5	Sources of Inquiry

Moreover, a truly definitive history of Greek warfare would require a knowledge of many aspects of Greek life. The would-be investigator would have to be familiar with terrain in the case of any given battle, have an acquaintance with the archaeological artifacts of various types, close familiarity with the written sources, and most important, an understanding of the general economic picture. He would also need some insight into ancient religion and acquaintance with military and naval procedures and strategy.

—Kendrick Pritchett, introduction to

The Greek State at War

From Greek literature we learn most about how the infantrymen of the city-state fought and died, and Greek literature begins with the two great epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, which have come down to us under the name of Homer. Of the two, the Iliad is the more important for our purposes here, inasmuch as its 15,000 hexameter lines sing of battles rather than war—a series of grisly, violent struggles between Greeks and Trojans in the tenth year of the Greeks’ siege of Troy. From Homer we can learn a great deal about the early Greek attitude toward war and death in battle. More importantly, because the poet saw combat as essentially a struggle between individuals, he alone in Greek literature describes in explicit detail the blows and wounds which armored men inflict and receive, regardless of the formation in which they fight:

The son of Telamon, sweeping in through the mass of the fighters,

struck him at close quarters through the brazen cheeks of his helmet

and the helm crested with horse-hair was riven about the spearhead

to the impact of the huge spear and the weight of the hand behind it

and the brain ran from the wound along the spear by the eye-hole,…

(Il. 17.293–98)

Yet there are questions of a historical nature which cloud the use of the Homeric poems as unambiguous sources for aspects of Greek hoplite battle. One, of course, is the matter of chronology. The author of the Iliad may have composed his epic as early as the latter half of the eighth century—a time when archaeological evidence suggests that hoplite armor (but not necessarily the associated tactics of massed attack in the phalanx) was just appearing for the first time in mainland Greece. Many therefore argue that we can obtain no sure knowledge of the arms and armor that the hoplite infantrymen wore from the descriptions of Homeric heroes. Secondly, the manner in which his epic warriors typically fight does not closely resemble the later custom and practice of phalanx infantrymen. In Homer, we find some traces of the Mycenaean world of the Linear B tablets some five centuries earlier, mixed together with more frequent references to the material culture of the Dark Ages and Homer’s own eighth-century Greece. The resulting picture is an amalgam-mosaic spanning five hundred years, the exact nature of which is still uncertain; it may not reflect an actual historical society at all. Remember, too, that the Iliad and Odyssey are epics, heroic poems that were not intended to be a precise historical reflection of contemporary life. Many of their battle descriptions, even when they do not employ the formulaic conventions of oral poetry, must, like all epics, entertain, romanticize, and so sing of a strange, far-off world no longer present:

But Tydeaus’ son in his hand caught up a stone, a huge thing which no two men could carry such as men are now, but by himself he lightly hefted it.

(Il. 5.302–4)

Nevertheless, throughout the Iliad a surprising number of passages show men fighting in unison, in massed formation of some sort; they cannot have fought and died much differently than their successors several generations later, even if they were not armed and deployed exactly like hoplite warriors.

More can be learned from the remaining fragments of Greek Lyric poetry, the new genre of literature of the Greek Archaic Age of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., which followed the epic poems of Homer and Hesiod. Their usefulness as historical sources for information on Greek battle is less problematic, inasmuch as the authors were usually living when hoplite armament was first introduced and the tactics of the phalanx within the Greek city-state were developed; they are near witnesses of the so-called hoplite reform. For example, the poems of Archilochos, Tyrtaios, Kallinos, Mimnermos, and Alkaios all mention most of the components of the classical hoplite panoply, and suggest at times the voice of a man who has fought in the massed ranks of the phalanx. Because this focuses for the first and nearly the only time in Greek literature on the personality of the speaker and the particular circumstances of its delivery, we receive an unusually vivid, fresh view of battle, unlike that found earlier in the Homeric poems or even later within the prose narratives of the classical historians:

No, no, let him take a wide stance and stand up strongly against them,

digging both heels in the ground, biting his lip with his teeth,

covering thighs and legs beneath, his chest and his shoulders under the hollowed-out protection of his broad shield,

while in his right hand he brandishes the powerful war-spear and shakes terribly the crest high above his helm.

(Tyrtaios 11.21 ff)

The camaraderie of combat in close order, the fear of the collision of armed men, the agony of wounds to the unprotected neck and groin, and, above all, the need to stay together without flinching in the face of the enemy are described in a first-person realism found nowhere else in Greek literature:

For once a man reverses and runs in the terror of battle,

he offers his back, a tempting mark to spear from behind,

and it is a shameful sight when a dead man lies in the dust there,

driven through from behind by the stroke of an enemy spear.

(Tyrtaios 11.17–20)

Battle in these poems is fresh and vivid, reflecting the poet’s fascination with a new type of combat, a new type of warrior who seeks ultimate victory not by himself but rather in concerted effort with men of his own class and circumstance. Much of the power of these poems is attributable to the rapidly changing environment in which the poets wrote, for many were among the first generation of hoplite fighters in the Greek-speaking world. One ought also to remember that proportionately few of these poems have survived intact from antiquity; most have been pieced together through quotations in extant prose authors or have been found fragmented on scraps of papyrus. Because of this lack of textual continuity and also because most of the poets lived well before the fifth century, we know few facts about the circumstances of the authors’ lives. All too often the fragments are detached from any reference points—an exact date, a known war, an incident in a poet’s career. Naturally these shortcomings have impaired the use of Lyric poets such as Tyrtaios as sources for the study of early Greek strategy and tactics or even Greek history in general. Yet in simply trying to catch a glimpse of battle, to learn how individual infantrymen fought and died in the great age of the hoplite, their value is unmatched.

Unfortunately, we have no contemporary prose accounts of the latter seventh and sixth centuries B.C., during the high point of the hoplite; our knowledge of that period must rest with less adequate archaeological finds—representation on vases and stone sculpture, and those precious few lines from the Lyric poets. Yet we must concentrate precisely on this very age of “pure” hoplite battle, where there was little variation from generation to generation in armament or in the manner of personal combat, if we are to learn about ancient Greek battle. For it was from this era of hoplite battle that the soldiers of the fifth century, so prominent in the accounts of Herodotus and Thucydides, learned to fight. However, we have no real accounts of these battles, and so the struggle on the Lelantine Plain, the battles at Hysiai (669), Tegea (560), Sepeia (494), and Dipaia (471), and even the later encounters in the first Peloponnesian War at Koroneia (447), Oinophyta and Tanagra (457) must all remain little more than mere names from a distant age.

Consequently, when the first prose writers of European history appear, in the latter fifth century B.C., and describe the warfare of the classical Greek city-state and thus the contemporary battles between hoplites in phalanxes, the great age of soldiers covered from helmet to toe in plate armor (700–500 B.C.) was already waning. Infantrymen like those of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand had gradually begun to reequip themselves with lighter body armor, often of nonmetallic construction. The use of additional contingents of lighter-armed infantry, occasional javelin-throwers, professional skirmishers, and the independent deployment of cavalry all modified warfare; and yet, through such adaptation, paradoxically, this ensured that phalanx battle would be preserved for another hundred years, even if the heavy infantry was no longer now the only force on the battlefield.

From the three great historians of the fifth and early fourth centuries, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, we receive the first clear account from beginning to end of a Greek hoplite battle where two massed armies square off to collide on level ground, such as occurred at Delion (424) or Mantineia (418). And while each author saw war and battle as the theme of their histories, they also took for granted an understanding of battle practice on the part of their audience, mostly male and veterans themselves. Occasionally, it is true, there is a brilliant exception—such as the fascinating description of the battle at Mantineia where Thucydides goes to great lengths to ensure that we understand the confusion and disorder that confronted the Spartan commanders in the field. There he describes the tendency, universal among hoplites in the phalanx, to drift slightly to the right, each man in search of protection for his own unshielded right side. But in general the historians placed much more emphasis on political history, and so they considered detailed accounts of the campaigns or theaters of operations (as part of some larger plan), more than graphic descriptions of the actual fighting between individual hoplites, to be the more effective technique in chronicling the change in fortune among Greek city-states. Consequently, when it comes to the clash of armed men, there is a sparsity of detail, an economy of style on the part of these writers—something Thucydides himself labeled “an absence of storytelling” (1.22.4)—which limits their battle pieces in most cases to a brief notice of a charge, “heavy fighting,” the inevitable rout, and the final exchange of the dead.

Yet there is a wealth of information found in nearly all other literature of the fifth century—drama, comedy, oratory, and philosophy. Most Greek writers knew of battle firsthand; like the generation of American writers who went through the Second World War—Jones, Heller, Manchester, and Mailer—these veterans returned to their experience in combat to clarify or broaden their thoughts on whatever subject they were discussing. In the same way as the experience on board B-17s over Europe or jungle fighting in the Pacific became known to readers through postwar novels, so too in Aristophanes or Plato we hear often of the bothersome clumsiness of hoplite armor or the need to stay in rank during the fighting—in the course of a speech or dialogue otherwise unconcerned with war. From Aristophanes we learn that men might defecate before the onslaught of battle, in a scene where he intends no exaggeration in his ridicule of the fancy, though now soiled, cloak of a pompous commander. (Pax 1175–76) Plato, likewise, returns to battle imagery in his Laches, when he says that the brave men are those who hold their rank in the formation and do not run from the approach of the enemy. (190 E) We should not be surprised with the epitaph that Aeschylus was purported to have left behind for himself on his death in Sicily. It makes no mention of his some seventy great tragedies presented in the Athenian theater but, rather, refers only to his service at the battle of Marathon as an ordinary hoplite in the ranks:

Under this monument lies Aeschylus the Athenian

Euphorion’s son, who died in the wheatlands of Gela

The grove of Marathon, with its glories, can speak of his valor in battle

The long-haired Persian remembers and can speak of it too.

(Aesch. Vita [Lattimore translation])

Hoplite battle was second nature to nearly all these writers, and mention of the use of the spear and shield, the shame of flight, the art of weapon handling, the terror of a sudden collapse in the ranks, all appear at unlikely moments in allegory, metaphor, or simple storytelling. These allusions to battle, which can appear anywhere in Greek literature, cannot easily be located through the use of indices and concordances; yet, it is from these sources that much of the most helpful detail concerning combat between hoplites can be found.

Many classical scholars are hesitant to consult the later Greek writers of the Roman period, such as Diodorus, Pausanias, and Plutarch, who may be more than five hundred years distant from their subjects of inquiry. Yet most of the Lyric poets’ accounts of battle in the great age of the hoplite are lost, while the ensuing fifth-century historians witnessed an altered and thus less representative type of phalanx warfare, which scholars are willing to accept as valuable evidence. Also, in defense of these less gifted inquirers of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, it should be noted that they sometimes drew on good (and often lost) contemporary sources about Greek hoplite battle of all epochs and, more importantly, their biographical approach and interest in an individual’s role in history often preserved personal detail that otherwise would have been left unrecorded. If they are less valuable for the traditional study of tactics and military strategy due to their anecdotal, idiosyncratic, and unsystematic approach to historical writing—their bothersome omissions of crucial battles or treaties, and confusion over or misunderstanding of chronology and important changes in government—they nevertheless may be of even more interest to us by the sheer perversity of information which they do choose to include. For example, while we rarely hear of individuals fighting in hoplite battles in the more traditional (and reliable) histories of Thucydides and Xenophon, and so are not told much about wounds from sword and spear, there is an abundance of gore in both Diodorus and Plutarch—striking descriptions of battle injuries that can bring us much closer to the carnage of the battlefield: the image of the Greek general Philopoemen limping along “held as if by a fetter” when a javelin pierced both thighs simultaneously (Plut. Phil. 6.4–7), the dying Epameinondas at Mantineia with a broken spear protruding from his chest (Diod. 15.87.1–6), the nameless Spartan who hobbled from the battlefield on all fours suffering from multiple wounds to the legs and feet (Plut. Mor. 241 F 15), or Dionysius struck in the genitals at Rhegion (Diod. 14.108.6).

A final genre of literary evidence is the military manual or handbook, formal treatises on tactics from the late Hellenistic and Roman age, as well as the accompanying strategemata, which are essentially collections of old battle adages and clichés. These works of Aelian, Arrian, Asklepiodotos, Onasander, Polyaenus, and Frontinus (all in Greek but the last) are usually dismissed by military and classical historians alike as dry exercises in pedantry: “There is a collection of stratagems,” wrote F. E. Adcock in his Sather Lectures on Greek and Macedonian warfare, “hastily compiled by Polyaenus to illustrate the dim mind of Lucius Verus on his Parthian campaign. It is uncritical, as is its Roman counterpart, the work of Frontinus, but it is, at the worst, the sediment left behind by the tides of war.” (102) However, on occasion their uncritical approach allows them to include almost inadvertently interesting detail about how infantrymen reacted under specific conditions. While they do not intend to tell us anything about the men in the ranks, they often do, nonetheless; the first-century A.D. Platonic philosopher Onasander advised his general:

When the enemy commander is distant, yell out, “The hostile general has fallen,” or the king or whoever it may be. And it is crucial to call this out in such a way that the enemy also hears, since his own men, on hearing that their side is winning, are encouraged and even more eager to continue fighting, while the enemy, when they learn the depressing news, suddenly becomes discouraged, so much so that on occasion they run away immediately. (23.1)

We should note here the surviving chapter entitled “On the Defense of Fortified Positions” (part of a much larger, lost work on military operations) by one Aeneas Tacticus, and seven “minor” works of his better-known fourth-century contemporary, Xenophon. These treatises, written in the chaotic world of the early and mid fourth century, view military practice from an especially idiosyncratic viewpoint in a variety of different genres: the political pamphlet, the biography, the didactic handbook, the single-subject essay or monograph. From such wide-ranging discussions on horsemanship, hunting, municipal security, mining, fortification, and cavalry sorties a good deal of information can be gleaned concerning individual problems of armament and weapons handling during combat.

Archaeological finds—excavations, topographical studies, and examination of sculpture and vase painting—are the second kind of source material from which we learn about the Greek infantryman in battle. The Greek practice in the Archaic Age of dedicating captured arms and armor as votive or thank-offerings at Panhellenic sanctuaries—a custom contemporaneous with the rise of the hoplite—has ensured that we know quite a lot about how even the earliest Greek hoplites were armed and protected, and more importantly, how difficult such equipment was to wear into battle. The collections of shields, breastplates, helmets, greaves, ankle and thigh guards, swords and spear points, and butts uncovered at Olympia and elsewhere (Delphi, Argos, southern Italy, and Athens) not only provide information about weight and size, but also illustrate regional specialties and even individual modifications in arms. There is evidence too of a gradual trend over some 250 years toward lighter and less cumbersome armament, showing the hoplite’s increasing desire for greater mobility and maneuver. Some idea of the rich flavor that archaeological evidence adds to the study of Greek battle is illustrated nicely in a small, obscure footnote in G. B. Grundy’s classic Thucydides and the History of His Age. In his masterly chapter on Greek warfare—an account based almost exclusively on literary sources, written as it was before most archaeological and epigraphical evidence was known, much less organized and published—he remarks on the discomfort of hoplite armor:

I have tried on a Greek helmet found at Delphi, and I have also tried on various helmets of genuine armour dating from various periods in the Middle Ages. The iron of the Greek helmet was extraordinarily thick, and its weight was, I should say, nearly double that of the heaviest helmet of the medieval period, even than those used by the Spanish common soldiers of the sixteenth century, which were naturally made of comparatively inexpensive metal. (244)

Finally, the excavation at Greek battlefields can add some knowledge about combat. But the resulting topographical studies are more valuable for tactical and strategic reconstructions of battle when literary descriptions are fragmentary or in need of supplementary detail. Not only can the size of ancient armies be envisioned (they must fit into the confines of the battle plain), but traces of the dead sometimes have sometimes been recovered. For example, at the Kolonos hill of Thermopylai, arrowheads of an Eastern type were found not far from the place that corresponds to the last stand of King Leonidas and his Spartans against the Persians in 479 as described in Herodotus and Diodorus. Spartan dead, buried at the end of the Peloponnesian War, were unearthed in the Athenian municipal cemetery with spear and arrowheads lodged in their skeletons, intact after 2,400 years and confirming an incident known previously only from Xenophon’s brief remark that “Chairon and Thibrachos, both polemarchs, were killed there, and Lakrates, the Olympic victor, and the other Lakedaimonians who lay buried beneath the gates of Athens in the Kerameikos.” (Xen. Hell. 2.4.33; cf. Van Hook) Likewise, under the lion monument at Chaironeia, 254 skeletons were unearthed, which may suggest the spot where we are told the Theban Sacred Band of Three Hundred finally perished in battle against Philip of Macedon in 338.

Men in battle, or on their way to war, were also a favorite topic of red- and black-figure vase-painting and sculpted relief on public and private monuments on stone. While scenes were often heroic in nature—the fight over the body of Patroklos, or the farewell of Hektor to Andromache—the artist quite naturally portrayed his figures in the battle dress of his own time, although occasionally reverting to easily identifiable “heroic” nudity. There are frequent pictures of swordplay, spear thrusting, hoplites arming, or infantrymen stumbling in an attempt to ward off a blow. Again, these representations are not so helpful for learning about ancient tactics: the “group” effort in the phalanx is a difficult one to portray successfully in iconography, and therefore never really appears. Yet, for the discovery of the sequence of events in combat between individuals or small groups, these paintings are quite useful and provide a glimpse of individual life-and-death encounters after the two phalanxes collided and became one mixed mass of humanity. Unlike the narrative accounts of Herodotus or Thucydides, they naturally concentrate on the individual, not the state’s or the community’s, experience with war; therefore they capture even the minutest detail: the bleeding thigh wound of an injured soldier, the last movements of a trampled, smashed hoplite, the final seconds before a fatal spear thrust. In a sense, this interest on the individual in battle is not unlike the personal voice of the Lyric poets, and so it comes as no surprise that our best knowledge of Greek battle may derive from these two sources.

Finally, epigraphy provides the third source of our knowledge of Greek military history; examination in recent decades of hundreds of public documents on stone concerning the financial structure of fifth-century Athens is a good example of a revolutionary change in the scholarly study of the city’s imperial administration. Records of leases, public sales, honorific decrees, inventories, contracts, and civil and criminal legislation unearthed from the American excavations in the Athenian Agora have provided material for a social and economical history of Athens unknown from the literary evidence. Understandably, however, most of this epigraphic material is of a public nature, more important in learning about the army’s enlistment, command structure, and casualty figures of the army than about specific detail concerning the fighting and killing in the phalanx. There are occasional exceptions. For example, public casualty lists usually recorded the dead by tribal affiliation; this may suggest that the men in phalanx were more than a mere collection of citizens, but rather were drawn up and arranged by familial and kin relationships in order that those stronger ties might extend to the close-in fighting of the battlefield.