Collections: Hoplite Wars, Part IIIb: A Phalanx By Any Other Name

Collections, Weapon Studies 44 Minutes

This is the second half of the third part of our four-part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, Intermission, IVa, IVb) discussing the debates surrounding ancient Greek hoplites and the formation in which they (mostly?) fought, the phalanx. Last week, we discussed the development of hoplite warfare through the Archaic period (c. 750-480). Our evidence for that early period of development is very limited, but what we have points to an emerging shield wall formation which neither resembles the rigid shoving-matches of the orthodox school on hoplites, nor the fluid skirmishing of the ‘strong’ heterodox vision. Instead, it seems likely that hoplite equipment developed for a shield wall that already existed, which worked to a significant degree in conjunction with skirmishers and cavalry, acting as a ‘base’ as well as an offensive striking force.

This week we’re going to move into the better attested Classical period (480-323), where we begin to get literary sources describing Greek warfare in some detail. What I want to accomplish here is basically two-fold: first to address the definition question of what a phalanx is and then second to outline in a broad way how it seems to have worked in this better-documented period.

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Battle Definitions and Definitional Battles

Followers of this debate will note a major chronological question left unanswered in the previous section which is often given quite a lot of definitional import: when are the non-hoplites excluded from the shield wall? That question in turn takes up new significance because of the definitional fight over what a ‘phalanx’ is and thus when it developed. Generally, both the orthodox and heterodox scholars accept that a definitional component of the ‘phalanx’ in its mature form is that it excludes light infantry and cavalry, being an all-hoplite formation.

For the ‘strong’ orthodox school, the answer to this question is easy: their developmental model essentially requires that light infantry were never much integrated into the phalanx and swiftly excluded. From this perspective, the achievements of light infantry at Sphacteria/Pylos (425) and cavalry at Delium (424) and during the Sicilian Expedition (415-413) all in Thucydides, represent the early beginnings of a tactical revolution away from pure hoplite fighting. In this model, ‘the phalanx’ – defined by a fairly rigid adherence to the orthodox tactical model (very tight files (c. 45-60cm file widths), charge to collision, shoving othismos, standard depth of 8, exclusion of light infantry and cavalry) exists and is the standard method of war for Greek polis societies no later than 640 with the Chigi Vase.

By contrast the heterodox school favors much more gradual development, with light infantry still fighting in the same formation as the hoplites very late, often well into the fifth century.1 Since the segregation of light infantry and cavalry from the hoplites is taken as a definitional element of the phalanx, that in turn pushes back the development of the thing called ‘the phalanx’ into the fifth century, with a mature phalanx that excludes all other kinds of soldiers only emerging potentially in the mid-fifth century. It is worth noting this sort of definitional vision is somewhat reliant on the vision of light infantry being basically scattered within the formation (thus rendering the whole thing something more of a loose skirmish line), but as we’ve already discussed, I don’t think that was likely to have been the case even in the seventh century, much less the late sixth.

Instead I think this date-of-the-phalanx debate suffers from an excessively rigid definition. That rigid definition is, I should note, by no means required by the ancient sources themselves. While we tend to use ‘phalanx’ to mean only two specific Greek heavy infantry formations (the hoplite phalanx and the sarisa phalanx), the ancient Greeks were happy to use the word of almost any regular formation of combatants. As we’ve noted, the term gets used for hoplites, sure and also sarisa-carrying phalangites, but also Roman legions, ‘barbarian’ infantry (including Gauls), formations of ships, chariots, and even elephants. In ancient Greek, φάλαγξ just means any battle line or array, similarly flexible to its Latin equivalent acies. It has, I’d argue, an implication of some kind of regular order – it is a battle line, not a mob or a mass – but beyond that it isn’t some kind of technical term.

Now of course we often use a generic word in another language as a technical term to indicate that specific culture’s version of that concept, especially in military contexts. German Messer just means ‘knife,’ but in English it has come to mean a specific family of German swords (sometimes more precisely Großes Messer or Langes Messer or – for two-handed versions – Kriegsmesser) defined by a knife-style hilt construction. Likewise in English katana, a generic Japanese word for ‘sword,’2 means generally ‘Japanese sword’ and very specifically the uchigatana. And of course the Roman word gladius (itself a loanword from a Celtic language) simply means ‘sword,’ but in English is used to mean specifically a family of Roman swords descending from the gladius Hispaniensis. So we do this all the time, taking a general term in a given language and making it a technical term in our language, usually a technical term for the other language’s culture’s version of the general idea.

From that framework, I would argue that the current definitions of ‘phalanx’ in use in these debates – demanding often very tight formations, the complete exclusion of light troops and a rigid tactical system (more rigid, probably, than most phalanxes actually were) – is excessively specific and overly inflexible. Instead we ought to think of ‘phalanx’ as closer to ‘a shield wall with ancient Greek characteristics.‘ That fits better the way we use the terms: ‘phalanx’ is the general Greek word for battle-order and so it can describe in English the distinctively Greek battle order. Such a definition would not be infinitely plastic: it has to be an at least somewhat regular battle order, but as we saw last time, I think the Greeks had a somewhat regular battle order for their hoplites from at least the mid-seventh century. Say what you will about the impression of formation depth on the Chigi Vase, the intention of the artist is clearly to show a regular battle order, with figures all neatly the same distance apart and close enough to be shown overlapping. Consequently, this broader definition largely obviates efforts to back-date the phalanx to the fifth century, because it does not require the full exclusion of light infantry in all cases altogether.3

That said, I think there is (as we’ll see below) a meaningful difference between the earlier hoplite phalanx, which seems to operate much more tightly integrated with its light infantry and the later hoplite phalanx which increasingly excludes those troops. Paul Bardunias distinguishes, in terms of his tactical models, between an Archaic Phalanx that is something of a hybrid – shield wall in front, skirmishers behind – and a Classical Phalanx that is ‘all hoplite’ and a more exclusively shock formation and as we’ve discussed previously, while I suspect there are most places for the skirmishers ‘to go’ in the battle order (I suspect Paul suspects this too), those models seem to me to make the most sense.

What I would propose then is a three-part division: first, a proto-phalanx (or Archaic phalanx), in which skirmishers can be present but where the core of the formation is pretty clearly a shield wall of hoplites, which is clearly in use in the seventh and sixth century. Next, there is a hoplite phalanx (short for ‘all-hoplite-phalanx’ or also ‘Classical Phalanx’), which is the formation that seems to be in use for most of the fifth century, in which light infantry have been fully segregated out into other battlefield roles (discussed below). There is clearly a process of transition involved between these two forms happening around the turn of the sixth century into the fifth which we can see only imperfectly. Arguments about that transition are fundamentally going to turn around interpretations of Herodotus – and in particular how much of Herodotus one is willing to gainsay or discard. For my own part, I think Herodotus clearly intends us to understand an all-hoplite-phalanx at Marathon (490) (but, interestingly, not at Plataea (479), where he attests lots of light infantry – it makes sense a transitional period might involve different poleis operating at different points in the transition) and I find efforts to gainsay Herodotus writing within or just beyond living memory4 of the events with Pausanias,5 writing six centuries later pretty unconvincing. Personally, I suspect, given the presence of Greek artwork – again, as early as the Chigi Vase in c. 640 – of images depicting solid, uniform lines of hoplites in close formation that the ‘all-hoplite-phalanx’ probably co-existed with the proto-phalanx for quite a while during the Archaic and that both approaches were available on the ‘tactical menu’ by the Greco-Persian Wars.

Finally, there is the sarisa-phalanx, the third sort, which we need not dwell on here except for me to note that it is a clear extrapolation out of the all-hoplite-phalanx (as an all-phalangite-phalanx, in effect, albeit with supporting light infantry on its flanks and possibly operating in the intervals between its regiments), which I feel is necessary to justify calling the Archaic phalanx a ‘proto-‘ phalanx, since means that this military system is going to spend several centuries iterating on the idea of an all-heavy-infantry ‘phalanx’ block.

In my view, this sort of schema lets us understand – as I think we ought – not a question of ‘when the phalanx’ (which we now answer with ‘no later than the mid-seventh century and probably earlier’), but rather tracking changes within the concept of the phalanx, from a proto-phalanx that may put all of the hoplites together (perhaps in the front several ranks, or in a block at the center of the army), but is still expecting to be fairly tightly integrated with non-hoplites, to the all-hoplite -phalanx that has fully segregated those troops.

With that in mind, we can now turn to the question how did the all-hoplite-phalanx function?

Spacing and Depth

We’ll start with how I think our evidence suggests that the phalanx formation functioned itself – individual spacing, the nature of its charge, the style of its engagement and so on – and then we’ll move towards larger picture questions of the organization of whole battles or campaigns.

As you may have noticed, the orthodox and heterodox ‘schools’ do not necessarily agree on spacing. Traditionally, the orthodox vision – and this has tended to inform a lot of modern artistic reconstructions – often assumed something close to shoulder-to-shoulder spacing, which would come out to a file width of about 45cm. We’ve discussed the concept of file width before – file width can be a tricky concept because there are several ways of measuring it – but what we’re measuring when we say file width here is the distance from one man’s left shoulder to the left shoulder of the right man, so a space that contains one body and one interval of open air.6 When considering the question more carefully, orthodox scholars often resorted to Polybius’ report (18.29) of the (sarisa)-phalanx’s spacing which comes out to about 90cm, though as we’ve discussed before this figure is also not without its debates which are wound around questions of the length of the sarisa since Polybius does all of his math for the sarisa-phalanx in units of two cubits. The problem there is there’s no real reason to suppose the sarisa-phalanx must use the same combat spacing as the hoplite phalanx: after all, the sarisa-phalanx is using a different weapon (a two-handed pike) and a smaller (c. 80cm) shield.

Hans van Wees, meanwhile, in Myths and Realities, suggests a much looser spacing, with six foot intervals (c. 180cm) and expresses skepticism that even at this wide spacing was the vulnerability of any man’s right side (the one without the shield) a real problem in that way that, I must stress, Thucydides explicitly says it is (Thuc. 5.71).7 My sense is that many heterodox scholars have backed off of this sort of wide spacing as being typical (though of course there might be circumstances where you’d want it), but since Myths and Realities hasn’t been revised or superseded as the monograph treatment of the heterodox model, that wide spacing remains ‘in the air’ for students and enthusiasts alike.

Of course the challenge here is that, as you may be picking up from the above, no source explicitly attests the file intervals for the hoplite phalanx. We do get such attestations for Macedonian and Roman armies (from Polybius, above), but not for Greek hoplites.

I think there are two ways of attacking this problem. The first is to think about how a formation comes together and the latter is to think about how it most optimally fights and in both cases I am not breaking new ground here, but following others (Peter Connolly in the first case, Paul Bardunias in the latter). In the first case, Peter Connolly observed quite rightly that armies do not line up men with rulers.8 Instead they are going to use some easy measurements available to them in their context to quickly get men at more or less the right intervals. Connolly uses that to explain what Polybius is doing: while the cubit, a unit of length measurement, varied a bit from one place to the next in its ‘official’ length, it always had as its common sense the length of an adult man’s forearm. So when Polybius says men line up with a file width of ‘two cubits’ what he means is they line up with a file width of ‘roughly one full arm-length.’

And that’s easy to pull off in practice: you are marching in column into position (your marching width will be your file depth in a second), you have every man put out his arm to touch the back of the man in front of him. Then everyone pivots 90 degrees to the left and there you are: each man has basically one forearm (plus a handful of centimeters for the back-to-chest space) of space, giving you a roughly two-cubit, 90cm spacing. As Michael Taylor9 has pointed out, if you are the Romans and want slightly wider spacing, you simply have the men pivot first and then do the arm trick second, so that the file interval instead of being one arm-length is now one arm-length plus shoulder width (which comes out to roughly 135cm).

A reminder of the easy and standard way to form from Column into Line, which uses marching width as file depth. I suspect for the 8-deep ‘standard’ (see below), the marching width was probably half-files (4 men wide).

Given that method of accomplishing regular intervals, you can see that you aren’t going to have an infinite number of interval choices, but a handful based on the size of things you have to line up with. Half an arm’s length (one cubit) is clearly doable, as is a super-wide full-arm-length-plus-full-arm-length-plus-shoulder-width (five cubits, 225cm). Alternately you could use objects – lining up spear-length (c. 2.5m) apart, for instance. Or, of course, you could use the aspis, lining up, say, an aspis width apart. Which is 90cm. And you see, perhaps where I am going with this.

We have an easy interval to create and a shield that is exactly as wide as that interval. This seems intentional.

From there we can hop over to the second approach which is to instead look at combat dynamics, do some group sparring and ask how formations at the different widths fare. After all, the one thing we can be reasonable sure about the hoplite phalanx is that it worked. The Greeks were remarkably militarily successful in the Late Archaic and Classical periods, establishing and defending colonial settlements all over the Mediterranean and holding off the local Big Damn Empire, the Achaemenids.10 Paul Bardunias has done exactly and presented the work in this video I am just going to keep linking because I think it is very good and it turns out that to a point, tighter combat spacing (60-90cm in Bardunias’ experiments) is really beneficial because it is really hard to defend with an aspis effectively if you are opposed by multiple enemies due to their tighter spacing.

Of course there are limits. Even turning one’s body to the side, it is really hard to get any tighter than 45cm – any tighter than 90cm, of course and you have to angle and overlap shields – and really anything below 60cm or so seems solidly ‘unfightable.’ I’m struck here that the Greeks sometimes reference a formation synaspismos (‘shields together’) which seems to be a special, ultra-tight formation (though references are few and separated by a lot of chronology, so this term may have shifting meanings). As we discussed before, I suspect this is a special ‘ultra-tight’ formation, probably to resist ranged attack, similar to Roman close-order formations: you don’t fight this way, you close up to get through (ranged) ‘fire’ and then widen out again to fight. This would be easy to do because your ultra-tight interval is neatly half of your regular interval: you just have the back half of each file move up into the gap (though a formation might also just cluster together under pressure more organically).

We can then take this thinking back to our best evidence, which is the representation evidence. From the 640s onward, when hoplites are represented in formation groups, they are generally presented in a line, with regular spacing and shields touching or overlapping, much as on the Chigi Vase.11 Now, if we’re familiar with other cultures’ artwork of massed infantry formations, we know to be immediately skeptical here: artists often compress infantry in artwork to make them look more impressive or simply fit them in the space. We see medieval and even Roman infantry so compressed all the time, so we can’t take this depiction literally and try to measure spacing from it. But what we can assume, I’d argue, is that the assumption here – at least the ideal – is a formation with regular spacing and relatively tight spacing. These fellows are near each other, if maybe not so close as depicted.

None of that evidence is as strong as we’d like, it’s all, in a sense, ‘circumstantial.’ But it all points the same way: the combat testing and the forming up process both seem to suggest something like a 90cm interval,12 which in turn brings the idea that the Macedonian phalanx inherited the spacing of its predecessor hoplite phalanx back with a little more foundation, and that spacing is consistent with the artwork, especially when we consider the strong tendency in many artistic cultures to cram close-order infantry together. And then of course there is the aspis itself, which at roughly 90cm intervals would have their rims just touching, thus presenting a solid line of protection when drawn close.

Although I should note here, I don’t think they always were drawn close – you absolutely can extend an aspis out in front of you (albeit not as far as a center-grip shield) and I suspect this was often done in fighting, I imagine it was probably the standard stance when fighting out of formation and in the ultra-tight synaspismos formation, some degree of angling the shield forward would simply be mandatory.

The other question about the formation is depth: how many men deep was it? We simply have no basis to estimate the distances front-to-back of the men (though further extrapolation from Polybius might suggest 90cm as reasonable, but the evidence here is paper thin), but how many men in a file we are sometimes told. The orthodox school says the standard depth is 8, whereas heterodox scholars sometimes doubt a standard depth at all (amateur warriors, after all). Roel Konijnendijk put all of the figures together to argue that there is no rigidly standard depth and I suppose I take his argument halfway.13 He is correct that depth varies. On the other hand, of his 20 examples, eight have a depth of 8, two more a depth of 16 and two more a depth of 4. The remainders are 1, 2, 9-10, <10, <12, 25, and >50 (2x). But we’re also looking at a simple majority of examples (13/20) are clean multiples of four, which to me really suggests that the most common half-file (perhaps a standard marching width) was four, with armies sometimes forming up half-file to stretch the line or double-file to narrow it. The classic eight-deep formation is four times more common than any other choice, which really does suggest it was ‘standard,’ especially keeping in mind that we’re more likely to be told a formation’s depth when it is unusual (that is, our authors are going to report every 50-man-deep column, but not every 8-man-deep standard formation).

So it seems fair to say ‘standard depth may have varied, but 8 was by far the most common.’

We also have to discuss various attested ‘ultra-deep’ formations and their purposes. The orthodox view on this often recalls Napoleon’s attacking columns with the idea being that a deep formation provides impetus to an attack which of course fits with the ‘shoving’ model, the idea being that a deep formation has more men shoving. The problem with this, as Roel Konijnendijk notes (op. cit., 134) is that no classical source explicitly says this (as opposed to Hellenistic sources talking about the sarisa-phalanx, which do; e.g. Polyb. 2.69.8-9, 18.30.4-11; Asclepiodotus, 5.2); instead he argues – drawing on the work of previous scholars – the most likely purpose here is reinforcing a key point in the line and adding a psychological pressure: reaffirming the cohesion of the men in front of them while demoralizing the enemy with their seemingly unstoppable numbers.14 And here I think Konijnendijk is clearly correct. After all, thinking back to the analogy of gunpowder attack columns, Napoleon’s Imperial Guard were not physically pushing each other on to Austrian bayonets either, but a deep formation is naturally intimidating.15

Then we also have various attested ‘ultra-deep’ formations, which have always recalled for historians Napoleon’s attacking columns, the idea being the deep formation provides impetus to an attack, but such formations are treated as unusual, innovative or compelled by terrain (though, as Konijnendijk notes (134), no classical source explicitly says this so some caution is required). Konijnendijk supposes rather than adding momentum or impetus to an attack, depth was a way to improve cohesion and avoid collapse: an ultra deep formation was harder to break and I think that is probably right.

So there is roughly our formation: probably eight(-ish) men deep, and as many men wide as you can make it, with each file occupying probably around 90cm of space or so.

There are, within that force, unit divisions, though in most cases these tend to be big and pretty unwieldy. Xenophon advocates strongly (Xen. Lac. 11) for the Spartan system of officers and Konijnendijk assumes this means that other poleis lacked equivalent systems, although we do hear of lochagoi and taxiarchoi.16 Assessing those is tricky: when Xenophon details the Spartan system, a lochos is a unit of 640, but in the Macedonian system, a lochagos is the leader of a file-unit of 16; clearly the term has drifted somewhat. Plato also briefly implies wealthy men might τριττυαρχοῦσιν, “they might command a trittyes” (a ‘third’), suggesting a trittyarchos (Plato, Rep. 5.475a-b), which implies an officer perhaps for the trittyes, which would have been roughly one-thirtieth of the army, which might have not been too far off from a half of a lochos.17 I might not be as strong as Konijnendijk in asserting there are no subordinate figures here, but it certainly does seem to be the case that hoplite armies tended to have large unit divisions and relatively limited officers to provide for command and control, which is going to play into their tactical function here in a moment.

Battle Tactics

Now we can start thinking about a how a hoplite phalanx of the classical period functions in a larger battle.

And here I want to contrast three positions, a ‘strong’ orthodox position (which I think is wrong), the heterodox position (which I think overcorrects) and a ‘weak’ orthodox position that I think is closer to accurate. If you recall the historiography from our first part, you may imagine how we got here: seeking to understand how hoplite warfare generally worked, those first ‘Prussians’ created a generalizing model, a sense of what was ‘typical,’ which subsequently hardened into a set of ‘rules’ that the ‘strong’ orthodox position assumes were always followed. And then the heterodox scholars respond with every exception to those rules – Konijnendijk (2018) very ably catalogs essentially all of them – to argue that there was no rule.

So the ‘strong’ orthodox position is that battles were often ‘by mutual consent’ (a Polybian expression), with armies lining up in relatively open and flat ground, with the position of honor on the far right, with the general on the right, where they then charged to impact, after which ensued the ‘shoving’ othismos we have already dismissed; after one side collapsed, pursuit was limited because these battles were to some degree ‘agonal’ (honor competitions) and so the matter was concluded by the victors setting up a trophy and allowing the defeated to recover their dead as part of a truce. By contrast the ‘strong’ heterodox position challenges all of these ‘rules’ as being regularly broken: war wasn’t ritualized, but absolute and intended to produce maximum slaughter. Terrain was used, as was trickery or any other tactical devices. Charge was not to impact but to ‘spear’s reach,’ there is no shoving match and pursuit might be a lot less limited and a lot more focused on casualties. To this end they pile up all of the exceptions to the rule.

Whereas to me, the truth of the matter is somewhere around where we started, rather than where we ended up: there were expectations for certain kinds of battles, which were sometimes violated, but very often followed. There is actually a really useful discussion of this relationship between the ‘reality of war’ and the ‘discourse on war’ cross culturally in John A. Lynn, “Discourse, Reality and the Culture of Combat” IHR 27.3 (2005), which I assign to students. Of course generals and soldiers are always ‘breaking’ the ‘rules’ (really, defying expectations) to try to win but that doesn’t mean the expectations have no force. Instead, the discourse on war shapes the reality of warfare to a degree, however when the two diverge – when the ‘exceptions’ begin to swallow the rules – the loop alters in one of a few ways. First, violation of the ‘discourse’ can create an ‘extreme reality,’ an escalation spiral of brutality, which is almost explicitly what Thucydides presents himself as describing in the Peloponnesian War, a series of ruptures with his discourse (which leaves aside the question of how old that discourse is – it need not be very old!).

Via Wikimedia Commons, a combat scene on a lidded amphora (c. 540). The figures here are represented as hoplites, but they are intended to be heroes from the Trojan War fighting (they are labeled on the amphora), which makes it tricky to try to tease out formation fighting from what they are doing, since they are heroic figures fighting in individually heroic fashion, even if they are presented in the equipment of the sixth century.
That said, I have sometimes thought these scenes, if we imagine them as a kind of surrealistic composite, might not give a bad impression of the utter chaos and brutality that would have existed between to fighting lines of hoplites as they fought with essentially everything – victory, defeat, survival, death – happening all around all at once.

Alternately, breaks in discourse can be compartmentalized by a given kind of violence being segmented away from ‘war’ or ‘proper war.’ We see this all the time today with ‘military operations other than war.’ In history this often happened with counter-insurgency operations, colonial conflicts and distant imperial wars: soldiers operating outside of ‘real war’ were free both to dispense with the expectations of ‘real war’ but also to discard the lessons of such conflicts as they prepared for “war as it should be” to use Lynn’s phrase.

Both ‘discourse breaches’ are at work in the Classical period in ways that complicate efforts to read exceptions against expectations. The Greeks even have a category to explain this idea, the notion of war “without heralds” or “without truces” meaning war conducted outside of the normal expectations that govern ‘real war.’ Likewise stasis within a polis or colonial warfare against ‘barbarians’ at the edges of the Greek world operated with different expectations. The tricky problem is that in arguing against the ‘rules’ heterodox scholars often include these examples, even when it seems that even the Greeks at the time recognized them as a discourse ‘other than war’ (and that such distinctions, while perhaps trivial to us, meant something to them). Likewise, the expectations for pitched battles – in the Greek context, clearly the most culturally important (if perhaps not strategically important) kind of violence – were not the same as expectations for the raid, the ambush or the siege.

To cover all of these points in detail would mean essentially rewriting Roel Konijnendijk’s Classical Greek Tactics (2018) but coming to different conclusions, so I will simply hit what I view as the ‘high points’ that I think synthesize the rules with the exceptions. First, we must take all of the things which are not pitched battle and not ‘war’ in Lynn’s sense and set them aside for now. Colonial wars had different expectations, as did civil wars, as did sieges and so on. We may imagine a single category of ‘violence,’ but the Greeks did not (and we don’t really do so in practice either), as their discourse about war without truces or heralds shows.

While ‘encounter battles’ (where armies blundered into each other) could happen, for the most part hoplite battles largely followed an ‘offer battle’ model: one army formed up on terrain it preferred and the other army could either accept the offer (and attack) or decline (and form up on their own terrain). We’ve discussed this sort of ‘negotiation’ (in the sense of offer-counter-off, not that they’re talking to each other) before. Greek armies seem generally to have preferred relatively open ground in offering battle (famously noted, Hdt. 7.9b.1), but did at times offer battle in narrows or on hills; the use of terrain for advantage was not ever unknown to them (as Konijnendijk rightly notes).

Generally they formed up with the position of honor and thus the general on the right. Konijnendijk presents a list (op. cit., 121-2, table 3) of general placements, 12 on the right, 7 in the center and 10 on the left with one either center or left, which is already right-heavy. But if we sort out the conjectures, things like generals caught mid-speech out of position (Athens at Delion) or ambushed (Sparta at Stratos) or non-leading states given positions of honor because the battle was in their country (Argives at Mantinea) and the like, we end up with something like 12 right, 5 center and 6 left. In short it seems there is an expectation that the right is the position of honor, but an expectation that could be deviated from if needed for tactical or diplomatic advantage. So I find myself taking a softer version of Konijnnedijk’s view: there was an expectation that the right was a position of honor, but it was not an infinitely strong expectation.

The role of light infantry and cavalry at this point – in the Classical period – is more complex. On the one hand, light infantry and cavalry are simply not reported in a lot of these battles. For all of the battles in Thucydides only once does a light infantry skirmish explicitly proceed a pitched hoplite battle (6.69.2-3) and this is in Sicily. Regional distinctions here clearly matter, of course: non-polis regions like Aetolia were mostly light infantry, while Boeotia was famed for its light infantry and Thessaly for its cavalry. By contrast, from Attica southwards, we seem to see the classic very hoplite-heavy armies. The Athenian expedition to Sicily – country in which it would turn out light infantry and cavalry were really important involved an initial wave of 5,100 hoplites, but just 1,300 light infantry and thirty (30!!) cavalry (Thuc. 6.43); later reinforcements would bring up the cavalry numbers to 460, for an army that by then had roughly 10,000 hoplites in it and perhaps 2,600 lights.18 By contrast, we’d expect a standard Roman army of the Middle Republic to have 12,000 heavy infantry (two legions, two alae), 4,800 light infantry and something like 1,200 to 1,800 cavalry.19 The Syracusan cavalry is both better and more numerous but the overall balance of their forces is also remarkably hoplite heavy as presented to us. That is not to say polis armies had no light infantry, far from it. But it is clear that in the poleis south of Boeotia, the trend towards deemphasizing cavalry and light infantry had gone quite a long way.

Determining what these fellows do is also tricky because, as noted, our sources often don’t tell us what they are doing very clearly. That is reflective of a belief by our sources (note Thucydides’ dismissive tone, 6.69.2) – one which continues through to the Hellenistic period and is sometimes made explicit – that while light infantry are very important in irregular engagements (ambushes, sieges, etc; actions like Sphacteria/Pylos), in pitched battles they generally were not decisive.

Konijnendijk, in an effort to understand the role these fellows might have, explores the idea of a ‘cascading charge:’ with cavalry attacking first, followed by light infantry, followed by the youngest, fittest hoplites, followed by the main force. I fear I do not think this point goes as far as Konijnendijk thinks. As has been elsewhere noted, none of the examples given save for an interpretation of Leuctra, involved pitched battles.20 More to the point, Konijnendijk points to Aeneas Taktikos to provide a description of this method, but I don’t think Aeneas is Tacticus is actually describing a pitched battle tactic. What he says is:

For when your supporting force is ready at the appointed place, and the enemy has already scattered for plunder, then and only then you should anticipate [προκαταλαμβάνω, ‘to preoccupy, apprehend before, anticipate, surprise”] their retreat with cavalry, make ambushes [ἐνέδρα] with picked men, and, displaying [ἐπιφαίνω] your light-armed troops, lead your heavy-armed men in formation not far behind those already sent.
(Aeneas Tacticus, 16.7; trans. Illinois Greek Club, with some modifications for clarity)

This is not a recipe for a pitched battle but rather ambushing a force that is looting or foraging in the context of a siege. Moreover, it is also not a cascading attack! The cavalry and picked men are not charging ahead of the main line, but rather heading off retreat or lying in ambush, while the light infantry is displayed or presented [ἐπιφαίνω], which is to say that you are demonstrating with a weak force (perhaps to invite attack) while a far heavier and more formidable force is coming up and your other troops are in ambush positions.

The other reason I have to doubt the regular employment of cavalry or light infantry in this fashion is that Greek hoplite armies were not constructed to this purpose nor well-suited for it. The obvious parallel here is the Roman legion which did imagine a ‘cascading’ attack: light infantry, then the youngest heavy infantry, then men in their prime. But as you will recall from our discussion of it, making that tactical structure work demanded a remarkably complex, ‘fussy’ tactical system with dozens of independent maneuvering units in order to create the lanes to allow each stage in the attack to retreat effectively without disrupting the formation of the line behind them. Greek hoplite armies do not have any of that organization, as Konijnendijk rightly notes.

Instead cavalry and light infantry seem to have had a mostly screening role. Hoplites were potentially vulnerable, after all, to light infantry harassment, but a modest screening force of your own light infantry could prevent this and then get out of the way when the ‘real’ battle was joined. Likewise, light infantry and cavalry were important for foraging and scouting, though it is worth noting that scouting arrangements in polis armies seem to have been pretty modest, reflecting, I’d argue, the meaningful expectation that another polis army is likely to meet them in an offered, pitched battle in a relatively open place, not lie in ambush.

Finally, we have the question of stratagems and trickery. Ruses of war and trickery were certainly not new to the Greeks, but neither are they new to us and yet our ‘discourse’ around the rules of war is so strong we went and codified it into an international legal system far more rigid than anything the Greeks could have constructed. But such tricks and surprises worked precisely because there was an expectation for what war was supposed to look like and there was a lively discourse in antiquity as to if they ought to be practiced or shunned.21 Konijnendijk is thus absolutely correct to note that the ‘Prussian’ ‘rules’ were not absolute, but just because they were not absolute does not mean that they were unreal.

The hoplites’ code, like the pirates’ code, turns out to be more guidelines, or as I prefer the framing here, expectations. Those expectations persisted because many battles did, in fact, resemble them, even as they were occasionally ruptured by trickery which did not and even as the Greeks understood there were zones of warfare either beyond the polis (colonial wars) or within it (civil wars) rather than between poleis, where the expectations did not apply.

The Collision At Last

Finally, our field clear of light infantry and cavalry, our ruses used (or not), our formations drawn up, we are ready to smash together two opposing lines of hoplite heavy infantry.

How did that work?

As we’ve already discussed, the ‘shoving’ model of the orthodox is simply not workable here. Likewise, if hoplites did not fight as skirmishers in the Archaic period when such light troops still seem to have been quite active on the battlefield, they surely cannot do so now. This must be a shock engagement but therein lies the trickiness because we do not have a good sense of how shock engagements work: modern military writing was very young when the last major shock infantry engagements were being waged and of course film was farther off still.22

First, we need to be aware that practices differed between poleis. Most poleis charged at a run, while the Spartans famously did not (Thuc. 5.70) and we have to imagine – this is a topic for next time – that the emergence of more training and semi-professional mercenaries may have meant different approaches as well.

But it seems like what we might imagine would be typical for a pitched battle (again, that’s an important category; there are other kinds of fight, but the hoplite is, I’d argue, built for this kind), the general would offer a final pre-engagement sacrifice before sounding a charge (using a trumpet). As far as we know, once that order was given, the general – who more often than not was fighting as a hoplite with his men – basically lost control of the battle. The only other easily available signal was ‘retreat.’ Generals could make last minute adjustments (or try to) to their formations – Konijnendijk again (op. cit., 149) very ably catalogs all of the examples (and they often don’t go quite right) – but the phalanx was a ‘dumb-fire missile’ once launched: it went straight forward and broke things. As we’ll look at later, part of this is because of the relative (lack of) training for our hoplites.

Beyond this point, we actually have fairly few details about the mechanics of charge and contact. That may seem strange, but it is actually very typical for pre-gunpowder cultures: what happens in the moment of contact was evidently hard to describe and in any case their intended audience had experienced it and so a detailed, mechanical description was unnecessary. Once the advance was sounded armies might join in a song or chant in the advance called the paean (παιάν); evidently different poleis had different songs.23 Finally, probably right before breaking out into the final charge, the soldiers issued a war-cry, which we can actually somewhat guess at the sound because it has an onomatopoetic word: ἀλαλή (alale, a-la-lay) and an associated verb ἐλελίζειν (elelizein, e-le-li-zane, ‘to issue the war cry’), suggesting it was something like a high-pitched keening or ululation sound.24 It was in this advance that Thucydides reports (Thuc. 5.71.1) the rightward drift of the formation began as men sought to protect their unprotected side; of course however a hoplite stood while fighting, while marching he was head-on to the enemy. Then came the charge.

The orthodox school assumes these men charged into collision, either hoping to physically push through the enemy or else to use their charge to add such impulse to their spears – like ‘horseless lancers’ – to stab through shields and armor. No infantry works this way and we’ve been over the reasons this is not very plausible.

Via Wikimedia Commons, the Chigi Vase again. Notice how they are not shoving, but instead things to fight with their spears in an overhand grip?
That is how hoplites fought.

By contrast, Hans van Wees argues hoplites slowed to a stop eis doru (εἰς δόρυ ‘within spear’s reach’). It is striking to me that van Wees offers this specific phrase to underline his point, because both of his examples (Xen. Hel. 4.3.17 and 7.1.31) share something in common which is no one is doing the thing he is describing. Instead, both cases describe an army doing what we would call ‘routing on contact’ – soldiers losing their nerve and turning to run in the split-second before impact. That is not an uncommon moment for cohesion to fail (indeed, in the last period of regular shock warfare scholars regularly observe that infantry almost never actually received a bayonet charge because they would rout on contact or before it).25 Xenophon is not describing hoplites slowing to contact at spear’s reach, he is describing one group of hoplites, seeing that the incoming enemy is not stopping losing their nerve and turning to run at spear’s reach.

That, in turn, is a psychological response that, at least to me, only makes sense if it seems to the soon-to-be-running opponent that the incoming charge will be delivered, not that it will politely stop six or seven feet short. Once again, training for bayonet charges is instructive: quite a lot of generals knew that bayonet charges did not usually result in lots of ‘bayonet fencing’26 but they trained to charge with bayonets, shouting, at full tilt anyway because you needed the other guy to think you intended to plow into him, even if you didn’t, in order to get him to run away.

At the same time, the same psychological pressure is working on the man charging: the same pressure that makes his opponent flee encourages him to slow down. And now we have to remember that both lines are advancing: hoplite armies almost never patiently ‘received’ charges.

I would thus suggest that the outcome at impact probably varied a lot: in some cases both sides lost their nerve and started to slow and the van Wees ‘slow to stop at eis doru‘ probably happened. But I suspect in most cases there is an effort to maintain momentum and cohesion so that the formation at least looks like it is going to crash into the enemy and thus in many cases if neither side blinks it must have done so; at the very least individually brave or foolhardy fellows must have considered putting their shoulder into the dish of their shield and simply impacting to try to throw an enemy down. Given that hoplites were – again, next time – relatively untrained, I imagine you had a bit of all of these options – men slowing to a stop, men slowing and colliding at lower speeds and full speed collisions – all happening up and down the line.

The danger, of course is that this produces something like crowd collapse (once again, Paul Bardunias discusses this) but for formations that are only 4 to 16 men deep and have nothing behind them the release for that pressure is easy enough: the formation can ‘accordion’ back out as men naturally back out of the pressure.27

So we might imagine the two formations first accelerate towards each other. As they near ‘spear’s reach’ one might collapse-at-contact from the psychological pressure, but ideally both are seeking to deliver the charge. That doesn’t mean everyone slams into each other full tilt – most men probably slow down at least somewhat, but we certainly get descriptions of men fighting ‘shield on shield’ suggesting to me that sometimes guys got close enough to make shield-to-shield contact (Tyrtaeus fr. 11 West). Shield-to-shield contact, especially with aspides that can’t extend as far, is a lot closer than ‘measure’ with thrusting spears (and thus a more dangerous place to be) but one can imagine a hoplite carried forward by the momentum of his charge clashing shield-into-shield before pushing back out. I know I keep bringing it up, but watching the movement patterns of Paul Bardunias’ experimental fighting line (below, on the left) I think gives a good sense of how these ranks might close up and accordion back out.

A screencap from Paul Bardunias’ presentation at the Battle of Plataea Conference which I hope he will pardon my use of. Though the 60cm side (left) doesn’t have a lot of depth, you can see how flexible the second rank’s position is – they’re not pushing the guys in front of them, but they can push up to assist by delivering strikes or drop back to create space. Such jostling is presumably happening all through each file, as each man probably has a few feet of ‘vertical’ room to move.

After that initial impact – which again, might range from a slow-to-stop-at-measure to folks slamming into each other, with every variation of those outcomes happening somewhere as the lines meet – assuming both formations remain cohesive, you are going to get a stabbing fight at the front line. I suspect the increasing frequency of this kind of fight is what propelled the development of the ‘all hoplite’ phalanx because lighter infantry would be at an extreme disadvantage in this kind of fight. Close-quarters engagements between heavy infantry and light or even medium infantry tend to be shockingly one-sided both because the heavier armor enables the heavy infantryman to be much more aggressive against his unprotected foe and because the mismatch leads to rapid cohesion collapse.

Via Wikimedia Commons, hoplites fighting ‘shield against shield.’ (c. 600). These sorts of combat scenes are common in Greek artwork but as you can see it is quite robustly hard to tell if the fighting we are seeing is formation fighting in a pitched battle or other kinds of actions.

However, since these are both heavily armored and well-protected lines, the casualties here will be tolerably low, probably around 5% of the total engaged force, which wouldn’t even represent a majority of the front line of an eight-man-deep phalanx (it’d be c. 40% of that line) even if every single casualty was from the front line, and we have to imagine some unlucky second or third line fellows are likely struck either in position or once they move forward to replace a downed comrade.28 This phase simply could not last very long because these formations have no way to ‘trade out’ the front ranks and exhaustion would hit fairly fast. A looser formation might be more able to trade out men, but as Bardunias’ own experiments demonstrate, if you adopted that looser 180cm formation, a tighter 90cm or 60cm formation would cut through it much too quickly.

As Ardant du Picq observes, under these conditions collapse comes not from the front, but from the back: the men in the back can see the carnage, they are stuck with the anxiety and fear of ‘waiting their turn’ but have none of the impetus to action of being in the fight. This kind of fighting is effective, but it pushes human psychology well beyond its intended limits and at some point something must break. Victor Davis Hanson’s ‘gaps and tears’ – break-down from the front – are thus unnecessary for formation collapse. Once basically anyone starts fleeing, cohesion collapse is rapid: every man who turns to run increases the psychological pressure on everyone else and all of these men are near the breaking point. As the formation collapses, the great majority of the killing occurs, probably around 10% or so of the fleeing army killed in the rout, most within a few moments of collapse.

Then the question becomes pursuit. The orthodox generally argue that the ‘rules’ of war and the heavy equipment of hoplites prevented long pursuits, while heterodox scholars29 argue that pursuit was broadly unrestricted. My view here, to be frank, is that they are both half-right. Within the ‘agonal’ war discourse – that is to say, in wars with truces and heralds between poleis – it sure does seem like pursuit after a battle was often limited. Outside of that discourse – wars in colonial areas, in civil wars, during actions other than pitched battle or wars that had broken the ‘truces and heralds’ bonds – pursuit could be and indeed often was long and savage.30 That said even ‘short‘ pursuits could be very bloody indeed if some obstruction or terrain prevented one side from getting off of the field quickly: Greek hoplites had little problem butchering enemies who did not or could not escape after a pitched battle between poleis, even if they might not chase them once they did so.

Notably, when thinking about pursuit, we probably ought to think about the strategic context here and this is a point on which I think the orthodox school may have things almost exactly backwards. The orthodox school imagines a sort of limited, ritualistic warfare dominating the Archaic period which then broke down under the pressures of the Classical period (the heterodox school imagines few limits to such warfare at any period). By contrast it seems to me that if we glimpse Sparta’s early history we can see a different pattern: a series of eventually ‘unlimited’ wars in the seventh century – during what should be the heyday of ritual, ‘agonal’ warfare – which destroy the Messenian polity and reduce its population to slavery. Some time in the mid-500s, they tried the same thing to tiny Tegea, but were defeated a the ‘Battle of the Fetters’ (Hdt. 1.66) and forced to back off their policy of direct conquest. Yet by Thucydides’ day, if not earlier, the idea that a war would extinguish a polis was a shocking breach of norms and expectations: the destruction of Plataea and Melos are major events in his history for this reason.

What I think is happening is not some utterly ancient Archaic ritual warfare, but rather that the emergence of a state system of reasonably well-fortified poleis produces a period of, effectively, ‘Kabinettskrieg‘ in Greece (in the sense of war aims, not in the sense of army structure). What had happened during the age of Kabinettskrieg in the early modern period was simply that the nature of warfare had made vast, sweeping conquests mostly impractical (lots of well-fortified towns were a major factor), so a system of more limited warfare developed, later to be, eventually, decisively disrupted by the Wars of the French Revolution. I think the same thing is happening here: as the Greek state system solidifies around fortified urban centers, war aims get limited because they essentially must. Greek armies, after all, are terrible at siege-craft, not just compared to the feats of later Macedonians or Romans, but even compared to earlier Neo-Assyrian armies. Major walled cities were almost impossible for them to capture with the kind of weekend-warrior militia armies they had, at least until the scale and intensity of the Peloponnesian War enabled modestly effective siege warfare again, at which point the period of ‘Kabinettskrieg‘ started to collapse, breaking those expectations, which in turn we hear about through the discourse and culminating in Philip IIs conquests at the tail end of the Classical period.

What to Expect When You Are Expecting Hoplites

To conclude this part then, I think the first step in trying to untangle this debate is to allow our definition of ‘phalanx’ a little more flexibility. The second step is to think in terms of expectations rather than rules, allowing our sense of Greek battle to have a little give in the joints: not the complete no-rules absolute murder-war of the heterodox school nor the ultra-rules-bound inflexible system of the orthodox.

If we were to simplify our model, the Greeks of the Classical period expected pitched battles to be won primarily by engagements with hoplites. Light infantry and cavalry were mostly for other kinds of military action or for distinctly subordinate roles around as much as ‘in’ a pitched battle. Pitched battle in turn was the most culturally important kind and could often be decisive, but was hardly the only sort of military action one might engage in.

In a pitched battle, the polis Greeks expected that both sides would ‘offer battle’ by forming up on terrain they were willing to fight on, eventually arriving on ground they were both willing to risk a battle on, which tended to eventually mean fairly open ground, but not always. They would draw up by detachments – for Greek poleis almost always fought in multi-city alliances in this period – probably with small intervals between them but these were not intended as precision maneuver-units so much as cohesion units (more on that next time). These formations would generally be about 8 men deep, sometimes deeper, sometimes shallower, though 8 seems to have been the normal, expected depth, with each file occupying around 90cm or of width, perhaps getting a bit tighter during that rightward-drift we hear about from Thucydides. The position of honor was the far right,31 but all sorts of expediencies both diplomatic and tactical might cause different dispositions.

Again, expectations, not rules.

Before deployment generals usually offered a sacrifice to the gods to determine if the gods endorsed offering battle. Another sacrifice was made as the deployment completed moments before, which was to please the gods rather than ask for information – it was too late to do much in any case. If light infantry were to do much, they might skirmish against each other during the deployment, before getting out of the way for the main show; cascading attacks were not a thing for pitched battles, for Greeks were not Romans and the hoplite phalanx not a legion. Generals tried to use terrain as much as they could and set out their formations as cleverly as they might and could in some cases give pre-made battle plans, but for the most part these armies were dumbfire missiles. The general signaled the advance, a trumpet rang out and the missile fired; a song was taken up on the advance, punctuated by a shrill war cry as the two advancing lines sped to a charge over the last few hundred meters.

Sometimes a phalanx collapsed before impact, or right in the moment of it, to general disaster. But generally once both sides ascertained that the other was not stopping they likely slowed a bit: individual impacts probably occurred but no mass shoving effort. The ranks probably compacted together and then, to a degree, accordioned out. In place of the shoving othismos, the front ranks probably backed out to ‘measure’ (spear’s reach) and thrust at enemies, with both lines irregularly wavering forward and back as men pushed forward to strike and backed up to avoid enemy strikes. Men who were struck fell and likely tried to crawl or were pulled by their mates back through the line. Behind, the ranks not yet in battle felt their courage slowly wither with the sounds of shouting, the cries of the dying, the sight of wounded comrades.

Eventually, the terror became too much and some of them men, likely men not yet in contact, began to back up. The rout would quickly be contagious as their fellows – every bit as scared and knowing full well that being the last man to retreat in a rout was a death sentence – noticed the weakening cohesion. As the formation collapsed, there was a tremendous burst of killing – we might imagine half of the killing might happen over the several minutes of charge, contact and sparring and the other half in the few seconds of the rout. But most of the retreating men got away: hoplite armies were not well designed for long pursuits and they weren’t expected or generally necessary for pitched battles against other poleis in any case. An enemy so defeated was unlikely to offer battle again soon, clearing the way for a siege or – in the age of ancient Greek ‘Kabinettskrieg‘ – more likely a negotiation over the recovery of dead.

Of course against non-Greeks, or in kinds of battle that were not pitched battles between ‘gentlemen’ hoplites, the rules were quite different, pursuits could be long and Greek armies recognized few if any distinctions between combatants and non-combatants.

That is, more or less, my effort at tactical synthesis. It will not, of course, describe every battle or even exactly describe any battle. Instead, it is an effort to lay out what the expectations were, particularly on the even of the Peloponnesian War (431-404) after which expectations clearly begin to shift and collapse.

Next time we’re going to look at society outside of the battle and talk about how the hoplite fits into the polis: what his social status is, how he is (not) trained and what the implications are for the nature of the polis and indeed how many Greeks there even were.

  1. H. van Wees, Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities (2004), 181-2, for instance, has light infantry still integrated into the main formation of hoplites through the Greco-Persian Wars (492-479).
  2. Specifically, I am to understand, a single-edged sword.
  3. I confess, I find it a little odd that some of the heterodox scholars, in the way they frame the debate on dates, discard everything about the orthodox model except its absurdly rigid definition, which is then sometimes used to present ‘no phalanx until [date]’ arguments, a seeming hangover of the original gradualism debates.
  4. Just because Herodotus reports that the story of Epizelus is second hand (6.117) does not mean we can consider his entire account of the battle perhaps 60 years later second hand as van Wees, op. cit., 177 does.
  5. Who reports slabs giving the names of the dead at Marathon: Athenians, Plataeans and slaves (Paus. 1.32.3). The slaves in question, of course, need not have been what we might term ‘primary combatants,’ – enslavers bringing enslaved servants along with them was common in most slave societies and very common in the Greek world and these ‘camp attendants’ were often armed to defend the camp. It would not be an enormous surprise to find that some ended up in the battle where, famously, the Athenians and Plataeans struggled to get a battle line wide enough to engage the Persian army. More problematic for van Wees is that this passage (the citation of which lives in an end note, rather than in the text for some reason) Pausanias explicitly declares this was the first time enslaved combatants fought, which would suggest not a fading tradition of the Archaic, but a momentary innovation to make up for a shortness in numbers.
  6. In contrast, for instance, measuring just the open interval, a right-shoulder-to-left-shoulder measure, or a measure of the full area of space a single person can move in, which would be a right shoulder -> interval -> body -> interval -> left shoulder measurement.
  7. op. cit. 168-9
  8. “Experiments with the Sarisa” JRMES 11 (2000)
  9. M.J. Taylor, “Roman Infantry Tactics in the Mid-Republic: A Reassessment” Historia 63.3 (2014)
  10. Though we ought to slightly caveat that latter achievement in that it is clear the Greeks were not generally the Achaemenids’ highest priority and the logistical distance clearly limited the ability of the Great Kings to project power so far west.
  11. e.g. van Wees op. cit., fig 20, fig. 21a.
  12. Which I just have to note appears bog standard as a spacing interval for heavy infantry in other cultures too. It is, for instance, a common spacing for early modern pike formations, so far as I can tell. It’s a very natural interval which gives you enough space to use most spear-like weapons.
  13. Classical Greek Battle Tactics (2018), 128.
  14. That said, I think the notion that the rear ranks might hold firm because they are ‘out of the danger’ advanced by Adrian Goldsworthy (“The othismos, myths and heresies” War in History 4.1 (1997)) and taken by Konijnendijk (op. cit. 136, n. 100) runs into a real problem in terms of how cohesion was observed to break down by the last generations of men who fought in close-order infantry formations, e.g. C.J.J.J. Ardant Du Picq noting in Études sur le Combat (Battle Studies in English) that the moral pressure was greater in the rear ranks – who saw the combat, but were not “supported by the animation of the struggle” and so “deep files were powerless to push the first ranks forward as they recoiled in the face of death.” It is worth noting that the idea of a ‘shoving’ othismos is clearly unknown to Ardant Du Picq who assumes each rank must stand two paces or so behind the rank before. Ardant Du Picq is the great ghost of hoplite studies: today’s debates are inextricably founded upon him and yet he is almost never cited (absent in both the bibliographies of Western Way of War and Myths and Realities, for instance) because John Keegan’s Face of Battle upon which WWoW is fundamentally premised, does not fully acknowledge its overpowering debt to Ardant Du Picq and so neither does VDH and so neither do VDH’s critics – Konijnendijk too appears unaware of the one key Frenchman amidst his ‘Prussians.’
  15. They also didn’t always or even usually attack in column, though they clearly sometimes did. One advantage to a column formation that has nothing to do with ‘weight’ is that it simply moves faster, because the narrow column has to deal with fewer obstructions, which might be handy if the goal is to get through superior enemy fire quickly.
  16. As noted by Konijnendijk op. cit., 140, 186.
  17. Because the Athenian trittyes are not thirds of the citizen body as a whole, but a third of each of the ten phyle, tribes.
  18. We’re not told how many light infantry are in the reinforcements of 413 except that it is a large number appropriate to the infusion of another 5,000 hoplites, so doubling the number of lights seems a decent guess.
  19. And yes, the Romans regularly packed those armies on boats too.
  20. Noted in E. Wheeler’s frankly unprofessionally acerbic review of the book in AHB 9 (2019), 42.
  21. On this, see E. Wheeler, Stratagem and the Vocabulary of Military Trickery (1988).
  22. Another good reason, as an aside, for everyone to go back and read Ardant du Picq.
  23. Plut. Lyc. 22 notes the Spartans sung a hymn to Castor.
  24. Xenophon notes that the 10,000 raised a war-cry to Enyalios (‘the warlike one’ an epithet of Ares), they ‘τῷ Ἐνυαλίῳ ἐλελίζουσι,’ they all “alale’d to Enyalios.” Xen. Anab. 1.8.18.
  25. Once again a reading of Battle Studies would have been useful!
  26. Some disagreed and there was training in ‘bayonet fencing’ and some bayonets were designed for this purpose.
  27. It is striking, as Bardunias notes, that a lot of our instances of othismos seem to happen in confined spaces.
  28. On this see Krentz, “Casualties in Hoplite Battles” GRBS 26.1 (1985)
  29. E.g. Konijnendijk, op. cit., 188-205; Dayton, The Athletes of War (2006), 74-6; Krentz, “Fighting by the Rules” Hesperia 71 (2002)
  30. On this point, note Wheeler, “Land Battle” CHGRW (2008), 212 and “Greece: Mad Hatters and March Hares” in Recent Directions in the Military History of the Ancient World, ed. L. Brice and J. Roberts (2011), 81-2, esp. n. 100. I am largely persuaded on this point by Wheeler’s classification division on this point.
  31. followed by the extreme left, followed by the remaining positions from right to left.

Published by Bret Devereaux

Published

174 thoughts on “Collections: Hoplite Wars, Part IIIb: A Phalanx By Any Other Name”

    1. An interesting read. Unfortunately, it is what you would expect from an intelligent person with no actual experience with anything like hoplite combat or the mechanics of propagation of force through crowds. He has many of the elements of the Crowd-Othismos correct, but many are simply misunderstood as well.

      One of the oddities of this academic struggle is that othismos came to be a proxy for the rest of the debate. It is actually not at all critical to either side. I, for example, am quite the Heretic or heterodox in the more important issues of timing of hoplite tactical evolution. I also presented othismos as a crowd disaster analogy back in 2007 in print (for which many immediately thought me Orthodox). Othismos just does not matter in the larger scheme of things anymore than whether they fought overhand or underhand with their spears when in formation. (But of course the right answer is overhand).

      Reply

      1. I was going to ask about the overhand/underhand thing. The art seems to generally show overhand but that might also just be easier to portray. Most modern martial arts that use a spear seem to be more underhand, though they are not also using a shield and generally two handing the spear. With a big shield in play overhand would seem to offer a better shot at hitting something vital and less risk of having your spear trapped or broken. Less able to make sweeping motions but that wouldn’t be very relevant in a tight formation or powerful with only one hand on the spear.

        Does it seem like formation fighting was exclusively overhand or merely majority overhand?

        Reply

        1. The short answer, from years of testing, is that you use overhand in any tight formation because you can fight above the shields and have way more mobility- you can even deliver a strike from over your head above your left shoulder. I compare overhand to a cannon in a turret, underhand to a sponson. It is also far more powerful, though this is less important than one might think, at least as accurate and of equal or greater reach depending on the spear and the type of strike. More importantly you won’t stab the guy behind you or get your spear trapped under the shields.

          The main problem is that most modern people do not know how to use it in overhand. They tend to want it to be a big rapier. I did a video on this recently. The Italian fight masters Marrozzo and Monciolino are the best sources we have for spear and shield, though obviously much later. They primarily use overhand, or as they say “like a throw”

          https://youtu.be/QqF-2zvKM1I?si=qPOYg2sBgVwpdA86

          But they clearly used underhand as well. It is useful in single combat and probably was used by some after the enemy broke and you gave chase just to change your grip.

          Reply

          1. Thanks. That is really interesting. The overhand grip must also allow for multiple angles of attack even at the same target (depending on range). Being able to come in from a direct line, from higher with a downward angle, or from wider out would be a lot harder to defend against than just the fairly straight line direct attack an underhand grip would give you.

            I’ve done lots of modern weapons based martial arts but reading this stuff makes it clear how different the inclusion of a shield or a formation would make things vs what is mostly simulating unarmoured/shielded single combats.

            For your experiments do you prefer participants who don’t have real or sport combat experience to avoid the other variables they might introduce and keep closer to the concept that hoplites were relatively untrained militia practicing a fighting style that didn’t require much skill on an individual level?

          2. Castor Canadensis (It did not give me an option to reply to you, so I will do so here).

            The difficulty in translating things that individual combatants can, and often should, do into what works in a large formation has really hampered the study of hoplites. I have had to alter many of my original positions due to the reality on the ground. One example is that in my book “Hoplites at War”, which I wrote back in 2015 with Fred Ray, I was sure that only two ranks of hoplites could fight at the front with spears based on Arrian’s description and an analysis of reach. Then in 2019 we went full speed with HEMA combatants and the third rankers were deadly because they did sliding thrusts for extra rang to hit targets that surely thought they were out of the third rank’s measure.

            This dovetails into your other question. We need both experienced and completely inexperienced people to test. They provide different things. The educated are walking analogies for hoplites, showing if things from other martial traditions can be done while in panoply, but more important to me is when we see what people come up with on their own. There are many techniques that multiple groups of reenactors have converged upon independently.

            For example, when we do recreations of the Spartan drill, doubling by file in the manner Xenophon describes, and advancing and wheeling, a few military veterans in the mix generally leads to less, not more efficiency. A whole group of Veterans would probably do fine, but the mix screws things up. The best marching drill we do is when we have kids do it. The reason is that they don’t over think it and Xenophon sets out a simple bunch of follow the leader rules, that the kids take to easily.

            People with SCA experience often pick up habits that are bad for hoplite combat, like stabbing shields to move them out of the way. The problem there is that they have never fought with sharp weapons or mortal fear. Sharp weapons change everything. If you ask me the biggest challenge in reenacting, it is recreating fear.

          3. @Paul

            > If you ask me the biggest challenge in reenacting, it is recreating fear.

            IMO, this is one of the great virtues of larp. The weakness it has for exploring questions about ancient battles are the equipment and combat mechanics, which are by far the least accurate compared to re-enactment/HEMA/etc. However, the sense of immersion in your character it can engender means it can touch on the more emotional aspects of combat, like fear.

        2. Depictions of underhand usage are rare in the early Archaic, but become progressively commoner towards the Classical where hoplites fought with single thrusting spears (and depictions lose the bias of including many people holding throwing spears overhand)

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          1. Exactly. And I doubt all of these depictions represent single combats or chases. How common were single combats in Classical Greece, to begin with?

    2. Re: footnote 23, don’t forget your own ideas about expectations and how they could be subverted. 18th- and 19th-century European infantry with bayonets generally expected to use the bayonet in massed formation, where decision in the charge was achieved upon or before contact, but they also found themselves in other modes of combat; bayonet-to-bayonet fencing seems to have most commonly happened in looser, small-unit actions in broken terrain or in built-up areas, where the fragmentation of the terrain made it awkward to form up solid firing lines and achieve fire superiority, while at the same time making it far more likely for opposing small groups to unexpectedly run into each other at bad breath distance. Of course these situations didn’t always end in a bayonet fight — Du Picq himself related an anecdote of opposing units stopping at a distance and throwing rocks at each other rather than using their rifles or bayonets — but apparently the low odds of getting into such a bayonet fight wasn’t low enough to obviate the need for any training or preparation whatsoever.

      I don’t know if that has any relevance whatsoever to hoplite warfare, though, so there.

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  2. Concerning note 27: If a lot of these heavy infantry clashes happen in confined spaces, how did the lighter elements get out of the way when the phalanxes themselves charged? I imagine you do not want to be a skirmisher caught in the middle of those two formations of bronze armored guys smashing into each other. You probably can’t push your way through the friendly formation if you back up (and even if you could, you’d probably mess it up which would be bad), and if these are in confined spaces, was there really space to get out of the way? Curious if you have any thoughts.

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    1. There probably are small intervals between the contingents in an allied army and obviously you can also get out of no man’s land at the flanks.

      But both imply that you are bailing out of the center of the field rather a lot earlier than, say, the Roman velites would, because there are no nice, wide, prepared, regularly spaced lanes for you.

      And that seems to be what we get, as an aside, in battle accounts: the implication in the Thucydides passage noted is that the skirmishers do their thing and then basically quit the field before the hoplites engage as two, distinct stages of the battle.

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      1. “First, the stone-throwers, slingers, and archers of either army began skirmishing, and routed or were routed by one another, as might be expected between light troops”

        Honestly one of my favourite passages in Thucydides.

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      2. I would assume victorious skirmishers would try to whittle down the enemy phalanx before getting out of the way. Or was that seen as useless due to armor and shields?

        Would cavalry attempt to chase skirmishers from the field?

        Was there ever a battle where, for example, side A has more cavalry, so they can both occupy side B’s cavalry as well as driving their skirmishers from the field?

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        1. Skirmishers could absolutely harass a phalanx and do meaningful damage, but that’s why you have your own light infantry screening force.

          They cancel each other out, neither accomplishes much and there you go.

          Cavalry can ride down unsupported light infantry, but light infantry operating with heavy infantry nearby is a lot less vulnerable.

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          1. Thanks for the reply!

            I am a bit puzzled as to how heavy infantry could support light infantry against cavalry, especially if we’re assuming the heavy infantry’s training is minimal to non-existent.

            Either these phalangites need to open up their ranks for the skirmishers to rapidly retreat behind them and then immediately close ranks before enemy cavalry can filter into the momentarily disordered formation to mow them all down like the summer wheat, or the heavy infantry is operating in something like the Roman quincunx formation where the skirmishers rapidly retreat through the gaps between phalanx blocks, but you’ve explicitly told us that the Greeks didn’t do that.

            Am I just overestimating how hard it is to rapidly open and close ranks in this manner? Aren’t those exactly the kinds of maneuvers pike-and-shot infantry used to protect gunpowder infantry against cavalry, and didn’t that require an obscene amount of drill to be effective?

          2. Replying to Nebojša G. but there’s no link to do that.

            The “obscene amount of drill to do that” I think mostly involves getting them not to run away and stand with their fellows. Who by that time were likely recruited from all over the place and so needed lots of getting to know you stuff.

            The hoplites, coming from a relatively small class of relatively rich people in what we would consider a small city, likely all knew each other already. Getting them not to run away probably involved a lot less drill.

            It’s the reason for boot camp, and all the other methods of separating soldiers from civilians. It’s designed to make you depend on your fellow soldiers, and know that they’re dependable.

            I’m not sure how much drill would be involved in maneuvers to let heavies support lights though. Yeah, falling back on the heavies if they’re not trained to let you through somehow just lets the cavalry hammer you.

          3. Nebojša: While a 90cm interval is fairly tight for an enemy trying to get through, it’s more than wide enough to let a few friends through. When the guys you’re trying to run through want to create holes for you, then the crowd has to be extremely dense to stop them from being able to do so.

            Like, have you ever been at a standing-room-only concert, trying to get through the crowd? A packed crowd will have much shorter intervals (even once you correct for the space taken up by armor and shields), but you can still fairly easily squeeze through if the people see you and want to let you by. They don’t even have to get too far apart to allow it, either, so it’ll be fast to close up ranks after.

            It could easily be as simple as Peter and Paul Phalangites turning their shields 90 degrees to make a path (a simple forearm movement), and Scotty Skirmisher running between them, before they bring their forearm back to perpendicular. When nobody’s trying to stab you, and the intervals aren’t super-dense, this seems easy to me?

          4. Nebojša: even if the heavy infantry is disordered, as long as it is dense and won’t rout on a cavalry charge, the cavalry generally doesn’t want to approach them within 2-3x spear length.

            Charging into among them is not “mowing them down like wheat” but putting their single selves between 4-6 opponents. Even if they do kill an infantryman or two, for the cavalryman personally the outcome is “stabbed” or “pulled from horse” or some combination of both (or “thrown from the saddle by the impact”, and then stabbed and/or captured).

            Even getting close is iffy; any variant is vulnerable to one or more brave (or foolhardy) fellows suddenly striding forward and striking the cavalryman in the side. (While staying out of the path of the horse, or at least trying to.) Thus there’s a narrow zone, perhaps just a notional “zeroth rank of the formation”, where the lights are somewhat safe from cavalry.

            Additionally, if the heavies are drawn up with something like 90 cm spacing, the 45 cm intervals are already just barely sufficient for the light to quickly filter down the ranks, if they see there is no further need for them. The heavies on either side, presumably, will help them a little with that; they don’t even need to take a step to the side, just lean a bit, and you instantly get 2×10 cm more space. E.g. this is a bit wider, but not by that much.

          5. If I’m a light skirmisher prancing around in front of hoplite phalanx and cavalry makes a surprise charge, then the phalanx will just have to make room for me and I don’t care how much it disorders them. If I’m in a rush I’ll just point my shield edge forward and run against the rim of the hoplite shield and force them to turn them. If I’m in a less of a rush I might drop down and crawl between the columns under their shields.

            Another question is how would the cavalry charge the skirmishers. If they are skirmishing in front of the phalanxes and it’s problematic for them to get through the phalanx, then there is no way for the cavalry could do the same. The cavalry would attack from the side and I doubt cavalry would dare to charge between hundreds of meters or kilometer long lines of opposing phalanxes approaching each other. That seems like a likely place for cavalry to get butchered. If the cavalry charges from the side the enemy phalanx only needs to advance the wings forward to close the gaps and capture the cavalry between the phalanxes and they will get butchered before the phalanxes can get to the work at hand.

            If the cavalry manages to go around the enemy and appear behind your lines, then they can be a bigger threat. Your own cavalry probably should have been there to prevent that. This would be a bigger problem for the skirmishers since they can’t run to the front of phalanx in contact with the enemy, and will have to fight it out with the cavalry. But since I don’t think the ancient Greek cavalry horses wouldn’t be wearing armor the skirmishers wouldn’t be defenceless. I suspect even the slingers could make the horses think twice about approaching closer and if the skirmishers have spears and javelins remaining they should be able to resist the cavalry.

          6. Honestly I don’t think the skirmishers even need to get _inside_ the heavy infantry formation to gain substantial protection against cavalry. They could just sidle up to the shields of the heavy infantry and shelter behind the reach of the spears, which would often have been enough seeing as Classical Greek cavalry often fought with swords, javelins, and light thrusting spears that wouldn’t significantly outrange the dory. It should also be noted that cavalry numbers tended to be _tiny_ in classical Greece — a small force of cavalry pursuing too enthusiastically into a much larger swarm of skirmishers would be vulnerable to being hit with javelins, arrows, or slingshots launched from their flanks by other light infantrymen beyond their immediate reach.

    2. I think this goes to Bret’s response to the “cascading charge” suggestion. The phalanx wasn’t set up to allow for channels for light infantry to get out of the way (although I suspect gaps did open up due to rightward drift, different contingents of the army not standing so close together etc. this wasn’t intentional), and so reasonably we must assume the light infantry didn’t operate in a way that meant they were stuck between two charging phalanges.

      Either, I suspect, the light infantry operated between the lines until the phalanx approached within a certain distance then withdrew *before* the charge (which still requires them to push back through the phalanx at some point, but allows time for it to reorder) or they operated principally on the flanks of the phalanx throughout the engagement.

      Putting them between two phalanges in a confined space where they don’t have room to retreat would as you rightly point out be suicidal, so the chances are it wasn’t done, or at least not on purpose.

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      1. While sources speak of skirmishers “routing,” that isn’t normally what happens in a skirmish. In an intentional skirmish between two sets of ‘skirmishers,’ normally one side just leaves in good order after determining they can’t accomplish anything more (out of ammunition, outnumbered, managed to get the enemy skirmishers to use up most of their ammunition, etc.). Even if that manifests as a morale break, it doesn’t really look like a rout because they don’t generally get chased; instead the victorious skirmishers have to get moving themselves because the regulars opposing them now have every incentive to start charging.
        This can change a little bit with cavalry involved, but it tends to take the kind of cavalry that physically can’t hit-and-retreat to put cavalry in the face of a heavy infantry line at all.

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    3. Adam, the othismos mentioned by me in note 27 was not combat, but rather crowd disasters. For example panicked men who are fleeing and trying to get through a gate or as Plutarch uses it in his life of Brutus, politicians fleeing the Senate.

      It is important because it shows that one use of the term othismos in not combat, but a crowd crush. In my analysis this should be taken together- what would a crowd-crush look like in combat?

      As for moving light troops through hoplites, it would have happened before they charged, when the enemy lines were some 200m or more apart. It is not very difficult to form lanes if the light troops are not fleeing in panic, by just moving one file of hoplites into the next one, man after man. We do this in reenacting. But in a combat situation, where it must happen quickly, my guess is you just moved a unit forward, creating a gap in the offset between it and those next to is. They did this well in that movie Alexander if you want to see an example. A more involved, but still possible way was to countermarch files, moving a whole section of a unit or a whole unit backwards and out of line. Countermarching is pretty easy.

      All of these options are much more difficult when the men trying to get through are panicked in retreat. At the famous battle of Leuktra, the Spartan cavalry, which generally sucked, was routed by Theban horse and in a panic, fled straight through the Spartan lines. This disruption was extensive enough that Pelopidas, a Theban, could quickly charge with the Sacred Band as the ranks were reforming.

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      1. You could do that with othismos, but when professionals borrow a word from their own language into their jargon it’s almost always as a narrow metaphor, and often when the normal meaning of the term is truly apt they’ll instead coin a completely new word rather than dilute the uniqueness of their field.

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        1. I would argue that othismos is not jargon, but rather a plain description. When Herodotus writes something like they fought an even fight until it came to othismos, he is not using jargon to refere to a tactic the way many modern scholars would like to imagine, but rather simply saying when the hoplites finally crowded in so close than men were crushed together, the Greeks won. I think fighting at such close measure is in fact the Techne or skill that the Greeks had over the Persians.

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  3. “but since Myths and Realities hasn’t been revised or superseded as the monograph treatment of the heterodox model, that wide spacing remains ‘in the air’ for students and enthusiasts alike.”

    I really cannot recommend reading Richard Taylor’s “The Greek Hoplite Phalanx” enough, because it is, in fact, an up to date monograph that includes a treatment of the heterodox model in addition to largely superseding J.K. Anderson’s “Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon”.

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    1. Thank you Hergrim (once I had untangled your syntax and realised you were indeed recommending my book!)

      Of course I would say that I think our host is missing a trick by not reading my book, but I do also believe it’s true. My conclusions are very simlar to his, but with some variations, and I reference du Picq too, so what’s not to like!

      I can’t speak for academia but I think that outside academia people have moved on a lot from the days of van Wees’ original statement of the ‘heterodox’ position, and arguing against a rather extreme version of that heterodox position almost comes over as a bit of a straw man.

      At least Paul B is now getting some recognition (though I still disagree with some aspects of his model, though fewer than you might think).

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      1. I think that even inside academia people have moved away from Peter Krentz’s 6ft spacing (including Krentz himself), and that’s probably the biggest part of the model in “Myths and Realities” that people ultimately disagree with.

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  4. “…[B]ut they trained for me to charge with bayonets, shouting, at full tilt…”

    Now that’s enthusiastic participation by a historian in their field!

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    1. Arthur Wellesley, 1808: Think fast, lads! Devereaux will be here soon with his bayonets, shouting louds as he can!

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      3. On balance of probabilities, would the hypothetical Devereaux be a French officer or descended from the Hiberno-Normans, and thus a British officer?

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        1. Unlikely to be French I would think – Devereaux, or the older spelling Devereux which is more common in Britain, is a Norman name, originally d’Evreux.

          But I’m not sure if it is particularly Hiberno-Norman. The most famous Devereuxs were the earls of Essex, including the Memorable favourite of Elizabeth I, but they were originally Marcher Lords from Hereford and only got involved in Ireland later.

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          1. Might be one of the many Huguenots exiles who made a career in the British army – most notably Lord Ligonier. Would fit the enthusiasm for the bayonet.

  5. Miles/Christian Cameron’s Writing Fighting playlist might be worth a look. Plus the dude went to great lengths in his research for his books and he’s just a damn good writer.

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    1. Christian and Giannis, in that video, are good friends of mine and were involved in all of my early testing with reenactors. I have crushed them both in othismos.

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  6. Forgive the ignorance of a non-Greek speaker, but where does the “n” come from in the original Greek “phalagx”? I see a gamma but no nu, am I missing something more subtle?

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    1. the simplest answer is that we take our spelling from the Latin spelling rather than re-transliterating the greek.

      However as for why they spelled it like that, and we continue to think it reasonable, you are indeed missing a nuance in pronunciation: «Both in Ancient and in Modern Greek, before other velar consonants (κ, χ, ξ – that is, k, kh, ks), gamma represents a velar nasal /ŋ/» (cite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma )

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    3. Gamma has the sound [ŋ] (the [i]ng[/i] in [i]singer[/i]) when followed by a velar consonant (kappa, chi, xi or gamma). (Something similar happens in Latin: intervocalically GN represents [ŋn], hence puns like [i]agnus Dei[/i].)

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  8. The question I have about the model of Hoplite warfare where it involves the all-hoplite phalanx prior to Marathon as the standard Greek form of warfare is, essentially, what changes at Marathon and subsequently?

    Note that the answer could be “nothing”, but at the same time it seems to be the case that the Persians (1) do not really have much trouble defeating the Ionian Greeks and (2) their model of warfare is faced with possibly unsolvable tactical problems by the hoplite phalanx we’re all used to (the one that consists of hoplites in close order).

    So… it looks like something has changed from (1) to (2)…

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    1. A possible answer off the top of my head is just that the peninsular Greek polities are further away from Persia’s centers of power than the Ionian Greek polities, as well as being separated by the Aegean Sea.

      So, to fight the peninsular Greeks, Persia either had to fight its way through the Athenian Navy and cross the Aegean, or go the long way through Thrace and Macedonia to invade overland. The Achaemenids seem to have tried both approaches multiple times.

      The likely result in both cases was that whatever forces Persia could get to Greece would tend to be smaller and hungrier than the forces they could get to Ionia.

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    2. Keep in mind that the Ionian Greeks did slip out of the Persian sphere during the Persian wars, and stayed indepen- I mean, became subjects of Athens until Sparta sold them out to Persia.

      Then became independent again as Sparta turned against Persia, and got annexed again as Athens cooperated with Persia against Sparta (for the second time; Athens let itself get voluntarily annexed by Persia before the Persian wars to scare off a Spartan army, then forgot all about that during the Ionian rebellion).

      Important lessons about trusting Greeks aside, the ability of Athens and Sparta (well, Sparta’s allies) alike to project force into Ionia and stop the Persians there does not suggest that Persian logistics were at the end of their rope in Greece but could manage in Anatolia.

      To me, it looks more like the Ionian Greeks were simply small time in comparison to Athens & Sparta. They won when one of the big boys was with them, they lost when tuey were on their own.

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      1. It is also notable that in Ionia, the Greek poleis were settler communities on the coast, with native non-Greek populations inland. Thus, if the Persians could make a credible case to the local rulers of Anatolia that siding with them was the winning ticket, they could advance in friendly territory almost on the door step of any Greek polis. This is a strategic advantage that should not be discounted. Attacking Greece proper was a much more challenging endeavour.

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        1. That’d of course make the Greek successes even more impressive, though an admittedly very casual glance suggests that Lydia at least was… not a beacon of stability, with newly appointed satraps fighting their predecessors, the odd rebellion against the king, the likes.

          By contrast, half the Greek poleis submitted to Xerxes without a fight when he came to visit.

          And by the early 300s, a thoroughly exhausted Sparta managed to campaign not just in Lydia, but into Phrygia (behind Lydia) and although not conquering either, beat local Persian forces into the dirt (despite sending their best general home, even). Sure, Persia had just gotten out of a civil war, but the Spartans had just gotten out of the Peloponnesian war, so I’d call that one a wash.

          Point being, Athenian and Spartan feats were legit impressive, and Persia very visibly wasn’t able to count on reliable local allies on a regular basis. The moment a state of Sparta’s or Athens’ – still an order of magnitude or two smaller in nominal capability than Persia – came knocking, Persia tended to be locally overmatched.

          Honestly, it looks very much like local subject populations of the Achaemenids just weren’t terribly loyal and didn’t give much of a fuck about what happened to their overlords. Not just the Greeks. Worth noting that Egypt kicked the Persians out and regained independence for a little bit, too.

          The modern internet popculture reputation of Persia as le multicultural super best friends empire where only the Greeks objected to their just and benevolent rule is probably… pretty unearned.

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          1. I think to some degree it is sort of like Rome versus Seleucids (though the Persians seems to had somewhat greater resources and resilience). The Greek city states proportionately can raise far more manpower and Persians seem to be somewhat inferior tactically for good measure. Of course Sparta or Athens are far weaker than Rome, but then Rome won Magnesia with 2 legions when it managed to raise over 20 legions against Carthage. Very plausible to bully around when the Persian royal focus is elsewhere. Of course only a major coalition can face a royal army.

            In some ways pre-Roman Italy and greater Greece are pretty similar places. The anti-Persia alliance in 479 manages to field nearly 40,000 hoplites, large numbers of light troops, and 50-75,000 men at sea despite not all Greeks opposing Persia. Rome just figured out the magic trick of unifying its city-state+tribal neighborhood while still being able to fully tap that manpower…

          2. “In some ways pre-Roman Italy and greater Greece are pretty similar places. The anti-Persia alliance in 479 manages to field nearly 40,000 hoplites, large numbers of light troops, and 50-75,000 men at sea despite not all Greeks opposing Persia. Rome just figured out the magic trick of unifying its city-state+tribal neighborhood while still being able to fully tap that manpower…”

            Yes, that´s a major issue. How similar was the society of Greece to that of Italy, how different were they? How big part of a “typical” Greek polis fought in a phalanx, compared to Rome? Brett is critizising some of the arguments for similarity.
            Like, an observed fact is that Rome ended up conquering Greece. And as for why, we can see that Rome in Second Punic War managed to mobilize numbers of men that no Greek polis could and no coalition of Aegean Greek cities managed to.
            One offered explanation is a different social structure – that a smaller fraction of men in a Greek polis fought in a phalanx than the fraction of men in Rome who fought in legions.
            But there are other options. One is that the small and mountainous peninsula of Greece south of Macedonia simply supported a smaller total population than the Italian peninsula – there were fewer men to mobilize. And the second is that the Greek cities were never as good uniting other cities as Rome was.

            And a third explanation… Note how our sources are biased towards the few cities that are otherwise untypical for being big – untypical not only among cities but among people. In 225 BC, Polybius reports that there were 325 000 Roman men but 443 000 Italian men – from unspecified number of cities. How much of our “Roman” history comes from that majority of Italy and discusses the recruitment and organization of their armies? Greek sources are biased towards Lacedaemon and Attica – which were unusual for being big since Archaic time. In Greece we don´t have total population counts like Italian census of 225 BC and yet there is a clear impression that the smaller Greek cities taken together appreciably outnumbered the big two – yet where are the sources for ordinary Greek cities? Out of 110 Greek court speeches, only 1 was not made in Athens.

            We have quite some reasons suggesting that the armies of the big two were each untypical. Sparta had an absolutely strong army heavy with Spartiates that were otherwise idle… yet in all evidence it was small relative to area and population. Sparta could afford to concentrate the riches of Messenia to relatively few Spartiates, because no more were needed to confront Tegea, Elis or Argos one at a time. Just because Sparta could afford oligandry and small, idle elite does not mean Tegea or Elis could! Likewise, if Athens could afford to limit the phalanx service to rich zeugites – because Athens was much bigger than any single neighbour – does not mean that Megara or Plataea could.

    3. Maybe he all-hoplite phalanx was the standard Greek form of warfare prior to Marathon in Greece, while in Ionia the more archaic mixed phalanx was still used. But it is just a guess, not supported by any direct evidence. Some political or logistic reasons (or just pure luck) might be a better explanation.

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  9. At the very end

    Instead, it is an effort to lay out what the expectations were, particularly on the even of the Peloponnesian War (431-404) after which expectations clearly begin to shift and collapse.

    even should be eve

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  10. How well accepted is the “charge to contact -> accordion to spear measure -> stab until one side breaks” model hypothesised here? One I keep coming across (and not just for phalanx, but for pre-gunpowder warfare generally) is “charge to contact -> accordion to spear measure -> stab until tired -> less confident side retreats to javelin measure -> first side to recover confidence and energy closes back in -> repeat until one side breaks completely”.

    This was discussed in past comments in this blog series and it explains several things that we see in the sources, such as battle line shifting over time, battles lasting hours, and very low casualty rates. Is Bret deliberately rejecting the multiple pulses of intense fighting here and, if so, why?

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    1. So on the topic of ‘pulses’ I’ll allow for what I’ll call ‘micro-pulses’ – men step out of measure after striking or after an exchange of strikes. But ‘macro-pulses’ – where the entire line pulls well out of measure, out to javelin distance – strikes me as less plausible. We don’t see such things generally described in the sources and one thing that resounds from both the ancient sources and that last generation of musket-and-shock warfare was that it is *extremely hard* to stop a retreat once it starts. So how are you pulling back part of the line twenty odd meters backwards without collapse? And why doesn’t the enemy press their advantage?

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      1. Phil Sabin compiled evidence that ancient battles often had an hour or more of close combat, so either ancient men had much more endurance than modern athletes, or most of that time was spent doing something less intense than hand-to-hand fighting (for example, sometimes the lines come together, cavalry fight and ride a significant distance, and the infantry lines are still together when the cavalry return). IIRC he, Goldsworthy, and Zhmodikov also collected descriptions of Roman battles where spear throwing seems to continue after the lines come together.

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        1. It’s a battle to the death, and both sides know that. Showing your back to the enemy *and* charging out of the shield wall both mean near-certain death, so I can imagine both sides pulling back a bit after the initial charge and exchange of strikes and trying to psyche themselves up or to goad the enemy into an uncoordinated attack. Talking to each other a bit, pointing out who you think are the most dangerous and the weakest warriors in front of you. And then some part of the formation finally charges again and this advance ripples out along the shield wall. Again, people strike at each other, some men fall or are wounded, but if it’s just a small rip in the wall, it’s folly to rush in and bare your sides to the enemy, so if your opponents manage to pull back a bit to patch up the formation, you generally let them, and this causes the two armies to gradually become unstuck again. Repeat until something fails and one side starts to flee.

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      2. Where do you draw the line though? Whole phalanxes 100s of men wide pulsing seem hard to synchronise if nothing else. But a mate and the 3 guys around them going from just outside to just inside spear measure for 10s at a time doesn’t seem hard to imagine or necessarily leading to a rout. More shuffling forwards and backwards than turning around and retreating per se.

        Not that I claim I have all the answers. Just that there are so many questions that seems so far outside what the source material (or my amateurish understanding of it) can settle.

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        1. I’m not actually sure how much co-ordination it would use. As in Paul Bardunias’ video (which is as good as Bret mentions), it could well just develop organically in the reactions of each individual to his immediate neighbours.

          Paul used the example of a mexican wave in a sports stadium, which is a fairly complex feat of co-ordination on the population-scale, achieved simply through people reacting to their immediate neighbours (stand up when the person next to me stands up).

          Let’s say you’re doing the micro-pulse thing Bret describes above. You and the couple of folks either side of you duck into measure to strike and then duck out again. Now, the folks standing next to your mates aren’t going to be unaware of this going on (because they’re the people standing next to your mates). This sort of interaction ripples up and down the formation as people react to the people around them, and out of that macro-level patterns arise that appear co-ordinated but aren’t (e.g. a thousands separate micro-pulses operating on a semi-connected basis happen to coincide in a moment where everyone’s sort of disengaged at the same time, or at least enough for everyone to sense that we’ve stopped fighting for a moment and need to psych ourselves up again).

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      3. “…As the two armies engage, the noise of lances breaking and swords striking armour is as loud as a rock-fall and can be heard several miles away. Armour crumples and swords thrust at faces. The ranks become confused and so close together that you cannot distinguish the cowards from the brave, the valiant from the heedless. Positions change and men advance or retreat as one repels or kills an enemy and moves into his place. Their lances broken, knights fight hand to hand; pressed close by their mounts, they can only fight with with swords or battle axes. The sound of battle is that of clanging hammers in a blacksmith’s forge.

        For the first hour it is impossible to tell who is getting the better of the fighting. This is fiercest on the Polish left wing, where the Knights seem to be having a difficult time; so the Knights increase their pressure on the right wing, where are the Lithuanians, whose ranks are thinner, their horses smaller and their equipment inferior, so that they might be considered easier to defeat. If that can be achieved, it will allow the Knights to attack the Poles on the other wing more effectively. The plan is a good one, but it does not wholly succeed. Under the increased pressure the Lithuanians, Ruthenians and Tartars begin to weaken and withdraw nearly half a mile. The Knights keep up the pressure, forcing them back again and again, until finally they turn and run.”

        – “The Annals of Jan Długosz”, tr. Maurice Michael, p388.

        The battle continues while the Teutonic knights pursue the Lithuanians for “several miles”, capture a “crowd of prisoners” and return thinking that the fighting is over with, only to have to throw themselves back into the fray once again (p389).

        Jan Długosz was not, of course, an eyewitness, but some elements (such as the length of the battle) are corroborated in the surviving extract from the eyewitness “Cronica conflictus Wladislai regis Poloniae cum cruciferis anno Christi 1410”, which says the battle lasted for six hours and confirms that the Lithuanians were forced to flee after an hour of battle.

        Now, to me, it’s very hard to imagine a battle lasting for six hours with only “micro-pulses”, and unless we’re to take the advancing or retreating of men to mean the entire front line was replaced several times over through attrition, at some point those position changes must have been big and long enough for men at the front to catch their breath or rotate. Długosz also specifically mentions the Grand Duke rotating out exhausted men.

        It’s not a battle from Antiquity, and it’s longer than most medieval battles, but it does provide some evidence of battle lines falling back a substantial distance without breaking and routing and, from the internal chronology and mention of exhausted units rotating out, there must have been periods where both sides had backed off enough to safely change out their front lines.

        It would be a mistake to apply this to all battles at all times, but I think it’s equally a mistake to argue that, just because it’s not generally mentioned, it didn’t happen. As you’ve noted yourself, those with an intimate familiarity with combat, whose audience was similarly familiar, rarely felt the need to explain what was common knowledge.

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        1. Whereas Jan Długosz the chronicler was not himself an eyewitness, he had as good an access to an eyewitness account as possible. His father Jan Długosz the knight (capitaneus of Nowy Korczyn and Nowa Brzeznica) fought at the battle. The description of the battle in the Chronicles of Długosz is widely considered as very solid.

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      4. Quoting from the Helm’s Gate series: “The major difference in the overall assault, both with the ladders and at the gate, is Tolkien’s description of it coming like waves, with Saruman’s host charging, breaking, reforming and trying again (TT, 162). This is far truer to the nature of such attacks than the endless cresting wave of the film. […] It is not uncommon, both in sieges but also in open battles, to hear of forces attacking, being repulsed, backing off to a distance, reforming and trying again, sometimes several times“.

        Furthermore, surely the Romans did not rotate the hastati-principes-triarii by either of:
        – the previous line breaks and routs through the next, which holds and either charges or receives the pursuers **;
        – advancing through the previous line while those are in the process of receiving sword strikes.
        Instead, there must have been lulls sufficiently macro for some officer to recognize their occurrence and to give orders.

        **: By the theory of “the line breaks from the rear, because they see the fighting but don’t participate (yet, but know are next)”, shouldn’t the second or third acies break even before the first, assuming that any do break? Surely not. If I may be so arrogant, I think the statement becomes true exactly as written only for quite thin lines, 2-3 deep, as were dominant by the time this observation was written down. But in an eight deep line, I would expect it to be recognizable that the rout would start in the second or third rank.

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        1. How could the rout start in the second or third rank?

          If you are a hoplite in the second or third rank of an eight deep “typical” phalanx, and you’re terrified to the point of running away, and you turn around to do so, well you will find yourself trapped in front of a file of five or six other hoplites.

          You could shove past them I suppose, but the physical presence and the moral pressure of your community and comrades staring at you would pose some considerable problems!

          Whereas the guy in the rear rank, with open space behind him and less eyes on him, has much more freedom and scope to turn and run. If I recall correctly, Macedonian armies usually had the most experienced soldier as the file-leader, and 2nd most experienced man as the file-closer at the end, for this reason.

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          1. It could, as an example, start with the guy in the first rank receiving a severe/incapacitating wound and dropping. The guy behind him fails to switch into the “too busy fighting to think” mode, and instinctively takes 2-3 steps backward, away from the threat (without turning around yet), colliding into the guy in the third rank. Furthermore, now there’s a hole in the first rank, thus there’s a decent chance the enemy can quickly score a hit on one or both first-rankers of the neighboring files, maybe getting another second-ranker to go “AAAA!” in a similar fashion.

            The third-ranker would in some sense be surprised more than anything (other than terrified), because they didn’t expect to be “promoted” two ranks in one go. If the sudden confusion on top of the background fear causes a similar reaction in them as in the second-ranker, which I think is not at all implausible, the result could almost be described as a “reverse othismos” in some sense, with these two people at the (remaining) head of the file inadvertently pushing back on/”through” the rest of the file, creating a confused compression in depth by closing the intervals. (The rest of the file might not be actively recoiling, since there are still two or more bodies in front of them, but more a “what is going on?”, being pushed around. They don’t want to fall over, thus they step backward to maintain their footing, but don’t actively push.) It may indeed be the file closer to first react to this chain reaction reaching him by turning around and running away, as opposed to just shuffling backwards as everyone has been doing so far.

            To forestall any chance of definitional problems: if someone insists that it’s a rout only from the point someone turns by more than 90°, then sure, that may very well happen from the rear. But it should be pretty obvious that (other than the front rank, who are too task-saturated) it is the second rank who are under the greatest mental strain, with the strain getting less and less as one gets farther from the line of contact. Thus I think one should expect the failure-to-do-the-rational-thing, the individual mental rupture that snowballs into a collective rout, to happen in close proximity to the contact line. Indeed, I wonder whether depth — other than being more intimidating to the enemy — might perhaps allow for people farther back in the file to retain their wits sufficiently to suppress an incipient rout?

            Incidentally, the sarissa-phalanx and other pike formations may be partial exceptions, because they have multiple front ranks actively engaged in the task of trying to stab the enemy, unlike one-handed-spear shieldwalls where only the frontmost rank is.

      5. We do see them described in sources though. I recall reading an account of a subsaharan African battle between armies in the Zulu tradition that progressed with perfect exactitude in step with Sabin’s model, three bouts of close engagement with minutes of standoff between them until one broke, and the same is heavily implied in Roman accounts, Homer, outright stated in Anglo-Saxon poetry like the Battle of Maldon*, etc.

        *
        They then sent forth from their hands shafts hard as
        file,
        murderously sharpened spears flew.
        Bows were busily at work, shields received spears.
        Fierce was that onslaught. Warriors fell in battle
        on either side, young men lay slain.
        Wounded was Wulfmaer, meeting death on the battlefield,
        Byrhtnoth’s kinsman: he with sword was,
        his sister’s son, cruelly hewn down.
        There were the Vikings given requital:
        I hear that Eadweard smote one
        fiercely with his sword, withholding not in his blow,
        (…) The slain in battle fell to Earth.
        Steadfast and unyielding, Byrhtnoth exhorted them,
        bidding that each young warrior’s purpose to this battle,
        against the Danes a desire to win glory in war.
        Advanced again to fierce battle, weapons raised up,
        shields to defense, and towards these warriors they stepped.
        Resolute they approached Earl to the lowest Yeoman:
        each of them intent on harm for the enemy.

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  11. And all this makes the early Roman Republic army so much more impressive. Romans advanced, threw their javelins, and then advanced again, armed with a *sword*. That means they had to advance well within spear reach, past all the thrusting tips, using their shields not only to protect themselves but also their mates on either side, all the way to shield contact (a gladius is only about a foot and a half long or so). The training and discipline necessary to accomplish that could well be the “secret ingredient” that allowed them to steamroller over everyone for so many centuries. One can imagine how intimidating that must have been.

    And the gladius may have been a tactical choice: “The only way out of this, boys, is forward.”

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    1. Yeah but looked at another way, a javelin out-ranges any spear. You only get two shots or so, but an opponent armed with a spear cannot reply until you choose to close with them.

      Using a sword and a big shield, in combination with a lot of armour (by ancient Mediterranean standards) also makes it relatively safe to pass through spear points, especially if the enemy front rank has taken casualties from javelins and you catch them in the process of replacing them.

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      1. At the micro level, sure, but less so at the macro level (an entire army at once). The Romans need *every* legionnaire (or nearly so) to march into the enemy’s spears *at the same pace*, more or less, which must have seemed like fighting terminators. That level of training and discipline is very impressive.

        I would very much like to see the same sort of video evidence with Roman equipment.

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        1. On the face of it, the Romans just need each legionary to avoid getting too far ahead of his neighbours, which sounds like a need each legionary will try to meet.

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          1. Not falling behind his neighbours, meanwhile, is taken care of by the ranks behind, who will be more likely to keep pace as they have the front rank between them and the enemy…

        2. Too much is made of Roman “training and discipline”, in my opinion. It’s a very modern frame of analysis. The Romans fought their greatest wars of conquest in the Republic, before they had a professional standing military as they would later acquire in the Augustan period.

          Most Republican armies marched straight from the levy into whatever their current campaign was too, too. Polybius tells us that Scipio the Elder before the Battle of the Trebia wanted to avoid a battle with Hannibal, in order to have more time to train the troops up. So, evidently, a Roman army could end up on the eve of battle without all that much training at all, to the point that a consul could feel they weren’t adequately trained and should avoid combat to train some more.

          As well, within the Republican legion 2/3rds of the heavy infantry would consist of men with prior campaigning experience (Principes and hastati). As the velites consisted of both the young AND the poor, some unknown portion of them were probably old campaigners as well (Although presumably not too many, as light infantry work is a young man’s game). Their commanders, consuls and praetors, were also elected by fellow soldiers, from candidates with prior military experience.

          In general, the Romans seem to have valued real, hands-on military experience more than “training” per se.

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    2. There was no exceptional training and discipline. They were a militia. Training and discipline came afterward, as the army professionalized.

      The secret ingredient is the long-shanked javelin, whose emergence in Italy closely correlates with our earliest evidence for the sword-and-javelin medium infantry archetype. This poorer intermediate between skirmishers and the hoplitic elites, potentially associated with the growing urban centres of the time, grew steadily in popularity.

      If I recall correctly only one line of the acies deployed in this manner before the first Punic war, two lines thereafter, and of course finally towards the end of the Republic this form of panoply was regularized across the remaining spear-armed triarii also to form a homogenous force, which as Caesar shows was thereafter quite flexible when it came to exact battle orders past the maintenance of reserve cohorts.

      Chainmail can be safely dismissed as a factor for initial adoption, seeing as it only came into significant use in the 2nd Punic War while the medium infantry archetype emerged well before. However the innovation of a cheap and high-coverage form of metal body armour was surely an important factor in Rome’s successes thereafter, and in the high metal weights per combatant that Devereaux has noticed (I’ve so far seen no particular evidence for the same being the case prior, really the reverse, as early Italian armour was not particularly impressive by Archaic Greek standards, even though it was substantially modeled after them; and native Italian designs like the triple-disc assembly trended especially to the lighter side in keeping with this apparent poverty).

      Notably, with all this said, Rome struggled very substantially against and could in terms of panoply be considered fairly on par with the Iberians and Carthaginians and other Western Mediterraneans, with an equipment advantage or peculiarity first really coming up against the very distinct martial culture of the Hellenes. They scored a second major success against Gaul, though the overmatch in that engagement makes it hard to isolate any specific material advantage from the very generalized advantages of wealth and organizational disparity. Toss in a few other punch-down fights and we come to the revolving door of Asian horse empires, which the Romans fully stalemated against and would eventually come to adopt every conceivable element of panoply from.

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      1. If you guys are asserting that 4000 men can simply be told to walk into a line of spears and a shield wall with no training or instruction at all, I’m afraid I find that wildly improbable.

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  12. In that screenshot the second rank of the 180 cm side appears to be positioned in the most counter productive way possible. They are practically stepping on the front rank which interferes with the front rank freedom of movement and makes the second rank too tangled up to do anything. If they would just step to the side a bit they could actually be helpful while still being behind the first rank.

    If the shields were actually designed for shoving it would explain what I always found so perplexing about Greco-Roman wrestling. Freestyle wrestling is very practical, it’s great for when you want to prevent someone from hurting you whereas Greco-Roman seems strange and artificial. It’s hard to see how that style would have emerged as a standalone thing. But in the context of that shield shoving it kinda makes sense, you can’t attack the opponent below the waist except the occasional heel trip and the footwork and exertion of the upper body effort would translate well.

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    1. It’s my understanding that “Greco-Roman” wrestling is actually modern, and not particularly Greek or Roman.

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      1. The scoring system of ancient wrestling makes a lot more sense in the context of something like greco-roman style then freestyle.

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    2. Greco Roman wrestling was invented in the mid 1850s or so from various then-extant (mostly French) folk wrestling styles, and has nothing to do with actual ancient Greek or Roman wrestling.

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      1. As others note, actual ancient Greek or Roman wrestling did not operate under the rules of modern Greco-Roman wrestling, and did permit leg holds and trips. What I don’t know is what holds or moves the ancient Greeks actually did know. Are there any ancient sources that discuss wrestling techniques in any detail? (This is sort of a sister to the questions about combat techniques.)

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          1. The first three seem pretty easy to understand.

            Headlock throw
            Double leg takedown
            Step around throw

            Thee other two it’s a little harder
            Fourth might be a firemans carry but the lacuna makes that very speculative
            Fifth seems to be some kind of snapdown. Hard to say exactly what but that’s not really surprising because snapdowns are more opportunistic and reactive. Basically they’re just do whatever you like to mess with your opponent until you have a chance to shove him down (assuming you dont get a chance for something like the double leg first).

            First three and snapdown are all basic techniques that a modern wrestler would learn first (although maybe an instructor might do single leg before double leg).

            The double leg takedown wouldn’t fit with the notion that this stuff is hoplon technique inspired but the text is centuries after the hoplon is gone so that might not be significant.

          2. On second thought, the fourth one might be a reversal. That would make sense because then you are covering all the major offensive techniques (for a point system that only has takedowns not pins).

          3. They could be as you describe, or they could be a variety of other things. Taking just the first as an example:

            > You stand up to his side, attack with your foot and fight it out.

            Could be a headlock, sure. Could also be taking a body grip and then using a trip/foot sweep. Or it could be a leg reaping hip throw like osoto gari.

            There just aren’t enough details for most of these to really be specific at all about what they’re describing.

          4. > Could be a headlock, sure. Could also be taking a body grip and then using a trip/foot sweep

            I have a hard time seeing that reading. These are basic instructions so it would make sense that they are covering basic moves. And the examples I gave are very fundamental techniques, a more complicated technique is going to be compared to them once the student has gotten some experience with the muscle memory of a basic attack.

          5. You are baking an awful lot of assumptions into your analysis.

            Let’s start by outlining a few of the things we don’t know about this text:

            1. Who is the author? We have no idea. Is this written by a teacher/instructor, by a student as class notes, by a junior teacher learning from a more senior one?
            2. Who is/are the audience? Again we have no idea. Is this written for a student, for a teacher, for someone learning to teach. What experience might they have?
            3. What is the purpose? Did the author intend this to be sufficient to learn the moves just from reading it? Or is it an aid to memory for something taught in person?
            4. What form of wrestling/fighting is it for? What are the rules or conventions? Are there grip aids, like a jacket or belt or scarf? How do you score or win?

            Note that depending on what you assume about the answers to these questions (and they are interlinked, as an aside), the depth of the instructions doesn’t necessarily need to correlate at all with the complexity of the moves.

            Secondly, it’s not like the alternative moves I outlined are super complex either. Osoto gari is typically one of the very first throws taught to beginners in judo. De ashi barai similarly shows up pretty early usually. If this was for some sort of standing wrestling vaguely along the lines of judo, they could both be perfectly reasonable first actions to start a short list with. The common technical progression of modern wrestling is not the only possible technical progression of wrestling moves.

            Most importantly though, when trying to analyse any sort of historical text you really need to remain clear about the difference between it’s actual _contents_ and your _assumptions_ which you are surrounding that with. The actual contents here are very thin! Your reading is coherent, but it is by no means the only possible one, and you’ve made a whole boatload of assumptions about the text and its purpose to support that reading. Someone else can read the same text, make different (but also reasonable) assumptions about it, and produce an entirely distinct but equally coherent interpretation of all of the techniques.

      2. So it derives from the same source, at the same time, more or less, as the Orthodox school of Hoplite fighting.

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        1. Yes. As does the Kingdom of Greece and it’s Danish royal family that eventually resolved into the modern Greek republic.

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    3. What you suggest is of course exactly what the second rank at 180cm spacing should do, and that is why they could not do it in the test. We were not testing the best way to fight, but pitting the spacing suggested by the Orthodox against the spacing suggested by the Heterodox. As you rightly point out, the 180cm spacing is foolish and the second rank would be better off moving up to form one rank at 90 cm. The combatants all knew this, and it took some pleading from me to keep them at 180cm. They also did not want to repeat the test again because it was so one sided that it was not fun.

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  13. I imagine that someone like Thucydides would not have much respect for light infantry – could light infantry be more important than we think, but our sources don’t mention them because they are social inferiors?

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    1. Absolutely! It is mentioned in multiple places on this blog that surviving works on military matters were written by military aristocrats, for military aristocrat readers. Naturally they emphasized the role of military aristocrats on the field, both because that’s what the student had direct control over (i.e. his own actions), and also because “we win battles for society” is an excellent justification for why we ought to have wealth and power. More generally, we have some surviving opinions of what aristocrats thought about peasants; it is not surprising that the peasants would not have agreed with them.

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  14. I have some more pedantry, nitpicking, considered disagreement (whichever it might be):

    “which neither resembles the rigid shoving-matches of the orthodox school on hoplites, nor the fluid skirmishing of the ‘strong’ heterodox vision.”

    As I’ve said a few times now, I’m not convinced that anyone has ever argued for “fluid skirmishing”, at least not in the sense our host seems to be using it. My recollection of van Wees’ model is that it is much closer to mine, and our host’s – mass with promachoi – rather than fluid skirmishing.

    “So we do this all the time, taking a general term in a given language and making it a technical term in our language, usually a technical term for the other language’s culture’s version of the general idea.”

    Maybe we do, but I would argue (and do argue) that we shouldn’t. The trouble with adopting ‘phalanx’ and ‘othismos’ into English to mean something specific (respectively, a particular type of rigid formation, and a shoving match) is that it carries the assumption (explicit in the way our host has phrased it above) that this specific thing was indeed “the other language’s culture’s version” of the thing. But (heterodoxists argue) this is not true; ‘phalanx’ is the Greek word for a line of battle, ‘othismos’ is the Greek word for ‘struggling’ (in all sorts of diffferent forms and contexts). The specific, technical meaning is not present AT ALL either in the original language, nor (so far as we can tell) in the original military practices of that culture.

    “I’m struck here that the Greeks sometimes reference a formation synaspismos (‘shields together’) which seems to be a special, ultra-tight formation (though references are few and separated by a lot of chronology, so this term may have shifting meanings).”

    Greeks sometimes reference, using varying vocabulary, a tightening of the formation; it is only with the Hellenistic tacticians that the noun synaspismos comes to be used for a specific interval (that of one cubit). I believe that this is because hoplites generally spaced themselves in whatever spacing felt right (probably about shield-width, two cubits) but sometimes (threatened by missiles, threatened by cavalry, wanting to make a particularly strong attack) crowded closer together, but without (this is the important bit) formal drill movements for doing so. In this of course they are far from unique – all close quarters infantry throughout history probably did something similar.

    “the most likely purpose here is reinforcing a key point in the line and adding a psychological pressure: reaffirming the cohesion of the men in front of them while demoralizing the enemy with their seemingly unstoppable numbers”

    This is the ‘problem of depth’. Many scholars have found themselves unable to comprehend why formations would form deep, and have supposed (on no good grounds at all) that Greeks were unique in doing so. But infantry throughout history have adopted deep formations (including in the age of firearms), and have found value in doing so. Any explanation of why they did so that requires something unique and unusual to Greeks (such as a scrum) fails on these grounds. Your (Bret) explanation is I’m sure on the right lines, but is perhaps only part of the story. I believe depth was valuable for a range of reasons, all of which together made depth useful, but never absolutely uneqiuivocally superior to a shallower formation, depending on circumstances. Deep v. shallow debates were (judging from Xenophon) as common as line v. column debates in the 18th-19th Cs.

    n. 27 “It is striking, as Bardunias notes, that a lot of our instances of othismos seem to happen in confined spaces”

    That’s not really true, though. There are two uses of ‘othismos’ for incidents in confimed spaces (both at gates) – Xen Anab. 5.2.17 and Pol. 4.58.9. No other examples suggest confined spaces (but then ‘othismos’ is used FAR more rarely than most people seem to realise).

    Concerning flight form the back, you are right of course, which is why the best man was put at the head of the file, and the next best at the rear, so that the file “may be led by the one and pushed by the other” in Socrates’ quoted words (Xen. Mem. 3.1.8). This is one of the uses of ‘otheo’ for something that seems to be literal pushing that needs to be addressed by anyone (like me) who rejects the scrum/shove model.

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    1. Hey Richard,

      You are forgetting two: Plutarch’s Brutus 18.1, where men are trying to get through a door, and Appian 10.71, again at gates. The importance of this is to show that othismos is not a military term, but a commonly used term to describe all sorts of presses, literal and figurative. But it does show that the context to an ancient Greek was not just a struggle, but a struggle with an impasse (sometimes Mental, as when Herodotus uses it to describe arguments). They are not just a crowd, Greeks had other words for that, they are a crowd moving in a direction and are stopped and physically pushing to continue. All this does is set up that a crowd-othismos in battle is not beyond the meaning of the word, it does not indicate that this was the meaning of the word.

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      1. Hi Paul – well I wasn’t forgetting those, I just didn’t go beyond Polybius in looking for examples as I meant in contemporary (with Greek/Mac phalanxes) sources (but I failed to make that clear, which you are right to point out!).

        I absolutely agree with you that othismos is not a military term and was used for all kinds of things; I don’t agree that the context is a struggle with an impasse (it might be sometimes, but isn’t always by any means – except inasmuch as if there isn’t an impasse of some sort, there isn’t a struggle). I agree that if Greeks wanted to describe a crowd-othismos in battle they could use the word ‘othismos’ to do so (but, I would further argue, they didn’t!).

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        1. I am not sure I would include Polybius as contemporary, but I get your point. If you want to go mad, analyze Procopius’s 16 uses of the word!

          As for othismos, it is a matter of faith at this point. I have shown that the lion’s share of reasons authors gave for it not being feasible are incorrect, and that most of the way the Orthodox presented it was wrong as well. I cannot say for sure they did, and we cannot say for sure they didn’t. Perhaps because I have done it so much. It has become banal. For all of the really important questions it does not matter. Most of the reasons the Orthodox invoked it can be shown to be based on faulty assumptions, so there is no need to discount it to discount them any longer. The difference between pushing by one or two ranks at the front and by whole files is just a matter of degree.

          As for the impasse, if I am reading what you presented correctly, you still have an “impasse” between the rear and front ranks. This could easily be covered by the term othismos. I would simply argue that sometimes the opposing promachoi must have come into contact in your scheme. Maybe only for a sustained fashion that the Orthodox saw as every battle at ‘a battle like no other’. Hard to say, but just the potential for it happening or happening only sporadically or between only some Taxeis satisfies my model.

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          1. I’m curious what your reasoning is relative to the specific criticism mentioned by Devereaux: that combat at such a short distance is too lethal to be sustainable, and not reflected by the panoplies involved.

            Amusingly the Mycenaeans are in some respects more likely candidates from that material-culture stance, since they put far greater priority on protection for the neck and shoulders than most ancient cultures I can think of.

    2. “But (heterodoxists argue) this is not true; ‘phalanx’ is the Greek word for a line of battle, ‘othismos’ is the Greek word for ‘struggling’ (in all sorts of diffferent forms and contexts). The specific, technical meaning is not present AT ALL either in the original language, nor (so far as we can tell) in the original military practices of that culture.”

      If “phalanx” is the ancient Greek word for a line of battle, it seems the obvious word to use to describe an ancient Greek line of battle. If some 19th century Prussian historian had chosen instead to call it a “nothername” we would just have ended up with a long-running argument about the ancient Greek “nothername” instead of about the ancient Greek “phalanx”.

      It might have helped if historians studying ancient Greek warfare had made more comparisons with other other peoples fighting with shieldwalls, lines of battle etc. Calling the “phalanx” something else would probably have been of lesser value. That which we call a phalanx would by any other name have been as divisive.

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      1. Ironically, after Xenophon, or perhaps just his day, Phalanx is used to broadly categorize formations, infantry, cavalry, and the Roman writers used it for Gallic and Germanic shield-walls if I am remembering correctly. It is like “hoplite” which does not pop up before I think Aeschylus or Hesiod, and was still used to refer to any heavy infantry- Assyrians and Egyptians for example.

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      2. Related thought on this:
        “So we do this all the time, taking a general term in a given language and making it a technical term in our language, usually a technical term for the other language’s culture’s version of the general idea.”

        People who speak other languages: does this happen with English terms in your language too? Any examples? The only one that comes to mind for me is that the Russian for boot is “ботинок” but the Russian for a football boot is “бутс”.

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        1. “Meil” in Swedish means primarily e-mail, i.e., a general and non-technical English word used for something more specific in Swedish. I would defer to a native speaker or a Swedish resident to learn if it is ever, in recent times, used for physical mail. I feel like I’ve seen examples in French over the years, but nothing comes immediately to mind.

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          1. That, and the Russian football boot, are close to what I had in mind, but I was really looking for something precisely like “katana” – where “Japanese for sword” becomes “English for a specifically Japanese sort of sword”.

            I think I’ve thought of one that more or less fits – “tank” in English means any large metal container holding oxygen, petrol, water or whatever, but in Russian and other languages there will be other words for “large metal container” and “tank” means specifically an armoured fighting vehicle, ie a sort of large metal container specifically associated with Britain.

  15. Thanks for continuing the series.

    I always recommend that people start to explore early Greek warfare with a bit of the Iliad, Xen. Anab., Brouwers’ Henchmen of Ares, and van Wees’ Myths and Realities. Substituting Richard Taylor’s book for van Wees would be a defensible choice.

    I am confused by the sentence “Once again, training for bayonet charges is instructive: quite a lot of generals knew that bayonet charges did not usually result in lots of ‘bayonet fencing’ but they trained to charge with bayonets, shouting, at full tilt anyway because you needed the other guy to think you intended to plow into him, even if you didn’t, in order to get him to run away.” A bayonet charge is not scary because a dude is charging at you, its scary because he wants to stab you with a sharp pointy thing. I don’t know anyone up to the end of WW II who recommended that infantry should crash body to body with the enemy but ram the bayonet at the end of the nice long musket or rifle into them.

    I don’t find the 19th-century concept of shock helpful because in the days of effective shields and armour combat worked very differently. European soldiers in the 19th century did not spend an hour or more within a spear’s throw of the enemy while cavalry rode all the way around their army like ancient soldiers did.

    Your hoplite phalanx spacing shows the shields held face-to-the-enemy in all three spacings, but at compact order you would hold them obliquely like the hoplites on the Chigi vase or Giacomo di Grassi recommends. As you show, you cannot reach such close order and still hold such a big shield face-on.

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    1. > A bayonet charge is not scary because a dude is charging at you, its scary because he wants to stab you with a sharp pointy thing. I don’t know anyone up to the end of WW II who recommended that infantry should crash body to body with the enemy but ram the bayonet at the end of the nice long musket or rifle into them.

      Having someone rushing at you with a weapon and the clear intent to use it, to carry the charge home and leave you skewered on the end – that’s definitely scary. However, if they falter, a huge amount of that pressure is relaxed for the defender.

      As the person attacking, you want to be coordinating your weapon with your movement so that they all launch together as you enter into distance, without you needing to slow down to aim or take a shot. Jousting is quite a good analogy for what this feels like when you get it right.

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      1. Hi Tea, what does that word “falter” mean to you? Whereas Hanson imagined that hoplites usually threw themselves chest to chest and shield to shield like an American football tackle or SCA war, van Wees (GW:M&R pp. 188-191) imagined that the charge usually ended with a spear thrust and some space between the two combatants. Sometimes it might end just outside that distance like in a fencing or boxing match, in earlier periods it might end with throwing a spear. Someone prudent in this situation will be feeling for his buddies (are they with me? are they speeding up or slowing down?) and watching the opponent (are they confident and in control or scared and flailing?) and his neighbours and decide how much to commit.

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        1. Obviously I’ve not done this with real melee weapons in a real fight, I’m extrapolating from modern fencing sports.

          Even in those, you can create a lot of psychological pressure with a continuous advance that does not slow down until after you have entered measure and launched your attack (obviously it might still be parried or the like). It’s not that you hit physically harder this way, but the message of “I have no doubt or hesitation and I’m going to come and stab you” is a very strong one which tends to make the opponent really uncomfortable.

          However, it’s quite a brittle kind of pressure. If you as the attacker pause or slow down, particularly right at the end, the effect is vastly reduced. So that’s what I mean by ‘falter’ – showing hesitation or delay as you reach the edge of distance and should be launching your attack.

          Interestingly, speed seems to be less relevant than continuity. Going relatively slowly, maybe with a slight acceleration towards the finish, and delivering your attack fluidly as you reach distance creates this very effectively. Conversely, running forward fast but having to slow down to sort out the coordination of your attack is much less intimidating.

          Obviously, since this is all extrapolation from modern sport there are questions about how well it applies. However, I’ve seen it work as an effective tactic across a wide range of such sports with a wide range of rules, and it also tends to work well against both new and experienced players, so I suspect there’s something more fundamental to it about how people think about threat.

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          1. OP was arguing (1) that VDH was right that battle would begin with a shield slam because inter alia later soldiers “trained to charge with bayonets, shouting, at full tilt anyway because you needed the other guy to think you intended to plow into him, even if you didn’t, in order to get him to run away.” I pointed out (2) that in a bayonet charge the goal is to slam the sharp pointy thing into the other bloke, not tackle them. You said (3) that on the other hand slowing down or stopping just out of measure is less intimidating, with the possible implication that the charging hoplite might not be able to stop after delivering the thrust. That may be but its not the claim about plowing into the enemy in the OP (and ancient Greek soldiers were not French conscripts of the class of 1912, trained in suicidal techniques to boost their élan, but athletic but aggressively independent amateurs; if something is good for the army but very risky for the individual soldier that would be a hard sell).

          2. Sean, I’m going to go beyond what Tea Kew seems willing to say and point out that you write like someone who has not experienced becoming adrenalized in the face of a threat of direct interpersonal violence, or at least hasn’t experienced it recently.
            It is the *anticipation* of a strike that intimidates, by the time the strike has happened it is too late to react. Thus the valuable use of the bayonet was always as part of communicating *threat*, and this is separate from how much damage you can actually do with a bayonet. A bayonet-affixed rifle matches none of the measurements of historical melee-combat weapons and is bad at every task pre-gunpowder weapons were used for, it even loses the ability an unmodified rifle has to be gripped by the barrel and used as a club. It is for convincing people that something sharp is coming at them and can only be dodged, not stopped, and it cannot do that if the person wielding it doesn’t put their whole self behind that message.
            I understand Tea Kew to be proposing that spear charges often ended up working on the same principle, with charging soldiers needing to communicate their willingness to carry the sharp thing into their opponents all the way through. The fact that a spear is a much better weapon doesn’t make it less likely to be used to scare enemies into a psychological reaction.

          3. Endymologist, its not fair to have a conversation like this between someone using his meatspace name and a random handle, but for good or bad my martial arts CV before COVID is a matter of public record. Since then I mostly do a group-fighting game. The aspects of ancient warfare which I have a lot of confident things to say about and the aspects I have a few cautious things to say about are also a matter of record.

          4. Have you ever turned your point to the side when fencing and slammed your chest into your opponent? Obviously not, because in fencing, as in live combat, the pointy thing is the threat. Charging to the measure of your rapier/speed is sufficient threat because if you are going to turn and run you have to be turned and run by the. That is what Sean, who I can vouch has weapons experience, is saying.

          5. Hey, I’m not criticizing you for a lack of experience with violence; interpersonal direct violence can have severe and long-term negative effects and should only be done very carefully. I’m critiquing your unwillingness to put that experience in your writing. You and Tea Kew both have personal experience competing in one-on-one swordfighting, but you refuse to cite that experience in your argument and had to (apparently) be goaded into even blind-linking it.

            I think I was rude to butt in, but your experience should inform your thoughts on the subject at hand, and knowing you have that experience only convinces me further that I was right to say so.

          6. Endymionologist, my experience is limited and modern sports and games aren’t a 100% match for war. So I try to let the serious experimenters like Paul Bardunias describe their experiences and mostly write about other things like campaign routes or arms and armour.

            I agree with Tea Kew that someone who slows down out of weapon distance is less intimidating than someone who approaches steadily and strikes, but I don’t know anyone who thinks that was what usually happened on ancient battlefields (although a Spartan army once came within a javelin’s throw of an Argive army, decided it was in too strong a position, and backed off to fight another day, Thucydides 5.65).

          7. @Sean

            First, I’d certainly like to be clear that I’m not calling your experience into question. I think we actually met in Glasgow some years back, and regardless you have always struck me as someone who is both well reasoned and careful about how much you are willing to extrapolate from e.g. modern experience.

            I’m also not quite explaining myself clearly I think, which is frustrating me. Let me take one more crack at it, and if not I concede the field 🙂

            What I’m trying to argue for is basically a middle ground between VDH and HVW positions; probably overall closer to HVW, however with a critical difference. So it’s not that they should be smashing into shield or body contact – stopping at fencing distance is fine. But for maximum psychological pressure, that stop should come as/just after the first weapon attack is launched, not before it. If your opponents fall back you can then continue to move forward, keeping the pressure up and delivering repeated attacks with your weapon. If they hold firm, you also stop at weapon range for your subsequent actions.

            Of course, they are likely to be doing a similar thing, so in practice there would be the chance that both people try to do this and end up a whole lot closer than they were hoping to be. Given in hoplite warfare we’re talking about two battle lines of amateurs, I would expect that nearly any outcome could and would occur somewhere along the line, averaging out to a broad outcome of roughly “closed to spear distance and started stabbing at each other”.

          8. Hi Tea, no worries. One reason I avoid writing about combat mechanics in public is that its often easier to show with demonstrations or videos (or even van Wees’ diagrams) than describe in words. Someone involved in the hoplite events in France and Greece could probably chip in on how easy they find it to stop at exactly the right time, and whether people with experience in martial arts or choral dances like a haka do better. Because the plague arrived and I moved back to Canada in 2020 I have not been able to attend those events so far.

    2. “A bayonet charge is not scary because a dude is charging at you, its scary because he wants to stab you with a sharp pointy thing”

      I was going to make the same comment, bravo Sean. You don’t stop 5-6 feet from your opponent and spear fight. You run right at him and stab him- which with a classical dory happens at a measure of 5-6 feet. If you slam into your foes with your aspis, you have rendered your spear useless and if your foe is smart he simply draws his sword and sends you off to see Hades. I know we have discussed this before, but for those reading, one of the biggest misconceptions of the old Orthodox was the idea that your somehow got an extra-powerful strike by running at your foe like a lancer. That only works on horseback, and in our tests running like that is far, far weaker than even a standing overhand strike.

      So for anyone keeping score on why they ran at their foes, it does Not add power to the thrust and it does Not add “momentum” to the mass push.

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      1. The ‘purpose of running’ is a rather similar question to the ‘purpose of depth’ and, for both, I think it’s really important not to treat them as special features of hoplites, in isolation from all other periods of military history. Lots and lots of cultures throughout history have formed deep and have run into contact (military contact, not necessarily physical contact). The reasons for doing so were probably broadly similar, though precisely what they were continues to elude us.

        The same applies, only more so, to cavalry charges. Did cavalry charge infantry? Undoubtedly. Did horses body slam infantry? Discuss.

        I have likened cavalry charges to a game of chicken https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game), and the same is also true of infantry charges. The nice thing about this is that one of the purposes of depth is to make it harder for your side to swerve.

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        1. I am not sure they elude us, but rather we see them all and somehow seem to want a single reason or a novel one. The number one reason men run to battle is nerves. As Xenophon describes at Cunaxa, it is hard to keep the men from running to battle. The long 200m plus charge we see during the Persian wars and after was about clearing missile range, nod to Krentz. It takes far more discipline, and probably an aulos or chanting songs, to keep men advancing at a march all the way to the enemy.

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    3. Running at people is more intimidating than walking. Shouting is recommended in a lot of sports – not all, because it expends more energy and oxygen – as a way of motivating yourself and again, intimidating other people. This may not be true against combat veterans, but I can’t imagine any other reason why so many different warriors / soldiers across the world are described as charging at the run and making noise as they do so. Sure, there are exceptions, but they are just that, exceptional.

      So yes charging and yelling without a pointy thing would be a lot less scary, but charging and yelling with a pointy thing is scarier – most of the time – than walking quietly with a pointy thing. I don’t see what’s confusing about that sentence.

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      1. It is possible to learn how to walk threateningly, but you’re right that it’s the kind of practiced skill that doesn’t get much use in amateur military units. It only has real utility when there’s a significant equipment disparity, for instance by police against peaceful protestors, and it usually gets discarded as a tactic whenever the strategic goals shift away from ‘let them flee.’

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      2. I can imagine “any other reason” for a body of men to charge at the run and making noise – to psych yourself and each other up. A positive morale impact on yourself, making you and your friends feel braver and stronger, as opposed to a negative impact on the other guy, to make him frightened.

        (the one doesn’t preclude the other, of course, it could be both – I’m just pointing out that there -are- imaginable reasons for doing this other than a negative morale impact on the enemy).

        I’ve heard it argued (including by Konijnendijk who Bret cites above) that for the kind of almost completely untrained, amateur troops that Greek polities fielded (and ideologically preferred) for their hoplites, charging and making noise might have been not only beneficial for their morale but practically a necessity to get them over the hump of their own nerves and into the reach of the other line’s spears. In this reading if you asked a weekend-warrior hoplite militia to advance into enemy spears silently and at a walk rather than charging and yelling, such an order might not even be, practically speaking, obeyable because too many would falter, it would be too severe a morale test.

        So to borrow a metaphor from Bret’s earlier articles on generalship, of ancient generals having had only a small “menu” of tactical options that their armies were prepared for and capable of executing, then considering the general lack of training and drill, advancing one large formed body of spearmen into another large formed body of enemy spearmen at a silent walk might not even be a tactic available on the general’s “menu” for most ancient Greek poleis.

        (I think – but I can’t check right now – that it’s Xenophon who said that only the Spartans were able to do it)

        Generally I also think that the morale and fear considerations of close-order combat are going to be an area where key things continue to be debatable and unsettleable questions for the foreseeable future, because what evidence we have (e.g. du Picq cited in OP) suggests that it’s easy for reasoning based solely on intuition and plausibility to get the morale dynamics of the situation wrong, but at the same time we cannot test and correct our intuitions and our sense of plausibility with modern experiments as we can for e.g. the mechanics of physically pushing in ranks.

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        1. This is also one of those times when I hit the post button and only after that discover that I pretty badly misread the comment I replied to as being solely about negative impact when it’s explicitly about positive and negative impact and basically in agreement with the “counter” point I was making. So, uh, comprehending the words I replied to wasn’t on my tactical menu this morning I guess.

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  16. I feel like the point about the evolution of limited war goals could be elaborated somewhat, instead of just linking to the Kabinettskriege Wikipedia page, which also doesn’t explain the Why very much. I’ll take a stab at explaining how I understand what you’re getting at:
    Basically after a won battle, a general has to make the calculation whether to use the immediate loss in morale on the opposing side to negotiate for his war goals and thus end the war, or to push forward to continue the war. And a combination of army structure and societal expectations can cause the equilibrium of the calculation to swing towards “win one battle, ask for rather limited concessions immediately” without assuming there’s some kind of understanding of war-as-sport or war-as-ritual. This happens as a result of the cost of continuing the war being high, the chance of being granted greater concessions when doing so being low and the chance of the decision to continue resulting in the general having to just pack up and go home without getting anything being considerable.
    We can see all of those influences coming together for hoplite warfare:
    – The subpar supply situation makes it likely that trying to keep going just results in running out the clock of the campaigning season or otherwise running out of food
    – After having dispersed the main army, the next escalation is usually taking the town, but that’s unfeasible when towns are walled and siegecraft is underdeveloped
    – Dispersing into the countryside to inflict agricultural devastation is possible, but risks being defeated if the other army managed to reform, especially given the low amount of drill and officers that could help in getting the raiders back into line
    – Because of the understanding of the polis, the next escalation of war rewards beyond “demanding tribute” is pretty steep, going directly to “complete subjugation”, which means the defeated side will feel very pressured to keep fighting because they don’t want to become the next Messenia
    To that we have to add the cultural, reputational calculations: A general (or polis in general) with a reputation of adhering to the “rules of war” has a better chance to achieve success at the immediate negotiations because it’s understood that they will adhere to the terms of the agreement instead of immediately breaking them again to get the total war goals.
    That logic explains how warfare between the polis can be limited in its goals without posing the next obvious question of how it can still work outside this context. When being attacked by an external empire, securing colonial territory or fighting a civil war, this calculation changes. Both in that the possible war rewards are different, and also in that because of the differences in culture means the expectation that such immediate negotiations after the first victory can succeed are lowered or not there at all.

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  17. I don’t think the thirty horse in the Athenian expedition to Syracuse is a good example for the small size of cavalry forces given that Thucydides explains that the Athenians did not know how to send horses so far oversea and that the shortage of cavalry was one of the causes of their defeat. Likewise, Thucydides also explains that he does not see some light-armed as real soldiers. Just as in later medieval Europe, there was ambiguity between “servants” and “soldiers” and narratives for the leisure class focused on the deeds of wealthy warriors. These are not neutral technical descriptions or everyman history which try to give vignettes of all the types of people who were present, but something much more snobbish, like the histories of the holite debate which ignore all the works by wargamers in the UK but carefully cite quick-and-dirty academic studies from before 1960.

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    1. From what I recall, there was also the expectation from the Athenians that they would be able to recruit good cavalry locally because Sicily was good horse country.

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  18. Regarding retreating armies, Bret does not mention one thing I was taught, which was that pursuit and casualties therefrom were limited (limited in effectiveness, and therefore not essayed), because retreating hoplites could discard their shields and, being so unburdened, easily outrun their enemies. Archilochus and the Spartan mother (“With your shield or on it”) seem to support this theory.

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      1. Wow, I have no idea. I don’t recall any Anglo-Saxon poetry as cynical and light-hearted as Archilochus, but my knowledge is very limited.

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      2. I would note that the “weekend warrior” style of the Greek armies is not only in the training. It’s also about the things you can get your men to do. Sieges are heavy physical work. Getting the soldiers to do that kind of tasks is a lot different from getting them fight.

        This is well illustrated by the fortification works in Continuation War, where the Finnish Army was repeatedly worse than the Soviets in building fortified positions. The Soviets had a much more disciplined attitude towards digging in, and often, they would be found in dug positions only hours after capturing a location. During the stationary phase of war, from 1942 to 1944, the Soviet positions were noted by Finns to be superior in their construction whenever they were were captured. On the other hand, the Finnish troops tended to “lose” their entrenching tools surprisingly easily during any prolonged marching movements.

        Finnish fortifications, unless built by specialised troops, tended to be “just good enough”. The Finnish rank-and-file soldier tended to detest the labour needed to build very good level of fortifications, and they were often seen as make-work. Everyone understood the need for combat, but getting motivated to build fortifications, especially in depth, was very different.

        This was, very much, a question of attitude: the Finnish military had relatively lax discipline compared to its German and Soviet counterparts, and especially reservists saw war as a temporary calling where it was the combat proper that was the key, while everything extraneous should be kept to minimum. (This is actually, still the key to leading a continent of Finnish reservists: you really need to give people an internal motivation for doing things. Otherwise, they will not be done.)

        Considering that Greek hoplite of a polis were all self-standing landowners, used to sitting with their feet under their own table, the social atmosphere might be somewhat similar. I can easily see why they would suck at siege warfare: that was not culturally a thing that should be done by a hoplite. (Romans, with a socially similar army, on the other hand, would be able to get a culture where building things was, culturally, part of the soldier’s honourable duties.)

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      3. I would preface this by saying that I think shield wall is a pretty unideal term here; there’s no substantial difference between a “shield wall” and a pike block or group of halberdiers when it comes to being mutually-supporting combatants on foot, each of which we can otherwise simply describe as being in close order.

        That said: different shields are likely going to give a different calculus for retreat. Early medieval roundshields, alike to early Greek dipylons, had guiges and could thus be slung over the back; they were also fairly lightweight. The combination of these factors is that the most sensible course of action in flight would often be to sling your shield where it would protect you from attacks from behind while not taking up your hands or adding all that much to your load. This is not something you can do as easily with an aspis — although it can be done — and an aspis is a greater overall encumbrance, so more incentive to just ditch the thing.

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  19. Shower thought from a complete amateur: If there was a concern about the formation drifting to the right due to shield coverage, was the “default” position of honor on the right to help prevent that movement? If you put your best, most motivated troops there (along with the individual who set the initial battle plan) they could in theory help minimize right-drift by acting as an “anchor” by drifting less themselves.

    This gives a default tactical reason to put your best elements on the right, but other tactical considerations unique to a specific battle could easily override this. This would make the right being a position of honor a norm, but not a rule that must be obeyed.

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    1. That is a perfectly reasonable suggestion. Another possibility is that the men on the right tended to die less often (because they were overlapping, not overlapped), which meant that is where the ‘best’ men would want to put themselves. Plus, the right side is just considered better, by many cultures. I doubt there was a single reason (for what was anyway a guideline not a rule), but lots of factors all tending toward a similar outcome. The same applies to many aspects of ancient (and non-ancient) warfare – the quest for The Reason is often illusory.

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      1. Another possibility is that the men on the right tended to die less often (because they were overlapping, not overlapped), which meant that is where the ‘best’ men would want to put themselves.

        Cross-culturally, military-cum-social elites were almost always expected to fight in the more dangerous positions, not the safest ones.

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      2. Another possibility is that the men on the right tended to die less often (because they were overlapping, not overlapped), which meant that is where the ‘best’ men would want to put themselves.

        That strikes me as unlikely — cross-culturally, the elite soldiers were more usually placed at the most dangerous part of the battle-line, particularly if they were also a social elite and so needed to earn their status in the eyes of everybody else.

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  20. Stupid question: In the Eurytios Krater image, what are those two lower things on the inside of the shield? The top ones are the center strap and the hand grip, but there are what looks like two other straps lower down. For stashing your spear on the march, or slinging the shield on you back, or what?

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    1. There are no stupid questions on hoplites, and the one you hit on is a biggie. That thing you are seeing is rope that runs through rings around the inside of the aspis. Some think it was to help carry the shield, some thing you could grab the rope of the guy next to you in combat to stay together or march together. Some think it is just decoration. I have used it for all of those functions and it does work and look nice, but I think it was originally there to hold the boards of the shield, or wicker in the ancestral shield perhaps, in place. It may also have served the crucial function of holding the leather lining of the inside of the shield from ripping out. If you have ever driven in the back of your grandfather’s Chevy and the material on the roof has come loose, you will see the problem. We see in later aspides a metal hoop in exactly the same place the rope is, so it must have served a function.

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  21. “More to the point, Konijnendijk points to Aeneas Taktikos to provide a description of this method, but I don’t think Aeneas is Tacticus is actually describing a pitched battle tactic.

    […]

    (Aeneas Tacticus, 16.7; trans. Illinois Greek Club, with some modifications for clarity)”

    I assume “Aeneas is Tacticus” is a typo, but why the shift between “c”s and “k”s in the spelling? Some subtle aspect of Greek?

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    1. The original Greek is Τακτικός, Taktikos is a direct romanisation of this while Tacticus is a latinised version.

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    2. Ancient Greek and Roman authors have a set of standard Latin names (eg. Aeneas Tacticus is “Aeneas (Αἰνείας) the military writer” as opposed to other writers with that name- his father’s name and city have been forgotten). Today many scholars prefer to transcribe Greek names but some books and articles still use the Latinized forms.

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    3. TBH, I assumed all of that was an over-aggressive autocorrect. “Taktikos” is not how anything is spelled in English, after all. On the other hand, I’m not sure how “tacticus” got into the dictionary, if my hypothesis is correct, because the only “Tacticus” I know of off the top of my head is in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, where he has an ancient writer who is sometimes referenced by that name entirely in places where he’s having a character talk like someone who is referencing texts on war that they presumably read in Latin class.

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  22. Bret,

    “Most poleis charged at a run, while the Spartans famously did not (Thuc. 5.70) and we have to imagine – this is a topic for next time – that the emergence of more training and semi-professional mercenaries may have meant different approaches as well.”

    Consider that this may be a trap built upon expectations of Spartan tactical innovation. The Aulos player was not a later addition as some tactical breakthrough by Spartiates, but rather the ancestral state of Archaic hoplites being retained by conservative Sparta. We see an aulos player on one of earliest images we have, the Chigi. Back them everyone marched to battle the way Sparta would later do, but “contact” happened at the range of a far thrown spear. It is only when they give up spear throwing that they run directly into spear thrusting range from their initial deployment into line. In the Archaic a charge probably occurred in most battles, but it was from the range of the thrown spear rather than 200m of running. Persian archery and the need to close ended that- we see it happen in real time at Plataea.

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  23. “At the same time, the same psychological pressure is working on the man charging: the same pressure that makes his opponent flee encourages him to slow down. ”

    At this point one thinks of that Terry Pratchett quote from “Guards! Guards!” when Captain Vimes reflects on:

    “that special kind of run that guards had. He knew it well. It was the run that said, there’s a dozen of us, let someone else get there first. It said, he looks ready to kill, no-one’s paying me to get killed, maybe if I run slowly enough he’ll get away”

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  24. Two objections to things said in the referenced video, which I otherwise loved:

    – Of course I monitor a wave going around a stadium to know when to stand. Guess that means i wouldn’t be able to fight in a battle line properly. 🙂

    – when the charging reenactor falls, the guy right behind him does in fact almost trip over him and has to turn around to avoid it. And that is with only one guy behind the tripping guy, a 2 rank deep formation.

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    1. Thanks, I am glad you enjoyed the video. You can watch the wave go around the stadium, but you do not time it and predict when to stand, you stand when the guy next to you does. In the field of self-organization this is called a local cue. Imagine watching the wave go 3/4 around the stadium, then closing your eyes and predicting when to stand. You could do it, but it is far easier and more accurate to just stand when the guy beside you does.

      These local cues play a crucial role in the movement of men on the field. They are what allows untrained men- or untrained flocks of birds or schools of fish- to move in such harmony. Interestingly for our purposes in reenactment, there is something of an “uncanny valley effect” where guys who know no drill or military training do this easily, we have children do Xenophon’s Spartan drill at events all the time, but those with some training do worse, while a well drilled and rehearsed group does best of all. This has allowed us to see how men can move like they appear to be trained, when not, and also how actually training does still have advantages.

      Since that was me on the ground, I assure you that he did not trip over me, and more importantly the whole group stopped within a couple of paces. This was said to be impossible by those who thought a lot about it, but never tried doing it.

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      1. Hmmm. I still think of it as standing when i see the wave getting to me, but I suppose that requires standing right after the people just before me did. So i somewhat take your point. Conversely, I can say if i looked at the ground and tried to stand when the people around me did, I’d be surprised every time and do it too late if at all. So to me it must be a combination of (conscious, thoughtful) awareness and monitoring the larger situation tying in to planning to act, but actually acting in concert with others as they do by local cues. That’d might track with men in the field. But would it really track with birds in flight or fish schooling? That sounds more purely reactive, and they generally lack the thinking/planning functions we have.

        Conversely and against my own point, I’ve never fought in a battle (or even re-enacted one), so maybe thinking mostly shuts down. I know it mostly does during sparring one the action kicks off. 😉

        I’ll take your word on the falling thing, since you’d know if you were stepped/fallen on. 🙂

        Wonderful video and re-enacting looks like a ton of fun! And very impressed you’re taking the time to interact with us all here.

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        1. “But would it really track with birds in flight or fish schooling? That sounds more purely reactive, and they generally lack the thinking/planning functions we have.”

          I’d be cautious of falling into the trap of human exceptionalism when it comes to the cognitive abilities of animals (especially ones that the public tends to write off as ‘unintelligent’ like fish).

          Not saying that there isn’t a step-change in many cognitive abilities between humans and the overwhelming majority of animals (we really are very smart indeed), but that we’re increasingly finding that that step change is both not quite as big as we’d thought, and occurs unevenly in different abilities in different animals.

          It could well be that flocking birds and shoaling fish use a combination of local cues and individual planning/prediction to co-ordinate their movements. In fact, considering the sheer ability of many birds and fish to flock and shoal, this may be something that they are more cognitively capable of doing than we are (however it’s achieved).

          Reply

          1. I love the interest you both are showing in this, because this is my day job. Honestly, I am only involved in the study of hoplites because my family comes from Sparta, so I had read my Xenophon, and I saw that some of the algorithms we were deriving from animal groups worked with human formations as well. It has sort of sucked me in since then, but I began simply asking questions as you are. I gave a talk a few years back on applying some of these concepts we derived from studying flocks and swarms to the study of hoplites. I hope you find it informative and feel free to email me any questions.

        2. “But would it really track with birds in flight or fish schooling? ”

          If birds can do it, you might expect humans to be able to, even if more slowly and clumsily. They are not so superior to us that we should be completely unable to do it at all.

          Reply

  25. In the Iliad we see descriptions of defeated warriors asking for mercy, to be spared and ransomed later. Was this an attested practice in Archaic and Classical Greece? Or was the rout and chase always described in the sources as a hunt for killing the enemy?

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    1. Taking captives was common, but could not be assumed: there was no gentlemanly requirement to take defeated enemies captive instead of just killing them and no strong norm against deciding to kill all of the captives after the fact either. However, it was quite common to take enemy soldiers captive and either enslave them or ransom them.

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  26. “Notice how they are not shoving, but instead things to fight with their spears in an overhand grip?”

    Possibly “things” should be “trying” (or maybe something else)?

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  27. > Then we also have various attested ‘ultra-deep’ formations, which have always recalled for historians Napoleon’s attacking columns, the idea being the deep formation provides impetus to an attack, but such formations are treated as unusual, innovative or compelled by terrain (though, as Konijnendijk notes (134), no classical source explicitly says this so some caution is required). Konijnendijk supposes rather than adding momentum or impetus to an attack, depth was a way to improve cohesion and avoid collapse: an ultra deep formation was harder to break and I think that is probably right.

    This entire paragraph seems to be a relic of an earlier draft you forgot to delete, as the preceding paragraph covers the topic in more detail and contradicts this one. I agree that these formations were likely intended to intimidate with their depth and that, since formations fell apart from the rear in most cases, they would do little to improve cohesion and might even harm it. Or at least that was the effect they had, since we can’t be sure our Greek generals weren’t ignorant of this fact, and know this was the rationale for excessively deep sarissa-phalanxes later on.

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  28. “This phase simply could not last very long because these formations have no way to ‘trade out’ the front ranks and exhaustion would hit fairly fast. A looser formation might be more able to trade out men, but as Bardunias’ own experiments demonstrate, if you adopted that looser 180cm formation, a tighter 90cm or 60cm formation would cut through it much too quickly.”

    How did a Roman legion with their 135 cm formation survive against the tighter 90 cm Greek phalanx?

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    1. Good question, to which Polybius gave a long (but slightly unsatisfactory) answer.

      I would though plead that people try to wean themselves off these ’90cm’, ‘135cm’ etc intervals. While it does no harm in helping to visualise intervals, no ancient formation would ever have been this precise, and even if they tried to be, precision would be lost in the course of marching about the battlefield or contacting the enemy. Better to use ancient measures (one cubit, two cubits), or if you want to convert to modern measures, then round (half a metre, one metre). It makes life easier, and is more likely to match reality.

      As to the intervals you cite – 135cm is never attested for Romans (or anyone), but I believe is Michael Taylor’s (no relation) interepretation of the difficult passage in Polybius. 90cm is also not attested for Greeks come to that, but is a reasonable guess. More pertinent though, since Romans actually fought them quite a lot, is the two cubit / one metre interval of the Macedonian phalanx.

      Now Polybius’ analysis is not without its faults and controversies (and is the subject I think of another post on this blog) but he says that each Roman (at four cubits / two metres) faced two Macedonians (at two cubits / one metre) in the front rank, plus another four ranks behind them whose sarissa points extended beyond the front rank, so one Roman v. ten Macedonians. So how did they survive – well, broadly, they didn’t try. They didn’t stand toe to toe and fight them (or if they did, they lost, quickly). Instead they found ways to break up the Macedonian formation before engaging.

      As to Romans fighting Classical-style hoplites, though you would think they must have done so at some point, there is no clear record of what happened (AFAIK). In the course of fighting Carthaginians and Iberians and Gauls (not to mention other Italians), they must also have come up against similar challenges. You would think that they simply closed their intervals when necessary, though Caesar famously tells us that at the Sambre, facing Gauls, he ordered his men to open their intervals so they could use their swords more easily (he doesn’t say what intervals they were at, or what they switched to).

      My suspicion from all this is that the mental model (or indeed physical model, in the case of reenactors) of how all this works is out of whack in some fundamental way. But it’s a big topic (which I cover in greater detail elsewhere).

      Reply

      1. Ceasar’s order is interesting because it is the opposite of the tactic described by Polybius 2.33. Here they famously reenacted a hoplite phalanx: “The Tribunes accordingly gave out the spears of the Triarii, who are the last of the three ranks, to the first ranks, or Hastati: and ordering the men to use their swords only, after their spears were done with, they charged the Celts full in front. When the Celts had rendered their swords useless by the first blows delivered on the spears, the Romans close with them, and rendered them quite helpless, by preventing them from raising their hands to strike with their swords, which is their peculiar and only stroke, because their blade has no point. The Romans, on the contrary, having excellent points to their swords, used them not to cut but to thrust: and by thus repeatedly hitting the breasts and faces of the enemy, they eventually killed the greater number of them”

        The Roman’s force the Gauls to fight at two measures that are not that of their long swords- spear range and very close-in. In fact when it comes to gladius, crowding them is a rather othismotic way so that the Gauls had no room to use their weapons.

        Who knows if this is true or just Polybius riffing, but it does remind us that there is no single way to fight or spacing. A few chapters earlier, Polybius has the Roman’s defeat the named Gestatae with thrown pila. Ceasar has the Gauls formed so close in another battle that their shields overlapped and got pinned together by pila. And lest we forget, the Roman’s were a “Greek” phalanx of sorts when they were defeated by a Gallic invasion that sacked Rome.

        I can tell you this. The scutum does change the nature of the shield-wall. The aspis is great because it can alternately be used as an almost literal meter stick for foming ranks and really wants to overlap with the shields beside you if you present it forward. The Scutum on the other hand wraps around and covers so much that each man is an island within the wall of shields, allowing more independent movement, but requiring more training, i.e. some training, to coordinate formations. A hoplite fighting a man with a scutum 1 on 1 is at a disadvantage due to the greater coverage compared to fighting another hoplite.

        Reply

      2. I’d argue that the way to think of spacing is in “half arm’s length” and “arm’s length”, since, in the field, that was most likely how correct spacing was measured. Once in formation, but before setting off, extend right arm to the person next to you. If you can barely touch them with your elbow, you’re at half arm’s length, if you can barely touch them with your closed fist (holding a spear, remember?) you’re at arm’s length.
        Yes, this means that no two men will have exactly the same spacing. And? It’s quick, everyone has the “measuring tool” right there with them, and it’s close enough to correct.

        Also, yes, intervals were probably often situtational. Possibly moment-to-moment situational even in a single battle.

        As to the Romans facing sarisa-phalanxes, it bears to recall that the sarisa is a PIKE. It’s a four-metre pole of which only the first ten centimetres pose any danger. Duck behind the scutum, rest it against the helmet, in fact, angle it to deflect the pikes UP, and you can just walk right up to the guy with the pike and stab him.
        Yes, even if it’s a formation eight deep – they’re at the wrong end of a four-metre lever. They cannot hold that pike down if you push it up at what in a sword would be called the weakness.

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        1. Single sword and shield vs single pike, yes it’s relatively easy to push out of the way.
          Against a pike phalanx it’s multiple pikes at staggered depths, one after the other. If the phalanx is more tightly packed, shoulder to shoulder, then there’s even more pike points per legionary. No, the pikes don’t have much leverage individually, but there are four? six? of them against just you.
          If you’ve ducked behind your scutum, you don’t have a good view of where the pike points are. Pikemen in close formation can’t move their weapons around much, but they could, say, bring the point back half an arms length and point it down at your knee.

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        2. In reenacting, we generally do, three spacings. Shield rim to shield rim is about 80-90cm depending on the shield. Shield held out to the left, which is roughly the same as your full arm spacing and suitable to move the half-files up between files when doubling. Usually before advancing, we overlap roughly the rims, though remember than the rim extends behind the shield, so it is this full rim length, not the part out front. This is about 72cm and allows for men to stay in physical contact when running, which keeps the ranks from breaking up.

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      3. > well, broadly, they didn’t try.

        I think there’s whole series here about Roman vs Macedonians, detailing all 3 wars where they fight. Frankly, I don’t see a satisfactory explanation in there either and it seems like the Macedonians just seem horribly stupid and easily broken. But our host tries to claim that “3 times is not a coincidence so clearly Rome is still superior” so…. I don’t know.

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  29. The danger, of course is that this produces something like crowd collapse (once again, Paul Bardunias discusses this) but for formations that are only 4 to 16 men deep and have nothing behind them the release for that pressure is easy enough: the formation can ‘accordion’ back out as men naturally back out of the pressure.

    This makes me wonder if ultra-deep Leuctra-style formations were intended to present this sort of “accordioning”. If the enemy front ranks are accordioning back but yours are still being pushed forward by all the men behind them, it’s easy to see how the enemy battle-line might be pushed back, and back, until very soon they lose cohesion and collapse entirely.

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    1. As you note, the timing of pulses is something that can increase pressure. Synchronized movement is difficult to organize down the deep number of ranks (i.e., along a deep file). We found in testing something that Ardant di Piq reported long ago from the experiments on an unnamed Prussian officer. As you add new ranks, the amount of force they add to the total goes down. This is because coordinating is difficult and if you are not perfectly synchronized you waste some of your force moving or crushing together the men in front of you. This is the peristaltic or accordian movement. So around 12 to 16 ranks you start to plateau and most of the time 25 or 50 ranks are not pushing much harder than 12 (this explains the prolonged battle at Leuktra).

      But there are ways to add synchronicity. One way, is to sing, or even have experience dancing. Anything that adds rhythm. Many die during disasters at concerts specifically because the bass beat causes synchronized pushing. Interestingly Spartans sang in the ranks and all Greeks of this period did group dances.

      But there is another way to force men into a tighter packing that better transfers force: push them against a wall. Moving back in ranks against anything, even your own rear ranks if they do not give ground packs you tighter. By adding many ranks, you create a mass behind your front ranks that acts like a wall. This is why the Thebans threw even non-combatant baggage carriers in the rear ranks. They just had to stand. What you end up with is like a ratchet, 50 ranks may not have much advantage moving forward, but they resist moving back. The result is likely a slow forward progression as long as the men in the back, a dozens of ranks beyond the actual fighting, don’t break and run.

      The last thing to consider it that you can get freak pressure waves if the men by chance all coincide in their pushing, we have experienced these. More ranks probably make this more likely, but they don’t last long.

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  30. “Finally, probably right before breaking out into the final charge, the soldiers issued a war-cry, which we can actually somewhat guess at the sound because it has an onomatopoetic word: ἀλαλή (alale, a-la-lay) and an associated verb ἐλελίζειν (elelizein, e-le-li-zane, ‘to issue the war cry’), suggesting it was something like a high-pitched keening or ululation sound.”

    So you’re saying there was something Xena got right?

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  31. My first ever university course was about Classical greece, and I recall distinctly the talk about the Orthdox and Hetrodox position (though I believe our material tneded to support more a sort weak-orthodox position, iirc), so it is very fun to come back to it. It is is also very great to see the comments from the two proffesors – R. Taylor and P. Bardunias in the comments, equally as enchriching.

    It is nice knowing that Age of Empire II’s Greek and Macedonian DLC’s got the Ululating aspect of the battle cry mostly correct!

    ‘Ἀλαλή!’

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  32. Perhaps I’m feeling a bit emotional at the moment for unrelated reasons, but the depiction on the lidded amphora, along with last week’s line drawing of the push-of-pike, really drives home to me how horrible this must have been. Maybe this is just my perspective as a sheltered civilian, but it’s shocking what humans are capable of doing to each other.

    You empathize with the people in your histories to quite a large degree. I’m reminded of the prologue to Rex Regi Rebellis by Turisas, taken from “The Surgeon’s Stories: Times of Gustaf Adolf” by Zacharias Topelius:

    “Not straying indifferently from one thing to another which excites your curiosity, but taking a warm and vital interest, as if you yourself stood in the midst of those struggles, now long since fought out. Bled in them, conquered or fell in them, and felt your heart beat with hope or apprehension according as fortune smiled or betrayed”

    Compartmentalizing these things, along with all the attendant horrors of our modern age, so we can find joy and comfort where we can, is really tough sometimes.

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  33. “Determining what these fellows do is also tricky because, as noted, our sources often don’t tell us what they are doing very clearly. That is reflective of a belief by our sources (note Thucydides’ dismissive tone, 6.69.2)”

    Its worth pointing out general he might have been but there Is no evidence I know of that says Thucydides (the man who lost Amphipolis) was a good general, certainly no Iphicrates let alone a Demosthenes. One assumes Demosthenes might pen a different opinion and still regret not waiting for the rest of his allies (darters) or wishing he had the force of IG I3 60 before plunging into Aitolia. That decree itself suggests perhaps the Demos did not agree with Thucydides. If I’m not mistaken it is presumed the Athenians chose to anchor both sides of their line so there was no way for the enemy cavalry or light infantry to be effective one assumes the same worked against the Athenian forces. In fact, it seems rather clear the Athenians were aiming for a Heavy infantry engagement. Even Iphicrates’ peltasts did best the Spartans head-to-head but in a running battle.

    Round about I guess my point is when one side has gone out its way to force a heavy infantry fight in deal circumstances and the enemy accepts (that is Syracuse chose to come out) it seems a poor example to use for what light infantry could do or might do.

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  34. Opps ” Even Iphicrates’ peltasts did best the Spartans head-to-head but in a running battle.”

    should be did not

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      1. As soon as I read “alale” I heard the Lucy Lawless scream…

        Kind of ironic that “Xena warrior princess” got something about classical greek warfare more right that the proper academics of the sector. (that apparently are locked in a dick neasuring contest based on vase depictions that, judging from the full frontal, may be fetish art a la “girls und panzers”)

        Reply

          1. Yeah, it’s a struggle to deal with the comment interface on mobile devices. I don’t know how far it can really be tweaked without more fundamental changes to the WordPress code, though.

  35. Nice job Bret, as always. I’m so glad that reading Du Picq re the line collapsing from the rear forward helped. As you’ll remember, that’s how I describe the phalanx in lecture. You may also recall, that I also argued that the mostly-closed helmet is an advantage in this circumstance, in that it limits the rear rankers’ attention to events occurring to their sides and rear. Just a bit. Maybe just enough, for them to stay in line longer.

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  36. On the subject of organization, John Lee estimates a much smaller average Lochos based on the number of Lochagoi referred to in Xenophon (at least for the ten thousand) in A Greek Army on the March.

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  37. Pingback: Collections: Hoplite Wars, Part IVb: Training Hoplites? – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
  38. Pingback: Collections: Hoplite Wars: Part IVa, The Status of Hoplites – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
  39. Pingback: Collections: Hoplite Wars, Part II: Hoplite Equipment, Hoplight or Hopheavy? – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

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