, especially those in the front ranks. Although admittedly art, such as the Hans Holbein piece, tends to be all over the place in terms of how much armor they depict the pikemen wearing.
I also suspect that the growing number of firearms on early modern battlefields made any sort of low-energy pike fencing or “small” pulse combat models increasingly untenable. While soldiers with shields and armor could potentially stand at or near pike length for a very long time while enduring stones, darts, and arrows, there is nothing that can protect against muskets or arquebuses at that range and therefore a lot more incentive to either press in aggressively and force the issue quickly, or else retreat back to a much safer distance.
Already by the late 16th century some authors were starting to note that melee clashes seemed to be getting shorter, and definitely did not last nearly as long as the battles they were reading about from antiquity or the middle ages. And that it was becoming increasingly common for one side or the other, after being weakened by gunfire, to simply break before contact.
Concerning early modern pike formations:
All the manuals that I have seen certainly describe a decent gap between both files and ranks . . . but some 16th century descriptions of formations (or discussions on spacing) use phrases like crowded together so that “the beard of one is over the shoulder of the other”.
[This forum has excerpts from manuals showing intended spacing, followed by a collection of descriptions: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/essay-european-pike-formations-in-the-pike-and-shot-age-late-16c-mid-17c-a-question-of-spacing.926280/ ]
I’ve been trying to track it down, so I don’t have the source (and perhaps I am misremembering), but I recall an English manual from the 17th century which included different spacings between soldiers in formation. It included a very close spacing, but the author commented that it didn’t need to be practiced, because the pikemen would naturally bunch together as they closed with the enemy.
So perhaps the spacings given in the manuals were an attempt to counter a natural tendency to crowd together? On modern battlefields, it’s been noted that novice soldiers often crowd together (for morale) under artillery bombardment — when they should be spreading out.
The short version is that during the 16th century by far most common, and in many cases only, distances mentioned in military treatises are 3 feet per file, and 7 feet per rank for pikemen. William Garrard, an experienced mercenary who wrote a compendium of sorts out of many different military treatises he read before his death in 1587, states that “this proportion hath bin found out and limited, of great practised and cunning men.”
However, given that 3 foot by 7 foot just so happens to be the same distances Vegetius gave for arraying heavy infantry, it is perhaps more likely that all these authors were just copying him, and maybe found that 3x7ft. seemed to work ‘good enough’ so they kept using it.
This was the standard battle array, but it is also generally assumed that pikemen would usually close up somewhat before the actual clash and it is unclear by how much. There are frequent mentions that pikemen would “serrie and close,” especially against horse, and it is often pointed out in later works that for a just square of men to be “equally strong on all sides”, the 7 foot distance per rank must at some point during the battle be shrunk down to at least 3 feet to be equal to the distance per file.
William Garrard is perhaps the most clear on this, giving instructions for how close soldiers are supposed to be when they come to the “fight” while still committing to no exact values, (except in saying that the 7 foot distance is not meant for fighting at the very end):
>”And now returning to my discourse of one ranke from an∣other, when the Souldiours are ioined & closed in battell with their pikes, & when they stand in terme to fight, to me it séemes, that then in that accident, the battell is to close and ioyne as straight together as is possible, in such sort as they may manage and bestir themselues with their weapons, without being an impediment one to another, to the intent that the rankes being straite in fighting, or that the souldiors be inuaded by their enemies, or that they recoile by force of an onset, they néed not to fal to the ground, but rather that they may by those ranks that bee behinde their backes receiue helpe, that vndersetting them with their brests, they may hold them straight vp vpon their féete. And this is not onely my opinion, but of diuers other most excellent wits.
>The other rule of the distance of seauen foote from ranke to ranke, which we haue spoken of, is meant of marching and the managing and exercising of a battell, to the intent the soldiors may receiue exercise & discipline in the said battell, in the which alwaies the foresaid order of measure & distance is to be obserued, to the intent that the Sergeant & the other heads which do gouerne them, may the more comodiously manage and enter in and out through the space of the said ranks.”
Close enough that each man can keep the man in front of him from falling over while still leaving enough room for both of them to manage their weapons without impediment, make of that what you will.
Anyways, in the 17th century the 7×3 distance suddenly disappears from military treatises and gets replaced by a new set of oft repeated values: 6 feet, 3 feet, and 1.5 feet, as well as the terms “open order,” “order,” and “close order” (albeit the exact usage varies, some authors define “order” as 3 feet and the other values accordingly, other authors label 6 feet to be “order” and 1.5 feet to be “closest order”)
If the previous century was defined by everyone copying Vegetius, it would seem that this was the result of a minor Greek revival in some places leading to a new appreciation for certain greek works, notably the treatise of Aelianus Tacticus, which mentions for the various distances used by the ancient macedonian pikemen: 4 cubits, 2 cubits, and 1 cubit.
A 1616 english translation of “The Tactics of Aelian” with commentary by a captain John Bingham is available online, and at the end includes a section titled “THE EXERCISE OF THE ENGLISH IN the seruice of the high and mighty Lords, the LORDS the ESTATES of the vnited PROVINCES in the Low COVNTRIES”, meant to show the similarities between the Aelian’s treatise and the tactics of modern soldiers trained in the Netherlands.
Here you do get the sense that, just maybe, they feel the need to mention a 1.5 foot distance if only to line up with the “Synaspismos” mentioned by Aelian.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A05855.0001.001?rgn=subject;view=toc
>”To exercise the motions, there are two distances to be obserued.
>The first is when euery one is distant from his fellow 6 foote square, that is in file and ranke 6.
>The second is when euery Souldier is 3 foote distant one from the other aswell in file, as in Ranke.
>And because the measure of such distances cannot be taken so iustly by the eye, the distance of 6 foot betwixt the files is measured, when the Souldiers stretching out their armes doe touch one an others hands: and betwixt the Rankes, when the ends of their pikes come well nigh to the heeles of them, that march before. And the measure of 3 foote betwixt the files is, when their elbowes touch one another; betwixt the rankes, when they come to touch the ends of one ano∣thers Rapiers.
>For to march in the field, the distance of 3 foote from file to file is kept, and of 6 foote from Ranke to Ranke.
>To order themselues in Battaile, as also to goe towards the enemy, the di∣stance of 3 foote in file, and ranke, is obserued; and likewise to conversion or wheeling.
>The Musquettiers also going for to shoote by Rankes keep the same distance of 3 foot, but going to skirmish they goe *a la Disbandade*, which is out of order.
>There is yet another sort of distance, which is not vsed, but for to receiue the enemy with a firme stand, and serueth for the pikes onely (for the Musquettiers cannot be so close in files, because they must haue their Armes at liberty) & that is, when euery one is distant from file to file a foote and a halfe, and 3 foote from Ranke to Ranke. And this last distance is thus commanded, *Close your selues throughly*. But it is not to be taught the Souldiers, for that, when necessitie shall require it, they will close themselues but too much, of their owne accord without command.”
Thank you for that very detailed response.
What’s our evidence that chariots were no longer used in Homer’s day? They still show up on iron age pottery, and iirc are recorded in the musters of classical polises, including in Cyrene, where they are described explicitly as fighting in the same way Homer’s heroes did; I believe Caesar describes British chariot warriors fighting in a similar manner. The tactics evidently work within their local threat environment; this indicates to me there’s no reason to think that comparison with Bronze Age near eastern chariot warfare would invalidate his depiction. We can thus imagine a few chariot borne men of bronze at the heads of throngs of poor slingers and archers, stiffened with a few gentleman-hoplites who, dispensing with corselets and greaves, are not much heavier than peltasts or velites.
War chariots also appear in paintings from Anatolia and documents from Babylonia in the 6th and 5th century BCE. So the idea that war chariots were gone in archaic times is yet another example of projecting what Thucydides describes in one part of Greece in his own time on the whole Greek world centuries earlier. We also have pots with the Archaic Greek terms for two-man teams, a warrior who would hop off the horse when he got close to the action, and a servant who would turn the horse and get it out of the hail of missiles until master wanted it again.
“If this kind of shoving were normal, we’d expect knives and daggers, not spears, to be the weapon of choice…”
This sort of comment undermines the credibility of your analysis. There’s a lot of unquestioned assumptions that don’t withstand scrutiny, and a lot of parts of the fight you’re not considering.
This might be valid if the only thing the fighters had to worry about was the immediate point of impact–when shield meets shield. But they don’t. In order to push someone you’ve got to get to them. If I’ve got a knife and you’ve got a 12 ft spear, you can stab me for several yards before I can respond. Doesn’t sound like much, but in a fight it’s incredibly significant. It’s really, really hard to maintain discipline in the face of unanswerable attacks–look at ship battles from the early 1800s. Give men a chance to fight back and they’re And while there are ways to block spears and come up on the enemy, these tactics work equally well with spears and knives.
Further, the assumption that reach is irrelevant when you’re shield-to-shield is not born out in my experience. The enemy isn’t standing there like a straw dummy waiting for you to attack; they’re hacking and stabbing at you for all they’re worth, and–more critically–DODGING. Even in extremely tight formations you can move around enough that a knife won’t reach you. Harder to dodge a sword. Further, longer reach allows you to protect your arm better. If you try to stab me with a knife or dagger, you’ve got to have your arm over my shield. And that’s a nice, juicy target for my buddies. We don’t even need to stab you, we can break your arm, or hyperextend your elbow, or just pin the thing and let our friends hack you to death. Trust me, once your weapon arm is out of commission it’s OVER for you; even in mock combat such an event ends your day (I speak from experience, and not just one). A longer weapon like a sword allows you to keep your arm on your side of the shield, a lot safer.
The other thing is, you’re not just trying to kill the other guy. You’re trying to stay alive. A sword allows you to do things like brace your shield, perry weapons, unhook spears from your shield (people will hook your shield with their spear and pull it out of alignment so their buddies can stab you), things like that. You CAN do some of this with a knife, but a longer weapon (still short enough to be effective in extremely compact formations, but longer than a knife) is going to give you a much better shot at that sort of thing.
And remember, the goal isn’t to kill everyone. It’s to terrify them to the point where they run away. A bunch of guys coming at you with knives is not terrifying if you’ve got spears and shields. A well-ordered unit bristling with yards-long pointy metal, on the other hand, is absolutely terrifying. That’s not insignificant; as you said, most kills were in the route, not the battle. If you can scare the enemy into running away you don’t NEED to stab them. Further, sometimes you just want to pin an enemy unit, or deny the area, or something, at which point you only need to be capable of killing them. Again, if I’ve got spears and you have knives I’m not intimidated and I’m coming at you, and let the chips fall where they may. If you’ve got spears, maybe I decide to hold my unit out of range–effectively pinning me, which was your short-term objective.
Before commenting on how shield walls work, it’d be useful to observe some in action. Granted, modern recreational combat isn’t (usually or intentionally; accidents happen) life-or-death. But the mechanics are the same. This is an area where living history can provide some real insights, as it allows you to test out some ideas. It won’t tell you what DID happen, but it can help develop the operational envelope these people were operating within, as well as help you identify factors that you haven’t previously considered.
I am not sure what your experience is, but from what you wrote I don’t think you ever been in an othismos of hoplites with aspides? Hoplites did use dagger length swords during the time period when othismos was most likely and we know from battle descriptions they could be shield on shield (however they got in close). Whether one thinks they are doing some thing real or just larpers pushing at each other, you are definitely half-way to Elysion if I have a short, dagger-length xiphos and you have something like a medieval sword. You are shield on shield and fighting with your raised right hand. When someone asks me why they would go to othismos the obvious answer is the need to get closer than the measure of spears because they have lost theirs or they are simply overmatched in spearmanship. Anyone who has done any boxing, or simply watched it, knows that the safest place in the ring is running away from your opponent, but the second safest place in in the clinche. When you are shield on shield and you have bound up your foe’s sword you are at least as safe as you would be at spear range. In testing the casualty rate is similar. Much safer than at spear range and you have broken spear.
I don’t mean to single you out and please don’t take this as an attack, but those of us with practical mock-combat experience need to be doubly careful about what we say. You cannot simply extrapolate from a medieval shield-wall experience to hoplite combat. If we do not know and we opine we are no better than the armchair warriors who started the whole Orthodoxy-v- Heretic schism.
I’m late to this party (but as I don’t believe our host reads the comments anyway, usually, I don’t suppose it matters).
If pointing out typos is part of what we pedantic readers do, it would be nice if you (Bret) got Paul Bardunias’ name right – Bardunias, not Bardunais, throughout. I see he is here to defend himself though (hello, Paul).
“it is good to see someone working on a synthesis position.”
A number of people are. I believe I might have mentioned my book, which reaches broadly the same conclusions as you do, on a range of issues, small and large. A happy coincidence.
I do have a few nitpicks (of course), and though I know I am pissing in the wind, here are some:
“nothing in the source tradition requires us to interpret othismos (a term that is not used in every or even most hoplite battles!) this literally”
You can go further than that – it is a term used precisely once for a battle of hoplites against hoplites (and twice more for hoplites against Persians). If you extend the search to include various verb forms (otheo etc) you get more hits, but then those involve peltasts, ships, city walls, cavalry and all sorts of things aside from hoplites. So there is no reason whatever to suppose that either the noun or the verb form are something specific to hoplites, or something that must be taken literally.
“instead it is used to mean what we might term ‘coming into contact’ or ‘shock’ (e.g. Hdt. 7.225.1, 9.62.2, Xen. Anab. 5.2.17, etc.etc.),”
Well steady on. The two Herodotos references are fine (they are the two Greeks v. Persians ones I mention above). But Xen Anab. 5.2.17 describes a scene were men who have entered a town to plunder it all try to leave in a hurry by the same gates (resulting in “pushing and shoving”, we can imagine). You can’t include this in an example of use of ‘othismos’ in a battle context! This sort of (if I may say so) sloppiness is what has bedevilled this whole debate for decades.
“However it is also the case that Hans van Wees is also pretty much the only scholar in print to lay out a complete model, so we have to deal with it.”
No, you just haven’t read the other scholars’ work. Perhaps because you don’t consider them to be true scholars? I prefer to think that scholar is as scholar does.
“Skirmishing”
I believe, as I suggested would be the case last time, you are getting into a bit of a tangle because you haven’t defined what you mean by “skirmishing”. To you it seems to mean “the thing that peltasts and psiloi do, ie chuck some javelins, run around, surge forward, fall back (as a group)”. Clearly, men in hoplite equipment aren’t going to be doing that (not least because, with one javelin each, it’s going to be a short skirmish). But I don’t think that is what van Wees proposes (and it certainly isn’t what I propose). My model, FWIW, is of a base of more or less close order men (who, depending on period and city, might all be hoplite-equipped, or might include light infantry) who form a fairly solid mass, in front of which the ‘best’ (or at least best-equipped) men fight, largely hand to hand, but with the option to engage or to drop back to the ranks behind them as required. This is not “skirmishing” in the psiloi sense, but nor is it toe-to-toe hand to hand combat (still less a scrum). It fits the evidence of Homer and of Tyrtaeus et al (after all, Tyrtaeus hardly needed to exhort men to get right up close to the enemy if they are at the front of an eight deep formation shoving them forward), and it also fits the (surprisingly plentiful) evidence for combat of this type continuing into the Classical period. This is, more or less, what van Wees has in mind (though his slightly unfortunate New Guinea analogy, and his insistence on very open order, has muddied his model a little, I believe). Getting too hung up on precise file intervals is a red herring, not least because it is very likely that there were no precise file intervals.
“Van Wees insists that a hoplite could advance and retreat just as well wearing their heavier equipment as a light infantryman (op. cit., 171) and that is just…obviously not true.”
As others have pointed out, hoplites absolutely could, on occasion, catch peltasts – see ekdromoi. I expect they couldn’t or wouldn’t want to engage in a large scale to and fro skirmish, but then that isn’t what anybody is proposing.
“The very tight shoulder-to-shoulder spacing seems quite clearly to be a product of reasoning from modern musket formations”
No, I think it’s perfectly clear that shoulder-to-shoulder spacing is adopted from the Hellenistic tacticians and applied retrospectively to hoplites. Wrongly, I’m sure, but it has nothing to do with musket formations.
“(we’re going to see my definition of ‘phalanx’ is a bit broader than some).”
Look forward to that. I wonder if it will be as broad as mine? As I read the evidence, ‘phalanx’ means, more or less, ‘line of battle’. There is no specific technical meaning for the word as applied to hoplites that is any different from its use for any other body of infantry (or cavalry) in broadly linear formations. Be interesting to see if you conclude the same.
““it is good to see someone working on a synthesis position.”
A number of people are. I believe I might have mentioned my book…
…
“However it is also the case that Hans van Wees is also pretty much the only scholar in print to lay out a complete model, so we have to deal with it.”
No, you just haven’t read the other scholars’ work. Perhaps because you don’t consider them to be true scholars? I prefer to think that scholar is as scholar does.”
Yes, THIS. Bret is citing Paul mostly based on one presentation he did at Harvard which Paul linked in the comments of Part I. As of writing this I don’t think he’s even aware that Paul literally published a book on all of this, literally A DECADE AGO. Its not that heterodox scholars have stagnated because they’ve had no one to debate their theories with; its that by and large they’re either unaware of or refuse to engage with the arguments of anyone who does not have a history PhD.
“Van Wees insists that a hoplite could advance and retreat just as well wearing their heavier equipment as a light infantryman (op. cit., 171) and that is just…obviously not true.”
“As others have pointed out, hoplites absolutely could, on occasion, catch peltasts – see ekdromoi. I expect they couldn’t or wouldn’t want to engage in a large scale to and fro skirmish, but then that isn’t what anybody is proposing.”
I don’t see how the second paragraph is meant to disprove the first. If anything, to say that “hoplites absolutely could, on occasion, catch peltasts” is to admit that usually the peltasts would outpace the hoplites. Which means that a hoplite could not advance and retreat *just as well* wearing their heavier equipment as a light infantryman.
Minor note here, only “one javelin each” is not entirely correct nor a distinction of any sort. Early to mid Archaic hoplites carried two javelins, and guess what most irregular javelin skirmishers in history, including the peltasts, carried? That’s right, two javelins.
I’m not an historian but a visual artist so I’m particularly dragged by the discussion around the “Chigi Vase”. Isn’t it kind of tricky to use it as “hard” historical evidence? We humans are a social species that share meaning via storytelling, so we tend to abstract and embellish the tales to better suit our needs. The fight on the vase was painted (and probably commissioned) by an artist that wanted to convey its idea of “phalanx fight” (or whatever specific term is more adequate) so he abstracted towards its “ideal phalanx fight”. I mean it’s like trying to deduct XX century military history from badly damaged and incomplete covers of Marvel comics.
It’s worse than that because we must take into account that stacking human figures on top of eachother slightly displaced is a common historical method for simply indicating a large group or quantity of those figures within the perspectival constraints of these paintings and reliefs. The same can be seen extremely vividly — because abstracted to the point of making no physical sense — in the much older Mesopotamian Stele of the Vultures.
It tells us absolutely nothing.
I meant to add, as regards the meaning of otheo/othismos, that there are cases where it absolutely does, explicitly, mean literal pushing (of some sort). Those cases really have to be dealt with before dismissing (or accepting as the case may be) the crush/scrum model.
To me, unsurprisingly, the most important othismos is not in combat, but when it occurs in situations which are clearly crowd-crushes, like Anabasis 5.2.17 “καὶ πολὺς ἦν ὠθισμὸς ἀμφὶ τὰ θύρετρα.” Where Xenophon describes a panicked crowd of men struggling to get through a gate in a fashion that is exactly what we see in crowd disasters where people get crushed to death.
I recommend your book all the time on various hoplite groups, it is an excellent introduction. It is a surprisingly good introduction to the Crowd-Othismos model because what you describe occurring when battles are en chersi or hand to hand is about 90% of my theory. The otheo in othismos is not about pushing the enemy, anymore than about pushing the walls of a gate, but about getting into a press or crush. It is also the inevitable outcome of your own file-mates “bracing” as you put it so that you cannot move backwards. If you can move forward but not back you will creep forward until shield on shield. At that point you are in othismos because your file is bracing you against the forward steps of the opposite file. Then we are just considering how much pressure is built up between crowds, perhaps almost none, but perhaps a almost a ton in shockwaves.
I do think combat had to be bi-phasis though: a spear fighting phase and a sword fighting phase. I don’t think there was any “bracing” during spear fencing. And the file left the first three ranks to fight without hampering their movement. When I am spear fighting I do not want anything hampering my movement or nudging me. Getting me to close to the foes to use my spear may well be one of the ways you got into othismos- along the lines of Smythe’s second way of fighting with pikes, ironically when not in the “push of pike”, which had nothing to do with pushing, but was rather foyning.
I am heartened to think we may yet drag you to the dark side of the Heretical form of othismos. One that was NOT a tactic, did not happen in every battle and surely was not the opening ploy, and to the Greeks did not really have a name because it was just what happened sometimes when they went to the sword.
I did a video with a friend of mine recently explaining some of this.
https://youtu.be/kKt_iGrHIsM?si=xLx-olDa4rJlwrmY
Battle description terms are a form of jargon, and a word enters jargon as a narrow metaphorical case of a term from the overall language before then (usually) broadening back out somewhat over time.
This is a problem for us in understanding what they really meant. Xenophon is notorious for jargon. You may not know but the term “phalanx” is not used in the way we commonly use it, referring to the battle line, until he uses it in the 4thc- centuries after hoplites had been taking the field. A far more descriptive word in the one that Thucydides uses, Parataxeis, which means roughly “units along side each other”. This captures the truth of the battleline being more like a string of beads than a single rolling rod, where each unit is fighting its own battle and often has its own fate on the field.
I’m familiar with the reasons why Europe at this time fought for control of land.
However, I’m not aware why West Africa would fight wars for control of people? Any reading on that?
Also, while I generally assume non-agricultural societies would war for territory, I’m not terribly confident on it either. Does that tie to the above question?
Query what the Stele of the Vultures
https://www.ancientworldmagazine.com/articles/stele-vultures/
tells us about ancient phalanxes (?phalanges?) or the Western Way of Warfare
Oh, that shield walls are not unique to ‘the West’ and never were. Though it is not clear if the formations we see there are ‘shock’ formations, or instead skirmish lines protecting archers (Paul Bardunias in the video I keep linking does a good job distinguishing between these ‘barricade’ shield walls). Again, we can’t know they’re barricade formations instead of shock: I’m not saying they are or aren’t.