The Hoplite Heresy: Why We Don't Know How the Ancient Greeks Waged War

yet the Greeks as I learned do wage war and they do it senselessly in their foolishness and stupidity when they have declared war against each other they come down to the fairest and most level ground that they can find and fight there so that the victors come off with great harm I will say nothing of the defeated for they are utterly destroyed if they must make war upon each other they should each discover where they are in the strongest position and make the attempt there the Greek custom then is not good so wrote the historian Herodotus placing the words in the mouth of a Persian this is the classic picture of several centuries of Greek Warfare heavily armored Soldiers the famous hoplites arranged in a Phalanx duking it out on the level playing field somewhere in Greece but this picture has several problems in the whole field of Greek military history revolving around the subject has been upended over the past decades what I want to do in this video then is explore Greek Warfare in the controversy currently raging among professional historians sometimes called the Phalanx heresy the central question in the study of Greek Warfare is not only why considering that Greece is an extremely Rocky landscape the Greeks develop the form of War based around organized groups of heavily armored soldiers fighting with Spears but also when at first glance it does not appear to make much sense the common image of the Greek hoplet usually looks something like the following The Shield used by the hoplites the aspis measured on average approximately 90 centimeters in diameter and weighed about seven kilograms and was about 25 to 38 millimeters thick being constructed of wood faced with bronze completing the Soldier's Armament would have been a bronze breastplate although it was eventually supplanted by the lenothorax Apparently made of linen bronze Grieves and a bronze helmet with the printable weapon being a spear initially about 2.5 meters in length but eventually growing to about 4.5 meters the shields overlapped forming a Phalanx formation with at least seven rows of soldiers although sometimes it was as deep as 40 rows in short This Is War characterized by the use of heavy infantry but as we'll see in this video there are issues surrounding this picture with about 20 to 30 percent of Grease being flat ground Farmland was comparatively scarce and this forms the Crux of the traditional argument about ancient Greek Warfare known among professionals as the Orthodox view in this line of reasoning the hoplite directly equates to the Phalanx it is not a standalone type of soldier and it was developed in the late 8th or the early 7th Century BC that is classical Warfare developed in the early Archaic Period these were the famous citizen soldiers of Greece who fought because they had a stake in the system in the Orthodox view this is sometimes referred to as the Greek middle class because Farmland was scarce phalanxes had to fight on the planes because the former soldiers could not risk losing anything to the enemy they had to stand and fight and when the Phalanx is engaged they fought in a manner characterized by orphismos shoving the opposing hoplites charged at a run crashing into the enemy front rank if one side did not collapse as a result of this crash then the men in the ranks behind the first press the broad Shields against the back of the man in front and pushed him forward the combined physical thrust of one densely packed mass of men was opposed by the thrust of the enemy phalanx eventually one side was forced back and its front collapsed The Hop lights perhaps being literally knocked over and trampled there was little or no actual fighting after the initial very brief Clash of Spears the shoving was decisive a hop late battle was literally a struggle of mass against Mass the long-term result is that phalan's Warfare was another aspect of Greek life characterized by competition with Unwritten Rules of Engagement based around honor and mutual respect and missile troops and Cavalry would not often employed War became a pre-arranged affair to the extent that one historian in particular referred to it as an absurd conspiracy designed to concentrate the horrors of War into a restrictive specially designed manner what altered this system was the prolonged conflict of the Peloponnesian War where Athens refused to face Sparta in the field the Athenians instead choosing to hide behind their walls which forced the system to change and break down the end result eventually was the conquest of the Greek city-states by Philip and Alexander or Macedon whose reformed Army was beyond anything the Greeks could possibly stand up to however among historians a new view has arisen in recent decades known as The heretical View they point out that we actually have very little evidence for supporting the Orthodox View and that that particular understanding of Greek war comes not so much from cherry-picking sources so much as it does from over emphasizing certain points and applying statements from texts centuries beyond what can actually be applied to we have very little Source material for the Archaic Period but we do know that Greeks fought and Phalanx is in The Classical period and what older generations of historians have done is take the characterization of The Classical period and push it back onto the archaic and like in Greek war to rugby or football no Greek historian for example emphasizes that of these most involves all of the troops in the Phalanx rather it has been assumed to be the case simply because the Phalanx had multiple rows of troops and the majority of the Rose must have been there for something because they were not in the front lines this is actually the case with much of the dispute over how the Greeks engaged in war what did the sources actually mention what do they leave out how do we interpret these things and what was the norm for Greek Warfare and what were the exceptions all of this then heavily revolves around the question of chronology and the actual development of the Greek phalanx there were three major views here the rapid adoption Theory argues that the Phalanx was developed between about 725 and 675 BC and that the heavily armed hoplite was restricted by use of the heavy Shield which forced soldiers to develop the formation and once this was done it proved so effective that their opponents had to do the same essentially the hot plate equates directly to the Phalanx the gradualist adoption Theory extends the timeline slightly between 750 and 650 BC and seized the creation of the Phalanx as emerging in a series of small steps but which ultimately became the dominant model for Greek Warfare by about 650 because it was so effective the last idea known as the extended gradualist Theory places the development of the Phalanx between about 750 and about 450 BC the first two are associated with the Orthodox View and the latter usually with the heretical view Central to that question of chronology is a small piece of pottery from about 640 BC discovered in Italy only 26 centimeters tall known as the kiji vase it depicts Greek warriors in battle wearing bronze armor equipped with large Shields that overlap this has been used to bolster the Orthodox view that the hoplite equates to the Phalanx that is heavily armored spearmen were present in at least the mid-7th century BC and that this type of War therefore had an early development this view has been called in the question by the Heretics however because while the armor appears to be what the hoplites would wear in which we do have surviving material evidence for the men are not equipped with Spears these are instead javelins and they appear to be carrying two or perhaps javelins alongside Spears they are raised overhead and it's not clear if they are intended to be thrown or thrust and the textual sources from this period of archaic Greece often discuss men throwing their weapons not necessarily stabbing as later sources directly tell us the soldiers are also not in a Phalanx it has been pointed out that the other soldiers are not directly behind their allies but are instead running to them perhaps as reinforcements and thus the combatants may actually be dueling but because of the medium it has to be depicted in two-dimensional form hence the confusion the point that the Heretics raised with this is that the chronology for a rapid adoption of Phalanx Warfare in the Archaic Period is not necessarily obvious and Crystal Clear in fact it's actually fairly murky the Heretics also point out that contrary to what the Orthodox Scholars have argued our texts from the time of classical Greek Warfare do discuss fighting on fields but they also discuss fighting in mountain passes with the Battle of Thermopylae perhaps being the most famous fighting behind strong points and the pursuing of rounded soldiers and massacres the Greeks opted for surprise attacks and selected precarious ground whether numbers or lack thereof would give them an edge against opponents including both the Persians and each other the chronology is also incorrect for an early adoption of the Citizen Soldier coming into being because if we take the Orthodox view seriously we should be looking for what has been called a Greek middle class which fermented what is usually known as the hoplite revolution in the 8th Century BC that does not show up until the 5th Century BC this argument is usually extended to support the idea of a class of Citizen soldiers being crucial to the development of Athenian democracy but the reality appears to be that prior to the 5th Century Hop Led to a drawn from a more mixed bag of people from across Greek society and it tended towards the wealthy this group of people does eventually appear but it is significantly later than what the Orthodox view requires so what does this mean for Greek Warfare how did they actually fight well the short answer is that this is still up in the air but current research is starting to move towards a new paradigm of fighting sometimes called the new Orthodoxy our key text on Greek Warfare such as thucydides xenophon and polybius among others reflect Warfare as it stood at the end of The Classical period and the early Hellenistic era this is when we really have completely unequivocal evidence of Phalanx Warfare in the manner that we typically conceive of it it is during the Peloponnesian War that we see the supposed Rules of Engagement such as establishing trophies over battlefields and truces to recover the dead which apparently dictated Greek Warfare for three centuries actually coming into being this is also when we have evidence of how large of Phalanx actually is these texts also reflect ideals of warfare not necessarily the reality none of this by itself is overly controversial what is controversial is the role of atheismos in the phalanx the new interpretation is that rather than being some sort of massive pushing contest only the first two or three ranks could really have been engaged in combat and it cannot have been a formation that was too tightly packed because pressure from the rear would have made the front lines unable to move and unable to use their Spears instead the termophysmos refers to pushing or shoving only in the first few ranks of the phalanx which might have been organized in a slightly looser spacing enabling a unified Shield wall if required but also limited dueling with the exception of the Spartans the majority of the Hop lights were not full time and thus not fully trained Soldiers the idea of an ordered well-trained body of spearmen Marching In lockstep appears to be an anachronism projected backward onto the archaic and early classical periods from the professional armies of the Hellenistic era it appears to have been normal for soldiers when advancing towards the enemy to break into a run in which case somehow distance the others causing the Phalanx to at least temporarily partially break up if the first few ranks wavered and broke then the formation would be in disarray which is what Lucidity is for example actually tells us so rather than the whole formation shoving into each other the depth of the Phalanx was designed with the bravest men to be in the front and the rear with the more timid troops in the middle and would have helped keep formation as it moved and lend support to the front line troops as they fought more experienced troops appeared to have formed shallower phalanxes as the Athenians did in eight ranks against 16 fielded by the syracuseans in 415. no matter how deep this was though there was a tendency for hoplites to move towards the right as they Advanced and as fighting began in an attempt to protect themselves with their partner's Shield although even this has been questioned recently because it has been pointed out that soldiers in the Phalanx fought in a side profile in which case The Shield would have covered most of the body battles in The Classical period Then tended to focus on opening gaps in the enemy's Phalanx rather than outright shoving match with the aim being to open a gap and then pour in the older view was that Warfare was dominated by the hot blades but recent work on Greek Cavalry and archers has demonstrated that the Greeks were aware that the Phalanx was not the end-all be-all that it was vulnerable it is for that reason that we read of Phalanx as being formed with their backs or one flank blocked by a body of water or some geographical feature or otherwise supported by calvary or missile troops far from being the dominant player on the battlefield classical Greek war saw the Phalanx as one piece in Combined arms Warfare Beyond this pitched battles were a rare occurrence which is why they stand out in the source material skirmishes sieges raiding and the wholesale Massacre of civilians is a Mainstay of Greek war in the Classical period and certainly appears to have been something of the norm in the preceding archaea due to the long development of this style of warfare the Peloponnesian War rather than representing the breakdown of the Phalanx instead represents the culmination of the Greek way of war and marked not the decline of the Greek city-states but the apogee of Greece and the maturation of the Citizen Soldier in the form that we have come to know so well

Channel: The Historian's Craft

Views: 552,536

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Id: ZWcCxTYk1E0

Length: 14min 52sec (892 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 09 2023