Introduction

Richard Taylor, The Greek Hoplite Phalanx: The Iconic Heavy Infantry of Classical Greece (Pen & Sword History, 2021) Available on Biblio and Amazon

The Greek Hoplite Phalanx is a survey of warfare on land in Athenian literature. That is both more and less than the title promises. Readers who sit down with it over long winter nights or lazy summer days will find thoughtful comments on many old questions. Readers who want something broad or concise may be less satisfied. In many ways it resembles John Kinloch Anderson’s Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon from 1970.

Contents

This 532-page hardcover is divided into nine chapters, an introduction, and supplementary material such as the bibliography and index. Chapter 1 “Origins” has a potted history of the Greek world after the fall of the Mycenean palaces, a definition of the key terms “hoplite” and “phalanx,” a summary of the hoplite debate (Taylor sees all the arguments about hoplites since 1840 as one debate), and essays on Homeric warfare, the origin of the Greek panoply, the separation of troops who shot arrows and hurled stones and spears from the main line of shieldbearers, the class origins of hoplites, when Greeks began to fight in ranks and files, and what was distinct about the Greek hoplite phalanx. Chapter 2 covers arms and armour (based on tertiary research in English, a decision with bad outcomes), chapter 3 covers organization and drill (ie. Athenian and Spartan organization and drill in Thucydides and Xenophon). Chapter 4 “hoplites and citizens” is another miscellaney with sections on hoplites as a Marxist class, hoplite self-definition against women and slaves, hoplites who were not Greek and Greeks who were not hoplites, the numbers of hoplites in different cities, mercenaries, training for hoplites, discipline for hoplites, recruitment of hoplites, and the material and psychological costs and benefits of serving as a hoplite. Chapter 5 ‘command and control’ faces the problem that Greek generals did little of either, so also addresses the selection of officers, generals’ assistants, training for officers (nonexistent), relations between officers and common soldiers, qualities of good and bad generals, and command on campaign. Chapter 6 ‘hoplites at war’ is something of a miscellaney with light infantry, cavalry, food and fodder, marching, camping, and combat operations other than battle. Chapter 7 ‘the hoplite battle’ begins by admitting that there was no such thing (hoplites were always part of an army with other arms who generally played an important role even if the aristocrats who wrote our histories sometimes try to hide it), then decides to follow Victor Davis Hanson and reconstruct a typical battle from the time of Thucydides and Xenophon. This includes the traditional discussion of combat between Greeks and Persians in Herodotus. Chapter 8 ‘fighting in the phalanx’ will be discussed below. Chapter 9 ‘decline of the hoplite’ considers the Macedonian phalanx, Iphicrates’ reform of hoplite equipment, the Persian kardakes, and thureophoroi (types of heavy infantry which became common as traditional Greek hoplites became rare) and ends with a brief summary of the book’s conclusions.

Scope

Probably the most important statement in this book is a note on sources and methods in chapter 1:

I will therefore attempt no more than to sketch in this chapter a possible picture of phalanx development before the fifth century, stressing the unknowns (known and unknown) and the limitations of the evidence, and the bulk of this book will consider the Classical phalanx of the fifth century and later, when evidence is more plentiful. … A full treatment of the hoplite phalanx would require in-depth knowledge not just of the ancient Greek literary sources, but also of the art and archaeology, and those of the neighbouring contemporary peoples as well. I do not have the expertise in those areas to offer new evidence or draw firm conclusions, so all I can do is to be aware, and hopefully make any readers of this book aware, of the limitations of the traditional approach and of the opportunities offered by a more holistic approach to the subject. (p. 15)

So this book is based on written sources and relies on other researchers to sort and interpret arms and armour, vase paintings, and sculptures. The middle chapters of this book are largely summaries of Thucydides, Xenophon, and the Athenian orators with thoughtful comments drawing on some important recent research. Taylor is opposed to the idea that Greek ways of fighting were very different from those of other peoples. Like some of the British wargamers he is suspicious of the practicality of wheeling groups of thousands of men (swinging a line of men like a door swings on its hinges): in antiquity and in recent times, movements like that seems to have been performed in column so that the men at one end of the line did not have to move so much farther than the men who stood still. He acknowledges that Victor Davis Hanson’s ancient history was written to promote a strange (but very Californian) reactionary political agenda, as Hanson himself said during his short time as a researcher and long career as a pundit. Writing a book about war in Greek literature of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE is a modest goal and certainly a trade book with a single author cannot be as comprehensive as a PhD thesis or a volume written by a team of scholars with different specialties and marketed to a few hundred experts.

Readers familiar with this material will discover tidbits they had not noticed before. Fourth-century Athens, like fifth-century Sparta, had a system of age-classes (men born in the same year were conscripted together, p. 198) It looks to me like most Greek armies had no permanently existing file: groups of soldiers were divided into files of four to fifty men on the day of battle, with all the difficulty of choosing who should go in front, who in the back, and who in the middle which that implies (chapter 3). The Athenian excuse for this seems to have been that this allowed an army to adjust its depth to exactly fit the battlefield, size of the army, and other circumstances: an army with a standard depth needed to be in that depth, half that depth, or twice that depth.

Although several chapter headings come straight out of military science (and some of the language, like referring to soldiers as “the men,” p. 194, comes straight out of the middle of the last century) Taylor recognizes that many Greek soldiers wanted nothing to do with military science, command and control, organization, mandatory peacetime training, etc. He addresses some of the reasons, such as that wealthy Greek men had enough experiences of masters oppressing slaves and strongmen oppressing ordinary men that they were suspicious of letting anyone tell them what to do, and that most Greek cities did not have enough income to pay for peacetime training or a military bureaucracy. Another reason appears on page 224 when Taylor uses the phrase “specific, centrally-organized training for officers.” Such training was only introduced into Europe and its colonies over the course of the nineteenth century, and expecting a little Greek city of a few thousand or a few tens of thousand citizens to introduce it is absurd. Well into the 19th century, most European and settler officers learned their trade by apprenticeship, by self-study, by experience, and by informal programs inside individual units using individual idiosyncratic curriculums and textbooks. If we expect that soldiers needed classroom training, we need to throw off our cultural blinders and let people in other cultures how us how they solved the same problem in different ways.

But anyone in Ancient World Studies knows that the best research uses at least two types of evidence with different strengths and weaknesses. I will return to the tension between showing Greek armies as a product of Greek societies, and showing them as good or bad examples of later military science below.

Writing

The Greek Hoplite Phalanx is clearly written with plenty of academic dry humour. Some parts are quite engaging despite the length and detail of the book. The clear writing and clear thinking do make some problems evident which I will discuss below.

Combat Mechanics

One of the liveliest debates in Greek warfare, both among professionals and the interested public, is what happened when two lines of Greek hoplites came together. Taylor addresses this in two widely separated chapters, 1 and 8. Whereas The Macedonian Phalanx uses the pike phalanxes of 16th and 17th century Europe as a model, the early British scholars used rugby games as a model, and Hans van Wees used photos of fighting in Highland New Guinea as a model, Taylor’s approach is basically philological. In Taylor’s view, the obsession with combat mechanics emerged out of both John Keegan’s Face of Battle (1976) and a debate between British scholars in the 20th century (pp. 391-393). This debate came to center on the question whether references to troops “pushing” (othismos, the participle of the verb othein) referred to whole files of men pushing together, or individual actions in fighting, or were simply metaphors as when armies in the 20th century pushed forward in a sector or when a policy faces resistance (“pushback”). “Modern military expressions such as ‘heavy fire’ or ‘the big push’ cause no confusion among readers.” (p. 394) By quoting all uses of othismos for combat up to the death of Alexander, Taylor shows the use of this term in Thucydides’ account of Delium is almost unique, and concludes:

given the scarcity of uses of the word othismos to describe battles between hoplites, or even battles involving hoplites, it is very hard to maintain the position that othismos is a characteristic and diagnostic feature of hoplite warfare, and that the word is used in a specific technical sense … when applied … to such battles. (p. 400)

Quoting all uses of otheo in Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon leads to a similar conclusion: in Herodotus and Thucydides it seems to be a metaphor for military pressure or threat in general, such as of light-armed troops against fortifications, a fort against the surrounding countryside, or a naval force against the coast they wish to land on, not a technical term for a type of hand-to-hand combat. How Taylor addresses the passages in Xenophon which seem to refer to massed pushing, as well as the technical military writers from later times, readers can see for themselves; these parts of the argument are more difficult to summarize and this is already a long review. Chapter 1 is focused on the concept of phalanx and whether the warriors in the Iliad who do not fight in ordered ranks and files and have freedom to move into the front lines then retreat to the rear should be seen as different from the warriors in Thucydides and Xenophon who do fight in ranks and files and are expected to hold the position assigned to them until victory or death. In this case, Taylor decides that it is meaningful to distinguish between an ordered and unordered phalanx, but that the Classical Greek concept of phalanx was so broad that it must include a variety of arrangements of soldiers in a rough line; he is open to the possibility that most armies in Thucydides and Xenophon had no formal file intervals beyond using their shields as a yardstick. His Homeric warriors stick relatively close together, with the nearest warrior rarely more than a meter away (p. 23), unlike slingers and archers in Kenya and Peru today who rarely stand as close as a meter away from an ally. The wider spacing reduces the risk that a missile aimed at one fighter strikes another, and it lets horsemen move among the fighters.

The classic problem of interpreting combat mechanics is that people with different intuitions and experiences find different things plausible. To say that “there is no evidence in the literary sources that would lead us to suppose that Greek hoplites fought in a fundamentally different way than other types of infantry or formations” (p. 427) begs the question “what do we know about how those other types of infantry fought?” Battle mechanics in Thucydides and Xenophon are nothing like combat mechanics in Polybius, Livy, and Tacitus; this can be seen in areas from casualties (symmetrical in the ancients, unbalanced in the moderns), command and control (basically nonexistent in the ancients, more sophisticated in the moderns), and descriptions of combat (brief and prone to sudden panics in the ancients, broken into pulses of intense fighting and pauses where the two sides throw things, shout, and catch their breath in the moderns). The people I know who have done more playfighting in groups than I have would respectfully disagree that the terrain on which a battle is fought is not important (p. 311). The Society for Creative Anachronism’s summer battles in Pennsylvania sometimes turn on whether one side can run fast enough to seize a roll in the ground two feet high and start striking downwards. I think most fighters would disagree that “in combat, the absolute reach of a spear within a meter or so each way cannot have been of enormous importance” (p. 91), although there are certainly circumstances and tactics which can make a longer weapon disadvantageous. To horribly generalize, people who have fought many mock battles in a group believe that massed pushing by at least the front rank or two ranks happened sometimes, while people who suspect it rarely or never happened are purely academic critics like me. I think that one reason that the general public thinks that Victor Davis Hanson’s California School still have a viable point of view is that on the specific question of combat mechanics, Hans van Wees’ alternative was not convincing to people who have fought many mock battles.

“War in Athenian Literature, 432-362 BCE” v. “War in the Greek World, 750-300 BCE”

The fundamental flaw of The Greek Hoplite Phalanx is that it cannot decide whether to be “War in Athenian Literature, 432-362 BCE” or “War in the Greek World, 750-300 BCE.” We saw that chapter 1 limits the scope of the book to ethnically Greek phalanxes in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, and says that it will be based on Greek texts and rely on other scholars for artwork and archaeology. That is a reasonable choice, but the rest of the book keeps touching on earlier periods, while neglecting written sources for cities other than Athens and Sparta. Since there are almost no surviving writings in Greek on warfare between the Homeric poems and the fifth century BCE, and almost none before Alexander outside of the Aegean, the statements about earlier periods are based on much later written sources rather than centering the many contemporary sources (archaeology, vase paintings, sculptures) and using the few late written sources to support them. This results in a book which often feels much like research by classicists from the 20th century, even though it warns that Athenian practices may not have been typical and questions whether Greek military practices were unique. Since almost all the examples given are Athenian and Spartan, and since war in the Archaic is implied to be much like warfare after 432, the warnings that Athens may not have been typical are unlikely to stick in readers’ memories.

Regarding the Greek practice of building a trophy (tropaion) of arms nailed to a post where the losing side had first turned (trope) and ran, we read:

It was almost universal practice between Greek cities to follow this procedure, although we can not tell if it was of any great antiquity, since it is known only from the early fifth century. (p. 316)

But the very fact that trophies appear in vase paintings from the fifth century BCE but not the sixth, and in stories about wars from the fifth century BCE but not the sixth, suggests that the type of warfare based on clashes of homogeneous lines of spearmen may not have been much older than the fifth century BCE. The trophy is tied to an expectation that once hoplites start to run they will keep running, while other types of warriors, including the warriors in the Iliad, can run for a time then turn around and rally. As for “almost universal,” is there evidence for this practice outside southern mainland Greece? Did Alexander and the successors build trophies of arms, and if not does that suggest it was never a Macedonian custom? What about the Greeks of Italy and Sicily?

Diodorus Siculus gives us a continuous history of Syracuse in the classical period, but this book rarely says anything about Syracuse except for the Athenian attacks on the city. Couldn’t Syracuse provide some examples outside Athens of the practice of electing generals (eg. Plutarch, Life of Dion, 29, 37, 38)? (p. 192, cp. the hasty general from Argos on p. 218) Syracuse also provides examples of how strongmen could use standing forces to seize control and tax revenues to fund further forces to keep control, which supports a theme of this book, the way that practices which were not ideal for fighting external wars were often more effective at maintaining political stability at home.

Great and terrible wars of the classical period such as the First Peloponnesian War (where the Athenians defeated the Spartans and the Boeotians in a single year!) and the Sacred War are basically absent from this book, even though they are covered by Diodorus Siculus. So are the tacticians, even though they seem to incorporate material on the Greek phalanx as well as the Macedonian (not just divisions of units, but also a reference to two ranks not five ranks extending their spears in front of the front line; as a genre in world history, technical literature tends to rework earlier material without credit). Excluding Diodorus Siculus and the tacticians would make sense in a book on war in Athenian literature, but not in a book on war in the classical period (Aeneas Tacticus is mentioned a few times).

Even the use of written evidence focuses on texts passed down in manuscript rather than inscriptions, papyri, coins, and fragments (quotations preserved in works on other topics such as grammar). The section on recruitment focuses on Athens and Sparta and does not discuss the army of the Boeotian League in the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia or the fragments of the Aristotelean Constitution of the Thessalians (pp. 197-200, cp. 123: HOXy has recently been translated into English and German, for the fragments of the constitution see Sławomir Sprawski, “Peltasts in Thessaly,” in Nicholas V. Sekunda and Bogdan Burliga (ed.), Iphicrates, Peltasts, and Lechaion (Gdansk, 2014) pp. 95-112). The section on training at Athens skips Eupolis, the poet of old Comedy who wrote a whole play about a soft youth being prepared for war. On the other hand, the ‘Oath of Plataia’ shows up but is not named and the questions about its date and composition history are kept to an endnote (p. 210). At one point the author complains about the lack of evidence for warfare before 432 BCE (p. 254), but this is only a lack of written evidence. Some types of evidence are more common in earlier periods and parts of Greece far from Athens: deposits of weapons in temples are rare after 480, and weapons were deposited in graves in Italy, Cyprus, Macedonia, and Thrace for centuries after southern mainland Greeks had given up the practice.

Because it relies so heavily on Athenian literature about the wars of Athens and Sparta, but talks about the whole Greek world from 750-300 BCE, this book gives the impression that Athenian and Spartan practices from 432 onwards are all we can know and that Athenian practices after this date were typical of earlier periods and other regions. Because narratives about Archaic Greece such as “the rise of the polis” or “the reforms of Lycurgus” are so widespread, a book that does not explicitly challenge them can seem to endorse them. As Dmitri Nakassis warns us, if we say we are doing something broad but implicitly accept that Greek and Latin manuscripts are the star our work must orbit around, however hard we fire our rockets we will find ourselves circling back towards Rome and Athens.

Poor Models and Outdated Narratives

Broad statements based on part of the evidence lead to another problem, the use of poor models and outdated narratives. For example, page 301 repeats Victor Davis Hanson’s old thesis that “Greek war aims were frequently limited, and wars of annihilation and conquest relatively rare … it is also true that, perhaps especially in the Archaic period but also in the Classical, that on the whole, war aims were of a more limited nature and that once honour was satisfied and status established, aims could be considered met.” Like the walls of an Archaic Greek city, this thesis collapsed as soon as it was attacked by experts. Someone destroyed Lefkandi on Euboia and Argos destroyed Asine in the Peloponnese in the eighth century. The Iliad takes it for granted that the Achaeans set out in their longships, attack towns, and enslave or kill anyone who does not escape. Miltiades the champion of Marathon, like the warriors on the Shield of Achilles, landed with an army on Paros, drove the Parians inside their walls, then threatened to destroy them unless they paid a hundred talents (Hdt. 6.133.2). In the classical period, Sparta destroyed Plataea and Athens destroyed Melos, but Argos destroyed Mycenae (Brouwers pp. 56, 88), the Thebans had harsh plans for Athens at the end of the Ionian war, the tyrants of Syracuse enslaved or deported whole cities of Greeks, and the kings of Macedon were just as brutal. Xenophon’s Cyrus says that it is law among all men (not just barbarians) that the conquerors can do as they like with the people and goods of a city, although the fact that he needs to tell his soldiers this suggests that in Xenophon’s experience, some soldiers might have moral qualms. Even the ‘moderate, limited’ Archidamian War began with rival fleets killing the crews of captured roundships and making many raids from sea to land which produced money, presumably from stealing civilians’ durable goods and cattle and ransoming or enslaving anyone who could not run fast enough. Decisive results like enslaving or deporting everyone in a city were rare because they were hard to achieve and provoked outrage, but we can find many examples as soon as we tear our mind away from “Sparta did not destroy Athens and Thebes did not destroy Sparta.” Many of the large poleis in writers of the fifth century BCE onwards existed because one city had assimilated others and their territory, whether relatively voluntarily (by synoikismos Wikipedia ‘synoecism’ as on Rhodes in 408/407 and Andros around the year 700) or at spearpoint.

When warfare before Marathon is discussed, it is discussed in terms of the city-state or polis. That is how Thucydides and Xenophon frame their histories of their times, but in their histories there are also wars between factions within a single city. Even smaller groups make war in the Homeric poems. It is likely that many wars in the sixth century BCE and earlier were between aristocrats, families, and villages not cities. Herodotus and Thucydides tell us that their histories are about especially big wars, and Xenophon complains that historians are expected to talk about big men and big cities and pass over the worthy deeds of others. Discussing the size of armies before 479 BCE in terms of later literary testimonies about the armies of cities begs this question about how many early wars were between communities as large as a city, rather than wealthy families crewing three fifty-oared galleys with friends and relations and setting out to steal someone’s cattle and tripods or kill someone who had dishonoured a daughter or judged a case wrongly. These wars did not have a whole city to remember them, and nobody could call them the biggest war ever like Herodotus claimed of the Persian Wars or Thucydides claimed of the second Peloponnesian War. We should not be surprised that the few stories about wars in Archaic Greece are about wars between cities which were powerful in Classical times.

The focus on war between city-states is also an example of a tendency to see the evidence through the categories of our armies and our military science (or perhaps our grandparents’ armies and our grandparents’ military science). In a world where we establish Tim Horton’s and A&W franchises on NATO bases in Afghanistan and hire Pakistani jingle-trucks to supply them, should we be so surprised that little Greek cities of a few thousand or a few hundred thousand residents relied on merchants and local governments to supply their armies rather than creating a permanent, specialized logistic service for the army? Athenian literature is full of accusations that people were stealing everything movable from Athens’ few public institutions such as the naval dockyard and temple building funds. Once a battle started Greek generals had very little ability to command and control at all, but since most Greek armies could not move in deliberate ways during combat anyways, that probably did not matter. And of course the very idea of ‘hoplite battle’ may say more about the class and ethnic biases of Athenian literature than about which types of troops fought. Athenian literature is full of examples of aristocrats, hoplites, and rowers arguing about who had made a worthy military contribution (and cities like Athens and Sparta arguing who had been a hero and who had been a hanger-on). This mental framework was more effective in The Macedonian Phalanx because the armies of Hellenistic kingdoms were a different kind of army growing from a social and political context much more like that of 18th and 19th century Europe.

So as not to be purely destructive, I wonder if a look at the armies of free towns in early modern Europe or the United States in the middle of the 19th century might have helped break this book away from measuring ancient Greek militias against our armies. Samuel Clemens’ comrades in a Confederate militia were ignorant of military science and hostile to anyone who tried to tell them what to do, but they could be effective as long as their leaders knew their limits and their opponents were not too well trained or organized. Throughout the 19th century professional officers and wannabe officers fought a war of words against the US state militias, and fun-ruining historians don’t always think that their criticisms were fair or disinterested (episode 133 of the r/askHistorians podcast will get you started). If you have spent years of time, sweat, and study to become a highly trained soldier, seeing that people can fight and even win without your guidance can reduce you to spitting rage.

(More dubious points are listed below)

Unworthy Authorities

The chapter on arms and armour shows the limits of relying on authorities. Taylor chose the secondary research in English rather than the primary publications of sites from the sixth century onwards in Greek and German. Since most of this research made limited use of those publications, or were written as part of the debate amongst Anglo classicists of the California and Krentz-van Wees schools rather than out of curiosity about material culture, they did not give him the clearest or most complete picture. A good example of the problem is the section on swords (pp. 93, 94) which does not inform readers that the classical Greek type of sword was invented in the sixth century BCE, and that earlier swords had a different construction and were sometimes much longer or shorter. It says that these swords were “iron” but the only ones which have been metallurgically analyzed contain a reasonable carbon content. Using research by Effi Photos, Hans-Otto Schmitt, Imma Killian-Dirlmeier, Marek Vercik, and Holger Baitinger would have provided more specific and accurate information and contributed to the question whether hoplites in the sixth century and earlier fought like the hoplites in Thucydides and Xenophon: if basic items of kit changed drastically, and in early times were different in different parts of Greece, is it reasonable to assume that fighting styles were basically the same for hundreds of years across the Greek world? Swords in classical Athens were probably short because they were meant to be used by close-packed infantry, but earlier warriors with a panoply may have fought from horseback or in small groups landing from ship or sneaking up on an enemy settlement at night. Different types of swords would be better for those different contexts.

Other problems are harder to blame on not using very expensive, rare books in a foreign language. To say that Greek hoplites carried spears 1.5 to 3.0 metres long is not a bad estimate (p. 90), but no basis for this estimate is given. The longest spear in classical Greek art which I know is the 2.75 metre spear on the grave stele of Panoitios, and I explain how I calculate that so that anyone who wishes can repeat my work. Stylized calf muscles were certainly not “moulded or etched” onto bronze greaves (p. 89); the construction of the wooden cores of shields is not uncertain although the most detailed study is in Modern Greek, the best English article is only available from the Vatican gift shop (seriously!), and we can certainly question whether the few best-preserved finds show all the methods of construction (p. 58). The section on armour gives time and sympathy to the glued linen theory despite the fact that it is the only theory about ancient linen armour which matches no surviving armour before 1970 and no description of armour before 1869 (and that description was based on a mistranslation of a summary of a medieval chronicle, not anything from the ancient world).

Outside of the chapter on arms and armour I noticed few errors (see below for a list). These few errors are on topics which are peripheral to war in Athenian literature, and since Taylor argues that Greek hoplites did not have a unique way of fighting linked to their unique kit, the exact properties of that kit are not essential to his argument.

Bibliography

It is now impossible to read or cite all relevant research on early Greek warfare, even in English. Taylor has worked together an impressive variety of research such as Rose Mary Sheldon on tricks and ambushes and Jason Crowley and Owen Rees on psychology. Some pointers to John W.I. Lee’s work on the social structure of the Ten Thousand might have helped to clarify how different early Greek armies were to our own armies. Whereas the armies which emerged in 18th century Europe take in a pool of recruits, break up their existing social ties, assign them to a new hierarchy of units, and train them in all the skills they will need, early Greek armies were self-governing communities which temporarily adopted a special military organization when they were formed up for combat then went back to sharing a campfire with their friends and neighbours (cp. the note on page 188 that the Spartan messes or syssitia did not correspond to military units). Comments on Spartan institutions and practices such as the agoge (p. 188) might have been rethought after the newer research by Stephen Hodkinson and others out of the UK which systematically separates mumbling about the bad old days and old scholars’ tales from the few contemporary sources. Some researchers suspect that the Sparta of Thucydides and Xenophon (divided into rigidly separated castes, short on funds and every kind of military power but hoplites) came into existence after Xerxes’ invasion of Greece as part of the reaction of leisured propertyowners against the rising poor which we see in Athens in the same period. Focusing on Thucydides’ and Xenophon’s picture of Sparta is defensible but it leaves out some nuance and spice.

As noted above, works in German and Greek by archaeologists provide much more accurate and specific information about arms and armour than anything in English; among the literature in English I would have emphasized the 2010 article by Peter Krentz and Brouwers’ Henchmen of Ares. Both of these are detailed and based on careful, open-minded reading of recent publications by archaeologists in continental Europe, and in my experience they hold up to close reading much better than the archaeology in Reinstating the Hoplite. The section on shield aprons pp. 70, 71 could have cited the original publications by Poulsen and Fraser rather than later retellings of the theory. Ian Morris’ research on Greek house sizes and inequality might have helped the discussion of economic classes within Greek cities, or indeed the obvious way that southern mainland Greece was exceptional: by the fifth century BCE, it had one of the densest collections of durable goods in the world. At the same time that warriors in Denmark were riding 20-oared boats and throwing bone-tipped spears, warriors in the Aegean were sailing on 170-oared galleys with massive bronze rams and swinging steel swords and bronze-plated shields.

Style and Physical Format

Books from Pen & Sword are good as books. I noticed no major spelling or grammar mistakes or inconsistencies. The paper is firm and the binding is strong although the margins are somewhat narrow. A series of clear black and white line drawings illustrated key vase paintings, sculptures, military equipment, and tactical movements. As usual with Pen & Sword there are endnotes organized by chapter but the corresponding pages or chapters are not printed in the top margin. This makes it very hard to find a specific note. The only serious failing of this book as a book is the very brief index (five pages, 1% of the content indexed).

Conclusion

Because the cover shows the Chigi Vase, chapter 1 focuses on Homer and the Archaic period, chapter 2 focuses on archaeology, and there are many references to Geometric and Archaic Greece scattered throughout the text, I had been reading this book for hours until I understood that it was supposed to be about warfare in Greek literature from Herodotus onwards. The Greek Hoplite Phalanx is good as long as it sticks to Athenian literature and the Homeric epics, but unreliable whenever it touches earlier periods or archaeology. Other aspects are not ‘wrong’ but are not the way of looking at things which I would have chosen. Rather than structuring the book around things our armies have, and showing that Greeks did not have them or had them to a very limited extent, I would have focused on how ancient and modern soldiers faced common problems but worked out different solutions that fit their societies and cultures (although Xenophon certainly has a lot to say about how to make a Greek army more like our armies, and many readers will assume that an army can only function if it is like our armies). This book’s perspective on Sparta is straight out of Thucydides and Xenophon which is a fine approach but not as exciting or multifaceted as some recent research.

Writing a survey is hard. While specialists now know its flaws, the research on classical Greek warfare during the Cold War was still so good that it inspired medieval historians, Danish archaeologists, and the general public. The Greek Hoplite Phalanx is a reasonable introduction to warfare on land in Classical Athens, but not as good, broad, or sound in its methods as reading Brouwers’ Henchmen of Ares, van Wees’ Myths and Realities, and Xenophon’s Anabasis. Experienced students will find thought-provoking comments on established questions packed into the cracks like a sheepskin in a hoplite’s helmet. Anyone interested in the mechanics of ancient combat will want to read chapters 1 and 8. But the refusal to accept the limits of focusing on Thucydides and Xenophon, or the demands of studying the Archaic period and the whole Greek world, mean that no audience is likely to be completely satisfied. I think that one more pass of revisions to exclude some topics and double-check others would have made for a much better book.

The Greek Hoplite Phalanx by Richard Taylor is available on Biblio and Amazon among others

I received a complimentary copy of this book to review. As always, telling a friend about this site, sharing a link, or donating is appreciated!

PS. Since this post was scheduled, the owners of Reddit did something monumentally greedy and stupid. I am not changing the post now, but will consider whether to link to it in the future.

Edit 2023-09-08: Rawlings, The Ancient Greeks at war, p. 154 n. 5 has a handy list of Greek cities which later writers said were destroyed in the 8th, 7th, and 6th centuries (obviously the study of early Greece should focus on the contemporary sources which are archaeology and a few texts).

Edit 2025-05-08: If you can get it, an handy introduction to warfare among the western Greeks is
Joshua R. Hall, “The Western Greeks and the ‘Greek Warfare’ Narrative,” in Roel Konijnendijk, C. Kucewicz, and Matthew Lloyd, (eds.), Brill’s Companion to Greek Land Warfare Beyond the Phalanx. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2021, pp. 266-292

Errors

p. 165 “citizens of Greek cities were all male”: since Pericles’ Citizenship Decree of 451/450 BCE said that a citizen was the child of two citizens (astoi, Aristotle Constitution of the Athenians 26.4, 42.1) women were clearly citizens of Athens although they had no political rights; Herodotus mentions that among the Lycians the child of a citizen woman (aste) and a slave is a citizen (1.173). Some of the archaic law codes such as the inscription at Gortyn might be worth studying. Roel Konijendijk recommends Citizenship in Classical Athens (2017) by Josine Blok.

pp 301-302 “In the Classical period, population dynamics seem to have stabilized, and in some cities – particularly Sparta – shortage of manpower … was more of a problem than what we might anachronistically call lebensraum“: but see eg. Ruben Post, The military policy of the Hellenistic Boiotian League, MA Thesis, McGill University (2013) https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/z316q5029 for evidence that the population of Boeotia peaked in the fourth century BCE; Ian Morris has a lot of research on population change in Greece in the first millennium BCE. The speeches of Isocrates call for Greek cities to conquer land in the east so that the masses will not be poor (ie. forced to work for a living).

p. 254 “the very hoplite-centered warfare of the Archaic period”: see Brouwers or van Wees (and this is a theory from the California School which first the Krentz-van Wees school and then the continental archaeologists of Brouwers’ school challenged, not a theory which emerged among the revisionists)

Dubia

The potted history in the preface feels old-fashioned

p. 177 graffiti at Abu Simbel: Graffiti in ancient Egyptian tombs and temples (and in medieval European churches!) is very common and in some cases was clearly made with the custodians’ permission. It took time, light, and ladders to carve some of these messages or images into stone.

p. 86 “Helmets … were inevitably made of metal.” Archaeologically preserved helmets are all iron or bronze, but archaeologically preserved shields all have extensive iron and bronze components, and from literary sources and finds in northern Europe we know that many shields contained no bronze or iron at all. Caracalla’s Macedonian phalanx wore oxhide helmets (cited p. 79!), and Brouwers pointed out that helmets appear in vase paintings before any survive so were probably of plant- or animal-based materials. It is therefore likely that the archaeolgical finds show us the prestigious, corrosion-resistant bronze helms but not the low-status, biodegradable hide, horn, and rope helmets which once existed.

p. 100 “The Spartans – or at least their full citizen class, the Spartiates – had, from the time of their semi-legendary lawgiver Lycurgus … devoted themselves full-time to practice for and of military action” (cp. p. 3): no text from before the Battle of Thermopylae suggests that the Spartans are known for disciplined living or excellence in warfare (like one text from this period says they are known for their women), and in classical times the military component of the Spartan lifestyle was limited to learning to obey orders, hunting a lot, and learning to perform and direct basic infantry drill, not the use of weapons or “professionalism.” See the suggestion of Stephen Hodkinson’s “Was Classical Sparta a Military Society?” above.

pp. 183, 184: The Homeric poems are vague about where skill or excellence come from (Odyssey 22.350) but didn’t Chiron teach Achilles hunting and medicine among other arts? Hunting was seen as fundamental to warfare from Xenophon to the 18th century. https://www.theoi.com/Georgikos/KentaurosKheiron.html There are also competitions in the world of Odysseus.

p. 197 “Persian armies are often described going into battle ‘under the lash'”: Does this trope exist outside Herodotus?

p. 204 “the expenses of maintaining an army (and often a fleet for amphibious operations) in the field would greatly outweigh what could be seized in movable property (even including slaves)”: But Thucydides and Xenophon tell us that Spartan and Athenian fleets could support themselves and sometimes generate a profit by sailing around and taking money and goods from people on the coasts and islands, and Herodotus has Polycrates the tyrant of Samos use his fleet of pentekonters and army of archers in a similar way (3.39). As for individual soldiers, Xenophon apologizes for the Ten Thousand by saying that they did not enlist in hope of plunder and that he did not even accept a wage, so his contemporaries thought that being a soldier could be a way to get rich. It was certainly a way to make connections with wealthy patrons who might give land or an allowance so you did not have to work for a living. Polybius’ and Plutarch’s Roman citizens think they can get rich on a good war against some opponents.

p. 296 Polybius 13.3 on the ‘good old days’: How do we know what time Polybius meant by “the ancients”? Assuming that he meant “the Archaic and early Classical Greeks” begs this question. This passage is a fragment so its context has been lost.

pp. 463 Describing the Macedonian phalanx as “professional soldiers” only to explain that actually they were mostly short-term conscripts and militia who were obliged to train as a group for a limited term in peacetime, just like the Athenians after Chaeronaea.

p. 473 Attempt to revive the old theory that hoplites were not suitable for “rapid, irregular operations on difficult terrain” (after rejecting it in chapter 1; AFAIK nobody makes this claim about Roman auxiliaries with their large shields, single spears, and iron armour and helmets).

(scheduled 26 May 2023)