The Boiotian Shield

[PMBardunias]

In essence, the Chigi vase illustrates what Herodotus writes of as occurring at Marathon - the Hoplites form up in line and charge into contact in a formed body....it really doesn't matter whether the 'in step' is an artistic convention or whatever.

This is a very important point that I am going to extrapolate probably beyond what Paul is comfortable with. :wink: I think we have created a largely artificial divide between "phalanx" combat and what came before. We do this because we look at the derived phalanx of the 4th C and compare it what was written by Homer, missing all the evolution in between. At exactly what point does it become a "phalanx?" If leaders are standing in front of a mass of close ordered men while throwing longche at each other its not a "phalanx", but the moment they step back and charge with the group it becomes a phalanx. When groups of men are fighting over the fallen body of a hero, undoubtably shoving with their shields by the way, they easily fit the description of a small phalanx.

Does forming up in lines of men make it a phalanx? It seems irrelevent to me whether they formed in a line of neat little rectangles or a series of men massed by tribes in mobs like a string of beads. They surely formed a "line" on contact with the enemy either way. How did the Zulu form their "lines"- surely to a greek writer they would have looked like a phalanx. What of the Germanic board-weals, what was their drill and rank system and how did they move from opened to close order? The neat lines and drill are not relevent to the definition of a phalanx in the broad sense or to the type of massed combat that has been argued to spur or result from yeoman farmers and Polis citizens and democratic ideas, etc.

Even in the later period the uniformity of the phalanxes battle line was an illusion. Ranks were not of uniform depth between and often within units, and cohesion was always much higher within units than it was between them. When they charged, they did so as units, not as a single perfectly ordered line, more importantly, when they broke they did so as individual units. You don't read of "the five ranks of Argives on the right stood firm with the Athenian unit beside them while the rest of the Argives fled." Men who charged at a run did not arrive in a close-packed phalanx with proper spacing at the end of the charge. Thus, it is irrelevent to the combat if they began their charge from ordered ranks, though it surely makes moving men around easier and was undoubtably quite useful to the leaders.

So what makes a hoplite phalanx different from all other battle-lines of massed men? Nothing, unless they are doing something that these other battle-lines cannot. I'll leave it to you to decide what that is. Whatever "that" is, it is the evolution of this factor of hoplite combat that is the driving force between the derived Hoplite phalanx and any old battle-line, not the way they are formed.