There Was No Typical Polis

Bret Devereaux recently published a strong post in his series on the hoplite wars. This was an especially strong post because it drew on his research focus. His current book creates financial and demographic models of the Roman Republic, Carthage, and the Hellenistic kingdoms and argues that the Romans were able to get citizens and allies to contribute more military service, arms, and armour than their rivals, while some of their rivals had higher incomes in silver. Victor Davis Hanson and Hans van Wees also created detailed models of early Greek farms and how the men with panoplies (hoplites and horsemen) fit into ancient Greek societies: how many of them were there, how wealthy were they, and where did their incomes come from? Even in Athens the sources are not as good as Polybius and Livy on the Roman Republic, but Hans van Wees was able to believe in them because he came from Homeric studies where the evidence is even worse. van Wees has long suspected that there was no hoplite class, but a leisure class who could easily afford a panoply and a group of small farmers and shopkeepers who could afford it at the cost of suffering. This week I will go over some of the ideas in Devereaux’ post from a slightly different perspective and show where they lead me. This post has consumed two days of writing time and is not as polished as I wish it was.

Empires Make Things Simple

Its hard to write history outside the context of an empire or a powerful state. Everything goes in different directions, one story does not have a clear connection to another, and there are so many names and relationships to learn. So since classical antiquity, and again since the nineteenth century, people have tried to simplify early Greek military practices into a single story. Thucydides and Aristotle try to tell the story of how the armies and navies of their times might have developed in the misty past, even though nobody wrote Greek prose at that time so they cannot have known what really happened. This trope is related to another Greek custom of describing foreigners in ethnographic terms. Athenian writers present Spartans as exotic and write more about their customs than they write about other kinds of Hellenes. Macedonians received similar attention during the reign of Philip of Macedon. If you take this approach to history, you can signal out some peoples as exotic and alien, while implying (without actually saying) that everyone you do not describe is like you. Just like histories tend to be about men unless the authors deliberately include women, many introductions to ancient Greece give the impression that ancient Greece was like Athens except for Sparta and Macedon which were different, and they achieve this by not saying much about parts of the Greek world far from Athens.

As Devereaux says, the Roman Republic spent several hundred years engineering Italy to provide the SPQR as many well-equipped infantry as possible. When it conquered nations in Italy, it often confiscated some of their land and divided it into small equal plots for a colony of Roman citizens. When it elbowed them into being ‘allies’ (socii) it demanded that they provide armies similar to a Roman legion. One of the main taxes on citizens, the tributum, was a tax on families who owned property but did not have a man in the army that year. While there are many questions about how exactly this worked (the Romans did not mint coins at all until the third century BCE, and for a long time just minted whenever they ran short rather than every year) the Romans engineered Italy to produce families which could provide a well-equipped man for the army. So we can speak in general about Italian armies and Italian society, even though we know very little about allied forces.

The Neo-Babylonian kings, Teispids, and Achaemenids had a policy of expanding irrigation in Babylonia. While no source tells us why they did this, the obvious answer was that large numbers of people clustered along canals provided more labour and taxes than small numbers of people drifting across the steppes of Iraq. We can also speak in general about armed force in Neo-Babylonian, Teispid, and Achaemenid Babylonia although we have no solid numbers for population and income.

The Greek World was Anarchic

However, Archaic and Classical Greece had no Roman Republic and no Great King who forced them to contribute to a single military system. They were a glorious anarchy of independent communities and clans which were sometimes organized into a league or under a hegemon. I have written before about how in some Iron Age Greek cemeteries, early steel swords are daggers 40 cm long, while in other cemeteries they are great slashing things a meter long. The first Greeks to use steel swords did not all want them for the same purpose. By the fifth and fourth century BCE, when we have written sources, we see that different Greek societies had very different armed forces.

Thessaly had many serfs, an elite of horseowners, and a modest number of light-armed peltasts with spears and cheap shields. Crete was divided into many little feuding cities whose men used distinctive bows and arrows and small bronze-faced shields. Laconia had an elite of leisured Spartiates who fought as spearmen on foot and bossed around their neighbours and helot serfs. Their city of Sparta was proudly unwalled and lacked the impressive monuments of cities like Athens or Corinth. Thessalians, Cretans, and Laconians were all Greeks (Hellenes), but they did not fight the same way. The wider Greek world from Massilia among the Celts, Sicily facing Punic Africa, Cyrene in North Africa with its charioteers, and the cities of Crimea and Scythia must have been even more diverse.

We would not have to worry about all this diversity if the Greek world had been a nice simple empire. But since it was not, trying to generalize about the social structure of Archaic Greece or the class basis of the hoplite phalanx will only lead to half-truths. Even the focus on hoplites can be a way of not talking about the many different ways that Greeks fought, or that some of the men with bronze breastplates rode into battle on chariots or galloped into the fray on horseback, jumped off to fight on food, and let their squires lead the horse out of the hail of spears and stones (hippobatai and hippostrophoi).¹ Italian hoplites may have never given up their second spear like Athenian hoplites eventually did. Most of these studies stick to Boeotia, Attica, and Laconia because we have the best evidence for how armies fit into Boeotian, Athenian, and Spartan society. There was a vast Greek world which we cannot study this way, and we have hints from the swords in early cemeteries to the Corinthian pots with knights and squires that those other Greeks did things differently. If we had the collection of constitutions compiled by Aristotle and his students, we might be able to say more about the range of variations, but almost all of those have been lost.

We can survey the physical remains of cities and speak of a statistical Normalpolis (one with a few thousand inhabitants under constant threat from neighbours or under the thumb of a major power like the Persian King or the city of Thebes). But social structures are not something like “how many children do people have?” which varies through a small range with a simple statistical distribution. They are much wilder, and much harder to understand without detailed written sources. As scholars realized that the men with panoplies fought in many different ways and had many different class backgrounds and could even be barbarians, sometimes they question whether these are really hoplites rather than expand their mental model to include more of the ancient reality. Models should serve data not pretend to be its master.

Devereaux argued that early Greece could not have many small equal farms because it did not have a Roman Republic to redistribute the land and tax large holdings and pay the money back to small farmers in the form of military pay. I argue that for the same reason, the Greek world could not have a single relationship between fighting and land ownership. It had too many different regimes with too many different ideas about the ideal society, and too many accidents of history like a colony which gave every settler the same amount of land, or the Spartan inheritance laws which let wealth become more and more concentrated and caused the number of Spartiates to shrink. The Boeotians let their population explode in the fourth century BCE, the time they were briefly one of the greatest powers in mainland Greece, and it may have reached an all-time high before collapsing and never recovering.²

Three Generalizations

Rather than narratives about hoplites, I think it would be possible to start a history from three generaizations about early Greek warfare. The first is as certain as anything can be in ancient history, the second is controversial, and the third is speculative.

• By about 650 BCE, Greeks shared some common military equipment and practices such as bronze helmets, round shields shaped like a soup-plate, riding horses into battle, and landing from the sea in long galleys with bronze rams. This equipment was very expensive, and early on armourers and bladesmiths competed to show off wealth with intricate embossed designs, long cutting swords, and beautiful castings. They were nothing at all like the arms and arms of the Hjortspring people with their simple affordable materials, minimalist design, and lack of decoration. They were also unlike the simple Montefortino helmets and pila of Middle and Late Republican Italy.
• Most early Greek societies were minoritarian regimes where a minority of the free male population (and an even smaller minority of the free and slave population) had political rights and was expected to provide itself with arms and fight when called upon. Hanson and van Wees agreed about this, they just disagreed whether up to 50% or up to 25% of Athenian men were obliged to fight as hoplites. The Iliad has a wealthy class who fight in armour and a vaguely described world of spinners and farmhands in the similes.
• Over time, kit got simpler, durable goods became more common, and the share of the population with a long spear and a strong shield ready to fight in a line increased. Aristotle thinks that in the best polis, those who keep arms and have political rights should barely outnumber those who lack both (Politics 1297b). Neither Hanson not van Wees thinks that this describes most cities in the fifth century BCE or earlier. Note that this is a narrative of progress and increased inclusion, whereas Hanson tells a narrative of a golden age before the Persian Wars and a fall from grace afterwards.

Within these three general constraints, there was vast variation. While many Greeks used shields with rims, Boeotians, Illyrians, and Macedonians sometimes used smaller round shields without rims. Some men with panoplies fought from horseback or rode into battle, hopped off, and let a squire lead the horse to safety. Some Greek societies had serfs and others did not. Some had many slaves and others had few. Some had many warships who needed rowers and others had few. A Cretan with a beautiful feathered helmet, a bronze-faced shield, a well-balanced spear, and a horn bow with a quiver of heavy bronze-tipped arrows might wear as much wealth as a Corinthian hoplite without fighting the same way. Since 2013, our task has been finding ways to think and write about all this wonderful contradictory diversity in the wider Greek world which are not so complicated that only a few dozen specialists can use them. I think the contrast between the Roman republic’s engineering all of Italy, and thousands of Greek cities and confederations engineering their small parts of the Greek world, might be one place to start.

Keep reading for a bonus thought on the estimates of ancient Greek incomes in comparison with another society.

Although I’m not weighed down by armour, I can’t keep dodging my other responsibilities forever while I am paid CAD $30/mo for my writing. If you can, please support this site.

Back in 2020, Jonathan Dean noted that ancient historians think you needed much less land to be a well-armed infantryman than medieval historians think. I would like to lay out some of those contrasting figures for your consideration, using a book I have on my shelves and an article I have on my laptop.

People who believe in the Solonic wealth classes think that the zeugitai of Athens had to own a panoply and fight as hoplites and had a minimum income of 200 medimnoi of produce (a volumetric measure different for grain and liquids)³. Hans van Wees estimated that a mixed farm with wheat, barley, olives, and grapes could produce that much on 7.4 hectares (18 acres) plus fallow (up to 12.7 ha / 30 acres) – ed.⁴ Its traditional to compare peasant incomes in terms of volumes of grain so lets estimate how big 200 measures of wheat is (there were all kinds of ways to cheat, such as piling your bushel high to make it big, or including inedible waste such as the chaff and husks).

200 medimnoi of wheat @ 51.84 L per medimnos (Devereaux) = 10,368 L of wheat

In 1299, Robert le Kyng was a serf with a yard of land (as much land as two oxen could plough in a season) at Bishop’s Cleeve in Gloucestershire. We will assume 30 acres of arable land and a three-field system to get his production as high as possible, although yards varied in area and some farmers used a two-field system (half the land fallow to kill weeds and feed livestock, half cropped to feed people). Medievalist Christopher Dyer estimated his productivity as follows:⁵

28 quarters 3 bushels of wheat, barley, peas, and oats @ 8 bushels per quarter = 227 bushels @ 35.24 L per bushel (Wikipedia old or US bushel) = 7999 L of wheat, barley, peas, and oats

Oats and barley are not as nutritious per volume as wheat. The Romans punished soldiers by replacing their wheat rations with barley. These are products before Robert le Kyng has to pay tithes or rent. So Dyer’s comfortable peasant produces about 8,000 L of grain and peas per year, and van Wees’ leisured farmer produces 10,000 L of tasty wheat.

Edit: Dyer estimates that a family of two adults and three minor children would consume 10 quarters (80 bushels) of grain per year plus meat, cheese, and dairy (so the Robert’s farm produced enough for three families before deducting seed grain), while van Wees (p. 48) suggests that a family of five would consume 44 to 58 measures of wheat, oil, and wine a year (so his minimum zeugites farm would support 3 or 4 families before deducting seed grain). Robert’s family drank ale and spread their bread with butter, so didn’t need olives or grapes. A poor family might feed more people by going hungry and eating less nutritious grains, but “how many comfortable families could this farm support?” is not a bad way of comparing these two farms.

Dyer imagines Robert hiring farmhands to help with the harvest or thatch his roofs, not having year-round help or being able to leave most of the work to his farmhands. He certainly could not sublease the land and still live well, and was not a rich peasant (traditionally reckoned at £5 / year in income, whereas Robert’s income was probably closer to £3 or £4). He was in the top quarter of peasants by landholding, but still had to work the fields with his own back and his own oxen.⁶ Under King Henry’s decree de forma pacis conservande of 1242, he was supposed to equip himself with sword, bow, arrows, and knife if he was not excused for holding land as a serf. Nobody with his income was expected to have a helmet or any sort of armour.

With almost twice the land a similar amount of land, Robert is well short of the standard of living that many ancient historians imagine a zeugites had. Edit: Zeugites is usually thought to come from a yoke (zeugos ζεῦγος) of oxen for drawing a plow and a cart, just what a yardlander was able to afford. End Edit. I am not a specialist in ancient agriculture or demographics but I think it would be very useful for ancient historians and medieval historians to have a conversation about why they come to different conclusions.

Edit: Lin Foxhall notes farmers at Methone in the Peloponnese living off mixed farms of around 3.5 hectares (8-9 acres) in the 1970s.⁷ These farmers aimed to produce some excess grain to sell and used some modern fertilizer but no tractors. So van Wees’ zeugites farm is only about twice as big as fed a family in the 1970s.

(scheduled 11 January 2026)

Edit 2026-01-12: link Arist. Pol. and Arist. Ath. Pol. Include estimates of how many families each farm could support, cite Foxhall.

Edit 2025-01-14: add back in van Wees’ allowance for fallow land

1. Josho Brouwers, “From Horsemen to Hoplites: Some Remarks on Archaic Greek Warfare,” BABesch 82 (2007, 305-319. doi: 10.2143/BAB.82.2.2020779) or Brouwers, Henchmen of Ares, pp. 76-78 ↩︎
2. Ruben Post, The Military Policy of the Hellenistic Boiotian League (MA thesis, McGill University, 2012) https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/theses/z316q5029 ↩︎
3. Edit: I was wrong! A medimnos is always a dry measure, but Aristotle (Ath. Pol. 7.4) believes that wet measures were also counted, and van Wees followed him. This could be a mistake because markets in Solon’s Attica were probably limited and “how many tenant farmers and servants can you feed from your land?” may have been more important than “how much could you sell your crop for if anyone wanted to buy it?” See Vincent Rosivach, “Notes on the Pentakosiomedimnos‘ Five Hundred Medimnoi,” The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 55, No. 2 (Dec., 2005), pp. 597-601 ↩︎
4. Hans van Wees, “The Myth of the Middle-Class Army” in T. Bekker-Nielsen/L. Hannestad (eds.), War as a Cultural and Social Force: Essays on Warfare in Antiquity (2001) pp. 45-71 especially pages 50, 51 ↩︎
5. Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (1989, this printing 2003) pp. 110-116 ↩︎
6. Dyer, Standards of Living, p. 119 has a breakdown of English peasants by the size of their land in 1279/1280 ↩︎
7. Lin Foxhall, “A view from the top: evaluating the Solonian property classes,” in Lynette G. Mitchell and P.J. Rhodes (eds.), The Development of the Polis in Archaic Greece (Routledge: London and New York, 1997), pp. 61–74 (this passage page 71) ↩︎