Hoplite - History of the word

[PMBardunias]

The article in full argues that there is no linguistic, literary, or artistic evidence at all for a pure "hoplite" phalanx before 480 or even 460, and quite a bit of evidence to suggest otherwise--and even follows the historiography of the movement to suppress the light-armed from the Phalanx among modern historians starting in 1969.

I’ve read the article. He does a good job of deconstructing Ober’s rules of Agon, but his case for “Homeric,” “Massed” combat down to the 480’s is weak at best.

To choose a few of his examples, he posits that the fighting over Leonidas’s body shows the tactics were the opened, fluid tactics he describes for Homer’s heroes. By this logic, the fighting over the fallen Spartan King at Leuktra shows that the Spartans were fighting a mass of 50 ranks of Thebans in some sort of fluid, opened order. I think we can agree that this is unlikely and fighting over a fallen king does not mean your tactics are fluid. In fact I think the reverse is true. It is in fighting over a patch of ground, i.e., that on which your fallen king lay, or a specific section of battlefield, that is beginning of what will later become othismos.

He also says that the Athenians “exluded” non-hoplite elements from their ranks so as to make a psychologically impressive “charge”- drawing on the Charge of the Cyrean hoplites almost a century later for analogy. Frankly I find this argument silly. If there were a military benefit to having light troops mixed in the ranks, then abandoning them unilaterally would be suicidal. If there were not then I see no reason to think that they had to wait until Marathon to figure that out. The lack of a long, fast charge prior to marathon implies to me that they did not have to clear a dead-zone of many interspersed missile units in the preceeding period before meeting the persians. Scare tactics sound good to arm-chair generals, but seldom work more than once!

To me the whole notion of a “Hoplite revolution” at any date is ill-founded. There is simply an evolution of Greek armoured infantry, whose tactics evolve and probably cycle to some extent over time. I believe the Chigi when it shows “Hoplites” armed with a longche and javelin. This doesn’t make them any less capable of close in fighting than a pair of pila does a Roman. Later we see a trend towards the loss of missile function for hoplites, but this does not mean a radical change in the manner of close-in fighting. Surely even early archaic Greeks could pull off the type of shield-walls performed by tribal Germanic “barbarians” in the next millennia. This is surely a better model than stone-aged New Guinean hill-men.

I also don’t buy the literal notion that each hoplite had 2 psiloi huddled behind his aspis as some would read Tyrtaeos. Differential troop types are always better used in discrete units, or ranks, attached to one another than simply mixed. Krentz cites Hunt (1997) for a scheme where 1 rank of hoplites backed by 7 ranks of helots- which smacks of persian practice and probably would have been referenced. Why choose this over 4 or 8 ranks of hoplites and a group of helots in a mass a short distance behind them?

Along the lines of what Stephanos wrote above, just because Hoplites could fight in close order in massed ranks, does not mean they always did. Most of the killing in fact probably occurred when at least one side was in disarray- after routing.