Worse than the weight of such arms and armament was the sight of hundreds of enemy spear points, which ancient authors sometimes compared to the bristles of a hedgehog. That sea of incoming iron explains why such an unusually large shield was necessary, as well as the peculiar compactness and density of the ranks and files to deflect jabs at all angles and directions. Again, the aim was not to rack up kills through individual prowess—the polis Greeks deprecated as “barbarians” those such as the Carthaginians who kept such scores—but to keep the spear level, shield high, body in rank, and then to defend, push, and kill anonymously, as the collective body moved ahead in rank and formation.
At the battle of Mantinea, Thucydides takes great effort to explain the natural tendency of each hoplite to seek protection for his vulnerable right side in the shield of his companion on his right. Here one can appreciate just how pivotal the nature and shape of the shield was to the entire method of hoplite fighting: ranks were almost always referred to by Greek authors as so many “shields” deep—rarely as so many “spears” or “men.” Still, for all the genius of concavity and flexibility, there were grave problems with the round shield. Its circular, rather than rectangular, shape ensured that the body was not entirely protected; thus every soldier by instinct needed to lean to his right to find cover in the left part of his neighbor’s shield.
Greek generals—except for Spartan kings, usually amateur and elective officials—led troops on the right wing to spearhead the attack. In defeat, leaders usually perished: Hippocrates at Delium, the Corinthian general Lycophron at Solygia in 425, and both Athenian commanders at Mantinea (418), a battle in which the small Athenian contingent suffered 20 percent fatalities (200 of the 1,000 Athenian hoplites died). This exposure of leaders was sometimes quite in contrast to the practice of the Greeks’ foreign adversaries. No Greek elected official, like Xerxes at Thermopylae or Salamis, sat above his men on a throne, gazing at the fighting below and issuing orders to a throng of court toadies to kill this fainthearted company and reward that resolute one. Thucydides himself was exiled for allowing Brasidas to take Amphipolis, probably through little fault of his own, since his promptness and audacity probably saved nearby Eion. There is also not a single major Greek general from any citystate in classical Greek history—Miltiades, Themistocles, Pausanias, Aristides, Pericles, Cleon, Brasidas, Gylippus, Lysander, or Epaminondas—who was not put on trial, demoted, fined, exiled, executed, or killed in battle.
After the great naval victory at Arginusae (406), the Athenian assembly nevertheless worked itself into one of its murderous moods and executed 6 of the 10 admirals responsible for the victory—among them Pericles’ own son—on dubious charges of negligently allowing wounded sailors to drown. Oddly, the chief crime for Greek commanders seems not to have been lost fights per se. Charges were more likely brought against those alleged to have avoided battle or to have failed to recover the dead. Generalship in the field was also in and of itself a deadly business: 22 Athenian elected leaders died in battle during the Peloponnesian War, or about 12 percent of all those who took up some sort of command.
Even more astounding was the Panhellenic custom of accountability and audit of generalship, often right on the field of battle. Some generals in effect apologized on the battlefield to troops for tactical defeat, partly to recover their morale, partly to instruct them about their past mistakes in hopes of better performance in the future. The Spartan general Gylippus, after a small loss of his Syracusan fort, said he was sorry by pointing out that it was his fault for leading a force dependent on light-armed and mounted troops into a confined space against hoplites. Although Nicias was de facto commander of the entire first expedition in Sicily, he nevertheless felt it necessary to explain his plight in detail in a lengthy letter to the Athenian assembly. In the modern world, many successful generals eye a postbellum political career; in the Peloponnesian War, most battle commanders were themselves already politicians.15
Killing Hoplites
Because of the limited tactical options open to a phalanx once battle commenced, complex maneuvers and tactics were problematic and so rarely attempted. A phalanx plowed through “like a trireme ram” on the stronger right side before its own inferior left wing collapsed and eroded the cohesion of the entire army. Well apart from a king on a hill, there was not even a grandee on horseback galloping in the rear—issuing complex orders by trumpet and signal flag for particular segments of the phalanx to attack in echelon, backpedal, or be held in reserve. Such articulation of forces would wait a century, for Alexander and his phalangites.
Thucydides goes to great lengths to explain how innovative the Theban decisions were to mass deeply and coordinate cavalry at Delium, as well as the Spartan frantic ad hoc efforts to redirect their attacks in the midst of the melee at Mantinea. In most normal cases, the generals apparently had sent their similarly formed columns out to hit each other head-on, tactical thinking being essentially nonexistent and almost unwelcome.16
In the two great battles of the Peloponnesian War, at Delium and Mantinea, one sees the very beginning of the Greek infantry tactics of deep columns, reserves, integrated cavalry units, adaptation to terrain, and secondary maneuvers, which would only accelerate in the fourth century under Epaminondas and come to fruition with Philip and Alexander. Hoplite battle in the Peloponnesian War began a slow transformation, from phalanxes rather artificially deciding wars to hoplites becoming a part of an integrated force of horsemen, light-armed troops, and missile troops that could win theaters of conflict on the basis of military efficacy rather than traditional protocol.
To kill and maim, the hoplite depended on his spear. Should the shaft break, he might turn around what was left of its nine-foot length to employ the reverse end, which was outfitted with a bronze spike, sometimes called a “lizarder” (saurotêr). Some hoplites stumbled and fell, only to be stomped on by oncoming infantry who slammed their upraised spears downward, the butt spike providing the coup de grâce as it smashed through the unfortunate man’s backplate into his chest or stomach.
A small iron sword was carried in case the spear was lost altogether. Vase paintings often show broken shafts; reference at Delium to “hand-to-hand” battle probably meant slashing with swords or stabbing with butt spikes. Because of the congested nature of the fighting, hoplites were hit repeatedly from all sides. But to be lethal, strikes had to be aimed at the unprotected groin and neck. Wearing hoplite armor in battle was in some sense the equivalent of placing a bull’s-eye over one’s unprotected throat and genitalia.
Sometime during the Peloponnesian War, the Greeks first began to explore the dilemma of proper depth versus width. Taking men off the battle line to stack them deeper than the standard eight shields gave the phalanx more penetrating power, even as the shortened front was in consequence left vulnerable to outflanking movements. The green Syracusans, for example, fought their sole hoplite battle against the Athenian invaders sixteen men deep, in hopes that their stacked columns would provide moral reinforcement to their inexperienced troops, while the resulting vulnerable and extended flanks were covered by a huge force of some 1,200 cavalry.
At Delium, Pagondas’ spirited hoplites, like Napoleon’s columns, thought they could blast apart their adversaries without being flanked, but only with the assurance that cavalry or rough ground protected the margins of the battlefield. This entire modern military dilemma of column or line, depth in contrast to breadth (or power versus maneuver) also first arose in the Greeks’ search to find the proper ratio within their phalanxes. The problem remained unsolved well into the nineteenth century, even in the age of gunpowder, until Wellington’s thin red line at Waterloo tore apart the massed ranks of the French Old Guard. Those who stacked deep, like the Syracusans and Thebans, in the manner of the later Macedonians, usually had superior cavalry to guard the exposed long files. In the same manner, George S. Patton repeatedly urged his division commanders to plow ahead, without worry about the flanks; but then he was protecte
d by superior air support, the modern equivalent of ancient heavy cavalry.
If the hoplite kept his nerve and formation with his fellow fighters, his seventy pounds of armor and the length of his spear made him invulnerable to cavalry charges and skirmishers alike on level ground. Even in the most desperate circumstances his line was impenetrable to any but other hoplites, as long as every man (a parastatês, or “one who stands side by side in rank”) kept his nerve in battle, did not waver, and held his shield up and his spear out. At Delium the nearly 20,000 unarmed or light-armed auxiliary fighters dared not attack either side’s phalanx while in formation. The unusually large contingent of 1,200 horsemen at Syracuse rode into the fray in the flight and pursuit only when both sides found themselves out of formation. When the victorious Athenians on the right ran from the sudden appearance of cavalry behind the hills of Delium, it was largely on the impression that it presaged the arrival of another infantry army altogether.
One of the peculiarities about Greek warfare at the dawn of the Peloponnesian War was the archaic idea of class, not military efficacy, determining the role of the soldiers. In theory, the landless rowed and threw missiles. The propertied served as hoplites. Only the very wealthy rode horses or outfitted and commanded triremes. Thus, the armored ranks of spearmen were not solely a military hedge against cavalry but a social statement as well that the larger property owners of the city-state who could afford ponies were nevertheless not as important as yeomen farmers to the collective defense of their societies. This cherished idea was also a casualty of the Peloponnesian War.
This class element in classical warfare has always struck me as paradoxical. In the ancient Greek world, those with property were the most likely to fight in the deadliest fashion, as if owning a farm earned one the privilege of getting stabbed in the face in a way unlikely for the landless. On occasion wealthy Athenian knights could feel the pressure to go “hoplite.” Thus, wealthy horsemen bragged that they had chosen to give up their mounts and fight instead as hoplites, illustrating that the greater military cachet was acquiring real “combat experience” in the melee alongside agrarian infantry rather than patrolling as aristocratic horsemen.17 In general, like everything in the Peloponnesian War, twenty-seven years of fighting finally eroded the strict correlation between status and military service. By the last years of the war, citizens (as well as aliens and slaves) fought in any manner that the city needed at its moment of crisis, as knights rowed and the poor donned state-supplied armor.
After the meeting of phalanxes, hoplites marched out screaming the war cry Eleleu! or Alala! Blinded by the dust and their own cumbersome helmets, they stabbed away with their spears, and in unison pushed ahead with their shields, sometimes grabbing, kicking, and biting, desperately hoping to make some inroad into the enemy’s phalanx. Usually they had little idea whom, if anyone, they had killed or wounded. Hearing and sight by those in the ranks were difficult, if not sacrificed entirely. Both of Thucydides’ descriptions of the two major hoplite battles of the war—Delium and Mantinea—reveal just such rampant confusion and misdirection: the Athenians accidentally killing their own at the former, or the Argives in the latter battle completely being unable to see an entire Spartan army approaching nearby.
The din of clashing metal and screaming men must have been earsplitting, but it went relatively unnoticed by the hoplites, their hearing almost obliterated by the heavy bronze helmet that had no cutouts for the ears. Dust, the crowded conditions of the battlefield, and the crested helmets with small eye slots would have limited their vision severely. Mistaken identity was commonplace, given that distinctive uniforms and national insignia were often absent.18
Descriptions of gaping wounds to the unprotected neck and groin, involuntary defecation and urination, and panic abound in Greek literature. This dark and mostly forgotten side of hoplite battle suggests that once the two sides clashed together, the interior of the melee was sheer bedlam. In such a mess, weight and discipline were crucial to hoplite success: the greater cohesion and thrust of the column, the more likely it was for a phalanx to shove itself over and through the enemy. Perhaps all the terrible battle calculus of this type of fighting was what horrified Pericles. Certainly, the very idea of sending his citizens into such an inferno against trained killers like the Spartans must have driven him to craft a strategy to win the war without risking hoplite confrontations.
Usually, within an hour the pushing (ôthismos) ceased, as one side collapsed and then fled the field. The exhausted victors stripped and returned the dead, and erected an ostentatious trophy as testament to their prowess. Often they annexed the disputed territory from the defeated. There are few instances of multi-day pitched battles in the manner of a Shiloh or Gettysburg, much less a weeks- or months-long holocaust like a Somme or Verdun. Instead, at Solygia, Delium, Mantinea, and outside Syracuse, the fight was probably over in a few minutes. During some twenty-seven years of war, Greek hoplites fought in pitched battles probably no more than four or five hours in the aggregate.19
Scholars debate endlessly whether the parochial rules of hoplite war stifled tactical and technological innovation or reflected the preexisting backward state of Greek warfare before Alexander. For example, did a characteristically limited chase really reflect the rules of battle, or was it a de facto admission that exhausted winners in armor, without many horsemen, could hardly catch losers who tossed away their equipment and fled once lightened by sixty or seventy pounds of cast-off weight? Quite unlike the bedlam at Delium, at Mantinea the entire defeated left wing of the democratic allies ran to safety without much serious pursuit from the Spartans: “The flight was neither pursued nor did the retreat go on very far; for the Lacedaemonians fight their battles long and stubbornly until they turn back their enemies; but once their enemies flee, their pursuits are both brief and only for a little distance.”20
Terms of deprecation like lipostratia, “leaving the ranks,” and tresas, “trembler” or “fleer,” referred to those who fled the phalanx or showed manifest signs of fright. The classical Greek language in addition had at least two specific terms of aspersion just for jettisoning the hoplite shield (rhipsaspis, “shield tosser,” or apobolimaios, “throw-awayer”)—an act that threatened the integrity of the phalanx and revealed the hoplite’s worry about his own, rather than the group’s, survival. These public slurs were serious stuff and stuck, haunting a man for the rest of his life, given the public nature of both phalanx warfare and civic life within the polis. In his comedies, Aristophanes was merciless to the Athenian popular leader Cleonymus for tossing away his shield to save his life at Delium. His infamy three years after the battle became a stale joke repeated ad nauseam in front of several thousand Athenian theatergoers.
In the same manner, the young Plato was probably ashamed that his stepfather, Pyrilampes, had also run at the first sign of trouble at Delium and was captured by (and later ransomed from) the Boeotians, a battle where his teacher Socrates’ fortitude, in contrast, became a subject of table talk at an entire generation of subsequent Athenian dinner parties. Much of the family cachet that propelled the teenager Alcibiades into prominence at Delium derived from the fact that his father, Cleinias, had died bravely at the front ranks not far away, twenty-three years earlier at Coronea.
If Greeks sensed that fright and courage were not so public during sieges, in the midst of civil strife, or at sea, hoplite battle was a different story. It could make or break a man’s civic life for decades afterward. The good citizen, in other words, throughout the Peloponnesian War was not the tosser but the aspidephoros (“shield carrier”), who always holds his shield steady and right, and stays in rank in the phalanx—even though there was almost no opportunity to do so over some twenty-seven years of war.21
Panic and fear were ubiquitous on the battlefield, given the curtailment of sight and hearing, and the ever-present danger of panic among such large mobs. Often in the Peloponnesian War unexpected natural phenomena—sudden thunder and lightning
, an eclipse, or an earthquake—would shatter the morale of a Greek human herd in massed rank.
Rampant slaughter could on occasion occur, but careful analysis reveals an economy to pitched fighting, and that the real killing occurred well off the hoplite battlefield. Rarely did more than 10 percent of the men who fought die in a single pitched battle—1,500 total hoplites were killed at Delium, or a little over 10 percent of the 14,000 armored assembled on both sides. Although the Athenians suffered a staggering 14 percent fatality rate among their hoplites, such a number of dead was unusual and made the battle among the most costly in classical Greek history. At Mantinea the combined hoplite dead of 1,400 suggests a similar fatality rate of about 7 or 8 percent—if, in fact, 17,000 to 20,000 hoplites crashed together. Throughout the entire war, Athens lost little more, on average, than 200 hoplites a year. Its aggregate of only 5,470 hoplite battle dead was less than half of those heavy infantrymen who perished during the war from the plague alone—and the vast majority of them fell outside hoplite battle in skirmishes, sieges, and at sea.22
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Page 20
