This is, at long last, the last part of our four-part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, Intermission, IVa, IVb). last time we looked at the social status of hoplites and the implications that had for the political and social structure of the polis and even the very basic question of how many people there were in ancient Greece.
I had originally planned for this week’s topic – the amount of training and combat experience hoplites had – to be an addendum to that discussion as it related to how we understand who hoplites are (yeoman soldiers or leisured elites? warrior elites or amateurs?) but there wasn’t the time to work it in. So it sits here almost as a coda to the entire series.
So that is what we are going to look at today: how were hoplites prepared for battle? This topic is going to be a bit more complicated than most of our neat binary orthodox-heterodox divides because they are divisions within the orthodox school here, although oddly those divisions don’t seem to me to be readily acknowledged. In particular, we might identify an old-orthodox position (hoplites drilled and trained), a new-orthodox VDH-position (hoplites fought a lot, but trained little), a non-scholarly and remarkably a-historical pop-orthodox Pressfield-position (hoplites did US Marines boot camp) and finally the heterodox position (hoplites were largely untrained amateurs).
So to tackle this question, we want to ask how often hoplites fought, what kind of training was available to them, when it was available and the degree to which it was compulsory. As we’re going to see, I think the evidence here leans in the heterodox position, though I would argue it doesn’t lean quite as far as Roel Konijnendijk, the heterodox scholar who I think has focused on this issue the most, might have it.
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Understanding the (Very Much Not Boot) Camps
But we should start by trying to get a handle on what everyone’s positions actually are and here I think we do need to be careful to make a distinction between three kinds of ‘training’ involved in warfare. When we say drill, we mean training in groups, focused on practicing moving and fighting as a formation. By contrast, when we say training at arms (or ‘training in arms’) we mean individual combat training on how to use weapons. A good way to think about this is the contrast between how a marching band collectively trains to move together during their shows (drill) and how the individual musicians train independently to play their instruments well (training at arms, except the arms are trombones). Finally there is fitness training, which is focused neither on the specific motions of collective action (that’s drill) or the specific motions of individual fighting (that’s training at arms) but rather on strength, stamina and agility.
You will want to keep those terms separate because of course it is perfectly possible for armies to do one kind of training and not the others. Many types of ‘warriors’ for instance, might train for individual combat (training at arms) and even for personal fitness, but because they do not expect to fight in formation in large groups, they have little use for drill. On the other hand, in some societies where the expectation is that soldiers are recruited broadly from a farming class that is already very physically active, there might be less emphasis on fitness training, but if they expect them to fight in formation, a lot of emphasis on drill. And of course different weapons demand different degrees of training at arms: spears are generally easier to use with less training than swords or muskets and so on.
So we’re interested here in both how much training but also what kind of training and we cannot assume just because we see one kind of training that the others are present.
So with our terms in place, to outline the debate briefly, the early German scholars of our ‘Prussian Foundations,’ when they thought about hoplites largely assumed drill, because it was the ubiquitous understood principle of their day that drill was the way that soldiers could be made to fight in formation together.1 Consequently early hoplite orthodoxy assumed that hoplite formations must have drilled in order to function. Likewise, extrapolating from their own (gunpowder) warfare, they assumed rigid formations with standard spacing, assigned places in line which maneuvered like early modern musket or pike formations, marching in time and with standard evolutions to move from column into line and such.2 It seems to have legitimately not occured to these early scholars that there was any way to do close-order infantry that didn’t involve drill and so even though – as we’re going to see – there’s very little evidence to suggest that hoplites regularly drilled, they just assumed they did. So that is the ‘old’ orthodox position: it assumes hoplites drilled and practiced at arms, without a lot of evidence to support the notion, because that’s simply what – to them – soldiers did.
(This is also, I think, another example of ‘Rome acting as the frog DNA for studying Greece.’ The Romans did drill and practice at arms and we know that because the sources tell us repeatedly. But part of the reason the sources tell us is that the Roman practice was strange to them, which of course in turn suggests you cannot use it to fill in the gaps for Greece or anywhere else!)
That said, the ‘Restatement of the Orthodoxy’ phase – inaugurated by VDH’s The Western Way of War (1989) took an odd turn from this point an in some ways. While WWoW is, for the most part, simply a full-throated restatement of the old orthodoxy on hoplites, one of VDH’s obsessions was the idea (substantially critiqued in last week’s post) of the hoplites as ‘yeoman’ citizen-warriors, which leads him to stress the importance of civilian social bonds (sub-units of the polis, called tribes (φυλαί, ‘phulai’)) and thus not to assume the sort of drill that the older Prussian scholars (on whom he otherwise often relies) do. I haven’t found any specific point where VDH openly disputes the notion that hoplites had drill or training at arms, but he pretty clearly assumes they don’t.3
On the other hand, WWoW assumes that in the ideal, archaic form of hoplite warfare, hoplite battles were really frequent, assuming “battle of some type on an average of two out of every three years.”4 So VDH seems to assume that hoplites are untrained but that hoplite army fight so frequently that most hoplites would have a lot of experience, which would make up for being untrained. VDH’s assumptions about the frequency of hoplite battles are, uh, quite flawed, as we’re going to see.
At around the same time (the late 1990s), hoplites, particularly Spartans surged back into the popular consciousness through the action of Frank Miller’s comic 300 (1998) – it gets a film of the same name in (2006) and Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire (1998). These form the bedrock of the modern popular misunderstanding of Sparta and are all terrible guides to the ancient world (despite Gates of Fire, to my eternal annoyance, frequently making military academy reading lists). Both pieces of popular culture are at best only tenuously connected to any actual historical scholarship or the actual historical sources and both, for reasons of their fiction, want to understand the Spartan agoge as super-badass warrior training. Both imagine both drill and training at arms in the context of Spartan training, with Pressfield especially imagining the agoge as an almost direct analogy to modern military training (particularly his own US Marine Corps boot camp). This is essentially a modern version of the same error our 19th century Prussians were making: assuming that armies have always worked the way they work now.
But this notion of hoplites generally and Spartans particularly as highly trained ‘super elite’ warriors persists in popular culture and leads to the sort of shocked incredulity one gets when noting that there is in fact relatively little evidence for extensive drill or any training at arms at Sparta, much less anywhere else.
Finally, there is the heterodox position, which has been most recently compiled and defended by Roel Konijnendijk in Classical Greek Tactics (2018), 39-71. Konijnendijk describes the question of training as a “hidden controversy” and I think that is right: there is in fact a lot of disagreement here, but because it is embedded in the assumptions beneath the arguments rather than the arguments themselves, it is rarely expressed as disagreement. Konijnendijk surveys the evidence and concludes, to quote him, “the typical Greek citizen hoplite knew no weapons drill, no formation drill, and understood only the simplest of signals“5 Konijnendijk allows for “modest advances” by smaller, more elite units in the late Classical but largely rejects a developmental model where the amount of training and drill increased over time.6 In short, hoplites were consummate amateurs – with the exceptions (Spartans, the Sacred Band, etc.) having still only very limited real training – and remained that way through the Classical period. Real military drill and effective mass-training would have to wait for the Macedonians.7
So let’s take a brief look through the evidence and see which of these viewpoints holds up.
How Often Did They Fight?
It may actually be easier to move out of order a bit and deal with the easiest to dispense with position first, which is actually Victor Davis Hanson’s notion that a polis and thus most of its hoplites fought a “battle of some type on an average of two out of every three years.”8 VDH provides no supporting evidence for this argument and it does not hold up either as a direct, evidentiary matter or as a matter of its logical implications.
Post-Publication Note! A bit of a goof here! VDH writes in WWoW, as quoted above, “For the citizen of the fifth-century Greek city-state who saw battle of some type on an average of two out of every three years” (WWoW, 89). Which is to say a battle every eighteen months on average. That is such an insane claim that I seem to have edited it in my brain to the also-wrong but at least less facially insane idea of a battle every 2 or 3 years. But, as folks in the comments pointed out, that’s not what VDH said, he said two out of every three. You can tell how VDH has just not considered the implications because on the very same page he comments that, “this long tour of duty meant that in the phalanx as a whole a great number of hoplites were always men over thirty” but at an 18-month (rather than 24- to 36-month) battle tempo, there actually wouldn’t be very many hoplites over 30 (for reasons discussed below)! I am not going to re-run my demographic math below to also figure for a 18-month tempo because there’s not much point to the effort: having demonstrated that a 36-month tempo is unworkable, a tempo twice as fast is already ruled out. However, I have made some light edits to reflect the fact that I am actually testing a much more reasonable case than what VDH has supposed.
The idea here is that, if the polis has a hoplite battle – or even a smaller action – every eighteen months or so, the typical hoplite who survived the roughly forty years of military eligibility – citizens served as hoplites from their late teens to 60 years of age – would see dozens of battles (around 25 of them). The problem with that argument is the obvious one: actual major hoplite engagements (and even minor ones!) don’t seem to have ever been that common. You may recall we listed every major Spartan battle (and a fair number of minor ones) between 500 and 323 B.C. and found 38 of them or one battle every 5 years or so, less than a third of the frequency VDH supposes (Sparta is useful for this exercise because unlike other poleis (other than Athens) we can be pretty confident that basically every major Spartan battle is attested). And that’s a list that includes battles in which there were basically no spartiates present (e.g. Amphipolis (422)) or which were very small actions involving just a few hundred hoplites (e.g. Pylos (425)) or fourteen naval battles. Filtering for all of that, we end up with Sparta fighting a major pitched hoplite battle something like once roughly each decade.
Making that figure even worse, it’s not clear that we can be sure any of those battles involved something like the entire Spartan citizen force. There ought to be something like 8,000 spartiates in 479, but only 5,000 show up for Plataea (479 B.C.; the remainder of the Spartan force are helots and perioikoi). The Spartan force at Mantinea (418), a major battle in Sparta’s backyard, we’re told had five-sixths (Thuc. 5.64.3) of the spartiates present, which comes close to an all-call. But most of these battles are much smaller and involve only a minority of the citizen body.
In short then, when we actually try to run the numbers, the suggestion we get is not that hoplites are rolling out for a major battle every two out of three years – or even once every three years – but rather than a polis probably only fights a major pitched battle around once a decade, with a few minor engagements between and that not every hoplite is at every battle, suggesting the typical hoplite, rather than seeing 25 (or 20 or 15 or 10) actions in his life, might instead see perhaps 3-4. An interesting data-point: we know that Socrates was of military age and fought as a hoplite for Athens during the difficult days of the Peloponnesian War and that he served in three campaigns and saw three battles: Potidaea (432), Delium (424) and Amphipolis (422); given the context – Plato is giving us a full accounting of Socrates’ service to the city in his defense in a period of very high military activity – we can probably assume this is an exhaustive list and perhaps on the high end.9 So the idea that a typical hoplite might serve on three or four campaigns and see perhaps that many significant engagements seems to fit with the evidence we have. Some doubtless saw more, some saw less and there are probably a bunch of minor skirmishes scattered in that we can’t see.
Which, as an aside, VDH has to be wrong demographically as well. As Peter Krentz notes,10 a typical pitched battle between hoplites seemed to produce roughly 10% losses (that is, KIA; ancient sources almost never count WIA), split between about 5% of the victor and 15% of the loser. Needless to say, a society losing 10% of its adult male citizen population every eighteen months on a permanent basis is not going to remain a society for very long.
We can actually quickly run the math on this. As noted above, I ran the math on this question for a significantly slower 30-month battle tempo rather than for the insanely rapid 18-month battle tempo VDH proposes, but the exercise will serve. A polis fighting a hoplite battle at c. 10% deaths would have lost half its population by the sixth battle and by the twelfth only a quarter would be left alive, purely from combat related deaths. Accounting for normal civilian mortality on top of this, a society fighting four hoplite battles (each at 10% casualties) a decade (so a 30-month tempo, rather than 18) would lose half of its generational cohort reaching adulthood by thirty and lose ninety percent of it by age 45. Accounting for male child mortality on top of that, you’d have a society birthing one thousand male babies (so just under two thousand total births) each year to have twenty eight men in that surviving cohort make it to 45 and around fifty or sixty men total living over the age of 45.11 That is simply not the sort of age structure suggested by ancient Greek literature.
In short then it seems like the typical citizen-hoplite saw battle infrequently. It was hardly a wholly foreign experience – the typical citizen hoplite expected to participate in a few engagements and perhaps one or two major battles in their life time – but they were hardly doing this often enough or consistently enough to get a lot of fighting experience. The contrast with the Romans – the average Roman male during the Middle Republic will have had to serve around 7 years to make up the numbers for the Roman armies we see – is marked.12
Hoplites simply didn’t campaign that often.
Training and Drill?
So let’s start with training at arms. Was there much training at arms among Greek hoplites?
Broadly, I think the evidence suggests ‘no,’ but I think Konijnendijk is maybe a little too quick to dismiss a developmental model, where the edges of that ‘no’ fuzz over time.
The general sense one gets is that broadly the Greeks did not think that contact fighting requires specific, focused training in the motions and patterns of fighting – that is, training at arms. Note how that doesn’t mean they didn’t think fitness was important – remember, that is separate. This appears to be Xenophon’s view, for instance: in the Cyropaedia (Xen. Cyrop 2.3.9-10, trans W. Miller), Xenophon has his ideal ruler, the Persian Cyrus, arm many of light-armed poor as heavy contact infantry (though with swords, not spears), on the grounds that fighting this way would eliminate the skill distinction (removing the advantage of enemy rich Persians, who trained extensively in archery) because:13
“And now,” he continued, “we have been initiated into a method of fighting [that is, hoplite-style fighting], which, I observe, all men naturally understand, just as in the case of other creatures each understands some method of fighting which it has not learned from any other source than from instinct: for instance, the bull knows how to fight with his horns, the horse with his hoofs, the dog with his teeth, the boar with his tusks. And all know how to protect themselves, too, against that from which they most need protection, and that, too, though they have never gone to school to any teacher.
As for myself, I have understood from my very childhood how to protect the spot where I thought I was likely to receive a blow; and if I had nothing else I put out my hands to hinder as well as I could the one who was trying to hit me. And this I did not from having been taught to do so, but even though I was beaten for that very act of putting out my hands. Furthermore, even when I was a little fellow I used to seize a sword wherever I saw one, although, I declare, I had never learned, except from instinct, even how to take hold of a sword. At any rate, I used to do this, even though they tried to keep me from it—and certainly they did not teach me so to do—just as I was impelled by nature to do certain other things which my father and mother tried to keep me away from. And, by Zeus, I used to hack with a sword everything that I could without being caught at it. For this was not only instinctive, like walking and running, but I thought it was fun in addition to its being natural.
Now this is essentially a made-up story that Xenophon is putting in the history of Cyrus II (the Great) who he is presenting as an ideal ruler, so this didn’t happen, but what it suggests very strongly is that Xenophon – an experienced military man, a mercenary general who wrote manuals on tactics – does not think that training at arms is necessary. Instead he stresses that the style of warfare is instinctive – that humans fight in contact warfare, in his view, the same way a bull fights with its horns, entirely untrained.
And that impression extends to much of the rest of our sources. Xenophon’s description of the agoge and broader Spartan rearing program features fitness and obedience training, but not practice with weapons (Xen. Lac. Con. 11, 12.5-6).14 Tyrtaeus, in a classic passage (West fr. 12) declares that he “would not rate a man worth mention or account either for speed of foot or wrestling skill, not even if he had a Cyclops’ size and strength or could outrun the fierce north wind of Thrace […] no, no man is of high regard in time of war unless he can endure the sight of blood and death and stand close to the enemy and fight,” essentially declaring that all forms of excellence that might result from practice or training were less important than simple personal courage. When Agesilaus was “wishing to practice his army” he offers the cavalry prizes for the best horsemanship, the skirmishers prizes for the best shooting and throwing and the hoplites just a prize for physical fitness, leading to the hoplites to call exercise in the gymnasia (Xen. Hell. 3.4.16). Over and over again we see that when hoplite armies do train, training at arms is unmentioned and instead physical fitness is stressed.15
On the other hand, we have some interesting references in Plato. In Plato’s Republic, we get a discussion of the military of the ideal city: Plato has Socrates in the dialogue suggest that their ideal, utopian society ought to have a professional army, precisely to allow for this kind of training, but notably he suggests this precisely because Glaucon – his interlocutor at this point – assumes that this ideal politeia will be defended by its untrained citizenry (Plato, Rep. 2.373-4). The implication is that at least some Greeks recognized that skill at arms might be useful, but that the typical hoplite generally didn’t train at it. Likewise, Aristotle (writing decades later and living for some time in the Macedonian court of Philip II) argues directly that mercenary troops were superior to citizen militias precisely because mercenaries actually trained on their weapons (Arist. Eth. Nic. 1116b.7-8). Again, the implication training at arms was understood to be potentially useful, but something everyone assumed citizen hoplite armies did not do.
Alongside this was the emergence of hoplomachoi – trainers at arms for hoplites – and their attendant hoplomachia. Our first references to these fellows are in Plato (Plat. Lach. 181e-183a) and honestly the vibe one gets from our sources is sometimes derisive: Plato has Nicias present this sort of training in arms as good and very helpful for young men, only to be immediately dismissed by Laches who notes quite bluntly that the Spartans – more interested in preparing for war than other Greeks – don’t make use of it, so it must be useless. Xenophon too is mocking (Xen. Anab. 2.1.7; Mem. 3.1). Konijnendijk, I think, maybe reads some of this mockery a little too straight – Xenophon wouldn’t feel the need if many folks did not take these guys seriously – but is fundamentally right to note that individual traveling weapon instructors were hardly going to train entire hoplite armies.16
The conclusion I think we have to draw here is that the lack of training at arms became a known problem in Greece but that at least in the Classical period, that problem was never ‘solved.’ Notably, it certainly was not solved in Sparta, which seems to have neglected this training entirely; so much for the idea of the agoge as being like a modern boot camp in terms of having practice on specific weapons. On the other hand arranging these reports chronologically, one senses something of a growing awareness – Plato and Xenophon are writing after the Peloponnesian War and Aristotle is a generation younger than them – that this is in fact a problem. Athens is going to make the ephebia, a military training program for young men mandatory in 336/5 (it existed before, but was non-mandatory and unpaid, so probably only for the very wealthy), right at the tail end of the Classical period, which may also be suggestive of something a little more like the ‘developmental’ model. It seems consistent with our limited evidence to suppose that other poleis – for which our evidence is far less complete than Athens – might have been trending in the same way in the late Classical, a trend which might have culminated in the Macedonian army of Philip II and Alexander, which is generally assumed to have been trained at arms and in drill.17
After training at arms, we can consider drilling, that is training to fight in groups. And here Konijnendijk summarizes the evidence neatly that prior to the 330s (when the Athenian ephebia is made mandatory, as noted above), “there is no evidence for formation drill anywhere outside of Sparta.“18 As Konijnendijk also notes, this isn’t just a question of pure silence – every so often sources note the absence of such training (.e.g Plato, Laws 831b). The most dramatic is the passage that tells us the Spartans could do formation drills: Xenophon presents as astounding the fact that the Spartans can perform even basic maneuvers “which hoplomachoi [instructors in fighting] think very difficult,” like forming from column into line (Xen. Lac. Con. 11) and elsewhere (Xen. Mem. 3.12.5) explicitly notes there was no public military training at Athens in his day.
Which is to say that the Spartans, the only poleis we have evidence did any sort of formation drill, amazed everyone by being able to do something that, in a broader world-historical sense is an extremely basic formation drill. If you will permit the contrast, in a century Macedonian sarisa-phalanxes are going to be advancing in separate units, charging, giving ground, wheeling under pressure, opening ranks to admit light infantry and even once forming square in combat but the very best that the Classical Greek hoplite can manage – and only in Sparta! – is forming from column into line as a group and a few other quite basic maneuvers that show up elsewhere in Xenophon (largely in the Hellenica). Once again, our ancient authors seem aware that this is a weakness and we might imagine there were some efforts here and there to remedy it, but the overall impression is that outside of Sparta, hoplites generally did not drill at all such that even the relatively modest Spartan achievements in this respect were considered remarkable.
Now I do think, when it comes to training at arms and drill, we probably ought to be alive to the idea that young men of the appropriate social status were probably prepared for the battles they were going to fight informally, at home. We’ve stressed the lack of formal training, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t informal training. Now, it has to be immediately conceded: our sources breathe not a word of this to us. No real sense that young men learned to wield a spear or stand a position from their fathers. But there’s a lot about the raising of children in antiquity we don’t really know – this omission isn’t surprising. That said, given the frequent notes on our sources of how limited the capabilities of citizen hoplites were, just how amateurish they were compared to mercenaries or the still-fairly-unimpressive Spartans, this informal training could never have been very thorough, if it happened.
All of which leaves physical fitness training.
The Greeks thought physical fitness training was important and put a fair bit of emphasis on it, although the fact that our sources also assert that poor wiry farmers made the best soldiers (e.g. that Plato, Republic 556cd) – the poor farmers who could not afford to spend a bunch of time training at the gymnasion is rather suggestive about how limited the role of formal fitness training was in most poleis. We do often see ‘picked’ bodies of men in hoplite armies, but these are generally the youngest and fittest fellows picked out, rather than a special unit that trains together (though special units do emerge – things like the Sacred Band – in the late Classical). Indeed, often Greek military fitness programs make the most sense if understood as an effort by the leisured wealthy elite to keep themselves and their sons from falling catastrophically behind the poor farmers in fitness. That certainly seems to be how we should understand the agoge, which included a ton of fitness training, but no training in arms that we are told of (nor any real ‘schooling’ as such, but it did include a lot of child abuse).
That said, alongside an emphasis on fitness training, we also hear complaints that, outside of Sparta (which did emphasize physical fitness), citizen hoplites were often in parlous condition. Xenophon complains of armies “from poleis” including too many old men, some soldiers who are too young and only a few men somaskein (σωμασκεῖν), “train their bodies” (Xen. Hell. 6.1.5).19 Still, this was something that poleis focused some pretty clear intentional collective action on, instituting physical spaces (gymnasia) and institutions for fitness training among the citizenry or at least among the wealthy citizenry.
Putting this all together, I fall closest to the heterodox position here. I am a bit slower than Konijnendijk to reject a ‘developmental’ model where training at arms and drill become (modestly!) more common over time, but hoplites do not appear to have regularly drilled (outside of Sparta, which did some drill but hardly excelled at it compared to the later practice of the Romans or Macedonians) and they did not regularly train at arms, although some training arms seems to have begun to seep in – not very much, just a bit – by the fourth century. Physical fitness was percieved as more important and central than either, although it is not clear how successful most poleis were at achieving a high fitness standard.
Overall then, the old-orthodox tacit assumption of drill is not based on the evidence. The modern pop-historical vision of hoplites (especially Spartans) as ‘elite warriors’ with rigorous boot-camp like training is functionally entirely a fabrication of modern fiction writers falling into precisely the same trap as some of the Old Prussians did: unable to imagine that a culture often presented to them as ‘familiar’ could in fact do something so alien as fail to have a modern-style drill-and-training tradition. It seems notable to me that while there is intense incredulity that the evidence for hoplite training is what it is, that disbelief does not follow if I say that other ‘non-Western’ cultures didn’t appear to engage in drill or training at arms. I think the underlying problem here is the assumption that the ancient Greeks were ‘like us’ and indeed even more ‘like us’ than modern or early modern people who were ‘non-Western.’ Whereas the truth is, Ancient Greece was a deeply alien place from our modern perspective.
Ancient Greeks were not Romans, but they were also not moderns and there is a specific kind of error (which, let’s be honest, often comes paired with a thick dose of orientalist xenophobia) which wants to imagine they were ‘like us.’ They were not.
Conclusions
So after all of that, where do we find ourselves?
We’ve laid out the two opposing ‘camps’ on hoplites so I suppose it is worth, at this point, doing something of an inventory of the key questions and where I fall.
On the emergence of the phalanx, I think the orthodox model of rapid and early development is simply clearly wrong, disproved by the archaeology for some time and largely abandoned. However, I also think the heterodox model has a problem: it takes an excessively narrow view of what a ‘phalanx’ is, to push back the ‘date of the phalanx’ in a definitional sense further than I think it should go. Instead, it is clear to me that hoplite equipment emerged gradually over the course of the eight and seventh centuries, but that it was likely being used for some kind of ‘shield wall’ from the beginning. I am willing to call that shield wall a ‘proto-phalanx’ early on, as it hasn’t fully excluded the light infantry, but I think it is clearly a kind of phalanx from at least 650 BCE.
That position is in turn supported by my view on hoplite arms and armor, where I effectively reject the ‘strong’ form of both camps. On the one hand, the ‘strong’ orthodox position, that hoplite equipment was so heavy as to be unusuable in anything other than a tight, shoving phalanx is absurd; as heavy infantrymen, hoplites were not particularly heavily equipped. On the other hand, the notion of a ‘skirmishing’ hoplite, as suggested by some ‘strong’ heterodox scholars is also, to me, quite silly: these are heavy infantrymen, not skirmishers and they are using an equipment set that seems tailored to operating in a close-order shield-wall formation. You could do other kinds of warfare in it, and Greek hoplites sometimes did, but the panoply is most clearly suited – from its very emergence – for a shield wall. It is ‘shield wall native,’ as it were.
That in turn informs my view on hoplite tactics. The orthodox ‘shoving othismos‘ rugby scrum has to be rejected – it is not required by the sources and is exceedingly implausible. However, I think the ‘strong’ heterodox position, which imagines ‘skirmishing’ hoplites moving fluidly in masses of men with no fixed formation or firm place, is also wrong – far too much of a correction from the overly rigid orthodox model. Instead, I favor something of a midpoint, a modestly tight (60-90cm file width) formation, with assigned places and an expected if not standard depth and width, which operated principally (eventually exclusively) in shock. That shock engagement in turn took the form of a sequence of ‘micro-pulses’ and ‘micro-lulls,’ not a ‘series of duels’ but in fact a rolling sequence of several-on-severals as the formations ‘acordianned’ forward and backwards. It would be rare for either side to fully disengage after contact, but men would spend a lot of time pulled just out of measure, looking for an opening to surge forward (or fearing their opponents might do the same).
When it comes to the rules of war for hoplites, I think that the heterodox habit of treating battles, raids, sieges and ambushes without distinction and thus insisting that essentially there were no rules is unhelpful and leads to confusion. The orthodox model, which imagines some sort of (unattested) Archaic golden age where the rules were always followed is absurd, but the idea of, if not rules, expectations that governed war between Greek states under certain circumstances (and which might not apply to non-Greeks, or in certain kinds of war) clearly seems true and is the way these things work in basically all cultures. In no culture does the ‘discourse’ of war fully match its ‘reality’ but the degree of disconnect is variable and the discourse does influence the reality. Within that frame, the orthodox scholars are correct to point to the Peloponnesian War as a conflict which ruptured the discourse that existed at the time it was fought, even if they are wrong to suppose that entire discourse had existed unaltered since 650.
In terms of the status of hoplites, I think the heterodox camp is essentially correct: the legally defined ‘hoplite class’ (like the Athenian zeugitai) were significantly smaller and wealthier than the ‘yeoman hoplite’ model advanced in The Western Way of War. Even if we include the ‘working-class’ hoplites who often didn’t enjoy the political privleges of the ‘hoplite class,’ we are still talking about a smaller slice of society than either Beloch or VDH suppose. That has implications for the relative breadth of political participation for the polis (narrower in oligarchies than sometimes supposed),20 the structure of class and wealth in the Greek countryside (meaningfully less equal than supposed) and finally the absolute population of the Greek world (higher than generally supposed). The field of ancient Greek history is beginning to really grapple with some of these implications (albeit not fully with the demographic one, yet).
Finally, in terms of training, while I give the ‘developmental model’ (a very little bit of increasing drill and training in arms over time) a bit more credit, I think the current heterodox position – functionally no drill outside of Sparta, extremely little formal training at arms, but an emphasis on physical fitness (with uneven results) – is the direction in which our evidence, such as it is, points. Hoplites were not drilled early modern soldiers, nor battle-hardened ultra-veterans, nor the products of elite boot camp style training – they were, for the most part, citizen amateurs with relatively little (if any) formal training. One strongly suspects that they were prepared for their military role by parents and other older male relatives, but not in any formal way.
The result is a mental model that is, I suppose, somewhat more heterodox than orthodox, but which does not fit neatly into either ‘camp’ and is instead something of a synthesis of their arguments and ideas. It is ironic that in a running debate about how rigid the phalanx is, both ‘sides’ suffer, I think, from a degree of doctrinaire rigidity. In my view, the next place that the debate needs to go is a synthesis of the two positions, although obviously it will not be me doing that work, as I am not a Greek warfare specialist.
Next week: something different!
- I should note, not all of the old Prussians do this! Rüstow, Köchly and Lammert, along with their English-language follow-on Grundy do, but Delbrück does not, which in turn likely explains why VDH (below) feels he can simply assume a lack of training or drill without needing to explain why, because he relies mostly on Delbrück of the Old Germans.
- This trend in their scholarship is documented neatly by Konijnendijk (2018), 8-11
- e.g. “unlike most modern armies, the bonds between hoplites on the line did not originate within military service or in weeks of shared drill in boot camp” (WWoW, 121). He doesn’t, I suppose, say they don’t drill, but that certainly seems to be the implication.
- WWoW 89. ‘Of some type’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
- op. cit. 70, emphasis mine.
- op. cit., 70.
- Konijnendijk doesn’t draw that final conclusion, but it is the necessary implication of his argument, since drill and training among Macedonian armies from Philip II onward is pretty universally accepted.
- WWoW 89
- Plato, Apology 28e. On this, see S.S. Monoson, “Socrates’ Military Service” in Our Ancient Wars, ed. V. Caston and S.-M. Weineck (2016).
- P. Krentz, ‘Casualties in Hoplite Battles’, GRBS 26.1 (1985). I think this is probably the most frequently cited single article on this blog.
- For reference, assuming ancient mortality and fertility rates, a society having around 2,000 live births a year probably has a population of just over 12,000 which, following M.H. Hansen, “An Upgrade on the Shotgun Method” GRBS 48 (2008) would put it in roughly the 85th percentile for polis size (most Greeks live in large poleis because they are very large but most poleis are quite small). So the suggestion here is that in the typical polis there are maybe 50 total men living over the age of 45. That seems…unlikely.
- On this, see N. Rosenstein, Rome at War: Farms, Families and Death in the Middle Republic (2004)
- But note Konijnendijk, op. cit., 59-60 on the limits of how far we can push the passage.
- We do hear hints of Spartan dancing rituals which may have had some military connections, but nothing to suggest this was intended as real training at arms (though moving in time is sometimes mentioned, e.g. Lucian, De Salt. 10), on this see Wheeler, “Hoplomachia and Greek Dances in Arms” GRBS 23.3 (1982).
- Konijnendijk, op. cit., 60-1 has collected the relevant references.
- op. cit., 66-70. Note also on the hoplomachoi, K. Anderson, Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon (1970), 84-93 and Wheeler, “Hoplomachia and Greek Dances in Arms” GRBS 23.3 (1982).
- Konijnendijk (2018), as noted, dismisses the developmental model, I think a little too quickly. Admittedly, though, the evidence is not a slam dunk either way – conjuring a developmental model requires assuming quite a bit into the blank spaces of our evidence. Hoplite heterodox scholars tend to be ‘primitivist’ in their outlook on the evidence – refusing to assume anything they cannot see demonstrated – and under that approach, it is certainly beyond the evidence to conclusively demonstrate a developmental model for training at arms.
- Konijnendijk (2018), 42
- Your σῶμα is your physical body, so to σωμασκεῖν is ‘to do bodying’ as it were – this is very much fitness training. It might include wrestling, but does not include fighting properly speaking.
- Which perhaps explains why Greeks like Polybius looking at the Roman Republic were unwilling to call it an oligarchy. It isn’t as restricted as a ‘hoplite oligarchy.’
Hey Bret, the first footnote here (on the lack of promise not to buy a hoplite panoply) appears to point to the wrong place – it links to the second article in this series. (I spent a little while reading that one, mildly confused, going “didn’t he already talk about hoplite equipment…”)
Fixed!
Bravo. I don’t really have anything intelligent to ask, but I have been reading closely and I have very much enjoyed this.
Sorry, isn’t VDH saying 2 battles every 3 years, not 1 battle every 2-3 years? “…battle of some type on an average of two out of every three years.”
So, he’s saying battle every 18 months basically?
But then you say “The idea here is that, if the polis has a hoplite battle every 2-3 years…”
I noticed that too. I don’t own a copy of VDH to check what he actually said, but this post is clearly inconsistent in reporting it. If it really is “2 battles every 3 years” then that’s actually double the frequency assumed later on, and so the consequences (demographic and otherwise) are even more absurd.
I think I must have messed up transcribing the quote. Checking.
Wow, no. He makes the strong “two out of every three years” claim. That is…I think I must have just in my mind edited it down to the also-wrong but more reasonable claim. Clarifying the text now.
Is “facially insane” in the corrected section a idiom I’m unfamiliar with or did you mean something else? Physically insane maybe? Or facetiously insane?
“Facially” can mean “on the surface” or “to initial inspection”, so here “facially insane” means basically “obviously insane”. That is, it’s not something which appears plausible but is insane on detailed analysis, it’s something which anyone would recognise as insane simply from hearing it.
I suspect that a ‘helpful’ spell-checker has altered ‘farcically insane’ to ‘facially insane’, but I may be wrong…
facially, adv., “(especially in law) In a facial manner; on its face; as something appears to an initial impression, prior to a deeper analysis.”
It is ‘facially insane’ as in, “you can tell it is insane prior to deeper analysis.”
Fixing.
I’m confused, Bret. First you quote VDH as saying poleis had hoplite battles two to three times a year, then you characterise his position as a battle every 2 to 3 years. Very different, which is it?
Fixing.
>I also think the heterodox model has a problem: it takes an excessively narrow view of what a ‘phalanx’ is, to push back the ‘date of the phalanx’ in a definitional sense further than I think it should go.
Shouldn’t “push back” that be “pull forward”?
No. English somewhat unhelpfully uses both idioms for past events:
1) Sit in the present moment, look toward the past, thus earlier events are “the remote past”, and are behind the later events.
2) Ignore the present moment as irrelevant to the events under discussion; sit in the beginning of the timeline, thus later events are behind earlier events.
To be even more confusing we have the entire CE/BCE distinction. Where BCE counts *backwards* and CE counts *forwards*. So “Early 400’s” can mean say, 420 in CE and 490 in BCE.
I looked at the referenced article “P. Krentz, ‘Casualties in Hoplite Battles’, GRBS 26.1 (1985)” and it’s frustrating me that the title of the article says “casualties” and that term is used repeatedly in the text as is “lost” as in “so and so lost x men”. Only sometimes does he say “died” or “killed” and I’m left to wonder if all casualties and losses discussed are deaths or only some of them out of a larger total of the wounded, sick, injured, and captured. My understanding is that warfare tends to yield highly variable casualty to death ratios, so the difference – if difference there is – could have a large effect on your population level arguments.
Casualty reports in antiquity are almost invariably deaths, with no report for WIA, recoverable or not. So Krentz is counting corpses, not the wounded.
That really isnt true – in ‘antiquity’, numbers of wounded are commonly given. It’s more true for ‘Classical Greek antiquity’ i.e. by Herodotus. Thucydides and Xenophon.
If those figures are for dead only, then the total losses – dead and wounded – would have been very high. The losing side typically takes 15% dead, you say. A modern battle typically yields 1:3 dead: wounded, so the argument here is that a classical army could keep fighting right up until it had suffered 60% losses.
Sixty per cent is huge! Nowadays we reckon that a unit is combat ineffective at 25-30% losses.
And it’s not like a mediaeval battle where a lot of losses would be in the pursuit – because the opposing armies don’t have light cavalry to run down and spear the retreating enemy. You chuck your aspis away and run, and the enemy isn’t going to be able to catch you.
Moreover, that’s the 1:3 ratio from modern battles, with their much more lethal weaponry – it seems reasonable to me to assume that bronze spears and swords would produce more wounded per dead.
No, most of the losses would still be in the pursuit, all of our sources are very clear on that.
Infantry pursuit? OK, that does make more sense, then. Thanks.
Yes.
First up, while the Greeks didn’t tend to have lots of cavalry they still had some, and a key role it would play is running down broken foes in pursuit.
Secondly, light infantry and fast runners can catch some opponents, and stabbing someone from behind is really very easy compared to trying to fight them face up.
Thirdly, a phalanx turning tail and running isn’t an instant process. People are going to be turning around, bumping into each other, maybe tripping over, etc as they get themselves sorted out. So even if the fleeing hoplites end up able to run faster from discarding their shields, some number can still be caught in those first confused moments while the formation collapses and people try to run.
I just did a weekend of a “self defense against/with knives” class.
It is… really hard to turn & run when engaged with someone at arm’s/weapon’s reach and not get stabbed in the back. A few live exercises *really* showed this. Even harder when there’s a dude two cubits behind you.
However, modern medicine keeps many soldiers in the wounded category and out of the dead category. For example wounds that perforated the bowels used to be invariably fatal after a prolonged and miserable infection. Ditto limbs mangled badly enough that gangrene set. (Did classical antiquity have surgical amputation of arms and legs?). Blunt force trauma to the head that produced subdural hematomas (we know they had trepanation that at least once in a while worked). Maybe there were a lot less serious-but-survivable wounds back then; you either were mostly okay or else you died.
“Ditto limbs mangled badly enough that gangrene set. (Did classical antiquity have surgical amputation of arms and legs?)”
Yes, absolutely – recommended specifically in cases of gangrene. Hippocrates writes about it. By the Hellenistic period they were tying off blood vessels, which was a major step forward.
Not sure exactly how this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Sergius_Silus lost his hand, but he survived and had a long career afterwards with a replacement one made of metal.
On the other hand, it is noteworthy that hoplite panoply is specifically intended to protect you from the most obvious kinds of lethal wounds, especially from in front. The helmet won’t necessarily save you from a blow to the head but it helps quite a bit. The combination of a breastplate of some kind and a big, relatively sturdy shield mean that you are relatively unlikely to suffer a perforated intestine. By contrast, the hoplite’s arms and lower legs are relatively vulnerable, but also places where an injury is less likely to be fatal.
As Dr. Devereaux has mentioned in other posts, there are many accounts in antiquity of well-armored men being “tired out with wounds,” with the implication that it would be by no means uncommon for a combatant to sustain multiple minor injuries without being incapacitated and without being in mortal danger.
However, modern medicine keeps many soldiers in the wounded category and out of the dead category.
Indeed, to provide another example, before antibiotics the risk of dying from an infection caused by minor wounds had not been negligible.
So, I presume you are likely correct that fatalities made up a considerably greater share of casualties back then.
However, I admit I am but a layman; so, I don’t assign a high certainty to that supposition.
This also makes me wonder whether there have been high quality studies by historians to attempt to measure this? I don’t even know whether there is even enough data for this…
Congrats the finish of the Hoplite series. I hope next week will be for Teaching Paradox: Hearts of Iron IV.
I have to say kudos to Bret for handling the frankly very hostile interview on Greece Podcast that’s linked in the article. The interviewer does read very much as somebody who wants to keep a Pressfield understanding of Sparta alive in the face of the evidence, even as he’d forced to retreat to a position of “Well, it might have *possibly* happened”. (There’s also some rather unkind framing in the opening of the podcast which is frankly grating)
I was also reminded of something Michael Hobbes said about the nature of debate in an episode of Maintenance Phase, that you don’t need to have somebody on a podcast to needle them to have a debate. One person putting out a position and then another person putting out a position separately is also a debate, and I feel like this is something badly communicated to the public, that academic topics are much more suited for the latter. Expecting a historian to just have the entirety of the sources and the chains of logic required to get from them to the consensus position ready on demand in case a lay person tries to argue the contrary is not helpful. Sometimes there just are matters that require thousands of words and a lot of interaction with the source base to fully lay out, which can’t be done in an interview format.
(I have side thoughts to what extend this is an unfortunate side effect of rhetoric no longer being considered a field worthy of studying or teaching in the way it used to be)
Which interview was that?
Just how disenfranchized would most “sub-elite but still hoplite” inhabitants of a typical polis have been? And what about people who were still poorer, but who still had to fight at least as light infantry?
We know the perioikoi had zero political rights in Sparta, but isn’t Sparta an extremely un-egalitarian state, even by Greek standards? Would a Theban farmer with enough land to feed his family and own a shield and spear have any meaningful say in his polis government? If not, why bother fighting for the Theban state? Did he enjoy meaningful political patronage from a member of the zeugitai-equivalent class of the Thebans, and showing up to fight is what his patron expected of him in return? As in “I let you use my ox for your farm for free, and defend you in court using my superior legal status, but you have to fight as my body-guard, I expect you to have a shield, helmet and spear.”
Or did he have the right to vote for magistrates, but his vote counted for less, because he was poor? Or was he part of a popular assembly that – while it could not actively propose measures – could still block unpopular ones and check the power of magistrates who were members of the ultra-elite and chosen by the voted just-barely-elite/hoplite class?
In brief, since a major point of this series seems to be to say: “The Greek polities were meaningfully less economically and politically egalitarian than the Romans, so they couldn’t mobilize their poors for military service nearly as much.” I’m left wondering how they managed to do so at all, since the Greeks clearly still do mobilize at least SOME of these people.
Hope my question isn’t too confusing.
I can’t fully answer this, but I think Bret noted last time that patronage networks were less of a thing in Greece compared to Rome.
The main issue is that there is no such thing as a “typical polis” in terms of breadth of political participation. The answer depends entirely on where it sat on the oligarchic-to-democratic spectrum, and all points on it seem to have been reasonably common.
> If not, why bother fighting for the Theban state?
Loot? Most pre-modern subsistens farmers were long labour and short land. Having a son of in the neighbours city for a month or two, eating their grain, put’s your family further inside the respectability threshold. And if he comes back with with fabric for a dozen tunics and an amphora of olive oil, he basically matched the production of all the women in the household.
Far better value, than having him toil on a piece of land leased from the local hoplite-class family.
” “The Greek polities were meaningfully less economically and politically egalitarian than the Romans, so they couldn’t mobilize their poors for military service nearly as much.” ”
I think Bret is kinda eliding an issue here: He’s mostly talking about greek *oligarchies*. Of course, Greece also had *democracies*. (now these two, like Rome, had thier own sets of political disenfranchisements and classes and so forth, and comparing them to Rome is complitcated for a whole bunch of reasons, but Bret is talking about some kind of “Ideal median greek oligarchy” here when he’s talking about the Hoplite class and their political power)
> Or did he have the right to vote for magistrates, but his vote counted for less, because he was poor? Or was he part of a popular assembly that – while it could not actively propose measures – could still block unpopular ones and check the power of magistrates who were members of the ultra-elite and chosen by the voted just-barely-elite/hoplite class?
Having the “How to polis 101” series in mind, I think the answer is that we sadly don’t know the answer for any poleis other than Athens and Sparta. In most cases, we don’t even know who the magistrates were or what they did. I may be wrong, though.
On the other hand, re: “why fight?”, most of these cities are small by pre-modern standards, so there would be ties of friendship and family. And in the case of a defensive war, you’ll fight for pretty obvious reasons.
That last line, of course, requires a giant foot.
I think it’s also worth noting that modern ‘drill’ – marching in step, twirling your rifle around – is worse than useless on a modern battlefield. It exists and endures solely to ‘look cool’. However, weapons training is absolutely essential – if you don’t know how to clear a jam from your rifle, you’re in big trouble.
Drill isn’t taught because it’s useful to perform in battle or because it looks look. It’s taught because the process of teaching it, learning it, and practicing it is a way to instil both trust within a unit and instant response to authority. For that, it’s still very helpful.
However, the precise content of the process is no longer useful. It could be almost anything and still work just as well. In the Napoleonic era, its content largely matched the manner in which line infantry was to fight on the battlefield. After that (as artillery swept away the previous era), the content was obsoleted but “coincidentally” left in place since, if nothing else would be better, why bother changing it.
Much the same applies to parade uniforms: back when cloth was expensive, it was the everyday and battlefield wear (just meticulously cleaned up). To a large extent, the first moves away from infantry being visible BVR and instead adopting various greens or light browns are reflected; however, the idea of how a parade uniform should look largely got frozen in amber at that point, as actual battlefield wear diverged toward patterned camouflage, and toward having a lot of baggage spread around the torso, which doesn’t look flattering. (Albeit some units here and there became ceremonial earlier than this, with the most extreme example being the Swiss Guard.)
Marching in step was useful off the battlefield when infantry still walked to get almost everywhere they went. It kept a unit together whereas an out of step group gets strung out between stragglers in the rear, the fastest and freshest in front, and the middles in the middle. As late as World War Two this was still important. Mechanized warfare today keeps infantry in APCs until they deploy in the hot zone.
No, from extensive personal experience, you definitely do not march long distances in step when you’re trying to move a body of troops on foot from A to B. It’s a great way to exhaust your troops far faster than necessary.
I think you’ve been fooled by the general use of the word “march” to mean “walk”. It does not always mean “march in step”.
I’m no expert; but I thought that marching in step was common enough that the Romans had a specific command to break step when crossing a suspension bridge, so that their synchronized steps wouldn’t induce a resonance.
“I thought that marching in step was common enough that the Romans had a specific command to break step when crossing a suspension bridge”
If so, they would not have used the command very often, because the Romans did not have suspension bridges.
After this incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broughton_Suspension_Bridge the British Army issued an order that troops should break step when crossing bridges – there are still signs on some bridges today warning about this (the Albert Bridge over the Thames in London, for instance). Other nations followed suit. It makes a lot of sense – even if the bridge doesn’t break, it’s very easy for people crossing a suspension bridge in step to make it start swaying significantly, which makes walking more difficult.
But that was in 1831.
Note that the US army command for marching in formation but not in step is “route march” – which backs up the point that if you’re marching long distances you don’t keep in step.
If your soldiers have been trained to take steps with a consistent length and cadence, then they are going to be roughly in step even if they aren’t “marching in step”.
“If your soldiers have been trained to take steps with a consistent length and cadence, then they are going to be roughly in step even if they aren’t “marching in step”.”
No, I don’t think so. Even if they’re marching in formation, they won’t be roughly in step – again, based on a lot of experience of marching groups of people around, they don’t naturally fall into step, even if they’re in formation. If anything they naturally fall out of step unless you’re calling time or they are exerting themselves to stay in step.
The dress uniform colors and patterns being frozen is certainly true.
However you also have other ideas, where camo uniforms are being presented as being dress, in dress colors (certainly they would be the opposite of useful in an actual fight).
And…they look awful.
The Swiss guard parade uniform is actually somewhat pseudo-historical: the deliberately renaissance-styled uniform was only introduced in early 20th century, at a time when the Swiss Guard had lost almost all military significance. Using an antiquated uniform made a political point about legitimacy, while simultaneously making a point that there was no serious intent to challenge the Italian state violently.
Around the world, the service dress that resembles civilian business dress is, slowly, on the way out. In most armies, it is relegated mainly to office use and even there, the more comfortable camouflage dress is gaining ground. For example, when I was a conscript, the service dress was worn by company-level career personnel for a normal day in office. (The conscript’s parade and vacation wear was camouflage even then.) Nowadays, even brigade-level staff wears camouflage on a normal day, and the SOPs require service dress only for the defence staff HQ personnel. As Finland is part of NATO, I would surmise that this is a wider trend: as the business suit is getting relegated to most formal use cases, its military counterpart is following suit. The semi-relaxed “sports” wear finds a counterpart in the camouflage uniform. (The fact that Mr. Trump needs to really spend some effort to require suits in White House shows how the business suit is really losing ground.)
As parade wear, the service dress has three serious competitors:
1) demonstrate combat readiness by having the troops wear actual combat equipment
2) make a compromise by having the troops wear a pimped-out version of the camouflage with decorations, unit badges etc.
3) have ceremonial, historically inspired uniforms reflecting the times of “old glory”.
The choice 2) is the cheapest, because choice 1) requires you to issue your parade units new or almost new gear that looks nice. That is actually expensive. With velcro patches, you can make a “parade” version of the best uniform of your average soldier very fast and very cheaply, and then later, use the same clothes as field dress. On the other hand, choice 3) has about the same cost as issuing field-coloured service dress, and looks better, if you don’t need to care about the fact that the uniform doesn’t blend with business attire at all.
Actually, I think the Swiss Guard uniform is very practical for what they actually do. It’s very recognizable, so if you’re doing crowd control you can instantly see where all your buddies are. Likewise, the halberd has some utility: the shaft gives you a lot of options for holding or clearing space.
And, come to think of it… Can’t imagine they planned for this, but the uniform is sufficiently bulky and weird that it’d be hard to hide under anything this side of a full creepy-flasher raincoat. There’s no way to balance blending in (to evade the notice of actual Swiss Guard who would notice that your face was wrong) with pretending to be a guard to bluff your way past, say, event staff who don’t know all the Guard.
Very true, but remember that “looking cool” has a legitimate value. Morale, unit cohesion, and building legitimacy within an often cynical or hostile public are all positive outcomes of military ceremonial activities.
Drill doesn’t just mean preforming rehearsed actions in parade. Modern battle drill includes things like small unit tactics, close quarters combat, how to react to a CBRN attack, what to do under artillery fire or ambushed, how to conduct an assault, etc.
A lot of things soldiers still very much need to know to be useful and not die
I was prepared for this to be a disappointing exercise in centrism, noting that there are two expert positions and staking out ground in between them because not belonging to two positions is cooler than not belonging to one. It’s mostly better than that, and you do show yourself in a process of moving into one of the camps (you are becoming ‘heterodox), which is actually something rare in expert writing. Good job on completing another good series.
“our sources breath not a word of this to us”
->breathe
Fixed
Would it be fair to say that a modern high school marching band has significantly more training for hoplite battle then actual hoplites?
Training at arms:
Hoplites have a modest edge in informal training but it’s not very important.
Formation Drill:
The band kids can do the most complex hoplite maneuver while playing music.
Physical fitness:
Band kids will have a massive advantage due to being better fed.
The debate between “better fed” and “actually spends all day doing physical work” and which produces more capable fighters is an ongoing one, which is often unhelpfully framed by one side or another who believes the answer is one absolute end of the spectrum. Obviously you can’t fight very well while malnourished to the point of lethargy, but also you can’t fight well if you spend your whole life in a chair at a desk and completely gas out within 30 seconds of donning armour and wielding a spear and aspis. I wouldn’t say either has a “massive” advantage over the other. You want to be well-nourished enough to be biologically functional, but also have a good amount of conditioning. People in band camp might hit the gym 4 times a week, but they could also spend all of their leisure time on their phones or the sofa.
You say “modest edge in informal training isn’t very important” but I’d disagree. As an instructor in melee combat, we get new members with wildly differing levels of proprioceptive comfort – ones who have done sport, dance, martial arts etc. are often starting months ahead of beginners who’ve never engaged in a physical hobby, never mind gotten used to the concept of “measure” and what it looks like, or dealt with the adrenaline resulting from physical contest with another human. You can often tell as an adult who got to spend time hitting each other with sticks in the back garden a lot when growing up, compared to people who didn’t.
So no, I don’t think a high school marching band is going to have more [useful] training than actual hoplites. Middle class life in 2025 does not really prepare you for an ancient battlefield filled with people trying to kill you.
I’m going to moderately disagree with you. First put the high school marching band were put into the same frame of mind as the hoplites: it somehow makes sense for me to don this armor at fight as contact infantry with spear and shield, and doing so effectively will protect my family. I think if they had that situation impressed upon them, and maybe had a day or two of marching to the chosen battlefield to get used to the idea, then they would be steady and courageous enough to not be at an insuperable disadvantage, and the cohesion built from all being in a usually rather tight-knit social group would serve to improve their steadiness.
Furthermore, if they had a captain who was clever about it, they have some advantages to exploit. They would be somewhat taller and significantly heavier than their opponents, which would aid them in intimidation. Perhaps more importantly, their skill at complicated marching drill would be completely beyond anything the ancient hoplites had ever imagined. I am thinking that looking tough and doing some performative marching displays (ie bluffing very hard) would have a significant chance of convincing their opponents to back down, if the numbers were anything like equal, and if accompanied by suitable diplomacy.
If that didn’t work and it came to a fight, I think they would do well to deliberately seek othismos. Basically, I think they would have the cohesion to do a committed push, and they could push shockingly hard due to the combination of greater weight, greater coordination and likely comparable strength. They might be able to rout the ancient hoplites quickly by doing so.
If it came to a drawn out engagement, however, I think all the factors you mentioned could start to tell, and the hypothetical battle could quickly turn against the marching band. They would be comparatively unused to hardship and blood, and probably have less endurance. So my optimism is predicated on a very front-loaded and psychological approach to the battle, which I think has some chance of working. Otherwise they might just be screwed.
Everybody who trains combat sports knows that 40-year-old, 5’7″ tradesman with no fat on him and grips like iron vices.
But can they execute those complicated maneuvers with spears? And wearing a helmet, cuirass, greaves, and carrying a big shield?
Yeah, probably. Not with pikes or sarissa, no: that takes specialized technique or practice with the things themselves. But the dory is short enough and center-gripped: it’s no more awkward than a trombone or large drum.
The marching band is going to be marginally less effective in battle than cardboard cutouts of themselves since the cardboard cutouts aren’t going to rout. No amount of perfectly safe training is going to instill the necessary courage in battle and it turns out that contrary to movies like 300, complex maneuvers, athleticism and such don’t give a significant edge over people with informal training + natural cohesion in a heavy infantry clash (Sparta itself being the example, as noted in the Sparta series).
I’d expect combatants to be the best fed in any ancient society, certainly not malnourished, so your final point is also quite questionable. These are either people who have to do hard work all their lives or are wealthy enough to afford to be well fed, and we know by definition they were capable of contact fighting in that full kit – hopla, or at least the part they could afford. Whatever nutritional advantages the modern human has are going to be marginal and more likely impacting stuff like long-term health.
Put the marching band in a setting where they don’t want to run (need to protect their families, socially conditioned not to etc) and they go from terrible to average in their first battle.
I think there is a famous estimate, maybe by Donald Kagan but probably older, that Classical Athens was at war two years out of three. I suspect that is where Hanson got the idea of two battles in three years (and of course Athens was a major imperial power so fought more often than most poleis and rural nations which were just trying to survive and maybe predate someone weaker: the Everest Fallacy strikes again).
Indeed. And now compare with the attested service of Socrates.
Athens was at war every year between 432 BC and 421 BC.
In these years, Socrates is mentioned to have been at war in 3 years. 432, 424 and 422 BC.
Analyzing the context – does the account pick out the times for which Socrates gained distinction? The times for which the speaker (30 years later) has witnesses not only to Socrates´ fact of service but his quality of service? Or is it a complete list of times Socrates served?
In years 431 to 425 BC, who fought the Peloponnesian War?
This was a very enjoyable series, and I appreciate the discussion on how limited the evidence for hoplite military training really is.
However, I would like to push back a little on this line about the Romans:
“The Romans did drill and practice at arms and we know that because the sources tell us repeatedly.”
Yes, but I think there’s more ambiguity and caveats here than a piece on classical Greece necessarily has room for.
The Romans, as much as the classical Greeks, have often been misinterpreted by modern people “reading modernity” into their own practices. A lot of the pop history stuff on the legions does the same Stephen Pressfield thing of assuming, basically, that the legions did a US Marine Corps boot camp. In 19th century historiography, the Romans also got the Prussian treatment of assuming they also did rigid, close order formation drill just like 19th century Prussians did.
You can see echoes of this in modern Hollywood depictions like HBO Rome or The Eagle, where the Romans fight in close formations and carry out all kinds of complex evolutions to verbal orders and whistle blasts. Forming testudo in a field battle is a particular Hollywood favourite.
The evidence for Roman training, especially in the Republic, is much more sparse. Evidence for formation drilling is I think especially hard to clearly identify.
Good old Polybius tells us that Scipio the Elder wanted to avoid battle before the Trebia engagement, in order to get his green troops a winter of training before fighting Hannibal (3.70.3-4). He also says Hannibal wanted to engage green and untrained Roman troops. He doesn’t tell us what this training entailed. And, this incident also informs us that it was possible for a Roman army to arrive on the eve of battle in a condition that their consul would consider untrained. There’s no indication this was an unusual state of affairs.
In book 2, Polybius also mentions the tribunes of an army instructing the troops how to engage both individually and as groups (2.33.1). However, in context, this seems to have been the tribunes providing instructions on tactics for one particular battle.
Later on, in book 10, Polybius does describe a training program that Scipio Africanus put into effect for his troops after the capture of New Carthage (10.20.1-3). It’s all fitness and weapons training and equipment maintenance. There’s no obvious description of formation drill, unless we read the “running in armour” as being in formation, which is possible.
The famous Polybian description of the Roman military system in book 6 also doesn’t tell us about Roman formation drill. He tells us about some of the manouevres they do, which maybe implies it, but there’s no “And the Romans spend this amount of time practicing manoeuvres as units”.
If Livy has any clear descriptions of Republican military training, I don’t recall them now. I’d be interested in learning of them.
The author of the commentary on Caesar’s African War also describes a training program Caesar implemented during his African campaign. (De Bello Africo, 71). Group manoeuvres seem to have been included, but as with the book 2 passage of Polybius this seems to be instructions for training his troops to deal with the specific challenges of one particular campaign and set of enemies.
The overall impression I get from the Republican period sources is that yes the Romans trained, but this training was fairly ad hoc, situational, and was the responsibility of individual commanders. It was possible for a legion to end up on the eve of battle with insufficient training.
There also seems to be more focus on fitness and weapons skill than on formation evolutions.
The contrast with the Macedonians is instructive here. The sources on Macedonian training are also fairly sparse, but we know that they must have drilled as formations because a sarissa phalanx is literally inoperable without such drill. A Roman maniple on the other hand is a much looser, more rough and ready kind of body, more reliant on the individual and less demanding of strictly maintained group movements.
That all said, it does seem likely that the Romans were more capable and trained at group drill than the poleis Greeks. Their mode of fighting relies less on drill than the Macedonians, but they also don’t seem to have been as entirely bamboozled by the simplest evolutions as the poleis Greeks were.
It’s also true that Vegetius says the Romans did group drill. Perhaps he was right for his era. However, I am intensely wary of applying Vegetius’s statements to the Roman Republican army. Greeks are not Romans, Romans are not Greeks, and Late Imperial Romans are also not Republican Romans.
I think that if we see in the sources that Romans had a clear idea of a distinction between a trained and an untrained troops and also the expectation that ideally the untrained troops should not see battle, then those two facts alone let us assume that they had to had a process of training them. This process could have been a series of activites performed on the march on the discretion of the commander, not something separate from a campaign. But commander’s discretion on organisation of training does not mean that the training itself was something not all commanders seen as important.
Michal,
Well, in the traditional Republican armies I think that the need for extensive training was lessened somewhat by the age cohort system.
As I’m sure we all recall, according to Polybius a Roman citizen was obliged to serve 10 years if they qualified for cavalry, 16 years for infantry. The younger men served in the velites and hastati, older men in the principes and triarii. There were 1,200 each of velites, hastati, and principes, and 600 triarii.
Meaning that the total infantry of a legion was 4,200 strong, and in theory we would expect 2,400 to be young and inexperienced, and 1,800 to be older campaigners with previous experience. Around 40% of the infantry component, in theory, have prior experience.
If we take the velites out of the equation and focus on the line infantry, the ratio is higher: 1,200 inexperienced hastati to 1,800 experienced principes and triarii. 60% of the heavy infantry are intended to be men with past service and experience.
We can’t say for sure what proportion of the velites and equites would be men with past campaigns under their belt. However, it seems probable to guess that they too were leavened with some experienced soldiers among them.
If your Republic goes to war almost every year, as the Romans did, and you have a fairly wide swath of military participation in your citizenship, and you deliberately organize your armies to ensure experienced men are always included alongside the younger, greener troops, then you don’t necessarily need long training periods. Even a relatively fresh legion on the Polybian model would include a lot of men who already knew the business of war and soldiering. Training might further improve them, and even an experienced old hand can get rusty at a perishable skill like fighting, but it may not be absolutely necessary.
I would also note that Scipio the Elder wishing to avoid battle before the Trebia was a fairly unique situation as far as we can tell to that point in Roman history. More usually, Roman consuls sought battle straightaway. When you only have a year in command to make your mark, there’s a strong incentive to be direct. Legions seem to have usually been levied and more or less marched straight to battle as quickly as they could. We very rarely hear of a consul avoiding battle for a time to better train his forces.
My thought is that a certain amount of what might be called “training” would be very simple, basic, but necessary things — especially for new soldiers or levies — like who your leaders were, what your unit was, where was your place in the ranks or on the march, how to find that place when the command was given, and what commands were the ones you needed to recognize. Very elemental stuff, but takes some time to absorb and without it, your army is a mob. These examples noted above could well have been references to a new army needing time to get organized — “trained”. And beyond that, time permitting, you could work on tactical maneuvers and higher-level movements, from small units to larger brigades.
I feel like the entire three-layer “Advance and withdraw” would require at least *some* amount of drill. Even with a fairly loose formation it’s a reasonably difficult manuever to pull off.
It’s interesting to me that the assumption of hoplites, and not just in Sparta, constituted a kind of elite warrior probably coincides with their success in the Greco-Persian Wars, which itself gets into projecting a lot of modern attitudes onto the significance of that success (I have frequently seen it expressed in terms of “the Greeks safeguarded the foundations of a modern world of equality and democracy from the onset of oriental tyranny”).
That is to say, when the wars are assumed to have an outcome relevant to modern cultural and political perceptions, that requires the winners to be able to win because of a superiority of character and capability. Such “superficial meritocracy as actual elitism” probably balks at the idea that success might come from material circumstances whose distribution was just a matter of good fortune. I.E. the Greeks just so happened to have an inclination for formations of heavy infantry that Achaemenid armies were not suited to breaking, and the terrain of Greece favoured being on the defensive.
Kind of a military Just World Theory.
I recall reading that Greek mercenaries were a regular thing in this era. And had a considerable reputation for quality. Were there mercenaries just a bunch of people hired as a unit from a polis, did they have their own organizations, were they just recruited individually, or what?
This is all from memory, so take it with a grain of salt; I’m also uncertain how much of it is directly supported by evidence rather than reconstructed conjecture.
Mercenary Greeks only really became a thing after the Peloponnesian wars (so post 400 BC), and are pretty rare before. Typically, they were hired as units that already had their own captains, often formed around a group of ex-citizens that were exiled from the same city. Those who couldn’t count on inheriting land but had the necessary equipment (ie 2nd / 3rd sons of hoplites) also seem to be a common source. Crete in particular seems to be the default place to go mercenary hunting; at least by the time of the Diadochi. But these bands don’t seem to have had the same prestige and permanence that, eg, the Condottieri had in Renaissance Italy. I’m also unsure how large the typical band was. A related curiosity are the mercenary “generals for hire” that didn’t come with a large army, but provided command expertise: Xanthippus for Carthage and Alexander of Molossia for Tarrentum are famous examples.
Writing this makes me think a one-off blog post about mercenaries in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC in the Greek world might be very interesting!
There is Egyptian evidence of hiring mercenaries from the Greek World, pre dark ages even. I’ve been waiting for that reference, in fact. Just discovered the blog today. Pre ‘Sea Peoples’ invasion, some of the same groups fought with the Egyptians and then against them.
So, heavily armed Greek mercenaries existed in pre-Classical Greece and were hired out to the ‘more advanced’ societies along the Eastern Med. We have the gravesites and documented significant presence in Egypt in 6th and 7th cent bce. Mycenaea has evidence of heavy armor, also.
The Iliad, while a myth and clearly ignorant of its topic’s actual history, does speak to its own contemporary setting, “hoplite era”, later on. In the poem, armor is specifically mentioned and admired, and armor is stripped from the dead and retained, regardless of side. So, no, Greeks at the time did not consider heavy armor as commonplace and certainly not issued to every land owning citizen. It was a big deal.
So the heavy Greek armor, while covering less, resembles Medieval armor in the economic and social sense. Meaning, valuable, durable heirlooms that grant the wearer a status allowing for foreign employment and city defense. The hoplites were unlikely to mass in formation in a rigid way since the owners were all ‘officers’ status and motivated by booty and individual valor. Like Viking bands, not Prussians. The armor was such an advantage that they were hired out and it became a way of life for certain ‘knights’ as we might term them, working or pirating overseas.
And the distance between merchant vessel and pirate at this time is paper thin. The armor would be key for defense of merchant vessels and trading centers and seizing targets of opportunity. Since they were already traveling to and from Egypt with their arms and armor, and they’re merchants, it’s natural to hire them out, even entire ‘armies’. It’s unique in its details but it rhymes with other history.
The economic key is that the Greek isles were traders with access to the raw materials from Europe and eventually the skill to fashion armor. This fits with another detail – the Greek religions were formed in part from Northerly gods that came from areas with the necessary tin.
I should note that just because everyone is always ready to loot the armor of the dead on both sides of a battle, doesn’t mean that heavy armor isn’t relatively common, just that the armor is one of the most valuable things that the citizen owns.
Think about automobiles in modern society. If someone dies, it’s a safe bet that someone is getting their car- if nothing else, it’ll be melted down for scrap. A car, being a valuable item that represents several months’ wages for the median adult in a developed nation, is also valuable enough that they have to be carefully safeguarded against thieves, are often passed on as “hand-me-downs” until they have completely worn out, and so on.
And yet most people in a country like the United States down own a car.
I’d be cautious about reading the use of mercenaries pre-LBAC (Late Bronze Age Collapse) to that post-LBAC. My understanding is that there was a very interesting sort of pan-continental mercenary-trader-elite complex operating in the late European/Mediterranean bronze age that effectively created a supra-ethnic warrior-mercenary class that travelled the length and breadth of trade routes from Britain and Scandinavia all the way down through the Western Med to Mycenae to Egypt and the Levant.
This appears to be quite unlike later iron age trade/mercenary cultural practices that appeared post-collapse (despite superficial similarities like both sets of mercenaries also being traders).
It may very well be that the two practices aren’t actually all that different after all, but that doesn’t seem to be the way the material evidence is pointing. From what I understand at least.
The timeline you suggest seems at least consistent with the Anabasis, which I have an impression might be the earliest solid account of Greek mercenaries.
I’m thinking it might be something similar to the Free Companies of the Hundred Years War. The demographic shifts created by circumstances in which otherwise ad hoc troops are more continuously under arms than is socially conventional for them creates a scenario where people with experience, a tendency to be abroad, cohesion, and not much actual strategic direction have a marketable skill for leaders who need specialized groups of more experienced and/or specifically armed troops than their typical roster.
Hmm, that reminds me of a quote of John Stuart Mill I had once encountered: “The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important that the battle of Hastings. If the issue of that day had been different, the Britons and the Saxons might still have been wandering in the woods.”
I very much doubt it was that important, at least relative to other battles in that time*.
IIRC, after subduing the Ionian revolt Darius the Great was fine with the Ionian Poleis keeping their ‘democratic’ form of government so long as they remained subordinate to Persia; so, even if we assume that a Persian victory at Marathon would have escalated into Persian dominance over Greece**, how different would the situation then be from the later domination of the Greek Poleis by Macedon and the Diadochi, and later the Roman Emperors?
Even if Darius the Great was a greater outlier, than I as a layman had presumed, and thus the difference between Persia and Rome and the Diadochi also greater when it comes to such things as the autonomy of subjugated Greek Poleis; still the Greek city-states in the Western Mediterranean would have remained independent from Persian power as would other republican regimes as Carthage.
* Based on the Butterfly Effect/Chaos Theory one could argue every battle of that size would have led to an unrecognisable world if the other side had won; however, I presume nobody wants to discuss that.
** This in contrast to the scenario where the Persians simply ignore mainland Greece after restoring Hippias to power in Athens; or at least until another event happens which leads to conflict.
The pushed-up Corinthian helmet in the frieze makes me think of main soldier characters in movies and video games that go helmet-less, while the background soldiers seem to care more about protecting their heads.
The space equivalent is having lights inside the helmet shining on the actor’s face.
The Sci Fi equivalent is Space Marines going helmet less even in vaccuum because they’re just that badass 😛
Helmets are heavy and sweaty and uncomfortable (face-covering hoplite helmets, I should imagine, even more so) and soldiers take their helmets off as soon as they can unless they’re actually in combat. Bareheaded is just more comfortable.
The Corinthian helmet, particularly in its late form, is designed to be wearable up on the head for the same reason other closed helmets have visors. It is very secure in that position and and even be fought in with it up- though why would you. In the Apulo-Corinthian we see the helmet modified to always be worn up.
I think there’s another layer of training that happens in modern militaries, and maybe not so much in the past, which might be called “indoctrination” and basically consists of initiation into military life (esp. for a very un-military civilian society).
“If you’re on time you’re late. You should be there 5 minutes early.”
We get a fair few ex-service personnel where I work. It really is a parallel culture.
Much more so now than for most of history in many western countries, since the rate of military service in the population is very low and often concentrated by families and in poor communities.
“Much more so now than for most of history in many western countries, since the rate of military service in the population is very low and often concentrated by families and in poor communities.”
I would question both parts of this. For most of history western countries did not have conscription. In modern history, almost all did. France, to take one western country at random, abolished conscription only in 1996. So if you are male, French, and born before 1978, you have a 75% chance of having a military background from conscription alone.
What was the rate of military service in mediaeval France, for comparison? Low. The standing army, the compagnie d’ordonnance, was 6,000 strong.
As for military service being concentrated in poor communities – this is a myth that is very hard to kill. France, like other countries including the US, tended not to recruit from poor communities either during conscription or during the volunteer period, for the simple reason that people who grow up in poor communities are less suitable for military service on both physical and educational grounds.
One general told Louis XIV that the hard winter and consequent misery of the Parisian poor had led them to join the army, providing the troops that saved the kingdom from defeat at Malplaquet.
“In my view, the next place that the debate needs to go is a synthesis of the two positions, although obviously it will not be me doing that work, as I am not a Greek warfare specialist.”
For anyone who is interested (and apologies for further shameless self promotion) there is Taylor, ‘The Greek Hoplite Phalanx’, which is (a bit) more recent than Konijnendijk (not as rigorous, but wider in scope), provides a (strongly heterodox-leaning) synthesis and is by (IMHO) a Greek warfare specialist! Just saying…
I nodded in agreement at most of this series.
I got your book and read it. While I have some slight stylistic reservations with it (a bit too long on the citations of Homer, and too short on archaeology / epigraphy / art for my tastes), I found it excellent. It’s nice to see both sides of a debate laid out and for a conclusion to be reached, while still caveating it from the paucity of evidence. So thank you for writing it, and for sharing its existence here. Your other book on the Macedonians is next on my list!
Has anybody ever tried to recreate a large-scale hoplite battle for the purposes of historical elucidation?
It seems to me that there are still a lot of open questions that might be resolved by simply taking a few hundred physically-fit young men and running mock battles with weighted gear, rubber-tipped spears, etc. One such question is whether training at arms would even be useful in the context of battle in phalanx formation. I also recall a Donald Kagan lecture where he mentioned that it’s even unclear how they gripped their spears.
Sounds like a job for… Grant Money Man!
When I was a student, Donald Kagan told me that he wanted one of his students (e.g., me) to become rich and build a fleet of triremes so we could figure out how fleet maneuvers worked. Sadly, though I am financially comfortable, I’m not that rich.
Paul Bardunias and colleagues, not too long ago. Referenced in part IIIa with link to video:
https://youtu.be/Sjypd4iSTnw?si=tS4l-_XW73s6Lfjx
Paul also contributed to the comments discussion on that part, and has more formal presentations and papers for more depth.
Oui, l’Expérience Hoplitique en France https://www.forceetcarton.fr/post/projet-hoplitique-une-bataille-d-hoplites-en-carton
Sadly, that is just the announcement / call for volunteers for the event, which took place last August. Full video with results, conclusions, etc not to be released until March 2026 🙁
The Expérience Hoplitique have released a lot of material already although mostly on YouTube (sigh) and Facebook (double sigh)
There are answers to many questions that have not disseminated widely yet, but we are progressing. Look me up on YouTube: @paulbardunias5950
I suspect your model for battle losses is incorrect, though I’m not sure if correcting it would make it any better.
The idea that losses occur randomly among the troops is unlikely. We see more or less universally that losses occur disproportionally among those who have no or little previous experience in a battle. Junior officers also have disproportionate losses, generally because of both that lack of experience and also generally having to be at the front line (at least back before individual radios).
So it’s not a random 10% loss, it’s likely those 5%/15% are taken mostly from the youngest cohort of the troops, the ones with no previous battles.
I don’t think it really changes the unreality of VDH’s battle tempo though. Losing mostly the younger ones is likely to make things worse, since they’re less likely to have had children. And so the polis ends up depopulated even faster.
That said, I’d be careful about talking modern post-gunpowder warfare and comparing it to pre-modern dito. A lot of the reasons junior officers died so horrible during WWI was because of snipers f.ex. While an officer in the the hoplite era might very well be carrying the best armour around.
Also, possibly, an upper class young man may have had more time for training in arms than a young man who needed to drive a plow regularly.
Yeah, but the officer in pre-gunpowder days really has to be in front of the troops to be able to have a hope of controlling anything.
The alternative of drums, trumpets, etc. doesn’t have nearly the same effect without extensive drilling. Which apparently these guys didn’t do.
Visual signals (flags) are useless unless you’re out in front.
Scipio certainly didn’t fight out in front of his men. Hence his quote: “Imperatorem mater me peperit, non bellatorem.” However, his troops did have extensive training and drill.
As I recall, the earlier series on this blog about pre-modern battlefield command suggests that Romans were better (even atypically so) about having generals (and possibly officers in general) serve as managers for their armies, whereas hoplite armies pretty much needed the leaders to be out in front not just as a matter of charisma and inspiration, but to let everybody know what direction to go in.
That’s Romans, probably the most drilled and trained troops in the ancient world.
I suspect that when Scipio said that he was the overall commander. Yeah that guy’s relatively far back, though still much closer than we would consider wise.
I did say “junior officers”, not “officers”. I’m not sure how this translates.
For Romans, it’s probably some form of centurion really, rather than the junior-most guys filling an elected office. But it’s the guy out front who is paying attention to any signals from the overall commander and making sure the troops are carrying them out. He has to be out front, so he can see and interact with the troops.
AFAIK the *number* of losses due to snipers is relatively low especially in such high-intensity conflicts, it’s more about the psychological effect that makes them stand out. The most successful snipers have kills in the hundreds which also skews the impression – but they’re the exceptions, not the norm, and there are few snipers total compared to regular infantrymen.
About training for the Hoplites, and what they did get or not. The piece from Xenophon gave me a nudge. Although the (soon to be) hoplites did not get any formal training, I imagine they did get a lot of informal training. As they were the sons of the well-to-do, they probably had to learn how to read and write, and study their fathers trade, if any. But apart from that, I imagine they had at least some free-time. And just like we play(ed) games now – tag, hide-and-seek, cops-and-robbers) they would have done so too. And their cops-and-robbers could very well be greeks-and-trojans, in which they enacted all the great fights in Homerus. With sticks standing in as spears and swords. Even if this is just “playing”, they would get some familiarity, and muscle memory with and about attacking and defending themselves from harm. And this could then be used when donning the whole panoplia as they were eventually big enough for it.
This is my instinct as well, especially given the quote from Xenophon. Boys love weapons and are drawn to them and play-fighting. This is just a thing.
Well, boys at least love weapons when they’re socialised towards the idea that fighting should be a norm for them.
A phrasing which suggests you know of a society in which boys are not fascinated by weapons. Which is it?
In addition to what you say, if the culture expects citizens to fight part of raising a child may well include teaching them the basics. Where men are expected to join the military, taking one’s son out shooting is a common enough bonding activity between fathers and sons (and daughters, but since this is Greece we can ignore that half of the population for the purposes of this discussion). If I know my boys are going to be in the army I’m going to teach them how to use their gear pretty early on!
Boys growing up on Dad’s war stories are going to act them out when they get a chance–often even when they’re supposed to be doing other things. And I’ve yet to meet a father who, upon seeing their son(s) do so, didn’t offer a few helpful tips. People are people, and fathers and sons have been giving their wives gray hairs since Ur. It’s good for society, if not for domestic tranquility.
Part of that will include “leisure” activities such as wrestling, running, and other athletic competitions. Sure, they’re fun. And they impress the ladies–ample justification for any activity to the mind of a young man. But they also build endurance, strength, agility, etc, making you a better soldier in that style of combat.
It’s worth mentioning that a lot of the justification for training in modern (read: gunpowder) armies is due to deracination. Skill may keep you alive, but cohesion wins battles. In a deracinated army you have to build cohesion through training. In a hoplite army, that cohesion is built from birth, through social connections. In formation the guy to your left is your neighbor, who you’ve been with since childhood and is like a brother to you; the guy to your right is the older brother of the girl you’re hoping to marry; the guy behind you is from a few farms down the way, you beat him at wrestling last year. You KNOW these people. And they are the people you will spend your life with. That sort of cohesion–the desire to prove yourself to the community, and the fear of public humiliation in front of your peers–is one of the few drivers stronger than fear of death in humans.
So while formal training may be minimal, that may be because Greek society itself provided an appreciable amount of training by virtue of being a Greek of the appropriate social class.
In modern systems one thing that I have never understood is how hazing and other such abuse is supposed to build cohesion also. I just don’t get that at all.
(Of course, OGP has addressed that in his series on the Spartan agoge as cult-like indoctrination.)
Outside the box a bit here, but did hoplite class men practice other forms of coordinated group movement that could have some sort of skill transfer? I’m thinking of practical things like rowing, barn raising, flushing of game animals, etc. and of cultural practices like group dancing or athletic competitions.
Thank you for your work!
I admit that yours is my only exposition to academic historical discourse but it’s very refreshing in a sector where there is this toxic attitude towards considering the past as an “ideal society” where martial achievements are the only important things. I’m Italian and “thinking (poorly and wrongly) about the Roman Empire” here is both a policy and… A disease. So having that aspect disassembled and properly situated within a nuanced wider society depiction is both eye opening and very entertaining to read.
” our sources also assert that poor wiry farmers made the best soldiers (e.g. that Plato, Republic 556cd) – the poor farmers who could not afford to spend a bunch of time training at the gymnasion is rather suggestive about how limited the role of formal fitness training was in most poleis. ”
The same is true today.
You can break physical fitness down into three interlocking areas – endurance, strength, and injury avoidance.
Serious armies have elite units that are mainly made up of people who look like poor wiry farmers, because endurance and the ability to avoid lower limb and back injuries are more important than pure strength. Non-serious armies spend a lot of time lifting weights in the gym because they care more about looking good in photos. But all that extra muscle mass on the upper body is just dead weight to haul around most of the time – modern warfare just doesn’t require you to deadlift very heavy things all that often, but it does very often require you to walk and run around over rough ground carrying fairly heavy things for long periods without breaking an ankle. (And the same would be true of hoplite warfare!)
The small wiry men are dependably better at this. “Bet he’s crap with weight” is the cliche comment towards any particularly large or heavily built soldier for a reason.
The small wiry men are dependably better at this.
Small and wiry, other things being equal, also means you can tolerate heat better because you have a bigger surface area to weight ratio.
That is a good point that I hadn’t thought of. Makes sense. Though the ideal build for heat-dumping is tall and skinny – if you think about the average build of someone from Kenya or Somalia, that sort of long-distance-runner build. Short limbs are actually commoner in cold-weather populations of both humans and animals – the Inuit tend to be pretty short in the legs and arms.
Good point, and that’s true. I’m thinking more or less of “if you hold body shape / proportions constant, is bigger better?” and I think *everything else being equal*, a 125 lbs guy is going to be able to shed heat better than a similarly shaped guy who’s 250 lbs.
I was thinking of marathon vs. distance runners in particular, and while you’re right that the ideal distance runner is probably tall and thin, you do see some who are quite short and thin, whereas sprinters tend to be very muscular.
Not to mention that it is not necessarily obvious that you want your soldiers to be able to tolerate heat more than you want them to be able to tolerate cold. I personally have spent a lot more time wishing for Inuit-type traits than I have wishing for Kenyan-type traits. But then it might have been different had I been in Greece.
Arethusa arose from her couch in the snows
Of the Acroceraunian mountains
And I from my bed in a bleak watershed
When the heavens were spouting like fountains
And I very much fear that the moment is near
When, as surely as I am a sinner,
They will tell me to fight for the rest of the night
And then run seven miles for my dinner.
It was all very well for that slip of a gel
If to sleep in the snow was her liking,
And I will not deny that in Greece in July
There is pleasure in climbing and hiking,
But I’m dashed if I see why a fellow like me
No more in his physical heyday
Must needs emulate at the whim of the State
An Acroceraunian lady.
I note that you quite quickly go from “campaigning” to “battle”? This might be my early-modernism speaking but I think we quite often see “campaigns” that do not end in battles at all: Either they just end in some kind of siege or, more likely, an army goes into the countryside, wanders around adn burns a bit of stuff, then retreats when winter comes having achieved not a lot.
RE: The pushed-back helmet. This is from older sources but werent’ at least some corinthian-type helments *designed* to be worn that way? I seem to recall at least some examples having eyeslits in the wrong position if you were to actually wear them “properly”.
So this makes me curious, how would the hoplites stack up against actual yeomen, e.g. the Anglo Saxon fyrd? My impression is that the panoply is certainly better, but having a 50%-of-the-year deployment means they’d certainly be more experienced and fit…
I’m not sure that somebody hasn’t made this point before – I’m reading this article and the replies below it on a screen that sometimes formats the comments in a way that makes them effectively impossible to read – but I did want to point out that, especially in the Ancient and Medieval World (When population structure and lower population levels in general meant that a lost battle or even a bloody draw could have immense demographic and political consequences) not every campaign ends with (or even features) a pitched battle.
It would therefore be somewhat dangerous to judge the average hoplite’s amount of campaigning experience based on the number of actual battles his polis fought during his lifetime: it’s also worth pointing out that historians have tended to overemphasise battles over campaigning in their histories (Military or otherwise) because battles are discrete, dramatic events with generally-dramatic consequences whereas military campaigns generally tend to be a combination of the tedious, the forgettable and the outright inglorious.
Hence the perceptible tendency for histories (Ancient and Modern) to skip the boring bits of campaign history that tell us far more about a soldier’s level of military experience in favour of the most dramatic, unforgettable and arguably unrepresentative bits.
Once upon a time, a “rumble” between rival urban gangs was a thing. Probably extinct now because gangs escalated to using guns and police oversight is harder to evade. But doubtless there was that level of calculation about the benefit/risk ratio of being willing to engage in “combat” (and even without guns a real risk of serious injury or death was there).
An addendum to my previous post about what we know and don’t know about Roman training:
I did find a passage of Livy in which he discusses an army preparing for battle in the middle Republic. Ab Urbe Condita, 44.34:
“With these instructions he dismissed the troops, and even the veterans generally confessed that on that day they had for the first time, as though they were raw recruits, learnt what military service meant. And it was not only by remarks of this kind that they showed how greatly they appreciated the consul’s words – they began at once to act on them. In a short time you would see no one in the camp idle; some were sharpening their swords; others rubbing up their helmets and cheek-pieces and their cuirasses; others fastening on their armour and testing their agility under its weight; others poising their spears; others again making their swords flash with rapid thrusts and keeping their eyes on the point. So that anyone could easily see that on the very first opportunity of coming to close quarters with the enemy they would finish the war by a splendid victory or, in their own case, by a glorious death.”
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/From_the_Founding_of_the_City/Book_44
Much like Scipio Africanus’s training programme after the capture of New Carthage, the focus here is on equipment maintenance, physical fitness, and weapons practice. It also is something ad hoc and situational, devised during the Pydna campaign of the Third Macedonian War. Formation drilling doesn’t seem to be a feature, so far as we can tell.
I’m confused by this.
I would think that if you took several thousand guys into a field, with a strong sense of “hold the line” but little actual practice, and asked them to have a coordinated fight with several thousand guys who *had* any significant amount of practice, a huge number of them would end up getting spears stuck into them. Thus anybody who *did* start practicing would win all the time. Everybody else would see this and also start practicing, and you’d *quickly* get a competitive race ending at the optimal amount of practice, which I’d think would be pretty large.
Is it actually the case that drilling and training at arms *weren’t* that important to winning? If not, why not? I mean, if you’re still trying to get into your line, and the other guys are systematically stabbing you…
The gigantic shields probably helped a lot.
Sok Puppette,
Well, we can first of all say that when armies that did actually train end up facing untrained armies, yes the trained armies generally win. Philip and Alexander’s Macedonians trounced the lesser trained Greeks, for instance.
However, creating a trained army is no simple thing. The reasons for this are complex, but we can summarize them to social and economic challenges.
Economically, premodern societies live much closer to the edge of subsistence than our modern societies do. There is a lot of raw labour that has to be done every year to get the crops in the ground and to harvest them. Alongside the direct duties of agriculture like plowing and seeding, you also have tons of subsidiary and supporting labour that needs done: Tools also need to be manufactured and maintained, clothing must be made, fences and buildings need mending, herd animals have to be tended, and so on and so on. The list of tasks for maintaining an agricultural society where all work is done by human or animal muscle is nearly endless
Training men to fight takes time and effort, and men who are spending time training as soldiers aren’t doing agriculture or supporting other necessary economic activities. In the economic sense, you need economic surplus to be able to support training soldiers. Trained soldiers are also extremely expensive: They eat as much as any man, and probably more than most. Weapons and armour are metal that could be used for other things, and making them costs man-hours, materials, and fuel.
Because creating and maintaining a trained force draws on a society’s economic surplus, this creates the social problem. Why should the farmer give up some of his crop each year to support the soldier? How much does he give, and on what terms? Who gets to be a soldier, and what are their privileges? What are the limits on the soldier’s power within the society? There’s many possible answers to this, many possible social contracts which we have seen historically, but creating and legitimating that structure is a political challenge. It’s a challenge of collective social coordination, which isn’t an easy thing and is almost always contested.
Whole PhD theses can and have been written on this subject, so we don’t have the time or space to exhaustively explore this very fascinating topic here.
However, I will leave you with this: Often, war isn’t about being the best. Often it’s merely about being better than the other guy. If you’re a mostly untrained farmer-soldier, and so is your opponent, you might need only a slight edge to win. Courage is easier and cheaper to come by than technical military skill, so for the untrained farmer-soldiers of Antiquity they often culturally much preferred relying on courage.
Of course, then sometimes by happenstance the King of Macedon seizes control of some gold mines, and he can actually afford a professional army and now all the untrained farmers are in some real trouble.
Which reminds me of what Alexander Hamilton said in an open letter titled “Concerning The Militia”, now counted as the Federalist Paper #29. In that letter Hamilton was defending the provisions of the proposed federal constitution that would give the federal government co-authority with the state governments over summoning the militia to arms. Hamilton addressed the concerns of the Anti-Federalists that such an authority might be abused by a tyrannical government to regiment all able-bodied men under federal control. Hamilton poo-poos this saying:
I think this overstates. Most of these societies had a surplus of labour, and particularly of younger men. See, eg the steady flow of migrants out of classical Greece or medieval Flanders or Scandinavia – or the huge flow out of Europe in the C19.
Remember that hoplites or a medieval array did not fight as one unit, but in numerous smaller groups – men of one deme standing together, retinues or village or urban parish or guild-mates. Each with a share of veterans and a local leader. So units place themselves along the line, under general direction and the local leaders keep them sorted.
Something else to keep in mind when discussing the training and maintenance of troops in the Ancient and Medieval world is that no matter how much you invest in their training and equipment, a significant portion of these men won’t live to see battle and even more will die without being able to strike a meaningful blow because men die of malnutrition, exposure and most of all from illness every day of a campaign even when pitched battles are rare.
Communities are going to be well aware of this, so there’s one solid reason quite a few historical communities preferred not to waste useful labour on training for war – 90% or more of the time a man who spent his life working will have contributed far more to his family and his society than a man who spent all his days training for war.
On the other hand, you get Medieval English laws mandating weekly longbow practice.
How common was that, though?
Good job on the series (Although dismiss pushing too easily).
Hoplites definitely trained for war, it just looked nothing like the drill we developed in the early modern age. That drill was as much about turning massive numbers of conscripts into automatons and breaking their free will as about moving on battlefields.
How did hoplites train? They danced. A lot. In large groups and small. I could take a cattle-call audition of broadway dancers and in ten minutes have them moving like the finest marching band. Just being familiar with keeping measure while moving in sync and following direction is enough.
The reason is because the pinnacle of hoplite “drill”, the Spartan system as described by Xenophon is ridiculously simple. It is all follow-the-leader and we regularly have children do it with foam shields at events. In fact, they do it better than some adults because the only way to screw it up is to overthink it. Luckily for them, there was no more advanced drill to compare it to, no expectation.
To this we must add concepts from self-organization we have learned from things like huge flocks of birds in flight. They work with human swarms as well.
The fact that Spartan drill which either derived from or informed mercenary drill suggests to me that the cat was out of the bag when a large number of hoplites made a living as mercenaries. I think the various “picked” and “sacred” bands probably knew this level of drill. If for no other reason that being seen to do it appears to be a way mercenaries showed off their worth (as before the Cilician queen), so picked groups had better show off that they are worth the investment!
Unless things go bad though, drill has no great benefit on a hoplite battlefield. It makes deployment for flexible than simply marching a group out onto the battlefield and getting into ranks, but as we see over and over, fancy evolutions in the face of the enemy cost or almost cost Spartans battles.
By coincidence I was asked to write an article for Ancient Warfare Magazine last fall on the Archaic hoplite. The article, “The Archaic Greek Shield-Wall”, will be out in the next issue and will serve as an introduction to my theory of hoplite shield-walls for those who have subscriptions.
This series has taught my brain to automatically substitute the 3 letters ‘VDH’ with ‘dumbass who always gets it wrong by a ridiculous margin’.
I know I should take it with a grain of salt since this is only Bret telling his side of the argument, but this critique on VDH makes him look so bad that you wonder how the guy is an academic at all.