This is the last part of our four-part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, Intermission) on the debates surrounding ancient Greek hoplites and the phalanx formation in which they fought. We’ve spent the last two entries in this series looking at warfare quite narrowly through the lens of tactics: hoplite spacing, depth, fighting style, and so on. I’ve argued for what I regard as a ‘blended’ model that sits somewhere between orthodoxy and heterodoxy: no ‘shoving’ othismos, but the hoplite phalanx is a shield wall, a formation with mostly regular spacing that is intended for shock and functions as a shock-focused shield wall formation likely from a relatively early date.
This week, we’re going to now ‘zoom out’ a bit and ask what implications the hoplite debate has for our broader understanding of Greek society, particularly polis Greek society. Hoplites, as warriors, were generally found in the Greek poleis but of course not all Greeks lived in poleis and areas of Greece without poleis largely lacked hoplites as well. In particular, our understanding of the place that hoplites have in polis society has a bunch of downstream implications in terms of social structure, the prevalence of slavery and even the question of how many Greeks there are in the first place.
I ended up having to split this into two parts for time, so this week we’re going to focus on the social status of hoplites, as well as some of the broader implications, particularly demographic ones, of a change in our understanding of how rich hoplites were. Then next week we’re going to close the series out by looking at hoplite ‘discipline,’ training and experience.
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Orthodox Yeoman Hoplites
The key question we are asking here is fundamentally “how broad is the hoplite class?” That is, of course, a very important question, but as we’ll see, also a fiendishly tricky one. It is also a question where it can be unclear sometimes where scholars actually are which can render the debates confusing: heterodox scholars write articles and chapters against something called the ‘myth of the middle-class hoplite‘1 but it isn’t always clear exactly what the bounds of the model they’re arguing against is, in part because orthodox scholars are not generally proposing hard numbers for the size of the hoplite class.\
Post-Publication Edit: We’ve already had some confusion in the comments so I want to leave a clarifying edit here. We’re about to dive into a lot of questions about the percentage of people in the hoplite class. But all of the scholars involve calculate those figures on a different basis – in particular does the denominator include women? children? slaves? the elderly? I try to homogenize those estimates here as best I can, often aiming for a ‘percentage of free households‘ (so the enslaved excluded) or ‘percentage of adult males’ (so women and children excluded, but slaves included) in a given status type. But I am afraid you will have to keep track fairly closely of exactly what percentage of what we’re calculating (and of course it is entirely possible I have simply made a math error somewhere, although I have tried to be careful).
By way of example, I want to take Victor Davis Hansen out to the woodshed on this point – because his half of this specific disconnect was brought up in the comments early in this series – in terms of the difference between how he sometimes imagines in words the size and social composition of the hoplite class and then how it looks when he uses numbers. In The Other Greeks, VDH’s preference for describing the hoplite polis of the late Archaic is ‘broad-based’ a term he uses for it about three dozen times, including on when he talks about the “broad base of hoplite yeomanry” and how “when middling farmers were in control of a Greek polis government it was broad-based: it was representative of the economic interest of most of the citizenry” and when he references “the yeomanry […] who had built the polis and created broad-based agrarian governments.”2 These references are, in my digital copy, all within 3 pages of each other. They certainly give the impression of a middling, yeoman-hoplite class that dominated the typical polis. And indeed, in his more pop-focused works, like the deeply flawed Carnage and Culture (2001) he posits Greece as the origin point for a western tradition that includes “equality among the middling classes” tied to the hoplite tradition, which certainly seems to suggest that Hanson thinks we should understand the hoplite class as broad, covering even relatively poor farmers, and with a great degree of internal equality.
But then flash forward three whole pages and we’re calculating the size of that ‘broad-based’ class and we get a line like, “the full-citizen hoplites […] composed about twenty percent of the total adult resident population of Boeotia.”3 And pulling out just that second quote, someone might express confusion when I say that the heterodox argue that the hoplite class is small and exclusive, a rejection of the ‘middle class’ yeoman-hoplite of the orthodox school, because look there is VDH himself saying they’re only 20%! But equally, one may question the fairness of describing such a rate of enfranchisement as ‘broad-based!’
Now on the one hand VDH’s argument in this passage is about the relative inclusivity of ‘moderate’ oligarchies (the ‘broad-based’ ones) as compared to radical Greek democracies and so the question of the relative breadth of the hoplite class itself is not particularly his concern. But I think he’s also hiding the ball here in key ways: Boeotia is a tricky test case – unusual and famous for both its significant cavalry (drawn from an unusually wealthy aristocracy) and light infantry manpower (drawn from an unusually impoverished peasantry). VDH notes the low property qualifications for citizenship in Boeotia but does not stop to consider if that might be connected not to the hoplites, but to the unusually large numbers of Boeotian light infantry.
Moreover, there is a lack of clarity when presenting these percentages as to exactly what is being included. VDH’s 20% figure is 20% of the total “adult resident population,” rather than – as we might expect – a percentage of the adult male population or frequently the free adult male population. So he is actually asserting something like almost 45% (really probably 43 or 44%) of free households serve as hoplites (once we adjust for women and the elderly), which, as we’ll see, I think is pretty doubtful.4 For the sake of keeping comparisons here ‘clean,’ I am going to try to be really clear on what is a percentage of what, because as we’ll see there is in fact, a real difference between the orthodox assumption of a hoplite class of 40-50% of free households and the heterodox assumption that is closer to 25% of free households.
So when I say that heterodox scholars generally argue for a smaller, economically elite hoplite class while orthodox scholars generally assume a larger ‘yeoman’ hoplite class, it can be tricky to pin down what that means, particularly on the orthodox side. We need apples-to-apples number comparisons to get a sense of where these folks differ.
And I think the place to actually start with this is Karl Julius Beloch (1854-1929); stick with me, I promise this will make sense in a second. Beloch’s Die Bevölkerung der griechisch-römischen Welt (1886, “The Population of the Greco-Roman World”) is the starting point for all of the debates of Greek and Roman demography, the first really significant, systematic effort to estimate the population of the entire classical world in a rigorous way. Now if you recall your historiography from our first part, you will quickly realize that as a German writing in the 1880s, Beloch was bound to have drawn his assumptions about Greek society and the social role of the hoplite class from those early Prussian and German scholars who serve as the foundation for the orthodox school. They were, after all, writing at the same time and in the same language as he was. Equally useful (for us) Beloch’s basic range of estimates for Greece remain more-or-less the accepted starting point for the problem, which is to say that a lot of current historians of ancient Greece when they think about the population of the Greek poleis are still ‘thinking with Beloch’ (typically mediated by Corvisier and Suder, La population de l’Antiquité classique (2000)).
So analyzing Beloch’s approach – and because he is estimating population, he is forced to use numbers – can give us a sense of the society that the ‘orthodox’ vision of hoplites imagined at its inception and which it largely still imagines when it thinks in terms of raw population numbers. And that can help us lock down what we’re actually arguing about.
In very brief, Beloch had a problem to solve in estimating the population of Greece. Whereas in Roman Italy, he had census data to interpret, we have no equivalent in Greece (ancient reports of population in Greece are rare and almost invariably unreliable). So instead he adopts the method of estimating from maximum military deployments, the one number we reliably get from ancient sources. Doing so, of course, requires squaring away some key questions: what percentage of adult males might be called up for these armies? Our sources often give us only figures for hoplites, so this question really becomes, ‘what percentage of adult males served as hoplites?’ And then following on that, what percentage of people were female, children, elderly or non-free?
Beloch answers those questions as follows: he assumes that roughly half of all free households are in the hoplite class, so he can compute the free adult male population by multiplying hoplite deployments by two, that he can compute the free population by multiplying the adult male population by three, and that the non-free population is around 25% of the total (significantly concentrated in Sparta and Athens), including both slaves and serfs. You can see the logic in these assumptions but as I am going to argue all of these assumptions are wrong, some more wrong than others. We’ll come back to this, but I think Beloch’s key stumbling block (apart from just badly underestimating the number of children in a pre-modern population – he should be multiplying his adult males by four, not three) is that he largely assumes that the Greek poleis look more or less like the Roman Republic except that the Romans recruit a bit further down their socio-economic ladder. And that’s…not right, though you could see how someone working in the 1880s might jump to that expedient when the differences in Greek and Roman social structure were less clear.
Greeks are not Romans and the Greek polis is not the Roman Republic.5
Nevertheless those assumptions suggest a vision, a mental model of the social structure of the typical Greek polis: wealthy citizens of the hoplite class make up roughly half of the free households (he explicitly defends a 47/53% breakdown between hoplite and sub-hoplite), while the landless citizen poor make up the other half. Beloch assumes an enslaved population of c. 1m (against a free population of c. 3m), so a society that is roughly 25% enslaved, so we might properly say he imagines a society that is roughly 37.5% hoplite class (or richer), 37.5% poorer households and 25% enslaved households. And returning to a moment to VDH’s The Other Greeks (1995), that’s his model too: if 20% of adults (not just adult males) were citizen-hoplites in Boeotia, then something like 43% of (free) households were hoplite households (remember to adjust not just for women, but also for the elderly),6 which is roughly Beloch’s figure. It is a touch lower, but remember that VDH is computing for Boeotia, a part of Greece where we expect a modestly larger lower class.
What does it mean for a society if the hoplite class represents approximately 40% of households (including non-free households)?
Well, this suggests first that the hoplite class is perhaps the largest or second-largest demographic group, behind only free poor citizens. It also assumes that nearly all of the propertied households – that is, the farmers who own their own farms – both served as hoplites and were members of the hoplite class.7 In particular, this imagines the ‘typical’ member of the hoplite class (this distinction between hoplites and the hoplite class will matter in a moment) as a middling farmer whose farm was likely small enough that he had to work it himself (not having enough land to live off rents or enslaved labor), essentially a modest peasant. Moreover the assumption here is that this broad hoplite ‘middle class’ dominates the demography of the polis, with very few leisured elites above them and a similar number of free poor (rather than a much larger number) below them.
And I want to note here again there is an implicit – only rarely explicit (Beloch makes the comparison directly) – effort to reason from the social model we see in the Roman Republic, where the assidui (the class liable for taxes and military service) as a group basically did include nearly all farmers with any kind of property and ‘farmers with any kind of property’ really does seem to have included the overwhelming majority of the population. There’s an effort to see Greek ‘civic militarism’ through the same frame, with the polis a community made up of small freeholding farmers banding together.8 I think scholarship has not always grappled clearly enough with the ways in which Rome is not like an overgrown polis, but in fact quite different. One of those differences is that the assidui is a much larger class of people than anything in a polis, encompassing something like 70% of all adult males (free and non-free) and perhaps as much as 90% of all free households. That is an enormous difference jumping even from 37.5% to 70%. What that figure suggests is both that Roman military participation reached much more robustly into the lower classes but also that (and we’ll come back to this in a moment) land ownership was probably more widespread among the Roman peasantry than their Greek equivalents.
In short part of what makes the Roman Republic different is not just where they draw the census lines, but the underlying structure of the countryside is meaningfully different and that has very significant impacts on the structure of Roman society.9 Taken on its own evidence, it sure looks like the organization of land in the Greek countryside was meaningfully less equal10 and included meaningfully more slaves than the Italian countryside, with significant implications for how we understand the social position of hoplites. And that brings us to the heterodox objections and thus…
Divisions Among Hoplites
The response to the ‘yeoman hoplite’ model of hoplite orthodoxy has been Hans van Wees’ assault on the ‘myth of the middle-class hoplite.’11
What van Wees does is look specifically at Athens, because unlike anywhere else in the Greek world, we have the complete ‘schedule’ of wealth classes in Athens, denominated in agricultural production. He’s able to reason from that to likely estate size for each of the classes and from there, given the size of Attica (the territory of Athens) and the supposed citizen population (estimates from 40,000 to 60,000) the total size of each wealth class in terms of households and land ownership, in order to very roughly sketch the outlines of what wealth and social class in Attica might have looked like. Our sources offer little sense that they thought Athenian class structure was ever unusual or remarkable beyond the fact that Athens was very big (in contrast to Sparta, which is treated as quite strange), so the idea here is that insights in Athenian class divisions help us understand class divisions in other poleis as well.
What he is working with are the wealth classes defined by the reforms of Solon, which we haven’t really discussed in depth but these are reported by Plutarch (Solon 16) and seem to have been the genuine property classifications for Athenian citizens, which I’ve laid out in the chart below. Wealth was defined by the amount of grain (measured in medimnoi, a dry measure unit of 51.84 liters), but for non-farmers (craftsmen and such) you qualified to the class equal to your income (so if you got paid the equivalent of 250 medimnoi of grain to be a blacksmith, you were of the zeugitai, though one imagines fairly few non-landowners qualify for reasons swiftly to become clear).
| Name | Wealth Requirement | Notional Military role | Percentage of Population Following van Wees (2001) |
| Pentakosiomedimnoi (“500 Bushel Men”) | 500 medimnoi or more | Leaders, Officers, Generals | 1.7-2.5% |
| Hippeis (‘horsemen’) | 400 medimnoi | Cavalry | 1.7-2.5% |
| Zeugitai (‘yoked ones’) | 200 medimnoi (possibly reduced later to 150 medimnoi) | Hoplites | 5.6-25% |
| Thetes (‘serfs’) | Less than 200 medimnoi | Too poor to serve (later rowers in the navy) | 90-70% |
Now traditionally, the zeugitai were regarded as the ‘hoplite class’ and that is sometimes supposed to be the source of their name (they were ‘yoked together’ standing in position in the phalanx), but what van Wees is working out is that although the zeugitai are supposed to be the core of the citizen polity (the thetes have limited political participation) there simply cannot be that many of them because the minimum farm necessary to produce 200 medimnoi of grain is going to be around 7.5 ha12 or roughly 18 acres which is – by peasant standards – an enormous farm, well into ‘rich peasant’ territory. It is, in fact, roughly enough farm for the owner to not do much or any farming but instead subsist entirely off of either rents or the labor of enslaved workers.13
In short, the zeugitai aren’t ‘working class’ ‘yeoman farmers’ at all, but leisure-class elites – mostly landlords, not farmers – albeit poorer than the hippeis and pentakosiomedimnoi even further above them. And that actually makes a great deal of sense: one of the ideas that pops up in Greek political philosophy – albeit in tension with another we’ll get to in a moment – is the idea that the ideal hoplite is a leisured elite and that the ideal polis would be governed exclusively by the leisured hoplites.14 Indeed, when a bunch of Greek-speakers (mostly Macedonians) find themselves suddenly in possession of vast kingdoms, this is exactly the model they try to build their military on (before getting utterly rolled by the Romans because this is actually a bad way to build a society). And of course Sparta’s citizen body, the spartiates, replicate this model as well. Often when we see elements in a Greek polis try to create an oligarchy, what they are intending to do is reduce political participation back to roughly this class – the few thousand richest households – which is not all the hoplites, but merely the richest ones.
Of course with such large farms there can’t be all that many zeugitai and indeed there don’t seem to have been. In van Wees’ model, the zeugitai-and-up classes never supply even half of the number of hoplites we see Athens deploy; they only barely crawl over half if we assume the property qualification was (as it probably was) reduced at some point to just 150 medimnoi. Instead, under most conditions the majority of hoplites are thetes, pulled from the wealthiest stratum of that class (van Wees figures these fellows probably have farms in the range of ~3 ha or so, so c. 7.5 acres). Those thetes make up the majority of hoplites on the field but do not enjoy the political privileges of the ‘hoplite class.’ And pushing against the ‘polis-of-rentier-elites’ model, we often also find Greek sources remarking that these fellows, “wiry and sunburnt” (Plato Republic 556cd, trans. van Wees), make the best soldiers because they’re more physically fit and more inured to hardship – because unlike the wealthy hoplites they actually have to work.
What the transition to the Athenian democracy meant was the full enfranchisement of this large class of thetes, both the fellows who could afford to fight as hoplites (but previously didn’t have the rights of them) and the poorer citizen thetes.
And of course this isn’t only Athens. The only other polis whose complete social system we can see with any clarity, of course, is Sparta and when we look there, what do we find? A system where political participation is limited to the rentier-elite class (the Spartiates), where there is another class of poorer hoplites – the perioikoi, who fight as hoplites – who are entirely blocked from political participation. It appears to be the same kind of dividing line, with the difference being that the spartiates had become so dominant as to deny the perioikoi even citizenship in the polity and to physically segregate themselves (the perioikoi lived in their own communities, mostly on the marginal land). It is suggestive that this sort of divide between the wealthy ‘hoplite class’ that enjoyed distinct political privileges and other ‘working-class’ hoplites who did not (and yet even far more poor farmers who could not afford to fight as hoplites) was common in the polis.
That leaves the notion of a truly ‘broad-based’ hoplite-class that runs a ‘broad-based’ agrarian polis government that consisted of ‘middle-class’ ‘yeoman’ hoplites largely in tatters. Instead, what you may normally have is a legally defined ‘hoplite class’ that is just the richest 10-20% of the free citizen population, a distinct ‘poor hoplite’ class that might be around 20% and then a free citizen underclass of 60-70% that cannot fight as hoplites and also have very limited political participation, even though many of them do own some small amount of land.
Once again, if you’ll forgive me, that looks nothing like the Middle Roman Republic, where the capite censi (aka the proletarii) – men too poor to serve – probably amounted to only around 10% of the population and the light infantry contingent of a Roman army (where the poorest men who could serve would go) was just 25%.15 So whereas the free ‘Roman’ underclass of landless or very poor is at most perhaps 35% of (free) households,16 the equivalent class at Athens at least (and perhaps in Greece more broadly) is 60% of (free) households. Accounting for the enslaved population makes this gap wider, because it certainly seems like the percentage of the enslaved population in Greece was somewhat higher than Roman Italy. It is suddenly less of a marvel that Rome could produce military mobilizations that staggered the Greek world. Greeks are not Romans.
This is a set of conclusions that naturally has significant implications for how we understand the polis, particularly non-democratic poleis. Older scholarship often assumes that a ‘broad’ Greek oligarchy meant rule by the landholding class, but if you look at the number of enfranchised citizens, it is clear that ‘broad’ oligarchies were much narrower than this: not ‘farmer’s republics’ (as VDH supposes) but rather ‘landlord‘s republics.’17 That is quite a different sort of state! And understanding broad oligarchies in this way suddenly restores the explanatory power of what demokratia was in Greek thought: it isn’t just about enfranchising the urban poor (a class that must have been vanishingly small in outside of very large cities like Athens) but about enfranchising the small farmer, a class that would have been quite large in any polis for reasons we’ve discussed with peasants.
I think there’s also a less directly important but even more profound implication here:
Wait, How Many Greeks Are There?
The attentive reader may be thinking, “wait, but Beloch’s population estimates assume that the hoplite contingent of any Greek polis represent half of its military aged (20-60) free adult males, but you’re saying that number might be much lower, perhaps just 30 or 40%?”
I actually haven’t seen any scholars directly draw this connection, so I am going to do so here. Hell, I’ve already seen this blog cited quite a few times in peer-reviewed scholarship so why not.
If it isn’t already clear, I think when it comes to the size of the hoplite class, van Wees is correct and that thought interlocks with another thought that has slowly crept into my mind and at last become lodged as my working assumption: we have significantly under-counted the number of Greeks. Or, more correctly, everyone except Mogens Herman Hansen has significantly under-counted the number of Greeks. So good job to Mogens Herman Hansen, everyone else, see me after class.
Now these days the standard demographic reference for the population of Greece is not Beloch (1886), it is Corvisier and Suder, La population de l’Antitiquité classique (2000). Unlike Beloch, they do not reason from military deployments, instead they reason from estimated population density. Now I want to be clear, they are reasoning from estimated rural population density, which is not the same as reasoning from built-up urban area18 The thing is, we can’t independently confirm rural population density from archaeology (unlike urban area estimates) so this method is entirely hostage to its assumptions. So the fact that Corvisier and Suder’s estimates fall neatly almost exactly on Beloch’s estimate (a free population of c. 3m in mainland Greece) might suggest they tweaked their assumptions to get that result. And on some level, it is a circular process, because Beloch checks his own military-based estimates with population density calculations in order to try to show that he is producing reasonable numbers. So if you accept Beloch’s density estimates at the beginning, you are going to end up back-computing Beloch’s military estimates at the end, moving through the same process in reverse order.
But you can see how we have begun to trouble the foundations of Beloch’s numbers in a few ways. First off, we’ve already noted that his multiplier to get from military aged males to total population (multiply by three) is too low (it needs to be four). Beloch didn’t have the advantage of modern model life tables or the ability to see so clearly that mortality in his own day was changing rapidly and had been doing so for a while. Adjusting for that alone has to bring the free population up to support the military numbers, to around 4m instead of 3m (so we have effectively already broken Corvisier and Suder (2000)). Then there is the question of the prevalence of the enslaved; Beloch figures 25% (1m total), but estimates certainly run higher. Bresson, L’économie de la Grèce des cités (2007/8) figures perhaps 40-50% and 30% is also a common estimate, though we are here, in practice, largely guessing. Even keeping the 25% figure Beloch uses, which we now have to acknowledge may be on the low side, we have to raise the number of enslaved to reflect the larger free population: 1.33m instead of 1m, for a new total of 5.33m instead of Beloch’s original 4m.
But then if the number of men who fight as hoplites is not, as Beloch supposes, roughly half of polis society, but closer to 40% or even less, then we would need to expand the population even further. If it is, say, 40% instead of 50%, suddenly instead of Beloch’s computation (very roughly) of 500,000 hoplites giving us 1,000,000 free adult men giving us 3,000,000 free persons, resulting in a total population of 4,000,000 including the enslaved, we have 500,000 hoplites implying 1,250,000 free adult men implying 5,000,000 free persons, to which we have to add something like 1,500,000 enslaved persons19 implying a total human population not of 3 or 4m but of c. 6,500,000.
And there’s a reason to think that might be right. The one truly novel effort at estimating the population of Greece in the last few decades (and/or century or so) was by Mogens Herman Hansen. Having spent quite some time on a large, multi-scholar project to document every known polis (resulting in M.H. Hansen and T.H. Nielsen, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (2004)), M.H. Hansen decided to use that count as a basis to estimate population, assigning a rough estimate to the size of small, medium and large poleis – using the built-up urban area of poleis we knew relatively well – and then simply multiplying by all of the known poleis to exist at one point in time. The result, documented in M.H. Hansen, The shogtun method: the demography and ancient Greek city-state culture (2006), produced an estimate of 4-6m for mainland Greece and I think, to be frank, Hansen pulled his punch here. His method really produced the top figure in that range, a significantly higher figure that generally postulated for Greece.20
My strong suspicion – which the evidence is insufficient to confirm definitively – is that van Wees is right about the relative size of the slice of men who fight as hoplites (distinct from the ‘hoplite class’) and that M.H. Hansen is correct about the population and that these two conclusions interlock with each other to imply a rather different Greece in terms of equality and social structure than we had thought.
Looping back around to what is my repeated complaint this week: we were often conditions to think about Greek agriculture, the Greek peasantry, the Greek countryside through the lens of the much better documented Roman Italian agriculture, peasantry and countryside. After all, it is for Italy, not Greece, that we have real census data, it is the Roman period, not the classical period, that gives us sustained production of agricultural treatises. We simply have a much better picture of Roman social structures and so it was natural for scholars trying to get to grips with a quite frankly alien economic system to work from the nearest system they knew. And that was fine when we were starting from nothing but I think it is a set of assumptions that have outlived their usefulness.
This isn’t the place for this argument in full (that’s in my book), but briefly, the structure of the Roman countryside – as we come to see it in the late third/early second century BC – did not form naturally. It was instead the product of policy, by that point, of a century’s worth of colonial settlements intentionally altering, terraforming, landholding patterns to maximize the amount of heavy infantry the land could support. It was also the product of a tax-and-soldier-pay regime (tributum and stipendium) that on the net channeled resources downward to enable poorer men to serve in that heavy infantry.21 Those mechanisms are not grinding away in mainland Greece (we can leave Greek colonial settlement aside for now, as it is happening outside of mainland Greece), so we have no reason to expect the structure of the countryside to look the same either.
In short the Romans are taking steps to ‘flatten out’ their infantry class (but not their aristocracy, of course), to a degree, which we do not see in Greece. Instead, where we get an ideology of economically equal citizenry, it is an ideology of equality within the leisured elite, an ‘equality of landlords’ not an equality of farmers. We should thus not expect wealth and land distribution to be as ‘flat’ in Greece as in Italy – and to be clear, wealth distribution in Italy was not very flat by any reasonable standard, there was enormous disparity between the prima classis (‘first class’) of infantry and the poorest Roman assidui. But it was probably flatter than in Greece within the infantry class (again, the Roman aristocracy is a separate question), something that seems confirmed given that the militarily active class in Roman Italy is so much larger and more heavily concentrated into the heavy infantry.22 Consequently, we ought not assume that we can casually estimate the total population of Greece from hoplite deployments, supposing that the Greeks like the Romans, expected nearly all free men to serve. Instead, the suggestion of our evidence was that in Greece, as in many pre-modern societies, military service (and thus political power) was often the preserve of an exclusive affluent class.
Implications
But returning to Greece, I would argue that accepting the heterodox position on the social status of hoplites has some substantial implications. First, it suggests that there was, in fact, a very real and substantial social division within the body of hoplites, between wealth hoplites who were of the ‘hoplite class’ as politically understood and poor hoplites who fought in the same way but only enjoyed a portion of the social status implied. That division suddenly makes sense of the emergence of demokratia in poleis that were more rural than Athens (which is all of them). The typical polis was thus not a ‘farmer’s republic’ but a landlord’s republic.
At the same time, this also substantially alters the assumptions about ‘yeoman hoplites’ who have to rush home to pull in their harvests and who are, in effect, ‘blue-collar warriors.’ Instead, the core of the hoplite army was a body – not a majority, but a significant minority – of leisured elites who had slaves or tenants doing most of their farming for them. What kept hoplite armies from campaigning year-round was as much poor logistics as yeoman economics (something clear in the fact that spartiates – by definition leisured elites – didn’t campaign year-round either).
Finally, if we extend this thinking into our demographic analysis, we have to accept a much larger population in Greece, with all of the expansion happening below the men who fought as hoplites (both the hoplite class and our poorer working-class hoplites). It suggests a remarkably less equal social structure in Greece – indeed, perhaps less equal than the structure in Roman Italy – which in turn significantly caveats the way we often understand the Greek polis as a citizen community relatively more egalitarian and free than the absolute monarchies which pervaded Egypt and the Near East.
And of course, for one last return to my pet complaint in this post, it should reinforce our sense that Greek are not Romans and that we cannot casually supply the habits, economics or social structures of one society to the other to fill in gaps in our evidence. In particular, the assumption that the Greeks and Romans essentially share a civic and military tradition is a thing that would need to be proved, not assumed.23
- e.g. ch4 of van Wees, Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities (2004) is, “Men of Bronze: the myth of the middle-class militia” and his 2001 chapter, “The Myth of the Middle-Class Army” in T. Bekker-Nielsen/L. Hannestad (eds.), War as a Cultural and Social Force: Essays on Warfare in Antiquity (2001).
- VDH, The Other Greeks (1995), 205-7. I have a digital copy of this (it’s a kindle version) which gives page numbers, but I do not know if these match the page numbers in the print version.
- op. cit., 210.
- Quickly on the math: if 20% of the adult population are hoplites, then shifting our statistic to the adult male population is going to basically double that figure to 40%. Factoring in the small but meaningful number of men over 60 who no longer serve is going to inch it up further, close to 45%. So the suggestion here is that nearly half of all households can furnish a hoplite, which we’re going to see in a second is exactly what I think VDH and other orthodox scholars mean. But notice how tricky that statistic is: we could say that under VDH’s model, 45% of households serve as hoplites in Boeotia, but flip that around and we could equally say with the same model that less than ten percent of free Boeotians at any given time were eligible to serve as hoplites, accounting for the fact that half of this society will be female and nearly 55% of it will be underage, so ‘adult males’ only make up around 22.5% of the population, so 45% of 22.5% ends up being almost exactly 10%.
- While we’re beating up on VDH, at the start of his chapter on the ideology of the polis, he quotes Pliny, Natural History 18.4 (18.4.18), “Anyone for whom seven acres are not enough is a dangerous citizen,” which just about broke me because of course first Greeks are not Romans and this is Pliny the Elder (d. 79 AD) quoting Manius Curius (d. 270 BCE at Rome) and also because it is a mistranslation: it is not seven acres but seven iugera, which is 4.36 acres (he’s also somewhat mangled the relative clause of characteristic here). Needless to say, Pliny the Elder cannot be an authority for the ideology of the Archaic Greek polis but also the fact that the ‘ideal’ Roman farm suggested here is significantly smaller than the figures we’re going to see in a moment for the Greeks is also a tell that the Romans maybe do not have the same assumptions about the wealth of their heavy infantry.
- Which I may note VDH fails to do, but men above fighting age (sixty for a Greek polis, generally) would make up about 2.5 of the population (and women of that age another 3.5%) even under the dismal estimated mortality figures in antiquity.
- I am struck by Hanson’s use of ‘yeoman’ here because he may be thinking of that social class in Colonial North America, unaware that in Britain there was in fact a significant class of freeholding farmers poorer than the yeomanry, called the ‘husbandry.’
- Again, Hanson makes this badly flawed ‘Greece and Rome are basically the same’ sort of argument more or less explicitly in his later works, like Carnage and Culture (2001). His grasp on the Roman Republic is, frankly, quite poor.
- The most obvious is the enormous role of patronage in Roman social structures; parallel social customs in Greece are much less common and weaker.
- In particular, to clarify this point, the upper-end of the Roman aristocracy were probably meaningfully wealthier even before massive Roman expansion, than their Greek peers, so inequality at the top of the distribution was greater in Italy. Certainly the ability of those aristocrats to mobilize hundreds of clients is something we do not see often in Greek poleis and suggestive of the greater power Roman aristocrats wielded. But underneath those ‘big men,’ I think our evidence suggests that Italy had more middling and small farmers and fewer ‘very rich peasants’ than Greece, in part because the very action of Roman conquest and land distribution seems to have purposefully produced that effect to maximize the number of households liable for conscription.
- As noted above, this is “Men of Bronze: the myth of the middle-class militia” in his monograph, Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities (2004) and his 2001 chapter, “The Myth of the Middle-Class Army” in T. Bekker-Nielsen/L. Hannestad (eds.), War as a Cultural and Social Force: Essays on Warfare in Antiquity (2001). The latter is more detailed to the point and mostly what I am covering here.
- van Wees does his calculations in hectares.
- That is, 200 medimnoi of grain is enough to feed the necessary enslaved work force and then still maintain the owner’s household in relative comfort. You’ll recall we did our peasant math in modii (8.73 liters) and our households needed around 200-400 modii of grain to survive and 400-800 to life in maximum comfort. The medimnos is a bigger unit (51.84 liters) so 200 medimnoi is 1,187 modii, more than enough to maintain one complete peasant household (of slaves) at subsistence and then another complete household (of leisured elites) in comfort.
- This idea is discussed in Pritchard, D.M. “Thetes, Hoplites, and the Athenian Imaginary,” in Ancient History in a Modern University, eds. T.W. Hillard, R.A. Kearsley, C.E.V. Nixon and A.M. Nobbs (1998) and also van Wees (2004), 55-7.
- On this point, see N. Rosenstein, Rome at War: Farms, Families and Death in the Middle Republic (2004) which has an appendix directly addressing the size of the capite censi.
- Keep in mind that a good number of the men serving as velites at any given time were doing so not because they were too poor to be hastati, but because they were too young: both the very young and the very poor get put out in front as skirmishers.
- This point is made quite effectively in M. Simonton, Classical Greek Oligarchy: A Political History (2017).
- As some works on the demography of Roman Italy have been able to do, e.g. de Ligt Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers (2012).
- 1,666,666 to be precise in keeping the 25% ratio, but I want to keep my numbers here clean in part to be clear what wild estimates they are
- MHH revisited these calculations and largely stood by the upper-end estimates (which I think is also indicative of how the upper-end estimate is the ‘real’ estimate) in M.H. Hanson, “An Update on the Shotgun Method” GRBS 48 (2008).
- Because the tributum was collected as a tax proportional to wealth, but wages (stipendium) were paid out on a flat basis with all infantry receiving the same wage, so poorer infantrymen paid lower taxes when they weren’t serving but received the same wage back as their richer compatriots who paid heavier taxes. Thus poorer assidui end up as net recipients of tax money while rich assidui end up as net contributors. This argument on tributum relies very heavily on the excellent scholarship of James Tan on the nature and function of tributum.
- Interestingly, the prima classis of Roman infantry, at around a quarter to a third of the total number of the pedites (very roughly estimated) approximates the slice of men in Greece serving as hoplites, which makes sense since our sources seem to think – there is some dispute as to if they think rightly – that the prima classis began as the part of Roman society that fought as hoplites. What is different is that the next set of fellows down the social ladder (the next four classes of pedites) in Roman Italy also fight mostly as armored heavy infantry (albeit with worse armor), whereas in Greece the ‘subhoplites’ fight as psiloi, ‘lights’ – skirmishers with very cheap equipment. That is, it turns out a big difference. if I am right above, mainland Greece actually had somewhat more total population than Roman Italy c. 212, but if you bolted all the poleis together you would still never match the Roman deployment of 185,000 men in that year (the largest combined polis army is at Plataea in 479, was probably around 80,000 men, with perhaps another 20,000 Greeks (or somewhat more) on the other side). It turns out spending a century terraforming Italy into an infantry-generation-machine generates a lot of infantry.
- Once again, the idea that Rome was a simple extension of the Greek civic and military tradition is a foundational assumption (read: mistake) of VDH’s Carnage and Culture (2001), which uses this slight of hand to conjure a continuous ‘western’ military tradition (which somehow goes on holiday for most of the Middle Ages) for societies that have functionally no connection at all to the ancient Greek military tradition.
Fascinating. One thing about this model though, is that it would imply one of two things; either democratization and the expansion of the hoplites to include people who aren’t properly of the hoplite class should produce relaibly more hoplites vis a vis the overall population and thus we should be able to see if democratic poleis can field larger amounts of heavy infantry than more oligarchic ones, or that oligarchic states would feel the pressure and institute similar notions themselves to allow them to compete on more even footing.
Of course, that’s complicated by how weak the evidentiary basis is, which makes it hard to tell how many hoplites a given polis can field before and after making a change like this.
I think van Wees or Konijnendijk report that the very phrase “hoplite class” does not seem to have an ancient counterpart. Its likely that many of the leisured men with a full panoply also owned a horse, had time to learn archery, or were part-owners of a fifty-oared galley. Its certainly not safe to assume that a panoply from an Archaic Greek grave or temple was the only arms that the owner posessed. The very assumption that panoply = infantryman may belong to the increasingly massed armies of the Peloponnesian War and the fourth century BCE (there are also hints in Xenophon that the hoplites/psiloi dichotomy in Tyrtaeus, Herodotus, and Thucydides was breaking down in his day as federations like the Boeotian League tried to maximize the size of their phalanx).
Horse ownership is a particularly fascinating aspect, because the Archaic hoplite ends up associated with horses more often than typically discussed; it’s arguable that the paradigm early hoplites were charioteers and “dragoons” and this provides explanation for the unusual breadth of armour development among other things.
I may be misinterpreting, but isn’t the argument here that democratisation was a process of giving (or recognising) political power to the class which had people already serving as hoplites? You would only expect the number of hoplites to expand if the distribution of household wealth shifted to produce more households able to support a hoplite. Perhaps we might expect the poorer households having more political power to shift wealth in their direction. But I can’t imagine that process ever being a sure thing – the rich will use their influence to resist, and getting intended consequences out of economic policy is hard at the best of times! Maybe getting that to happen only happened once, with Rome.
I might in turn be misunderstanding, but the impression I got was a process where because of internal political power shifting, there was a cohort of people who could theoretically afford the sort of arms and armor of a hoplite but were deliberately excluded from doing so, and those exclusions eroding away.
I think this is a misunderstanding. The idea as I understand it is that there are a large number of men (the wealthiest of the Thetes) who can afford a hoplite panoply, and DO fight as hoplites, but aren’t granted the political or social power of someone of the hoplite class.
Whether someone can “afford the arms and armour of a hoplite” isn’t necessarily binary. Does it mean having a shield and a spear? Having a shield and a helmet and two spears? Having a shield and a helmet and two spears and a sword and greaves? Are you carrying your own stuff and sleeping rolled up in your cloak, do you have a slave carrying your things and a small tent to sleep in, do you have a horse to ride and a couple of slaves to carry all your stuff? Etc.
One way you can think about the question here is that it’s not about who is showing up, but it’s about whether these poorer folks are being considered as “hoplites” by the richer folks.
I thought there would be a minimum quality at least, because I don’t want my right flank to be protected by a practically-skirmisher. I thought weak link in this shield wall is more harmful than if they weren’t there at all.
Remember the formation is 8 ranks deep. Much like making an actual wall, you can put the well dressed stone blocks on the edges (the wealthy men with good armour), and pack in the middle with rubble (the poorer men with minimum kit).
I think we discussed something similar in the context of the Roman dilectus, which also expected soldiers to turn up with their own panoply – the point was made that it would be very unwise for someone who could afford the full kit to turn up without it, because the full kit helps keep you alive. And I think it’s reasonable to assume that there was an explicit list of minimum kit, even if we don’t know exactly what it was.
I always enjoy a historical essay where the author both lays out the ‘conventional wisdom’ as well as going off on their own argument–acknowledging that they’re not delivering ‘complete’ knowledge but ‘in-progress’ arguments, but still exposing the reader to them. That’s not something you get often in works that aren’t facing the academy, and I always enjoy it.
I’m a bit confused by the beginning (detailed in not 4) where you translate VDH’s “20% of adults in Beotia” to “45% of free households”. Did you assume a negligible enslaved population for Beotia?
I understand Athens and Sparta had more enslaved people than other poleis (because they won more wars, which brings you enslaved captives?), but I’m surprised that Beotia would not have a significant fraction of enslaved people, and even more surprised if that is the case that you would not mention it in your math.
Err… could have been made more explicit, but I suspect that adding a “free” modifier proved necessary to make VDH’s quoted number compatible with, well, anything (otherwise a 25% unfree rate would imply ~60% of households provided hoplites?).
Recall that the context was in fact the Pedant complaining about a lack of clarity in various quoted percentages.
Could it be that slaves are counted as part of the household that owns them, rather than as their own (unfree) household?
I would assume from the peasant series that live-in house slaves would be counted as household members by OGH. Possibly field slaves count as their own households, which would make sense of the qualifier.
FWIW, Omar Coloru recently suggested that most Seleukid soldiers were on ‘active duty’ rather than living on their estates, citing Makis Aperghis and Christele Fischer-Bovet (Brill’s Companion to War in the Ancient Iranian Empires p. 315 n. 51). I’m not sure that Antigonid Macedonia had a phalanx of leisured farmers either.
While technology and inequality determine what military force a society could generate, the political economy determines what it actually does. Most societies are not aggressive imperialists because the people (“the militarily and therefore politically significant part of the community”) don’t see that paying so many taxes and providing so much dangerous service is in their interests. For every fifth-century Athens or Republican Rome that gets everyone aligned behind aggressive warfare, there are many societies like fourteenth-century France which would rather lose battles than let the bourgeoisie get any glory, or the sixth-century Sasanid Empire where the nobility seems to have been worried about what the Shahanshah would do to them if he annexed Syria and Egypt and had all that land and money. I am sure your forthcoming book addresses this.
I’m not sure of the evidence that Boeotia had unusually many horsemen and light infantry, Boeotia was not Thrace or Thessaly or one of the poleis around the Black Sea!
Yes, Aperghis assumes basically a large standing Seleucid army, on the back of functionally no evidence, but he needs it to make his high (almost certainly overgenerous) estimates of Seleucid revenues work.
I don’t think this works; both Taylor (2020) and Silvanen Gerrard (in her dissertation, also 2020) reject it, and I think they’re right to do so. Instead, the model remains a significant but small standing force (‘the guard’ in both Gerrard and Bar-Kochva) supported by regular Macedonian troops levied from settlers and auxiliaries levied from subjects.
That structure has the advantage of fitting the evidence we do have, being quite close to the institutions we see in Ptolemaic Egypt and Antigonid Macedon and not requiring the Seleucids to have revenues almost certainly quite a lot higher than they really did (Aperghis is probably over-shooting by around double).
Any estimate of population that starts from reported numbers of men deployed in battle seems highly suspect. Numbers for battles are famously unreliable, and can be inflated or deflated for all sorts of narrative or propaganda reasons. Ancient authors often disagree by wide margins: it’s not uncommon for some to report double or half what another source does. And then you’re adding in all sorts of assumption about how much of the population was of fighting age/gender, how much of that was liable to military service, how much of that was actively raised at the same time, and how much of that was deployed to a particular battle. Every step is a new assumption, every new assumption is a widening of the error bars.
Using this to calculate a total population to anything more than an order-of-magnitude estimate (or, at most, a half-to-double interval) is being widely over confident about the quality of the available data and the reliability of the methodology. This is why good numeracy involves keeping track of uncertainties at each step of the calculation; it’s too easy to fool oneself into false certitude. Footnote 19 stresses that these estimates are wild, but I think it drastically underestimates just how wild they are. I’d recommend doing the maths twice: once with low-but-plausible values for all the numbers involved, and another with high-but-plausible. That should give some indication of just how much uncertainty there is.
Yes you have to take any ancient writing about numbers in an army with a grain of salt, but you seem to be throwing the baby out with the bath water. There is a huge difference between Herodotus saying Xerxes brought 1.5 million soldiers to invade Greece and the Roman record that two double-consular armies were routed by Hannibal at Cannae. No historian believes the Herodotus figure, but the Romans suffering close to 80,000 casualties at Cannae is considered highly reliable for good reasons. If you just dismiss the writings we have then you are stuck trying to extrapolate from the archaeology of a battlefield in middle Europe what happened. Yes archaic written sources should not be taken at face value, but they are an important source of information. We have spent well over a century analyzing the written record and historians at this point are easily able to distinguish between Herodotus and Polybius.
I’m not saying to ignore ancient historians, and modern historiography, completely. Only to take them as a centre of a range rather than an exact number. Being honest about our (partial) ignorance is far better than steaming ahead with a bad number because it’s the only number we have.
Distinguishing between reliable and unreliable numbers is certainly not “easy” in most cases. And when it comes to Classical Greece (let alone Archaic) the sources are far more towards the Herodotus than Polybius end of the scale. You don’t have to dig deep into the academic literature to see that experts disagree by huge margins about the numbers involved in battles. To take your very example of Cannae, Livy himself states that the numbers are unreliable and mentions other sources that give significantly different estimates. If you take an earlier battle (eg, the Pyrrhic wars), then the range given by modern reconstructed estimates is huge.
The most famous rule of thumb is that you can take an estimate of your *own* side as at least a starting point a lot of the time but using estimates of enemy forces is almost always entirely useless.
That’s probably right but, even then, who wrote the number down that has survived to us? Rarely the general or an eye witness. And even if they are, if it’s a coalition army, do they really know the numbers for all their allies? Have they properly accounted for everyone who’s been garrisoned during the campaign? People who should have joined but never did? The wounded who stayed at camp? Deliberately rounded up (or down) for propaganda reasons?
All of these factors might be small but say you have 5 different (independent) factors in your estimate all with +/- 20% error bars, and these combine multiplicatively (far fewer terms with far better accuracy than we actually have). The total range of the final estimate can go from 30% to 250% of the “central” value! The extent to which every small uncertainty compounds should not be underestimated; there’s a reason why doing this properly is a major concern in the numerical sciences.
The problem is that the stronger side would often exaggerate their own number in hope of scaring their opponents.
@NVA Considering that the sources are published years, decades, or centuries after the battle, that has cause and effect rather reversed lol.
If you mean stuff like “lighting more campfires” to disinform enemy generals prior to a battle then sure, sometimes. But just as often they’d try to make their army look smaller to lure the enemy into battle. Yet another reason why numbers are unreliable and need to be considered with error bars!
This is a bit of a tangent, but defining “military age” up to 60 seems really high to me- certainly higher than the Roman Middle Republic, where most men seemingly finish their military service by their late 20s or early 30s, and men over 46 only get conscripted in major emergencies.
Is Classical Greece unusual in its reliance on old men as soldiers?
That is probably less about the fighting than everything else that soldiers have to do. Societies that want soldiers for years at a time, whether training (Athenian ephiboi after they lost the battle of Chaeronaea, post-1789 conscription) or imperial conquests (Republican Rome) usually recruit them after they are fully grown but before they marry and start households. These societies often want digging and other heavy labour from the troops. Ancient Greek soldiers were generally only called up during campaigns, usually had someone row them if they had to travel long distances, and frequently refused to do the kind of heavy labour that Roman soldiers were willing to do. So like Finnish or Kurdish conscripts today they could be useful for most of their adult life, building up skill and patience even if they got slower and creakier. The ancients were at least as worried about recruiting men too young as too old: Thucydides says that the youngest and the oldest men were kept home to defend the walls of Athens while the men of mature years were sent out to fight.
I have talked about the cult of youth in the US and British military before.
Tyrtaeus of Sparta wrote: “It is shocking when
an old man lies on the front line
before a youth: an old warrior whose head is white
and beard gray, exhaling his strong soul
into the dust, clutching his bloody genitals
into his hands: an abominable vision,
foul to see: his flesh naked. But in a young man
all is beautiful when he still
possesses the shining flower of lovely youth.
Alive he is adored by men,
desired by women, and finest to look upon
when he falls dead in the forward clash.”
And notice that Tyrtaeus assumes that there are significant numbers of men with white hair and grey beards fighting at close quarters! This does not happen in most modern militaries.
IIRC some of the medieval English laws want men from 16 to 60 to be equipped and available for the defense of the kingdom.
“And notice that Tyrtaeus assumes that there are significant numbers of men with white hair and grey beards fighting at close quarters! This does not happen in most modern militaries.”
Happens a lot in Ukraine, I assure you – as you can see from the coverage. The median Ukrainian soldier is in their early 40s.
Of course in a society in which men of almost any age fight in the front lines, the 60 year-olds we read about may have been the survivors, the fittest of a harsh winnowing process.
Given the dynamics of pre-modern warfare, I would be more inclined to assume that any elderly men that keep going in the ranks are beneficiaries of luck more than they are the most badass out of the elderly men in the army.
Well if nothing else, the healthiest of their cohort– the ones who were still fit enough to march and fight.
Much like some prefer a lucky general, I think lucky soldiers are probably an asset.
I’m sure lucky soldiers would be an asset if it was in any way something you could select for or was an actual characteristic.
Being fortunate doesn’t mean you’re innately charmed, it just means that the odds favoured you on that occasion.
“Wealth was defined by the amount of grain (measured in medimnoi, a dry measure unit of 51.84 liters), but for non-farmers (craftsmen and such) you qualified to the class equal to your income (so if you got paid the equivalent of 250 medimnoi of grain to be a blacksmith, you were of the zeugitai, though one imagines fairly few non-landowners qualify for reasons swiftly to become clear).”
What time period are you talking about? Medimnoi per month? Per year? I guess, you must be talking about grain income in a certain time frame since you cant store it as wealth infinitely.
Thanks!
Per year.
If Greece had 6 million people, then it follows that it took it until the 1930s to recover to its Classical population. This is very strange, since in Italy we have far better recovery – if 1st century Italy had 8 million people then recovery happened by the High Middle Ages, and present population is about 7-8 times that level, whereas modern Greece isn’t even twice the Classical population. What gives?
Migration to other, richer lands, perhaps? Remember that the Byzantines had Anatolia and for long periods of time, Syria, Egypt, Sicily, and even Italy (including Rome).
Are we comparing the same area here? Or does the 6 million ancient figure include more of the southern Balkan peninsula, maybe even Magna Grecia and coastal Anatolia?
Peninsular Greece has been used as an example ecocide for as long as that concept existed. Topsoil that originated in the forests encountered by Greek settlers can’t be replaced now that the forests are gone, and the soil preservation and enrichment practices that work in the larger flat spaces in Italy can’t be used effectively on unterraced hills. The area would have needed enough water to support rice cultivation in order to recover population support capacity lost from the soil erosion, or food transportation networks.
Greeks were always leaving Greece, too, however you define Greece; our host seems more aligned with the idea that land ownership was structured so that people couldn’t get new arable land locally, but there’s a competing idea that land arability was in constant decline forcing people out.
Lack of sufficient arable land to keep up with an enlarging population surely would contribute to all that Archaic Era Greek colonization of the Black Sea and Med.
Greece was a built-up civilization too early. It didn’t get gobbled by the Persians but demographically it had a similar experience to the Middle East. High populations for thousands of years, decline in relative and often absolute terms. Even more mainstream estimates my understanding is think more people lived in Greece than in the rest of the Balkans. Today it is only 25% even if you ignore Istanbul…
Land degradation was an issue, being more urbanized isn’t helpful demographically with disease, they were closer to carrying capacity. The longterm respective demographic trends of the Middle East and Northern Europe are insane. At the time of Cleopatra there were perhaps 5 million Egyptians and 2 million people in England and Wales. By the time of Muhammad Ali, there were 4 million Egyptians and about 9 million in England and Wales.
For much of the Middle East the time they really fell behind demographically was the 1200s on. The Mongols, plague and Timur were a devastating combo. Then the Ottomans saw demographic stagnation. The Ottomans were not great at suppressing low-level banditry and unrest, and not only did they fail to reverse a lot of land slipping from agrarian to nomad control in the 1200-1400s, in many cases things continued to get worse.
However, for Greece I would more suspect the 500s/600s which sees Justinian plague, collapse of imperial control away from coastal cities and Slavic migrations. It already seems quite a bit less significant by the medieval period, certainly compared to the northern Balkans
Collapse not only of imperial control, but also of writing and all larger settlements in the Balkans except for Thrace, Thessalonike, Thebes, Athens, Corinth and the fortress of Monembasia.
In your example, it’s very important to specify which Muhammad Ali.
Not just that, 19th century Greece appears to have had a population of under a million. While part of that is also that it was geographically smaller…wtf?
I’m not shocked by that, most of the peripheral regions of the Ottoman Empire underwent some brutal demographic decline in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Excellent analysis. Keep up the good work.
I’m admittedly not sold on a high count Greek population – six million Greeks imply a population density in the neighbourhood of 30- 50 people/km2 (depending on where exactly classical Greece’s mainland begins and ends). That’s enormous. That’s western European population densities in the late 17th, early 18th century huge. That’s we have access to potatoes in addition to wheat, have replaced oxen with horses and use all metal ploughs huge. That’s our largest cities are two or three times the size of classical Athens huge.
And this population density would be present in archaic and classical Greece. Not the Roman empire with its specialised production and mediterranean mass transit highway distributing African grain across its range, but politically heavily divided, ridiculous number of microstates Greece. Where sure, Athens might import Egyptian wheat, but what about everyone else?
I’d very strongly lean towards wagon-equationing the army sizes in the sources and assume they’re all inflated. As army sizes tend to be right to the current day.
Are there any studies on the actual carrying capacity of mainland Greece with archaic/classical era agricultural means? That’s where I’d look to establish an upper limit (always acknowledging that this upper limit would hardly ever be reached in reality).
20 people/km2? Upper end, but sure. 30? That’s rather pushing it. 50? Never.
Classical Athens to a large extend depended on grain imports from Crimea. Thats what made the battle of Aegospotami so important. The Athenians were cut off from their imports.
Yes, but as Rezo observes above:
“Athens might import Egyptian wheat, but what about everyone else?”
The impression I get is that the Aegean economy was exceptionally highly developed and monetized, using grain imports from Black Sea/Levant/Egypt to feed its relatively large urban population. So perhaps the point of comparison shouldn’t be Europe writ large with 17/18th century farming technology, but the Dutch Republic, say?
That’s fair, but the Dutch Republic around 1700 had a population density in the neighbourhood of 35 people/km2. That’s with potatoes, and modern(ish) iron ploughs, AND food imports into the most heavily urbanised area in Europe. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that archaic to classical Greece, with its mountainous terrain and significant areas that lacked urbanisation (e.g. Aetolia; for that matter, a major power – Sparta – wasn’t a city, but rather a collection of villages) probably had a noticeably lower population density than that.
I get that a lot of the medieval advances in agriculture were central Europe catching up to the mediterranean of antiquity, but this is IMO a bit beyond that. Europe ca. 1700 does IIRC beat out the classical era 2 : 1 in terms of population (albeit counting different areas, the latter includes mediterranean Africa, Asia minor and the levant).
A concept of Ancient Greece that confines it to the boundaries of the modern Hellenistic Republic is very wrong and not what the post is about. Even excluding places like Cypress, the Black Sea colonies, and Magna Grecia, the post’s “all poleis” is going to include vast swathes of what is now Turkey.
That’d be why the sentence ‘depending on where exactly classical Greece’s mainland begins and ends’ was used.
Beyond that, the use of the term ‘Greek Mainland’ rather implies that it is not the entirety of the Greek world.
I’d also emphasise that ‘Vast Swathes of Turkey’ rather gives the wrong impression – the Ionian colonies were very much coastal, whereas the interior was very much not Greek. Kind of like how I wouldn’t describe ‘New Jersey’ as ‘Vast swathes of the United States’.
“Greek Mainland” is certainly a nonsensical term, more appropriate to Nineteenth century North European romanticism than to ancient history. An idea of a ‘real’ Greece that excludes Lydians and Dorians and Crete and Rhodes and Smyrna and *Ithaca* is as Greek as Greco-Roman wrestling.
Okay, but the article under which we’re commenting uses the term ‘Mainland Greece’, with the implication being that the sources it is based on likewise use it. The article likewise explicitly mentions that the Greek colonies are a separate matter.
I don’t think it is particularly inappropriate to use the same terminology as the article we’re commenting on. Conversely, I’m not convinced it is particularly appropriate to bring up the Greek colonies when the argument is specifically about the demography of ‘Mainland Greece’.
All of the poleis had access to the mediterranean trade network, which always included merchants delivering goods to anywhere that could pay for them. They also seem to have produced similar foodstuffs. So, the rural parts of any poleis will have a density determined by the quality of the local farmland and urban cores that can support more trade as they have more people.
19th century Greece had a population of 750k. That makes 6 million in the classical era feel very, very, very high to me, even with Greece’s greater territorial extent at the time.
Did Greece suffer markedly under Ottoman rule, to the point of suppressing the population?
The balkans suffered from a couple of nasty epidemics in the 1700’s, and Greece specifically has suffered from topsoil erosion issues since classical times.
The academic interest of the people demands the peer-reviewed papers that cite the blog!
“Beloch assumes an enslaved population of c. 1m (against a free population of c. 3m), so a society that is roughly 25% enslaved, so we might properly say he imagines a society that is roughly 37.5% hoplite class (or richer), 37.5% poorer households and 25% enslaved households. And returning to a moment to VDH’s The Other Greeks (1995), that’s his model too: if 20% of adults (not just adult males) were citizen-hoplites in Boeotia, then something like 43% of (free) households were hoplite households (remember to adjust not just for women, but also for the elderly),6 which is roughly Beloch’s figure. It is a touch lower, but remember that VDH is computing for Boeotia, a part of Greece where we expect a modestly larger lower class.”
Sorry, isn’t 43% larger than 37.5%? I think maybe something got left out here. maybe the slave percentages?
43% of *free* households vs. 37.5% of all males. The former number excludes slaves from the calculation, the latter number includes it. Beloch assumes 47% of all free households serve as hoplites.
Regarding Sparta, I have to think that we must be overlooking some realities of what the social situation was in classical Sparta (which must also have shifted over the centuries, since we read so often in the mid-200s of reform movements to “restore” the Lycurgan model, implying that much of the old system that we normally read about (via outside, biased sources, almost exclusively) must have fallen apart and was no longer in effect in the old ways. (Whenever those might have been in force.) But there MUST have been a sizable class of men in Sparta, which grew larger over time, of “citizens” who did not qualify for FULL citizenship, were not true homoioi in the sense we read about the “equals”. Spartans who fell out of that class from poverty or some other failure. They would not be true perioikoi because they were not from the other towns of Laconia or born into that class — we don’t hear about Spartiates being “demoted” into perioikoi status — and they must have been liable for military service just the same as others. So the army ranks would have included “full citizens”, allied perioikoi (Laconian hoplites, light infantry such as the Skiritai), helots (skirmishers, servants, attendants) — and also the “Spartans” who were seen as second-class citizens, altho’ we have no name for these (I do not refer to the neodamodeis or mothaces but perhaps these were the mysterious hypomeiones, “inferiors”?)
Laconian freemen (perioikoi) do not seem to have shirked their duties as soldiers in the Lacedaemonian state, and neiher would the subclass of “inferiors”, even tho’ these groups are seldom talked about in the surviving histories (which again were mainly written by outsiders). But as the number of full Spartiates declined over the centuries, they must have made up an ever-larger number of the Lacedaemonian levy. It’s a pity we do not know more about their lives or their social or governing systems. The city of Sparta proper was a small part of a much larger polity. But we know little about so much of it.
If you read our host’s treatise on Sparta, he touches on that very question.
https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/
tl;dr: Throughout its history, Sparta had an ever expanding class of disenfranchised Spartans who had fallen out of citizen status
Telling people that your reform movement is seeking to restore your society to a past model is a sure sign that your movement is proposing nothing but radical and unprecedented changes to your society. Either the Lycurgan model never existed at all, or it’s actual structure was orthogonal to what the reformers actually wanted to do.
Bret’s previous posts about Sparta cite ancient sources that keep pushing the buck of the idealised Lycurgan past that contemporary Spartans were falling short of further and further back, in a way that weakens the credibility of it ever having been a thing at all.
It does appear that there somewhere in the Archaic period Sparta must have been uncommonly successful, given things like the extent of their holdings in the Peloponnesian peninsula or some of the apparent interference in pre-democratic Athens. But I wonder if outside observers and Sparta itself might have attributed that to their customs of citizenship, when it was really just a coincidence. And that whatever reduced Sparta’s power was less down to a moral decline in its aristocracy and more a case of aggregate institutional weaknesses before being faced with poleis that had become more cohesive by the Classical era.
>Bret’s previous posts about Sparta cite ancient sources that keep pushing the buck of the idealised Lycurgan past that contemporary Spartans were falling short of further and further back, in a way that weakens the credibility of it ever having been a thing at all.
That’s not really an accurate summary of the ancient sources, which are pretty unanimous that the Spartan decline happened after the sudden injection of wealth following the Peloponnesian War. Notably, neither Herodotus, who was writing before/in the early stages of the Peloponnesian War, nor Thucydides, who was writing immediately after it, give any indication that they consider Spartan greatness to be a thing of the past.
They didn’t regard Spartan greatness as a thing past, but they did regard it as a society in decline?
In the aforementioned post, Bret notes that language Herodotus uses implies that spartiates to whom he is referring are part of long-lasting generational wealth, which being before the Peloponnesian War has even happened would push it a few generations before the point at which this supposedly corrupting wealth flows in.
(Bret also cites poetry from the eighth century BC that also carries evidence of such wealth disparities)
That said, I will acknowledge that he was making a point about the history of supposed Spartan equality rather than anything else.
>They didn’t regard Spartan greatness as a thing past, but they did regard it as a society in decline?
No they didn’t. Or at least, I don’t recall any statements in either Herodotus or Thucydides implying such a thing.
>In the aforementioned post, Bret notes that language Herodotus uses implies that spartiates to whom he is referring are part of long-lasting generational wealth, which being before the Peloponnesian War has even happened would push it a few generations before the point at which this supposedly corrupting wealth flows in.
The corrupting post-Peloponnesian War wealth would have largely consisted of spoils of war, so gold, artworks, and other such showy things. At least in the eyes of Classical authors, there’s a difference between using your wealth to fund a life of public service and using your wealth to buy lots of fancy clothes and statues.
>(Bret also cites poetry from the eighth century BC that also carries evidence of such wealth disparities)
Though archaeology suggests that, by the time of the Persian War, such wealth disparities weren’t openly displayed through acquiring luxury goods, fine artworks, etc. I’m not sure if there’s any archaeological evidence of these things creeping back in after the Peloponnesian War, but it seems that, for at least around 150 years from the mid-sixth century, overt displays of wealth disparity among with homoioi were minimised, presumably for the sake of keeping up a united front against the helots.
Here you are simultaneously saying “ancient sources say no such thing as there being any kind of decline” and “corrupting”. This after having said “the ancient sources are unanimous that the Spartan decline happened because etc.” Do you see how this comes off as internally contradictory?
Anyway, it seems like it would be best to read the statements from the post in question (it’s the one on Spartan Equality) and address it more directly.
>Here you are simultaneously saying “ancient sources say no such thing as there being any kind of decline” and “corrupting”.
I never said “ancient sources” in general say nothing about decline, but that Herodotus and Thucydides specifically say nothing about decline. Later writers, such as Xenophon and Plutarch, do talk about decline.
>This after having said “the ancient sources are unanimous that the Spartan decline happened because etc.”
Sources written after Sparta’s decline are unanimous that it happened because of the sudden injection of wealth after the Peloponnesian War. Herodotus and Thucydides were writing before the decline happened, and so obviously don’t say anything about it.
Or at least they attributed the decline to the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War; correlation not necessarily meaning causation.
>Or at least they attributed the decline to the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War; correlation not necessarily meaning causation.
True, they might have been wrong. My point was simply that they are at least consistent on the matter.
Okay, I have a clearer understanding of what you meant in previous comments now.
The main substance of Bret’s arguments was that the concentration of wealth in an ever dwindling number of spartiate households (and the motivation to undertake such concentration) was the ongoing cause of their military decline because it diminished the class that provided their heavy infantry and their institutions were not well suited to reversing this. That’s a matter of a historian’s analysis, whether the sources themselves were cogent of the implications or not.
He cites Herodotus as a source on the idea of there being wealth disparities between Spartans at a time preceding the Peloponnesian War and with implications of going back a few generations before the Classical era, which implies that the causes of their diminishing hoplite class were inherent to the system rather than the result of some sudden influx. Basically, he puts forward the argument that Herodotus describes to us an ongoing decline, even if he didn’t recognise it as such at the time.
This ties into a point Bret has made before about how there’s more to the work of the historian than just describing the sources to us.
Indeed as Bret pointed out in his Sparta series, there seemed to be no route for ruined Spartiates of otherwise impeccable ancestry to regain their full standing. It’s a little as if in the South of the antebellum United States, any former “society” class who had through misfortune sunk to the status of “crackers” could never redeem themselves.
makes sense, you mention something that would be a later growth out of thaat with the Macedonian Ruling classes over bigger population of Conquered places, and how that would cause the Diadochi Successors endless amount of problems, not in the least in having so many peer Rival powers of each other to contend with when Rome Mostly at that point did not have nearly as much trouble with near peers in their own Back Yard anymore.
But also the massive issues of troop resource replenishment out of populations not fully sold on the Ruling Class, especially when it gets weaker and is bleeding.
Greece having less Heavy Infantry in the first place, and what it has being a bit more class divided, so the weaker and smaller forces that get decimated..
Later Rome who ever had to have fought a Complete Alexander Unified Empire
/when the thing never really had that and was quite crumbly even before/
would have been a nuts struggle, but Rome got them piecemeal.
but that slight diversion taking centuries before that as precursor to the Macedonian Nonsense.
Especially important is the whole, mostly fighting each other and a few others issue.
“This is the last part of our four-part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, Intermission)”
“I ended up having to split this into two parts for time”
heh.
Re: the relative wealth of Roman vs Greek elites, this made me recall when our host discussed the issue on the disappearance of elite burial goods as a result of Roman expansion. IIRC it was in a twitter thread on the Samnite armor tradition and does’t seem to be on Acoup unfortunately, a quick search and the closest I could find on the blog was a brief aside in the post on the Dilectus. Dispossession of these local elites is, I think, the real cause why the Roman elite at the time it appears in the written record is richer than their Greek (if not Macedonian) counterparts. Clientelism may be a foundational part of Roman culture compared to its much weaker presence in Greece but it was widespread among her close neighbors, and it seems unlikely they or maybe even their wealthier Etruscan neighbors were richer than Greek elites in say 500 BC.
Given that the remarkable capacity of the Roman society to generate heavy infantry has been mentioned before, and is here described as being a conscious choice, do researchers know how this came to pass?
Because playing an empire builder on the PC, I can see this happening, but in the real world – coming up with the model, convincing the rest of the ruling class, and then keeping it going for centuries – this sounds extremely challenging.
Oddly enough the previous week’s intermission may speak to this, in the debate about war as glorious. I can’t find the cite now but someone was writing about Homeric bronze age war being about individual martial glory, classical Greece being a mixture of glory-seeking and practical politics, and the Roman Republic/ Empire being almost entirely about practical politics. While in classical Greece war was still largely about giving the upper classes the chance to prove how strong and brave and important in war they were, somehow it came to pass that Rome as a society decided that war was about the mundane business of winning. Even by such unheroic things as making sure their poor nobodies had good weapons, and by the use of impersonal formation tactics that guaranteed that whatever the outcome between two soldiers facing each other on the front line, on average the Roman forces would give better than they got.
It’s simple enough: “Hey guys, what do we do with all this land we’ve gotten off those other Latins?”
“Well, we could hand it out to a few guys and make them really rich?”
“Fuck those guys, I’m not enriching them unless I also get enriched.”
“We could keep it.”
“I need another estate in Campania like I need an extra hole in the head. My fucking steward’ll just steal it all. And those urban poor’ll throw things at my villa.”
“We could hand it out to a whole bunch of the currently poor, indebting them to us under the system of clientism, giving us more people eligible for conscription, and incidentally also meaning everyone individually is a bit less likely to have to serve, which’ll be great for our grain reserves.”
“Sounds like a plan to me.”
It sounds better in Latin but I bet that was the gist.
“I have to parcel this land out some way, but if I hand it out *this* way I get a lot of happy, heavily armed clients to help in the Republics wars, and not at all to help me out in its internal politics.”
To be fair, right up until the Republic’s system started to come unglued in its final century, the “heavily armed” part wasn’t important to Roman internal politics.
The part where you as an aristocrat had lots and lots of clients in general who felt loyal, would vote in support of you, would generally back you up in one way or another, et cetera, now that mattered.
“I have to parcel this land out some way, but if I hand it out *this* way I get a lot of happy, heavily armed clients to help in the Republics wars, and not at all to help me out in its internal politics.”
…which was the specific predicament of P. Licinius Crassus?
Won a triumph for a war in Lusitania. Got land to parcel out and did.
Five years later his son Marcus the triumvir fled to Lusitania. Found clients of his father.
First he hid with the help of such a client for about a year. And then he called his clients to arms… they formed an army of 2500.
The men who could afford the arms to rally to Marcus (he was a fugitive, his wealth then modest to start with and unavailable in Italy) must have had the legal right to vote – if they happened to physically be in Rome. But even the richest of them, those who could afford to travel to Italy, could have done so for (prescheduled) elections, not to vote about (unpredictable) laws.
The clients of P. Licinius Crassus, because their land was in Spain, were no help to support Publius in legitimate political process of Republic, nor save Publius or his younger son Lucius from being persecuted to death when Populares won. Their only recourse was to take up arms and sail against Rome. This they did, and won.
“To be fair, right up until the Republic’s system started to come unglued in its final century, the “heavily armed” part wasn’t important to Roman internal politics.”
Not “directly” important, because the arms were not used against Romans.
“Indirectly”, a client was more useful when he had the wealth to physically travel to Rome and to vote at elections. How much more useful is another matter!
We happen to know the breakdown of Roman citizens by census classes:
*knights 18 centuries – but this was not wealth based; there was required wealth but most knights were knights of own horse and mere first class citizens
*first class citizens 80 centuries
*second to fourth class 20 centuries each
*fifth class 30 centuries
*smiths and musicians 4 centuries
*proletariat 1 century
But what I have never heard of and suspect is not available is the actual numbers of citizens per census class. In 225 BC, there were 325 000 citizens in 193 centuries and the 18 centuries of knights of public horse were just 100 men, but the others? The 174 centuries that formed the bulk of Roman people were on average nearly 2000 men each. But just how did the actual number of first class citizens per century compare to fifth class citizens?
If a Roman proconsul had land to the tune of HS 50 millions to parcel out, was he better off handing out HS 100 000 each to create 500 first class citizens, or HS 11 000 each to create 4500 fifth class citizens? At the centuriate assembly, the first class citizen might have had more weight. At tribal assembly, the voices of a knight and a proletarian were equal (and it was the tribal one that elected popular tribunes and passed laws).
The different systems didn’t build all at once is an obvious point, so its less “coming up with model and getting everyone to do it” then “when a decision needs to be made, lean towards more small independent farmers instead of some other option, which builds into a complete system.”
Then the suggestions of “increased focus on fighting wars” “can build client networks”, etc. come in. Romans consistently lean towards getting more infantry whenever they have to decide how to handle some situation, and this means giving conquered land to small farmers to be infantry seems like the natural thing to do.
The accounts of early Rome, insofar as they aren’t fanfiction, which is admittedly not a given, point towards an aristocratic society where aristocrats hogged all the power and wealth, although the aristocracy may have had a relatively wide base. And this continues into the early republic, with patrician families getting all the glory.
But as the Republic continued on, the social conflict between the Patricians and Plebeians goes largely in favour of the latter. This results in amassing wealth by the latter (the former, too, of course; but the important part is that the latter can compete), which allows their ever increasing participation in war, which in the Roman socio-political system valuing martial success results in increasing political influence.
Which of course, suggests to me that it very much wasn’t a conscious choice. The patricians resisted, but were unsuccessful, and since Rome kept winning wars, social tensions were limited since everyone grew – it wasn’t a zero sum game (once it became one because everyone around had been looted, the republic collapsed).
One might argue that Rome lucked into a winning social formula through plebeian political emancipation against the resistance of the ruling elite.
The later population estimates more or less double the earlier ones. But could Greece in this period actually support that many people (6 million+)?
I mean there’s apparently only about 10.5 million people there *today*, with farming practices that allow for much better harvests, and a much greater ability to import food.
Evaluating estimates of past population based entirely on modern population and incredulity that past population density could ever approach modern population density.
To pick an obvious example: Historians claim that Ireland had almost eight million inhabitants in the 1830’s, while Northern and the Republic of Ireland only have a little over seven million today. This, despite the Third Agricultural Revolution still being a century away!
It turns out there was an event in the late 1840’s which prevented Ireland from supporting as many people as it theoretically could. And it still hasn’t fully recovered.
I’m a layman, but I suspect that Greece’s relationship to the Mediterranean may have changed over the last 2,500 years. Perhaps multiple times?
It turns out there was an event in the late 1840’s which prevented Ireland from supporting as many people as it theoretically could. And it still hasn’t fully recovered.
Likewise, it’s estimated that Peru, for example, didn’t recover it’s precolonial population level till around 1965. Of course, that’s only a time gap of 430 years or thereabouts, not 2500, and it was also recovering from a famously extreme and well documented population collapse, something like 90% death or more. Did anything of that magnitude happen to ancient or for that matter medieval or early-modern Greece?
Not to that extent, but the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death were pretty fierce.
I’m pointing out that the field of Greece likely could not produce the same amount of crops as they do today in this period due to not having fertilizers, etc.
Is 6 million people in Greece a realistic estimate for this time period based on the acreage that exists in Greece and the yields they had then? Could they feed them?
Nothing to do with whether Greece had plagues, etc.
Sorry I’ve been reading Vaclav Smil’s Energy and Civilization: A History, so this immediately occurred to me.
It’s possible that improved climate could make enough of a difference to manage it. But I personally am skeptical.
Then again, I am very curious what productivity levels Romans were getting out of similar acreages. If they’re getting noticeably more than the notoriously-not-wealthy-from-the-farming Greeks, then I suspect it may make sense.
If Wikipedia and the source it cites on ‘Agriculture in ancient Rome’ is to be believed, then Italy was about twice as productive as Greece per hectare in the 20th century. This certainly seems plausible for the Ancient world as well.
Also, given Alcibiades apparently had only 28 hectares I think the Romans are running around a lot richer than the Greeks both at the elite level and at the peasant farmer level – the Greek hoplite class (both political and practical) is small at least as much because you need a much bigger farm to have the income to burn on being heavy infantry.
It should be understood that the famine in and of itself wasn’t the biggest cause of population decline compared to the fact that the poor economic prospects underlying the famine created a very high pressure for emigration, that persisted for a long time afterwards. Like, even into independence, remarkably high numbers of Irish people left the island. That reversal owes itself more to providing stability that made the population want to stay more than anything (and then offset by the fact that said prosperity coincided with the usual factors to disincentivize large families, aided by the legalisation of contraception).
(Also, historians don’t “claim” the population of the time; the famine has the convenience of taking place right after the UK government starts taking a widespread and effective census.)
With improved trade and farming practices…but 2500 years of soil erosion issues that have been notoriously difficult to rectify. If you want to look at how long-term local environment degradation can absolutely wreck a region’s ability to support agriculture in a way that’s difficult for even modern society to rectify, look at the effects of irrigation-driven salinity increase in the fertile crescent (that IIRC even to this day has not been recovered).
The climate in the classical era was also very different to present-day Europe in terms of suitability for agriculture. There’s been a sort of ‘agricultural goldilocks zone’ band that moves up and down Europe as the climate warms or cools that’s currently residing somewhere across the lower bits of northern Europe (say, from the Massif Central to the upper Midlands). In classical times when the climate was cooler, that band was lower and covered much of the Mediterranean coastline, including Greece. You can see this shift really clearly in how ‘good wine country’ has moved around Europe.
So it was less of a ‘southern Europe is a scorched chapparal and northern Europe is rolling green fields’ and more ‘southern Europe (including the north African coast) is a great place for growing crops and northern Europe is a frigid wasteland’ as the go-to broad-brush over-generalisation.
That and from what I understand, modern Greek government has tended to be one of the higher-inequality members of the European Union, which as many western countries are finding out is not exactly conducive to rapid population growth (largely through cost-of-living-driven issues with starting families). This is evident in their perennial issues with tax evasion (described as a ‘culture of tax avoidance’), considering that taxation policy is the primary method by which modern societies redistribute wealth downwards to the people who actually do the growing of populations. Stuff like that likely wouldn’t change their maximum carrying capacity much, but definitely does stuff that makes recovering from demographic shocks much harder (i.e. suppresses births and promotes high emigration).
So yes, I do kinda believe that the carrying capacity of ancient Greece may be significantly different to the carrying capacity of modern Greece.
Check
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Statesman%27s_Year-Book_1899
for 1890-s population.
Greece page 693. 1896 census (rounding to thousands by me). Area in square English miles. Then nomarchy borders.
2 433 000 people on 25012 square miles
Laconia – 135 000 people on 1679 sq mi
Messenia – 205 000 people on 1221 sq mi
Lacedaemon combined – 340 000 people (I may make rounding errors, here I know I do!) on 2900 sq mi
Rest of Peloponnesus – Elis and Achaea, Arcadia, Corinth and Argos – 560 000 people on 5363 sq mi
Total Peloponnesus – 900 000 people on 8263 sq mi
Attica and Boeotia, not administratively separated in 1896 – 313 000 people on 2472 sq mi
Western strip, Phocis to Acarnania – 317 000 people on 5057 sq mi
Ionian islands – 252 000 people on 1010 sq mi
Aegean islands – 249 000 people on 3139 sq mi
Note that regions that potentially fought on Greek side at Thermopylae had all combined just 2 030 000 people in 1896.
Yes, Macedonia, Thrace, Crete, Asia Minor I excluded – but they did not fight on Hellene side. I also left out Thessaly which surrendered before Thermopylae
And now take Italy… Pages 720-722. The estimates for 1898.
Sicily 3 603 000 on 9936 sq mi
Sardinia 766 000 on 9294 sq mi
on peninsula Italy:
Tuscany 2 332 000 on 9304 sq mi
Marche 981 000 on 3763 sq mi
Umbria 612 000 on 3748 sq mi
Latium 1 043 000 on 4663 sq mi
Abruzzi 1 398 000 on 6380 sq mi
Campania 3 177 000 on 6289 sq mi
Apulia 1 910 000 on 7376 sq mi
Basilicata 551 000 on 3845 sq mi
Calabria 1 335 000 on 5819 sq mi
total peninsula: 13 340 000 people in 1898
The Italian peninsula without islands, that is the area that contributed soldiers to Roman side on Cannae, had, in 1890s, about 7 times the population of Greek peninsula+isles that were maybe on Greek side at Thermopylae.
How did the ratio differ in antiquity
Its worth noting that the Battle of Mycale happened simultaneously, which adds another 20,000+. Then you have to remember the communities that largely stayed out of it. Only half or so of modern Greece was in the anti-Persia alliance. Greeks may have had similar mobilization capacity in *numbers*.
The issue is quality, in turn a reflection on societal structure and mobilization. The Anti-Persian alliance had over 100,000 men raised on land and sea simultaneously. Only ~40% of that heavy infantry, the rest light infantry, rowers. Romans by comparison are about 70% heavy infantry and their heavy infantry are heavier. The other issue of course is unity. Rome could mobilize all of Italy intensely. Even the anti-Persian alliance or Alexander did not come lose to that.
Incidentally on your Carthage twitter thread, while Carthage didn’t cover itself necessarily in glory in the Sicilian Wars compared to the Punic Wars to put it mildly, I think digging into it narrows the contrast. Carthage in 310 was able simultaneously to field a large army in Africa, maintain an active siege of Syracuse, and have a large fleet too. By comparison Carthage fielded about 60,000 men from Africa in the Second Punic War plus a navy.
I think the basic tale is:
1. Carthage never made an all-out effort against Syracuse.
2. Syracuse and allies could field 1 decent-sized field army and a moderate navy on a good day (quite respectable given this isn’t even all of Sicily!)
3. Carthage in the First Punic War makes a titanic naval effort and Romans like dying at sea in storms. But I think Carthage would have lost pretty quickly without bodies of water.
4. It required the massive new pools of manpower the Barcids tapped to be close to a land peer of Rome.
Core Carthage’s inherent strength wasn’t necessarily much different in Hannibal’s time than 100 years earlier even if the result combined with the Barcids was much more impressive.
Its worth noting that this core strength is far higher compared to population than Alexander’s Successors. Carthage’s African territories its hard to image had more than a few million inhabitants. Adding Barcid Spain adds a few million more. So similar to the Ptolemies and quite a bit less than the Seleucids. But it gave the Romes *far* more problems.
The local climate and arability in the Carthaginian parts of Africa more closely resembled the conditions of present-day southern Italy than the present-day condition of those lands.
“Our sources offer little sense that they thought Athenian class structure was ever unusual or remarkable beyond the fact that Athens was very big (in contrast to Sparta, which is treated as quite strange)….”
My impression is that most Ancient Greek sources are written by Athenians, who of course, wouldn’t think that the Athenian class structure was unusual. Is this just a “my culture is the norm, everyone else is the exception” thing or is there more to it?
One key preserved Ancient Greek source which is not written by Athenian, does not talk much about Athens and is not in Athenian dialect is “How to survive under siege”, by Aeneas Tacticus.
So, in general, quite a lot of writers from a culture may be interested in doing the opposite – that is, portraying it as atypical (laudatory). Americans constantly do it, coming up with American exceptionalist arguments, often about institutions and cultural elements on which the US is not at all exceptional. VDH does the same for Western culture writ large in The Western Way of War – he portrays Greek warfare in the orthodox model as atypical (laudatory) and portending Western superiority, even if it may not have been much different from what we see in other Mediterranean spear-and-shield cultures.
Yeah. One recurring pattern is that if a given society has a leisured elite with aspirations towards culture and literacy, and if it is in some way significantly different from its neighbors, that someone is going to write books where they practically dislocate their shoulders patting themselves on the back saying “this is how we are different from our neighbors and that’s why we are beloved by the gods and just the best place to live ever.”
There is indeed an over-representation of Athenian sources, but many of them even in the Classical period would have experience with other states to compare: both Herodotus and Aristotle were immigrants to Athens for instance; and (though Athenian) Xenophon spent much of his life with Spartiates and living in Spartan territory.
> What kept hoplite armies from campaigning year-round was as much poor logistics as yeoman economics (something clear in the fact that spartiates – by definition leisured elites – didn’t campaign year-round either).
I don’t think the evidence you advance proves this conclusion. If the spartiates march with the perioikoi, can they afford to stay on campaign when the perioikoi have to return home to their harvest? If Athens’ zeugitai aren’t numerous enough and they fill out the ranks so that 50% of their hoplites are Thetes, can they let the most cost-effective half of the phalanx go home while the minimum viable landlords stick it out?
That feels like a sentence aimed at long-time readers, who’ve seen Bret provide evidence that classical Greece in general and Sparta in specific are really really bad at logistics.
The Spartans conducted multi-year campaigns on the other side of the Aegean (e.g., Aegesilaus’ 396-394 BC campaign in Asia Minor), so the idea that they were “really really bad at logistics” is not supported by the facts.
My belief is that Agesilaus and others campaigning away from their home territories and supply bases are in effect “living off the land” in the manner of later armies. (Up thru Napoleonic times, in fact.) Those “expeditionary forces” abroad are confiscating or purchasing the food and supplies they need from the locals. These can work to a degree, depending on the size of your forces, the wealth of the campaign land, the ability to pay (or despoil) — and the amount of time you spend in a given area before bleeding it dry.
Who was feeding them over there? Were they shipping their own food across the Aegean, or obtaining it locally either by force or from local allies in the relatively rich and fertile territory of Asia Minor?
The real test of logistics is how well your army performs when you can’t rely on an easy local supply of food in the area of the campaign. If (hypothetically) your armies normally find themselves having to break off campaigns less than 100 miles from your home city for fear of starving to death, it’s not particularly significant that they were (hypothetically) able to deploy 500 miles from home while acting as guests in the territory of a friendly city that was quite happy to feed your soldiers as long as your kept pummeling their enemies.
I don’t know why you’re wasting time with this “hypothetically” stuff when it’s obvious what you’re referring to, so let’s just cut to the chase, shall we?
>Thucydides is in several cases (e.g. Thuc. 3.1.3) explicit that what causes these armies to fail and disperse back home is that they run out of supplies. They are two days – on foot! – from a major friendly trade port (Corinth), and they run out of supplies. Their last invasion was six years after their first and they still had not resolved the logistics problem of long-term operations in what is effectively their own backyard.
https://acoup.blog/2019/09/27/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vii-spartan-ends/
Although Bret says “in several cases”, he only gives one example. And when we look at this example, it doesn’t actually say what he says it does. Here’s the original passage from Thucydides:
τοῦ δ᾽ ἐπιγιγνομένου θέρους Πελοποννήσιοι καὶ οἱ ξύμμαχοι ἅμα τῷ σίτῳ ἀκμάζοντι ἐστράτευσαν ἐς τὴν Ἀττικήν: ἡγεῖτο δὲ αὐτῶν Ἀρχίδαμος ὁ Ζευξιδάμου Λακεδαιμονίων βασιλεύς. [2] καὶ ἐγκαθεζόμενοι ἐδῄουν τὴν γῆν: καὶ προσβολαί, ὥσπερ εἰώθεσαν, ἐγίγνοντο τῶν Ἀθηναίων ἱππέων ὅπῃ παρείκοι, καὶ τὸν πλεῖστον ὅμιλον τῶν ψιλῶν εἶργον τὸ μὴ προεξιόντας τῶν ὅπλων τὰ ἐγγὺς τῆς πόλεως κακουργεῖν. [3] ἐμμείναντες δὲ χρόνον οὗ εἶχον τὰ σιτία ἀνεχώρησαν καὶ διελύθησαν κατὰ πόλεις.
And in English:
“The next summer, just as the corn was getting ripe, the Peloponnesians and their allies invaded Attica under the command of Archidamus, son of Zeuxidamus, king of the Lacedaemonians, [2] and sat down and ravaged the land; the Athenian horse as usual attacking them, wherever it was practicable, and preventing the mass of the light troops from advancing from their camp and wasting the parts near the city. [3] After staying the time for which they had taken provisions, the invaders retired and dispersed to their several cities.”
Now, contra Bret, Thucydides isn’t actually “explicit” that the Spartans were forced to withdraw due to lack of supplies; what he actually says is that the Spartans took supplies for a given time, stayed for that amount of time, and then left. You can interpret the passage as implying that the Spartans withdrew because of supply problems (although “Thucydides is in several cases (e.g. Thuc. 3.1.3) explicit that what causes these armies to fail and disperse back home is that they run out of supplies” would still be a misleading statement), but it’s not the only interpretation. For example, it might be that the Spartans only ever intended to stay for a set amount of time (they couldn’t be away from home too long, after all, in case the helots started getting uppity), and brought supplies based on that. This explanation would be just as in accordance with the text, and would have the advantage of not requiring us to posit a big and obvious failing in the Spartan military system which every contemporary observer unaccountably failed to notice. In short, the cited passage really is an extremely weak basis for the claim that Sparta was “really really bad at logistics”, or that Spartan armies “normally found themselves having to break off campaigns for fear of starving to death”.
Mr. X: two days on foot from a major trade port and running out of supplies IS bad at logistics. It may be that all the other powers of the era were equally bad at logistics, but if you can’t coordinate getting supplies to your army from Corinth, you’re not particularly effective at logistics.
>Mr. X: two days on foot from a major trade port and running out of supplies IS bad at logistics. It may be that all the other powers of the era were equally bad at logistics, but if you can’t coordinate getting supplies to your army from Corinth, you’re not particularly effective at logistics.
I’ve already argued that the evidence adduced does not prove that Sparta couldn’t have got supplies from Corinth, so I don’t know why you hope to achieve by just repeating the claim with no extra evidence or argumentation.
And the landlord half of the army would want to remain in the field, as opposed to going home to an estate with wife and kids and servants, because… why exactly? I don’t imagine the strategos and/or polemarch who made them go camping in the middle of winter in enemy territory would be popular at all at the next election. The landlords get to vote.
This argument applies with equal force against going out on campaign in the first place. The landlords are out there because they want to win the war, and it’s hard to do that if you can’t sustain a siege. Limits on campaign time are limits on winning.
To clarify the stakes here: VDH has argued that hoplite armies did not campaign year-round because a) unlike warrior landlords, soldier-farmers had to go home for harvest. b) The greek hoplites were mostly yeoman soldier-farmers. Implicit in this theory is that they would campaign year-round if not for this constraint. Dr. Devereaux here argues that this theory doesn’t hold because the “hoplite class” were aristocrats, but simultaneously admits that many yeomen fought as hoplites despite not being members of the notional hoplite class. BD’s numbers are such that IF yeomen cannot campaign year round, THEN Greek armies would not remain viable when their yeomen left, regardless of whether the aristocrats were willing and able to remain in the field.
It may be possible to knock down VDH’s theory by attacking the claim that yeomen can’t campaign year-round, but arguing that only half of Athens’ hoplites were yeomen won’t do the job.
I think this is an issue with many cultures that have significant yeomen portions of their military. I suppose the issue comes in whether the culture believes that the army continues to be viable as a military force in its purely aristocratic mode (note that this is reasonably independent as to whether it actually is viable).
For instance, if the purpose of remaining in the field was to lay siege to another city…but that city’s inhabitants were numerous enough to break that siege with relative ease the moment your yeoman portion of your army went home (because they can spare their yeoman for a day or two but you can’t for a week to march there and back), then that aristocratic army remaining in the field isn’t a great deal of use.
I note that one of the few societies I know of that seems to maintain off-season military activities in a ‘significantly-yeoman armies without the means to maintain effective siegecraft’ milieu are the Mexica with their flower wars. While they’re often pitched as ‘ceremonial ritual wars’ in popular culture, there’s increasing consideration being made to their realpolitik effect. The idea is that they enabled different Nahuatl polities to apply their idle military elite in the off-season from war, specifically targeting the military elite of rival polities (by cultural-religious tradition, so protected somewhat from the ‘lets mob them with farmhands’ resolution).
So that’s an example of how an off-season military elite might be leveraged to continue pressure on a rival polity, but seems to require a specific set of shared cultural expectations to enable it to function. Cultural expectations that the Greeks didn’t seem to have.
I find it fascinating that the conflation of classical Greece and Rome is so prevalent, even among academics who should know better.
In some cases (V. D. Hanson), the underlying reason for the conflation is obvious. Much as Tacitus wrote about the Germans in order to actually make claims about the Romans, Hanson is writing about the Greeks in order to make claims about the notional unified ‘Western’ civilization he identifies with, which he perceives as being very long-lived, slow to change, and unified in its essence across wide spans of time. This means that he is naturally going to seize upon any line of argumentation that justifies his claims. So he takes “I know the Romans recruited heavily across all free social classes” plus “I imagine the heroic manly Greeks standing FREE against the PERSIAN HORDES” and adds it up to get “surely the Greeks, too, were fighting as a broad-based class of all freeholding farmers banding together against FOREIGN TYRANNY, never mind the insignificant slaves and urban folk and cootie-addled women scuttling around in the background.”
It’s natural for him.
The model laid out here is similar to that of the Swiss cantons – the wealthier classes, who could afford more armour, fought in the front ranks of the pike formation, with lesser-armoured folk behind (although the really wealthy, from lowland cities like Bern, served as cavalry).
An interesting corollary is that the wealthier faced more danger but garnered more glory. One contrast is with the US citizen army in World War II, where the better educated were more likely to serve in the technical arms, and the lower classes as infantry riflemen – which suffered disproportionate casualties.
On the other hand, you have the ROTC and its counterparts around the world, which meant that college-educated men were likely to be junior officers, who would suffer very heavy casualties. (In the US Army, the coloured units would mostly serve in dirty and dangerous support jobs, meaning this discussion only applied to the whites.) This, I would claim, greatly strengthened the meritocratic and technocratic aspects of early and mid 20th century: your average infantry veteran had seen those elitist college boys get wounded and die when leading their platoon, which gave a lot of credibility to that class later on.
Also, the rank of 2nd Lieutenant in the field is the ultimate apprenticeship for officers. 2nd Lieutenants who don’t learn either don’t get promoted or get flat-out killed. Such an apprenticeship provides an intimate acquaintance with the realities of combat, what one can and cannot ask of the enlisted and what works and what does not. Eventually producing upper officers who are less likely to be g.d. fools; as opposed to a system where nobility buy a commission and enter the army as completely inexperienced captains.
Low-level officers generally disproportionately die. And until very recently in most societies those leaned elite. British enlisted in WWI suffered about 12% mortality. Etonites who served suffered nearly 20% mortality. Really in relative terms, across Europe it was the traditional landed elites who paid the highest price in WWI. They had maintained by inertia enormous power well into the industrial era and by the time things settled down they were greatly weakened as a class (though less by the deaths as the high taxation, economic disruption, and in some places expropriation).
Really in general the World Wars are greatly underrated as a force of social and economic levelling in the developed world.
Agreed, but qualified by the relative lack of “professional” military skills required by an officer in a pre-modern army. Pre-20th century, battles/campaigns were shorter, the professional skills were limited to artillerymen, engineers, and quartermasters, and all a captain of soldiers was supposed to do was bring his men to the field in good order and provide a good example in combat, plus relay whatever orders he might receive from a higher-level commander. He didn’t need to go to school to learn that stuff, he already knew something about it from his place in society. And gifted students of the military arts learned thru experience. We didn’t have staff colleges in those olden days because they weren’t thought needed.
Oops, I should have noted exceptions to the above for navies. Navies required more specialist skills, at all levels.
In most of Europe, artillery and engineers had professional officer training by mid-18th century. Napoleon was, famously, an artillery officer.
Generally, the technical branches were open quite early to talented members of bourgeois families. That was where you went if you were hardworking and bright. In most countries, even the officer training would be free or very cheap. (I am thinking of the systems of Prussia, Austria-Hungary and Russia here.)
Your run-of-the mill noble would go to a line infantry unit, or if they were a bit lazy, to a line cavalry unit. In those units, a senior lieutenant could survive on their salary, and a captain’s salary would allow marriage. Guards units would require the maintenance of such lifestyle that only the ultra-rich could make it to captain, and even a captain would need support from external income. You would only break even somewhere around major’s rank.
On the other hand, your usual line infantry officer would never make major, while a guards officer would probably make colonel, even if incompetent, unless they would get completely alcoholic at a young age.
On the other hand, in these systems, the general staff academy was the route which allowed the talent from technical branches and line units to get past the guards officers with family connections and money.
The demographics of mass armies of the world wars were different. The continental armies’ platoon leaders were either long-service NCOs promoted to officer or bourgeois youth who had done reserve officer training. Around the world, the typical educational requirement was the senior high school (which was pretty rare at the time).
My own experience is that a junior officer’s job is quite doable with a rather short training. On the other hand, I have also seen enough work at higher echelons that I can see that the Finnish practice where a reserve officer can’t advance beyond major is very sensible. While work at company level, also in technical branches, is reasonably easy, and even work at lower-echelon staffs is manageable after you learn the sequence of work, higher level echelons simply require so much better general military education that conscription, refresher training and civilian education and experience are not enough.
‘People believe their religion’ also applies to their civil religion, and elites in society will thus believe either that they are elites and thus best suited to the fight or that they are elites and thus have leadership obligations. Either way, they’re not gonna shove the peasants up front to do the dying as often as a cold look at the land ownership figures would suggest.
OTOH as mentioned the wealthy tended to disproportionatley serve as junior officers, who tended to die a lot. WWI was harsh on all of the UK but it was a complete disaster for the upper class.
Wow, very similar to late medieval/ early Renaissance Scottish armies — the richer classes could furnish more armor and therefore stood in the front ranks of the pike blocks. Poorer ranks to the rear. Noblemen on horses. At least those with the most to gain/lose and the greater protection took the greatest risks. To a degree. (And the Scottish aristocracy in the Lowlands was decimated by the battle of Flodden, e.g.)
A notable reason for the divergence Peter T points out is that a pre-gunpowder army, to be effective, first and foremost requires a solid force of heavy infantry or heavy cavalry, which cannot be drawn (for various reasons) except from a relatively small and prosperous class of the richest peasants, the landlords, or the aristocratic “big men” depending on just how much equipment the army needs.
By contrast, an industrialized army, to be effective, first and foremost requires a lot of quite highly literate clerks and technicians with mechanical and mathematical skills. Without them, it hardly matters how many strong brave salt-of-the-earth types, or wealthy and glory-seeking aristocrats, you have, because they will all get mulched by artillery fire in a couple of days and your own side will have no answer to that because its own artillery is out of position, unable to aim, et cetera. So you really do have to put educated people in certain positions within the army.
“A notable reason for the divergence Peter T points out is that a pre-gunpowder army, to be effective, first and foremost requires a solid force of heavy infantry or heavy cavalry, which cannot be drawn (for various reasons) except from a relatively small and prosperous class of the richest peasants, the landlords, or the aristocratic “big men” depending on just how much equipment the army needs.”
Actually it CAN (how did you italizise “cannot”?). What´s needed is someone to pay for the arms. Because no one below rich peasants or landlords (and the usually less numerous rich merchants and artisans) can pay for their own arms to the amount of heavy infantry, or horses. (Or their own ships, either).
The obvious alternative is men bearing arms and armour owned by someone else, riding horses and chariots owned by someone else, sailing ships owned by someone else.
Who else?
One option is the supreme authority. King or community.
And the other option is Big Men – men who can afford to own more arms than he could bear, more horses than he was sitting on, ships that accommodated more people than himself.
What´s interesting, actually, is that the Greek hoplites seem to have owned the arms they bore, and so did the legionaries of Roman Middle Republic.
There certainly were Big Men capable of owning more arms than they could bear, in Greece as well as Rome! To start with, anyone capable of owning four good quality horses. Note that racing four horse chariots was the number two sport in Olympia after the various distance of foot race, the one that justified extending Olympic Games past one day in 680 BC. And it was the four horse chariots that were popular – two horse chariots (synoris) and riding a single horse (keles) were much less popular. In Rome, chariot racing was the number one entertainment, ahead of gladiators… and the foundation of Circus Maximus of bread and circuses. Again the popular sport was four horse chariots (quadriga) not the two horse ones (biga).
If a Big Man could own four good quality horses to pull a chariot, could he have owned four riding horses? And if he did, who were the other three men who rode to war on his horses?
If a Big Man could afford four horses, chariot and driver, how many hoplite panoplies could he have afforded?
While a mounted warrior might have only had one “destrier” (even if that as a breed hadn’t been developed yet), remounts allowing one to travel faster and further were long a thing. Three mounts per horseman weren’t considered excessive for a force dedicated to speed and range. Add in retainer’s mounts and pack animals and a single actual cavalry fighter might be able to put a small herd to use.
A couple of minor typos:
“Looping back around to what is my repeated complaint this week: we were often conditions to think about Greek agriculture” suggest… conditioned.
“between wealth hoplites who were of the ‘hoplite class’” suggest… wealthy.
BTW: Fascinating , well reasoned article.
Question: is there a way to toggle viewing replies between tree view and timeline view?
If the thete fight, who fund their panoply? I thought the entire reason thete (and capite censi?) don’t fight is that they can’t afford their armor. And weak people better not go to the front lest they just hamper morale. Also even if it’s 25% that number seems big enough for me. Of course not as big as ~50%, but still not Macedonian successors level of elitism. Whether or not all those 25% contribute politically is another discussion certainly. From other comments seem like the main debate is that even if someone become hoplite, they can’t participate in politics? Then, whether that number is 25% or 50% is irrelevant.
Also even if the wealth are all distributed equally, would the number of hoplites rise that significantly? When I see that kind of argument about inequality, usually it won’t move the numbers much even if everyone is equal. It’s like in the first place, there’s not much wealth in Greece to begin with.
The thete class? Well, they’re physically strong enough- they may well be more fit than the formally named hoplite class because they do a lot more manual labor. And the ones who do show up to fight are paying for their own panoplies- it’s just that for them, maintaining the panoply is a bigger expense.
These are the guys who show up with a spear and a shield, but they may not have a backup weapon. Their cuirass may be some kind of hardened linen instead of bronze. They may be using the same greaves that have been in the family for sixty years because in three generations no one’s been able to afford replacements.
Again, this is discussed in the article. These are farmers who have quite a bit of land, enough that they can afford to buy a piece of military equipment now and then in a good year, and to spare a bit of time to make sure that equipment is well maintained year-round. They’re just not rich enough to be able to survive by running their farms as a landlord or plantation owner who’s living more or less entirely off the harvests brought in by their tenants or slaves. They have to work on their own property for a living, and not just once in a while (one imagines that even the leisured landlord may be pitching in around harvest time, or to perform the odd task they happen to enjoy or take pride in being good at, if the culture’s definition of pride and honor allows- the Spartans’ version didn’t).
There are some classical references to central armories in Sparta — so at least some of that panoply was issued (and controlled ) by the state. But it may have been for perioikoi use; or “inferiors”. We really don’t have details.
The richer half of the thetes, are still a lot richer than the capite censi. The former still own enough land to live (comfortable) lives from working it, maybe even renting out some of it. They just can’t live of the income from other people working their land.
The Capite Censi on the other hand are the landless. The urban poor, small artisans, day laborers.
If the hoplite class was more exclusive than the Roman assidui, why is it the Roman legionary gets to go to war in heavier armor than a richer Greek hoplite? Yes, there are a bunch of hoplite thetes who do not actually meet the property qualification, but surely the zeugitai should be able to afford metal armor when basically every Roman legionary (which as you say is really the average Roman citizen) can afford mail or something similar?
On an other note, as the Athenian zeugitai clearly holds enough land such that he can live on rents and not work the land himself, can we properly call him a military aristocrat, as we would a knight? If so, would that also apply to the system of Greek military colonists in the Diadochi realms?
On why the Roman legionary has heavier armour, that’s going to be the subject of Prof Devereaux’s book. Has been discussed before, check out the “How to Roman Republic” series and also the Rome-related posts of “Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph”
I checked and we happened to have basically the same conversation on why Alexander the Great of all people wore a linothorax in part II of the series. Thank you for your input on the negative qualities of the Hellenistic cuirass.
That said, I do not believe the reduced flexibility of the cuirass is quite as pronounced a disadvantage in a heavy infantry formation as it would be on horseback, and as our host mentioned adopting the linothorax was mostly a question of cost. Hence my question; surely the question of cost is much less relevant to the average zeugitai than a Roman assidui? Yes, the linothorax may have been “good enough”, but better body armour sounds to me like the sort of thing that richer soldiers would gladly buy.
Without in any way claiming to be an expert, and trying to paraphrase (probably badly) Prof Devereaux, it depends very much on the structure of the society.
For legion vs phalanx, there was a fairly clear distinction between Rome, where individuals paid for their own equipment, and the Successor states, where the state paid for soldier’s equipment. And Rome was different again from say Celtic areas in having, whether by accident or design, a social structure with a lot of guys who could pay for good infantry armour.
Greek hoplite states may be more like the Romans, in that the individuals pay for their own gear and thus can have better armour. But the post(s) by Prof Devereaux, in particular this one, argue that Greek hoplite societies are sufficiently different from Rome that the Greeks ended up with fewer heavy infantry as a percentage of the population.
I heard in a different comment that there is some concern that greece may have had much poorer soil than rome.
And so a small roman farmer could produce more than his equivalent greek farmer on the same land.
This would imply then that more romans could afford to be heavy infantry based on agriculture rather than culture.
I would note that a full-panoply equipped hoplite has about as much metal on them as a fully-equipped Roman legionnaire. The Roman is in mail rather than a bronze breastplate, but that’s a technological advance so not available to the Greeks.
The lightly-armored Greeks/Macedonians are the phalangites, who are equipped with the sarissa cutting into their weight budget while simultaneously meaning they’re less likely to get up close and personal where it’s easier to get a blow around their shields.
I think he has mentioned a couple of times that the “fully bronze armored” hoplite seems to be relatively rare, and that a lot of them wouldn’t have all pieces.
Part of the answer is that the boundary between a zeugitai (who can probably afford to live in reasonable comfort off rents on his land) and the high end of the thete class (who can’t) is a bit wobbly. A zeugitai citizen who may really only own enough land to support two or three families, after all. If he, personally, sits idle during the harvest and lets his tenants do all the work, he won’t starve the way a poor farmer who didn’t work his own lands would, sure. But he is not so rich as to be immune to the consequences- his own table may be noticeably poorer and barer as a result.
This class is sort of similar to the Marxist conception of the “petit bourgeoisie,” those who own some durable capital/wealth, who extract profits from the labor of others using that capital (in this case land), but who are not so elevated by their ownership that they are immune from the need to perform some amount of work themselves if they want things to go well. The owner of a small shop probably does do some of the work himself, and so does the small landlord in an agricultural society.
By contrast, a medieval knight has a big enough manor that he never has to work a day in the fields in his life if he doesn’t want to, and it won’t be a problem, because there are literally dozens if not hundreds of peasants to do that labor for him. Since the Greeks generally recognize an entirely separate and higher class of ‘the BIG landlords,’ with names like “aristoi,” to refer to their own equivalent of the guy who is this wealthy… we usually don’t think of the hoplite class as being like this themselves.
I assume you wanted to reply to me, so thank you for your input.
But that is not the case. Our esteemed host did the math in footnote 13 and in the post linked by him. Anyone who qualified as a zeugitai AT MINIMUM had enough income to feed his own household comfortably and then a household of slaves. If you had less, you were not a zeugitai. True, the zeugitai’s household may need to contribute its own labour to reach this income level, but this math is for the absolute “rock bottom” zeugitai who makes exactly 250 medimnoi and using the very upper bounds of cost of living. There must have been a good amount of richer zeugitai (simply from van Wees’ estimate that a good 3-5% of the poleis was even richer than the zeugitai), and household expenses may not always be at the upper bound provided. I’m inclined to say most zeugitai could live comfortably without ever touching a plow.
The same is also noted in Part IV(c) of the peasant series, where it was noted the Ptolemaic kingdom awarded Greek settlers serving as infantry about 3-5 times more land than what an average Roman smallholder would have had. As noted by our host, the Greek settler was expected to live off rents, in this case from sharecroppers. I think it is fair to say that these Greeks, hoplite or phalangite, are not expected to labour. For reference, he explicitly described cavalry settlers (who got 3-4 times again more land than infantrymen) as more like knights than peasants.
https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivc-rent-and-extraction/
I’m sorry for the double post but this only occurred to me after I posted my last reply. I suppose my question was not clear enough.
Let us suppose your point about the zeugitai having to contribute their own labour is valid. I believe we can agree that the hippeis and the very upper class did not. Are they military aristocrats, does the fact that their class depends on property qualification and not hereditary status make them not aristocrats, or does some other reason make them not military aristocrats?
There can’t be a precise definition of whether these classes are “aristocrats” or not, because that’s an English language concept/term. As far as the Greeks were concerned, there are Zeugitai, Hippeis, Pentakosiomedimnoi ranks and it’s just determined by income, not your ancestry.
(Human nature being what it is, there probably were informal divisions among the zeugitai and those with more wealth looked down on those who didn’t.)
I think defining aristocrats as people who are sufficiently well off to not be doing manual labour themselves works for most people likely to be reading this blog, when talking about classical Greece. (Or Rome.) If we were discussing a medieval western European society, yes I would include hereditary status.
If you don’t think zeugitai should be called military aristocrats, how about supplying an alternative term?
““aristocrats” or not, because that’s an English language concept/term.”
Well, it’s a greek term. But it had a different meaning.
No, I think zeugitai could possibly be construed as military aristocrats, which was why I asked the same question further up the comments section in the first place. I was not happy with Simon’s explanation that zeugitai weren’t aristocrats because they had to do manual labor, because our host quite explicitly calls them leisured elites and has demonstrated their income suffices for them to live comfortably without doing their own farming.
In fact, your point about the lack of hereditary status is more along the lines of what I was looking for. Do you think the possibility of zeugitai losing their status from being poorer makes them not military aristocrats?
I think it makes them ‘not military aristocrats’ because ‘military aristocrats’ is a term that describes a similar-in-some-ways but not entirely matching position in a different societal-military complex that we’re using as a sort of focal-point for a broader supra-category of ‘different types of fighters’. You’re going to get a lot of edge-cases that sort of fit the concept in some way but not others.
You get this challenge with cladistics in taxonomy (which is effectively one colossal categorisation exercise). Depending on which animal you take as emblematic of a given clade, you can end up with different species ‘recovered’ as part of that clade or not.
Let’s say we recognised a ‘clade’ of ‘dudes who do fighting that aren’t poor’. We could choose a medieval landed knight as the archetype of that group, in which case we’d categorise a number of different other ‘dudes who do fighting but aren’t poor’ in that category, but perhaps not others. If we chose the zeugitai as emblematic, we’d end up with a category that includes and excludes different people.
The category itself is merely a tool we use to help our imperfect brains make sense of complexity, and can include or exclude pretty much whatever we want based on which criteria we deem to be important (with the only really important criteria being how useful a category is for enabling understanding).
Ultimately they’re zeugitai, which is its own standalone class descriptor with its own set of connotations. Is a herring gull the same species(category) as a black-backed gull (google ‘ring species’)? Neither. ‘Species’ is an arbitrary category we have devised to help us fathom the complexity of reality.
For comparison, van Wees’ zeugitai hold as much land as the median tenant in England in 1300 held, and just twice as much as the average subsistence farmer in 1970s Methone, Greece who worked the land with a mule-drawn plough and a few sacks of nitrate fertilizer (Lin Foxhall’s 1997 chapter has the statistics). I don’t think that is enough land to avoid working with your own back and intensely supervising any farmhands or slaves!
Is it not? Our host quite explicitly notes that the very minimum landholding to produce enough grain for a zeugitai-level income would be an enormous farm by the standards of most peasants. In his peasant series (post linked above) he quoted The Peasants of Languedoc to give a median farm size of 3 acres for one community in late medieval France, which was 1/6 of what our hypothetical zeugitai would have held. Sure, French peasants would be incredibly poor by zeugitai standards, but they evidently had enough land to pay tithes and taxes and rents and still feed themselves.
For the data and footnotes see the bottom of this post. About half of the peasants in England in 1300 held tiny holdings and needed to work on someone else’s land to live. But a holding around 7.5 hectares did not let a family in medieval Europe live without working, it just let them make a comfortable living from their own land (and “comfortable” means things like a two-room cottage separate from the barn, and a change of clothing every year). It put them about 3/4 of the way from the poorest to the richest in their village.
Those farmers with 3 acres in Languedoc would have been called cottars in England. Cottars relied on wage labour and handicrafts to live, but had a house and enough land that they were not at the mercy of the big men. In England, a holding of around 15 acres (a half-yardland) and up was enough that a family could rely on its produce to feed themselves and pay taxes and tithes and rent. People who lived comfortably off rent had many yardlands.
Is the productivity of land in Classical Greece comparable to land in medieval to early modern Europe? To give just one example, when homesteading land grants west of the Mississippi were given out in 19th century America, allowance had to be made that an acreage that was suitable in Ohio was not adequate in Nebraska.
small in outside of very large cities like Athens – small outside of, or small in Poleis outside of
shogtun – shotgun
a century’s worth of colonial settlements intentionally altering, terraforming, landholding patterns – not entirely clear. Are they altering and terraforming the landholding patterns?
Also, congratulations on getting this blog cited in academic research, I guess! What were you cited about?
It’s only me or even Academia has a huge “Shared Western values” problem? Some assumptions seems to come out from the shitter feed of your local flavor of Government sponsored columnist.
There are some British and American classicists with old-fashioned ideas about The West, but Victor Davis Hanson’s academic work in specific was mostly written in the 1980s and 1990s and aimed at a broad audience (The Other Greeks was published with a general press not an academic press). He eventually retired from the university to become a pundit. So this is older scholarship which tried to reinforce and popularize even older scholarship and tried to get students and legislators excited about a shrinking academic field.
“This is the last part of our four-part series”
So, we’re starting off with two lies.
Bret’s quantitative description of a “broad-based oligarchy” is similar to late medieval and early modern England, where political power was confined to the yeomanry and their superiors, i.e., about 30% of the population. (It’s actually only the adult males within the 30% who get to exercise that power, although hopefully they give some thought to the welfare of their wives and children.) If we consider the broader picture, however, we note that both the England of that period and the Greek poleis were quite democratic compared to most of the post-agricultural revolution societies that have existed.
it tends to get a lot trickier with a lot of socities because “political participation” can be quite vague (and often you have some degree of political participation reaching quite far down the ladder but it is sharply limited)
What an enjoyable essay. Thank you so much, Professor!
ACOUP, come for the orc logistics, stay for the discussion of the size and democratic makeup of classical Greece based on estimates of the size of the hoplite class!
Slightly off topic, but this is a glowing review of a new book called “Surviving Rome” which sounds right up this blog’s street https://www.ft.com/content/aa498151-6ccb-45bc-9519-c38bcbc50c6e
“… (he explicitly defends a 47/53% breakdown between hoplite and sub-hoplite) …”
Is the “he” here Beloch or VDH? Recency in the main text suggests Beloch, but vibe suggests VDH to me…?
It seems to me, through reading your blog, that the State that could field large numbers of soldier farmers, usually had a military advantage over the State where the gap between rich and poor was vast, and which relied upon professionals, or a military elite. However good the professionals were, they were always one big defeat away from disaster. Whereas, the soldier farmers could simply replace their losses, in case of defeat.
I did my Masters’ on the Peninsular War, and the partidas were far more effective against the French, in places like Navarre or the Basque Country, with large numbers of minor landowners, than in Andalusia, where vast estates were worked by landless labourers.
People fight hard in defence of their own farms.
Of course that depends on whether the military technology of the time permits large numbers of simply armed people to be militarily effective, versus whether heavily equipped forces are disproportionally powerful against any foe not so equipped. An elite of heavily armored mounted knights would not have endured for centuries in Europe if they could have been countered by peasant levies. When military technology demands that concentration of equipment and concurrent expense, the poor or even the not-rich are reduced to auxiliaries to the heavy hitters.
I’m not sure it’s quite that simplistic. Military traditions have inertia, both due to cultural expectation and infrastructure.
If you have a society that’s structured (both culturally and physically) to produce very good heavy cavalry (by concentrating land and power in the hands of the elite) then that society is going to produce relatively poor citizen levies. Thus, a citizen levy from that culture is highly unlikely to overthrow an already-dominant elite-cavalry-class from their position of dominance (bar significant outside influences).
Likewise, a society that’s structures to produce excellent citizen levies is going to be in the opposite position.
You can see this specifically in the parallel trajectories of France and Switzerland during the middle ages. In France, the aristocracy seemed to get the upper hand both in ‘civilian’ and military life. Thus the French had a very strong tradition of excellent heavy cavalry that was very stable. In Switzerland, their society was structured differently and produced the famous Swiss pikemen that were feared throughout Europe (including by those heavy cavalrymen).
I’m not saying that the balance of power between different military technologies isn’t a factor, but I am suggesting that for most of the periods we’re looking at (i.e. post-stirrup but pre-musket) the differing military technologies pale into insignificance in comparison to the interplay between wealth distribution, military competence, status, state capacity, and societal expectations that create different military traditions.
I once can across a claim that the point of equality before the law was to give landless men in early modern England something to fight for that wouldn’t cost the government anything.
And much the same for Revolutionary France.
Of course, in their day there was reason to have arms provided by the state: it is one thing to have soldiers in an army wearing slightly different armour, quite another to have them all carrying guns that fire slightly different ammunition.
I think it’s a bit semantic to claim that the upper 40%-30% of the population isn’t like a Yeoman middle class. Since by the early modern period the gentry was 25% of the population compared to the nobility owning another 20% of the land.
And this is after the collapse of the Demesne due to the Black death and mass agricultural collapse of the mid 14th century, which on an unrelated note was one the reasons why late medieval armies seem so small compared to classical armies.
” Since by the early modern period the gentry was 25% of the population compared to the nobility owning another 20% of the land.”
Those are very different figures! % of the population and % of land owned!
That said, “gentry” and “nobility” are both above the yeoman.
A fascinating line of enquiry! I do have a question – how did the Roman system operate during the times when our Italian farmer-soldier has been called up on campaign? If the Roman terraforming of Italy produced small farms cultivated by their owners rather than by slaves and tenants, who is doing the cultivating while the farmer is in the legion?
Often the other males (older or younger) in his household or extended family.
What role, if any, does the fleet have in any of these models?
Athens in particular has a fleet to, which is extremely important to it; and fit men, no matter how poor, can always row a ship, though not be marine infantry.
What does this mean and is it important?
Fleet is rowed by the men who can’t afford to be hoplites. In this era, it’s free rowers, not galley slaves. Been suggested this is why Athens went and stayed democratic; the rowers were an important constituency too.
It means that the very poor have a militarily useful role for the state. If they can organise themselves, this can be leveraged into a share of political power. It’s unlikely to be a coincidence that Athens was at it’s most “radically” democratic at the same time as it was most heavily invested in its fleet.
And indeed the names given to Athenian war galleys reflected this: “Parrhesia”, “Demokratia”, “Eleutheria”.
The obvious question here, then, is how much is your average (or just-barely-qualifying-to-be-a-legionary) Roman farmer making from his land? One would assume that a full set of mail etc is not cheap – but what did it actually cost? And did it cost more in Greece?
That over-estimates the price to some extent.
One under-appreciated advantage of maille armor (the use of the French spelling was beat into me….) is that it’s not one thing. It’s 10k-20k little things. A hauberk is going to be really expensive, sure–but individual links cost next to nothing and are the sort of thing any village smith could set his apprentice to as a teaching exercise. Jump rings, flattening the ends, piercing the ends, and riveting the ends together are all basic, low-skill tasks. If you have the specialized tool it’s even easier. If you can’t do these you don’t belong in the smithy in the first place. And while doing this ten thousand times is a huge time sink, doing it a few hundred times is a rainy afternoon sort of task.
What that means is that it’s going to be a lot cheaper to repair Dad’s old armor than to build a new hauberk from scratch. And since Dad was almost certainly in the army at some point, he’ll have one.
Even better, because the links are individual you can repair one hauberk with pieces of another. If you bring back a few scraps of maille any smith can use the links to repair yours. For that matter, anyone with access to a hammer and a convenient rock can probably do it. Removes the only difficult part (drawing the wire). So if I’m on campaign I can divide up a hauberk between my tent-mates and we all benefit significantly, while also reducing the weight to something easy to carry. (A lot of folks I know that wear maille keep patches and spare links and such for this reason.) This would reduce the cost to repair Junior’s armor significantly!
And remember that you don’t need to do this all at once. If I were a Roman father I’d already be setting aside some money or otherwise negotiating with the smith to get some armor for my boys–it’d be the equivalent of a college fund. Expensive divided by time equals affordable. Maille rusts, sure, but not THAT quick; my 20 year old hauberk is still in good shape.
Finally, there’s the Roman society to consider. We tend to think in terms of purchasing with dollars, but Rome didn’t work that way. A “friend” (read, patron or client) may well contribute some armor as part of the gifting cycle that was foundational to Roman society. After all, Junior there may come back covered in gold and glory, and it would be nice to be remembered as a friend and benefactor. Even if it’s not a huge amount, any little bit helps.
All of this would serve to reduce the cost. Now you’re not buying a full hauberk. Your dad is paying off repairs to his old hauberk, which is now your hauberk, while the neighbors donate some vambraces and Dad’s patron donated a helm. It’s still not going to be cheap to get fully kitted out, but it puts the purchase more along the lines of “new car” rather than “total ruination”.
“La population de l’Antitiquité classique”
“Antiquité” not “antitiquité”
Fixed.