Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience

by Victor Davis Hanson

  But even in the descriptions of the scrupulous Xenophon there can

  be uncertainty as to which rite is meant. When the Spartan commander Derkylidas suddenly ran up against Persian forces he ordered his men into battle formation and he himself began to sacrifice (ethueto). The engagement did not in the end take place because Tissaphernes proposed a parley which Derkylidas accepted while observing: 'I have made ready to fight, as you can see' (Xen. Hell. 3.2.17–18). Everything points to battle-line sphagia (presumably the signs were good) but the word used is the more general term for sacrifice which could also refer to the seeking of hiera by means of normal sacrifice. Although Xenophon's account is circumstantial we would need more details to be quite sure which ritual was chosen on this occasion.

  Contrasting usage is seen in the account of Mardonios' frustration before the Battle of Plataia in 479 BC when the sphagia performed by his Greek mantis would not come out as he wished (katathumia, Hdt. 9.45.2, cf. 41.4). These we may be fairly sure are not last-minute rites before the battle-line, but their purpose is so single-minded, directed only to moving to an engagement, that Herodotus uses the language of that final rite.21

  The difference between Herodotus' language and understanding of the procedures and that of much later writers is instructive. According to his description of the preliminaries to the Battle of Plataia, the Tegeans and Spartans performed sphagia with the intention of engaging Mardonios and the army that faced them. The sphagia were not proving favorable to them (ou…egineto ta sphagia khresta) and many of them were killed and many more wounded by the arrows shot by Persian archers from behind a wall of wicker-work shields. Pausanias, the Spartan commander who would have been responsible for the rites, looked towards the local sanctuary of the goddess Hera and called upon her not to let them be disappointed of their hopes for victory. The Tegeans had already begun to advance—presumably their sphagia had proved favorable—and after Pausanias's prayer they turned favorable for the Lakedaimonians too (thuomenoisi ta sphagia khresta), and they advanced to victory (Hdt. 9.61.3–62.1). There is nothing anomalous in this account, not even the use of thuesthai here in the most general sense of 'sacrifice.'22

  This incident when retold by Plutarch (Aris. 17–18) has been greatly elaborated. When the Lakedaimonians do not obtain hiera kala, they are explicitly ordered to ground their shields and not to defend themselves; they suffer stoically the attacks of cavalry as well as the rain of arrows. To delay a charge is one thing, not to defend

  oneself quite another, and we may doubt such a command was ever given. Plutarch also knows a version according to which a band of Lydians swoops down upon Pausanias, as he is sacrificing and praying (thuonti kai kateukhomenoi) a little away from the formation, and seizes and scatters the parts being burnt on the altar (so at least I understand ta peri ten thusian). They are repulsed by the Spartans with rods and whips. The details here are of normal sacrifice for hiera, not the battle-line sphagia. In fact, Plutarch says it is an etiology for a ceremony performed around an altar by ephebes at Sparta.23 Plutarch goes on to describe the sacrifice of victim after victim and the prayer to Hera. No doubt Pausanias did sacrifice for hiera at some point before the battle but Plutarch's account has no authority for what happened at Plataia. It shows, however, that by his time at the latest the battle-line sphagia could be thought of in terms of normal sacrifice for hiera. Two rituals have been conflated, at the cost of clear visualization of what was done on the battlefield.

  Another author of the second century of our era, Polyaenus, tells the story of a trick by the priestess of Thessalian Enodia, a Hekate figure, who in legendary times advised Knopos to deck out elaborately and then drug the largest and finest bull. The maddened bull breaks away, is captured by the enemy, the inhabitants of Erythrai in Asia Minor, who accept him as a good omen, sacrifice and feast on him and, thanks to the drugs they ingest, go mad and fall victim to the forces of Knopos when they attack (Polyaenus Strat. 8.43). The origin of the story has been traced by Walter Burkert to a type of scapegoat ritual found in Hittite and Sanskrit texts.24 Polyaenus, however, has put the incident in the framework of Greek military ritual. The proximity to the enemy suggests sphagia while the elaborate treatment of the victim points to a normal sacrifice, such as is the 'sacrifice to get good omens' (kallierein), as does the feasting of the enemy, which is essential if the trick is to work and so indispensable for the story. Once again, distinctions are blurred, and for such a fantastic tale, developed around a different type of rite not apparently known in Greece, that is not surprising.

  Our last example of the functional similarity of the two rites comes from tragedy. In a messenger's speech in Euripides' Phoenissae (1255–8), Eteokles and Polyneikes have been exhorting their troops. 'The seers slew (esphazon) sheep and marked the points of flame,/ its cleavages, any damp signs of evil,/and that high shining which may have two meanings,/a mark of victory or of the losing side.'25 The messenger concludes with a plea to lokaste to prevent the fighting.

  The scholiasts on the lines quoted are exceptionally detailed in the information they give about the signs to be derived from sacrifice. Both the text and the scholia speak only of fire, which we have taken to be characteristic of the camp-ground sacrifice for hiera, but impractical and otherwise unattested for the final sphagia. While the word used for killing, esphazon, may suggest sphagia, and the urgency of the situation implies that fighting is about to break out, neither the language (sphazo is the word for piercing the throat in any type of sacrifice) nor the actions described are inconsistent with the preceding sacrifice for hiera. In fact, it might be thought that once the sphagia had been performed, nothing could prevent the battle, whatever their message. The poet, therefore, is probably not describing the very last rite before fighting begins, but the distinction in time and function is seen to be very close.

  PROPITIATION OF THE GODS

  Propitiation of the supernatural as well as divination is implicit in all these rites. But in most cases no divine addressee for prayers or recipient of the victim is mentioned. In Euripides' Heraclidae (399–400) the sphagia victims stand ready to be sacrificed (temnesthai, 'cut,' a word associated with powerful actions) to the appropriate (hois khre) gods, who are not further defined. In the realm of legend is Theseus' battle-line sphagia to Phobos (Plut. Thes. 27.3), but Alexander is also said to have addressed personified fear with sphagia and secret, magical rites (Plut. Alex. 31.3). Two human sacrifices in Attic tragedy are to Persephone, perhaps as Queen of the Dead (Eur. Heracl. 403–5, 489–90), and to Ares, but as the father of the Theban serpent rather than the god of war (Eur. Phoen. 933–4).

  Though it has been guessed that the mercenaries of Xenophon's Anabasis would have prayed to Zeus Soter, and one might add Herakles (cf. Xen. An. 4.8.25), the only sure historical example of a specific addressee is Artemis Agrotera.26 To her the Spartans customarily sacrificed a young she-goat as sphagia, in sight of the enemy and with the officiants and the whole army wearing crowns of foliage (Xen. Hell. 4.2.20, Rep. Lac. 13.8; Plut. Lyc. 22.4). The epithet Agrotera occurs once in Homer, coupled with the description 'mistress of wild beasts' (potnia theron, Il. 21.470–1). She was worshipped in the Peloponnese, Megara, and Athens, and a scattering of other cities.27 But she was particularly associated with the Spartans (cf. Aristoph. Lys. 1262–4, Xen. Hell. 4.2.20), perhaps just because of their formal

  address to her before battle. At Aigeira in Akhaia she was associated with the use of goats to trick an attacking enemy (torches were tied to the goats' horns at night, Paus. 7.26. 3 and 11), a story that points to a military connection and a goat sacrifice. The epithet locates her in the uncultivated land outside of the settlement with its nearby cultivated fields.28 The Greeks traced her epithet rather to agra or agrai, 'the hunt,' which took place in this zone. The Spartans also made a vow of a share of the prey to her and Apollo Agraios at the moment when hounds were let loose in the hunt (Xen. Cyn. 6.13; the same epithets at Megara, Paus. 1.41.3). She too appears at times as Ag
raia rather than Agrotera.

  It is difficult at first sight to see the fighting of the developed hoplite phalanx having much in common with the hunting of hare (the most common game), deer, or even boar, unless we accept as a universal phenomenon the equation of hunting and warfare.29 The nature of the territory the goddess frequents, the agros, seems more relevant than the hunt over which she presides. Despite the picture that we have for the Archaic and Classical Periods of warfare taking place on, and for, the best farmland (Hanson 1989:4), it may be that when Artemis Agrotera gained her place in the rites of war either fighting took place in more marginal territory,30 or perhaps, rather, it was hoped that it could be confined to such territory. This Artemis was the goddess of the wild, protectress of the wild animals and their haunts, but also the goddess of men in the wilderness with the distinctive dispositions and emotions they had when separated from the social world of the town. Commonly that situation is associated with the hunt and with the liminal condition of boys about to enter the adult world. The sacrifice to Artemis Agrotera shows that it was also the condition of men at war. Of the animals men had at their disposal for regular ritual, the goat, Artemis' favorite victim, was most at home in that marginal territory.31

  Although Athenians thought of Artemis Agrotera as characteristically Spartan, the Athenians themselves had a long-lived cult of the goddess and a shrine just outside the city-walls. Her worship goes back to at least 490 BC and the Battle of Marathon, when a vow was made to her before the battle to sacrifice annually one goat for every enemy slain (fulfilled in practice by 500 instead of over 6,000 animals).32 In the Hellenistic Period and in the second century AD ephebes under arms marched in her procession and participated in contests in her honor.33 The shrine was located at Agrai ('the hunting lands'?) on the slopes of low hills on the far side of the Ilissos river

  from the town of Athens, where Artemis had first hunted when she came from Delos (Paus. 1.19.6). Symbolically it was wilderness in contrast to the town and the plowed fields of the plain.

  Her military character was remembered not only by the arms born by the ephebes but by the fact that annually it was the polemarch who sacrificed to her along with Enyalios (= Ares, Pollux 8.21) and that her treasury in the late fifth century contained money derived from the ransom or sale of prisoners of war (IG I3, 383, lines 85–97=IG I2, 310, lines 220–4). Were these solely acts of recognition of her help in 490 BC or did she continue to take an active part in Athenian warfare, as the money from prisoners might suggest? Was she perhaps the normal addressee of battle-line sphagia for Athenians as well as Spartans? Against this is the silence about her in accounts of later Athenian fighting, in contrast to the Spartan associations recognized in Aristophanes. Furthermore, two Athenian representations of battle-line sphagia show unmistakably a ram as the victim, not a she-goat (Figure 1, p. 218, and the accompanying discussion).34

  The location of her shrine may have bearing. The Athenian army mustered at the sanctuary of her brother Apollo, with the title Lykeios ('Wolfish,' an equally uncivil title), across the river on the plain some two stades (400 yds/ 365 m) due north.35 Her shrine was in view of the troops assembled at the Lykeion, preparing to march out to Marathon. Eleven years later, Pausanias was said to have looked up to the Heraion at Plataia and prayed to Hera just before the sphagia proved favorable (Hdt.9.6l.3–62.1). Artemis Agrotera may have been invoked in 490 BC, at a moment of unparalleled danger for Athens, in the course of a camp-ground sacrifice for hiera in the precinct of Apollo Lykeios. Even as the Spartan hunters vowed to share their prey with Artemis and Apollo, so the Athenians in effect vowed to dedicate to her all the men they killed by giving her an equal number of her favorite victims. Thereafter she may have had a role in war ritual that we cannot see but at the least she was remembered in an annual festival and by occasional dedications from the spoils of victory.

  The battle-line sphagia, it is clear, could be thought of as addressed to supernatural figures. None the less, the predominant silence on their identity cannot be without significance, as is the absence of figures one might have expected to be named such as Ares and Athena. They lead the men setting out for the ambush on the Shield of Achilles (Iliad 18.516) and Ares and Athena Areia are among those who witness the oath of the ephebes of Athens (n. 14, supra). Ares

  receives the human sacrifice of Menoikeus in Euripides' Phoenissae, but explicitly in recompense for Kadmos' slaying of his serpent (933–4), though, to be sure, one might argue that at an earlier time an even more brutal war-god needed no excuse to demand blood. Some scholars have supposed that the figures addressed were unnamed, infernal gods, such as poetry conceives of as ranging over the battlefield (cf. [Hes.] Scut. 248–57; most recently, Pritchett, War 3. 87–8). Others have thought of Ge, the earth, who in the absence of an altar receives the blood that this rite emphasizes, or the local heroes in whose domain the fighting takes place.36 Neither possibility would be inconsistent with the context and may well have been true at times, but instead of positing a single explanation, we might do better to suppose that the particular traditions and circumstances of the army and their commander, and the individual beliefs and feelings of the men, affected the choice and even the articulation of an addressee. To judge by the general lack of articulation, it looks as if what mattered at this juncture was the act itself.

  SPHAGIA AS PURIFICATION

  What, then, was the meaning of the act? 'Purification by placation' was proposed by Jane Harrison for sphagia in general and this has been applied, by analogy, to the battle-line sphagia by Pritchett who refers to carrying the dead victim around the targeted persons or place in purificatory rites.37 There may have been a comparable action before battle. In Euripides' Phoenissae the mantis Amphiaraos is described as going into battle carrying the sphagia on his chariot, instead of bearing arrogant symbols on his shield (1209–12, cf. 174). Thucydides, in his description of the battle at Syracuse (6.69.2), says 'the seers brought forward (proupheron) the sphagia,' which is usually taken to mean that they brought live animals forward for sacrifice. But more likely it means that the dead animal or a critical part of the animal, such as the liver, was carried forward to show that the ceremony had been completed successfully. There is no mention of killing and of obtaining good signs. No sooner had the sphagia been brought forward than the hoplite ranks advanced. It seems that the killing had already been done.38

  The dead animal has potency, certainly in Euripides' representation of Amphiaraos and probably for the Athenians at Syracuse, but the language of purification is absent from the rites of the battle field (the occasional purification of an army earlier or later is another matter, cf.

  Pritchett, War 3. 196–202). Can the victim be seen as a scapegoat, an offering that takes upon itself the pollution of the army, as in the Hittite and Indic practices that have been compared to the story, discussed on p. 208 (and n. 24), of how the original inhabitants of Erythrai ate the poisoned bull sent among them? But for the Greeks we know of no comparable procedure before battle—the expulsion of the victim or its despatch to the enemy. Mythical and pseudo-historical examples of human sacrifices, all sphagia since their flesh is not to be eaten by the sacrificers, equally lack the language of pollution and purification and do not involve expulsion of victims from the community and toward the enemy. But a number of these are powerful, imagined conceptions of the situation before battle and may contribute to our understanding.39

  HUMAN SACRIFICE

  Phylarchus, the Hellenistic historian, wrote that at one time all the Greeks killed a human being before going out against the enemy (FGrHist. 81 F 80=Porpyhry De Abst. 2.56). The mostly mythical examples on which such a statement was based were once thought to illustrate the evolution of civilization as mankind substituted animal for human sacrifice. More recently they have been examined as imaginative and symbolic expressions of human values and emotions in situations of great tension.40 The most famous of the allegedly historical examples, the sacrifice of three Persian prisoner
s before the Battle of Salamis by Themistokles, has been shown to be unhistorical, which is not to say that human sacrifice before battle could not have happened since there are two instances of the killing of prisoners being put into a ritual context. Alexander the Great is said to have killed those suspected of his father's assassination at his father's tomb, in effect converting an execution into a sacrifice (Just. Epit, 11.2.1), and Messenian prisoners of war were killed at the grave of Philopoimen in the second century BC (Plut. Philop. 21). Both examples recall the killing of twelve Trojan captives at the pyre of Patroklos in the Iliad (23.175–6) and of Polyxena's death in Euripides' Hecuba. Here the imagined practices of legend have been made real.