if you trust your rebel heart, ride it into battle

Posted by Bret Devereaux

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This is the second half of the third part of our four-part series (I, II, IIIa) discussing the debates surrounding ancient Greek hoplites and the formation in which they (mostly?) fought, the phalanx. Last week, we discussed the development of hoplite warfare through the Archaic period (c. 750-480). Our evidence for that early period of development is very limited, but what we have points to an emerging shield wall formation which neither resembles the rigid shoving-matches of the orthodox school on hoplites, nor the fluid skirmishing of the ‘strong’ heterodox vision. Instead, it seems likely that hoplite equipment developed for a shield wall that already existed, which worked to a significant degree in conjunction with skirmishers and cavalry, acting as a ‘base’ as well as an offensive striking force.

This week we’re going to move into the better attested Classical period (480-323), where we begin to get literary sources describing Greek warfare in some detail. What I want to accomplish here is basically two-fold: first to address the definition question of what a phalanx is and then second to outline in a broad way how it seems to have worked in this better-documented period.

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Battle Definitions and Definitional Battles

Followers of this debate will note a major chronological question left unanswered in the previous section which is often given quite a lot of definitional import: when are the non-hoplites excluded from the shield wall? That question in turn takes up new significance because of the definitional fight over what a ‘phalanx’ is and thus when it developed. Generally, both the orthodox and heterodox scholars accept that a definitional component of the ‘phalanx’ in its mature form is that it excludes light infantry and cavalry, being an all-hoplite formation.

For the ‘strong’ orthodox school, the answer to this question is easy: their developmental model essentially requires that light infantry were never much integrated into the phalanx and swiftly excluded. From this perspective, the achievements of light infantry at Sphacteria/Pylos (425) and cavalry at Delium (424) and during the Sicilian Expedition (415-413) all in Thucydides, represent the early beginnings of a tactical revolution aware from pure hoplite fighting. In this model, ‘the phalanx’ – defined by a fairly rigid adherence to the orthodox tactical model (very tight files (c. 45-60cm file widths), charge to collision, shoving othismos, standard depth of 8, exclusion of light infantry and cavalry) exists and is the standard method of war for Greek polis societies no later than 640 with the Chigi Vase.

By contrast the heterodox school favors much more gradual development, with light infantry still fighting in the same formation as the hoplites very late, often well into the fifth century.¹ Since the segregation of light infantry and cavalry from the hoplites is taken as a definitional element of the phalanx, that in turn pushes back the development of the thing called ‘the phalanx’ into the fifth century, with a mature phalanx that excludes all other kinds of soldiers only emerging potentially in the mid-fifth century. It is worth noting this sort of definitional vision is somewhat reliant on the vision of light infantry being basically scattered within the formation (thus rendering the whole thing something more of a loose skirmish line), but as we’ve already discussed, I don’t think that was likely to have been the case even in the seventh century, much less the late sixth.

Instead I think this date-of-the-phalanx debate suffers from an excessively rigid definition. That rigid definition is, I should note, by no means required by the ancient sources themselves. While we tend to use ‘phalanx’ to mean only two specific Greek heavy infantry formations (the hoplite phalanx and the sarisa phalanx), the ancient Greeks were happy to use the word of almost any regular formation of combatants. As we’ve noted, the term gets used for hoplites, sure and also sarisa-carrying phalangites, but also Roman legions, ‘barbarian’ infantry (including Gauls), formations of ships, chariots, and even elephants. In ancient Greek, φάλαγξ just means any battle line or array, similarly flexible to its Latin equivalent acies. It has, I’d argue, an implication of some kind of regular order – it is a battle line, not a mob or a mass – but beyond that it isn’t some kind of technical term.

Now of course we often use a generic word in another language as a technical term to indicate that specific culture’s version of that concept, especially in military contexts. German Messer just means ‘knife,’ but in English it has come to mean a specific family of German swords (sometimes more precisely Großes Messer or Langes Messer or – for two-handed versions – Kriegsmesser) defined by a knife-style hilt construction. Likewise in English katana, a generic Japanese word for ‘sword,’² means generally ‘Japanese sword’ and very specifically the uchigatana. And of course the Roman word gladius (itself a loanword from a Celtic language) simply means ‘sword,’ but in English is used to mean specifically a family of Roman swords descending from the gladius Hispaniensis. So we do this all the time, taking a general term in a given language and making it a technical term in our language, usually a technical term for the other language’s culture’s version of the general idea.

From that framework, I would argue that the current definitions of ‘phalanx’ in use in these debates – demanding often very tight formations, the complete exclusion of light troops and a rigid tactical system (more rigid, probably, than most phalanxes actually were) – is excessively specific and overly inflexible. Instead we ought to think of ‘phalanx’ as closer to ‘a shield wall with ancient Greek characteristics.‘ That fits better the way we use the terms: ‘phalanx’ is the general Greek word for battle-order and so it can describe in English the distinctively Greek battle order. Such a definition would not be infinitely plastic: it has to be an at least somewhat regular battle order, but as we saw last time, I think the Greeks had a somewhat regular battle order for their hoplites from at least the mid-seventh century. Say what you will about the impression of formation depth on the Chigi Vase, the intention of the artist is clearly to show a regular battle order, with figures all neatly the same distance apart and close enough to be shown overlapping. Consequently, this broader definition largely obviates efforts to back-date the phalanx to the fifth century, because it does not require the full exclusion of light infantry in all cases altogether.³

That said, I think there is (as we’ll see below) a meaningful difference between the earlier hoplite phalanx, which seems to operate much more tightly integrated with its light infantry and the later hoplite phalanx which increasingly excludes those troops. Paul Bardunias distinguishes, in terms of his tactical models, between an Archaic Phalanx that is something of a hybrid – shield wall in front, skirmishers behind – and a Classical Phalanx that is ‘all hoplite’ and a more exclusively shock formation and as we’ve discussed previously, while I suspect there are most places for the skirmishers ‘to go’ in the battle order (I suspect Paul suspects this too), those models seem to me to make the most sense.

What I would propose then is a three-part division: first, a proto-phalanx (or Archaic phalanx), in which skirmishers can be present but where the core of the formation is pretty clearly a shield wall of hoplites, which is clearly in use in the seventh and sixth century. Next, there is a hoplite phalanx (short for ‘all-hoplite-phalanx’ or also ‘Classical Phalanx’), which is the formation that seems to be in use for most of the fifth century, in which light infantry have been fully segregated out into other battlefield roles (discussed below). There is clearly a process of transition involved between these two forms happening around the turn of the sixth century into the fifth which we can see only imperfectly. Arguments about that transition are fundamentally going to turn around interpretations of Herodotus – and in particular how much of Herodotus one is willing to gainsay or discard. For my own part, I think Herodotus clearly intends us to understand an all-hoplite-phalanx at Marathon (490) (but, interestingly, not at Plataea (479), where he attests lots of light infantry – it makes sense a transitional period might involve different poleis operating at different points in the transition) and I find efforts to gainsay Herodotus writing within or just beyond living memory⁴ of the events with Pausanias,⁵ writing six centuries later pretty unconvincing. Personally, I suspect, given the presence of Greek artwork – again, as early as the Chigi Vase in c. 640 – of images depicting solid, uniform lines of hoplites in close formation that the ‘all-hoplite-phalanx’ probably co-existed with the proto-phalanx for quite a while during the Archaic and that both approaches were available on the ‘tactical menu’ by the Greco-Persian Wars.

Finally, there is the sarisa-phalanx, the third sort, which we need not dwell on here except for me to note that it is a clear extrapolation out of the all-hoplite-phalanx (as an all-phalangite-phalanx, in effect, albeit with supporting light infantry on its flanks and possibly operating in the intervals between its regiments), which I feel is necessary to justify calling the Archaic phalanx a ‘proto-‘ phalanx, since means that this military system is going to spend several centuries iterating on the idea of an all-heavy-infantry ‘phalanx’ block.

In my view, this sort of schema lets us understand – as I think we ought – not a question of ‘when the phalanx’ (which we now answer with ‘no later than the mid-seventh century and probably earlier’), but rather tracking changes within the concept of the phalanx, from a proto-phalanx that may put all of the hoplites together (perhaps in the front several ranks, or in a block at the center of the army), but is still expecting to be fairly tightly integrated with non-hoplites, to the all-hoplite -phalanx that has fully segregated those troops.

With that in mind, we can now turn to the question how did the all-hoplite-phalanx function?

Spacing and Depth

We’ll start with how I think our evidence suggests that the phalanx formation functioned itself – individual spacing, the nature of its charge, the style of its engagement and so on – and then we’ll move towards larger picture questions of the organization of whole battles or campaigns.

As you may have noticed, the orthodox and heterodox ‘schools’ do not necessarily agree on spacing. Traditionally, the orthodox vision – and this has tended to inform a lot of modern artistic reconstructions – often assumed something close to shoulder-to-shoulder spacing, which would come out to a file width of about 45cm. We’ve discussed the concept of file width before – file width can be a tricky concept because there are several ways of measuring it – but what we’re measuring when we say file width here is the distance from one man’s left shoulder to the left shoulder of the right man, so a space that contains one body and one interval of open air.⁶ When considering the question more carefully, orthodox scholars often resorted to Polybius’ report (18.29) of the (sarisa)-phalanx’s spacing which comes out to about 90cm, though as we’ve discussed before this figure is also not without its debates which are wound around questions of the length of the sarisa since Polybius does all of his math for the sarisa-phalanx in units of two cubits. The problem there is there’s no real reason to suppose the sarisa-phalanx must use the same combat spacing as the hoplite phalanx: after all, the sarisa-phalanx is using a different weapon (a two-handed pike) and a smaller (c. 80cm) shield.

Hans van Wees, meanwhile, in Myths and Realities, suggests a much looser spacing, with six foot intervals (c. 180cm) and expresses skepticism that even at this wide spacing was the vulnerability of any man’s right side (the one without the shield) a real problem in that way that, I must stress, Thucydides explicitly says it is (Thuc. 5.71).⁷ My sense is that many heterodox scholars have backed off of this sort of wide spacing as being typical (though of course there might be circumstances where you’d want it), but since Myths and Realities hasn’t been revised or superseded as the monograph treatment of the heterodox model, that wide spacing remains ‘in the air’ for students and enthusiasts alike.

Of course the challenge here is that, as you may be picking up from the above, no source explicitly attests the file intervals for the hoplite phalanx. We do get such attestations for Macedonian and Roman armies (from Polybius, above), but not for Greek hoplites.

I think there are two ways of attacking this problem. The first is to think about how a formation comes together and the latter is to think about how it most optimally fights and in both cases I am not breaking new ground here, but following others (Peter Connolly in the first case, Paul Bardunias in the latter). In the first case, Peter Connolly observed quite rightly that armies do not line up men with rulers.⁸ Instead they are going to use some easy measurements available to them in their context to quickly get men at more or less the right intervals. Connolly uses that to explain what Polybius is doing: while the cubit, a unit of length measurement, varied a bit from one place to the next in its ‘official’ length, it always had as its common sense the length of an adult man’s forearm. So when Polybius says men line up with a file width of ‘two cubits’ what he means is they line up with a file width of ‘roughly one full arm-length.’

And that’s easy to pull off in practice: you are marching in column into position (your marching width will be your file depth in a second), you have every man put out his arm to touch the back of the man in front of him. Then everyone pivots 90 degrees to the left and there you are: each man has basically one forearm (plus a handful of centimeters for the back-to-chest space) of space, giving you a roughly two-cubit, 90cm spacing. As Michael Taylor⁹ has pointed out, if you are the Romans and want slightly wider spacing, you simply have the men pivot first and then do the arm trick second, so that the file interval instead of being one arm-length is now one arm-length plus shoulder width (which comes out to roughly 135cm).

Given that method of accomplishing regular intervals, you can see that you aren’t going to have an infinite number of interval choices, but a handful based on the size of things you have to line up with. Half an arm’s length (one cubit) is clearly doable, as is a super-wide full-arm-length-plus-full-arm-length-plus-shoulder-width (five cubits, 225cm). Alternately you could use objects – lining up spear-length (c. 2.5m) apart, for instance. Or, of course, you could use the aspis, lining up, say, an aspis width apart. Which is 90cm. And you see, perhaps where I am going with this.

We have an easy interval to create and a shield that is exactly as wide as that interval. This seems intentional.

From there we can hop over to the second approach which is to instead look at combat dynamics, do some group sparring and ask how formations at the different widths fare. After all, the one thing we can be reasonable sure about the hoplite phalanx is that it worked. The Greeks were remarkably militarily successful in the Late Archaic and Classical periods, establishing and defending colonial settlements all over the Mediterranean and holding off the local Big Damn Empire, the Achaemenids.¹⁰ Paul Bardunias has done exactly and presented the work in this video I am just going to keep linking because I think it is very good and it turns out that to a point, tighter combat spacing (60-90cm in Bardunias’ experiments) is really beneficial because it is really hard to defend with an aspis effectively if you are opposed by multiple enemies due to their tighter spacing.

Of course there are limits. Even turning one’s body to the side, it is really hard to get any tighter than 45cm – any tighter than 90cm, of course and you have to angle and overlap shields – and really anything below 60cm or so seems solidly ‘unfightable.’ I’m struck here that the Greeks sometimes reference a formation synaspismos (‘shields together’) which seems to be a special, ultra-tight formation (though references are few and separated by a lot of chronology, so this term may have shifting meanings). As we discussed before, I suspect this is a special ‘ultra-tight’ formation, probably to resist ranged attack, similar to Roman close-order formations: you don’t fight this way, you close up to get through (ranged) ‘fire’ and then widen out again to fight. This would be easy to do because your ultra-tight interval is neatly half of your regular interval: you just have the back half of each file move up into the gap (though a formation might also just cluster together under pressure more organically).

We can then take this thinking back to our best evidence, which is the representation evidence. From the 640s onward, when hoplites are represented in formation groups, they are generally presented in a line, with regular spacing and shields touching or overlapping, much as on the Chigi Vase.¹¹ Now, if we’re familiar with other cultures’ artwork of massed infantry formations, we know to be immediately skeptical here: artists often compress infantry in artwork to make them look more impressive or simply fit them in the space. We see medieval and even Roman infantry so compressed all the time, so we can’t take this depiction literally and try to measure spacing from it. But what we can assume, I’d argue, is that the assumption here – at least the ideal – is a formation with regular spacing and relatively tight spacing. These fellows are near each other, if maybe not so close as depicted.

None of that evidence is as strong as we’d like, it’s all, in a sense, ‘circumstantial.’ But it all points the same way: the combat testing and the forming up process both seem to suggest something like a 90cm interval,¹² which in turn brings the idea that the Macedonian phalanx inherited the spacing of its predecessor hoplite phalanx back with a little more foundation, and that spacing is consistent with the artwork, especially when we consider the strong tendency in many artistic cultures to cram close-order infantry together. And then of course there is the aspis itself, which at roughly 90cm intervals would have their rims just touching, thus presenting a solid line of protection when drawn close.

Although I should note here, I don’t think they always were drawn close – you absolutely can extend an aspis out in front of you (albeit not as far as a center-grip shield) and I suspect this was often done in fighting, I imagine it was probably the standard stance when fighting out of formation and in the ultra-tight synaspismos formation, some degree of angling the shield forward would simply be mandatory.

The other question about the formation is depth: how many men deep was it? We simply have no basis to estimate the distances front-to-back of the men (though further extrapolation from Polybius might suggest 90cm as reasonable, but the evidence here is paper thin), but how many men in a file we are sometimes told. The orthodox school says the standard depth is 8, whereas heterodox scholars sometimes doubt a standard depth at all (amateur warriors, after all). Roel Konijnendijk put all of the figures together to argue that there is no rigidly standard depth and I suppose I take his argument halfway.¹³ He is correct that depth varies. On the other hand, of his 20 examples, eight have a depth of 8, two more a depth of 16 and two more a depth of 4. The remainders are 1, 2, 9-10, <10, <12, 25, and >50 (2x). But we’re also looking at a simple majority of examples (13/20) are clean multiples of four, which to me really suggests that the most common half-file (perhaps a standard marching width) was four, with armies sometimes forming up half-file to stretch the line or double-file to narrow it. The classic eight-deep formation is four times more common than any other choice, which really does suggest it was ‘standard,’ especially keeping in mind that we’re more likely to be told a formation’s depth when it is unusual (that is, our authors are going to report every 50-man-deep column, but not every 8-man-deep standard formation).

So it seems fair to say ‘standard depth may have varied, but 8 was by far the most common.’

We also have to discuss various attested ‘ultra-deep’ formations and their purposes. The orthodox view on this often recalls Napoleon’s attacking columns with the idea being that a deep formation provides impetus to an attack which of course fits with the ‘shoving’ model, the idea being that a deep formation has more men shoving. The problem with this, as Roel Konijnendijk notes (op. cit., 134) is that no classical source explicitly says this (as opposed to Hellenistic sources talking about the sarisa-phalanx, which do; e.g. Polyb. 2.69.8-9, 18.30.4-11; Asclepiodotus, 5.2); instead he argues – drawing on the work of previous scholars – the most likely purpose here is reinforcing a key point in the line and adding a psychological pressure: reaffirming the cohesion of the men in front of them while demoralizing the enemy with their seemingly unstoppable numbers.¹⁴ And here I think Konijnendijk is clearly correct. After all, thinking back to the analogy of gunpowder attack columns, Napoleon’s Imperial Guard were not physically pushing each other on to Austrian bayonets either, but a deep formation is naturally intimidating.¹⁵

Then we also have various attested ‘ultra-deep’ formations, which have always recalled for historians Napoleon’s attacking columns, the idea being the deep formation provides impetus to an attack, but such formations are treated as unusual, innovative or compelled by terrain (though, as Konijnendijk notes (134), no classical source explicitly says this so some caution is required). Konijnendijk supposes rather than adding momentum or impetus to an attack, depth was a way to improve cohesion and avoid collapse: an ultra deep formation was harder to break and I think that is probably right.

So there is roughly our formation: probably eight(-ish) men deep, and as many men wide as you can make it, with each file occupying probably around 90cm of space or so.

There are, within that force, unit divisions, though in most cases these tend to be big and pretty unwieldy. Xenophon advocates strongly (Xen. Lac. 11) for the Spartan system of officers and Konijnendijk assumes this means that other poleis lacked equivalent systems, although we do hear of lochagoi and taxiarchoi.¹⁶ Assessing those is tricky: when Xenophon details the Spartan system, a lochos is a unit of 640, but in the Macedonian system, a lochagos is the leader of a file-unit of 16; clearly the term has drifted somewhat. Plato also briefly implies wealthy men might τριττυαρχοῦσιν, “they might command a trittyes” (a ‘third’), suggesting a trittyarchos (Plato, Rep. 5.475a-b), which implies an officer perhaps for the trittyes, which would have been roughly one-thirtieth of the army, which might have not been too far off from a half of a lochos.¹⁷ I might not be as strong as Konijnendijk in asserting there are no subordinate figures here, but it certainly does seem to be the case that hoplite armies tended to have large unit divisions and relatively limited officers to provide for command and control, which is going to play into their tactical function here in a moment.

Battle Tactics

Now we can start thinking about a how a hoplite phalanx of the classical period functions in a larger battle.

And here I want to contrast three positions, a ‘strong’ orthodox position (which I think is wrong), the heterodox position (which I think overcorrects) and a ‘weak’ orthodox position that I think is closer to accurate. If you recall the historiography from our first part, you may imagine how we got here: seeking to understand how hoplite warfare generally worked, those first ‘Prussians’ created a generalizing model, a sense of what was ‘typical,’ which subsequently hardened into a set of ‘rules’ that the ‘strong’ orthodox position assumes were always followed. And then the heterodox scholars respond with every exception to those rules – Konijnendijk (2018) very ably catalogs essentially all of them – to argue that there was no rule.

So the ‘strong’ orthodox position is that battles were often ‘by mutual consent’ (a Polybian expression), with armies lining up in relatively open and flat ground, with the position of honor on the far right, with the general on the right, where they then charged to impact, after which ensued the ‘shoving’ othismos we have already dismissed; after one side collapsed, pursuit was limited because these battles were to some degree ‘agonal’ (honor competitions) and so the matter was concluded by the victors setting up a trophy and allowing the defeated to recover their dead as part of a truce. By contrast the ‘strong’ heterodox position challenges all of these ‘rules’ as being regularly broken: war wasn’t ritualized, but absolute and intended to produce maximum slaughter. Terrain was used, as was trickery or any other tactical devices. Charge was not to impact but to ‘spear’s reach,’ there is no shoving match and pursuit might be a lot less limited and a lot more focused on casualties. To this end they pile up all of the exceptions to the rule.

Whereas to me, the truth of the matter is somewhere around where we started, rather than where we ended up: there were expectations for certain kinds of battles, which were sometimes violated, but very often followed. There is actually a really useful discussion of this relationship between the ‘reality of war’ and the ‘discourse on war’ cross culturally in John A. Lynn, “Discourse, Reality and the Culture of Combat” IHR 27.3 (2005), which I assign to students. Of course generals and soldiers are always ‘breaking’ the ‘rules’ (really, defying expectations) to try to win but that doesn’t mean the expectations have no force. Instead, the discourse on war shapes the reality of warfare to a degree, however when the two diverge – when the ‘exceptions’ begin to swallow the rules – the loop alters in one of a few ways. First, violation of the ‘discourse’ can create an ‘extreme reality,’ an escalation spiral of brutality, which is almost explicitly what Thucydides presents himself as describing in the Peloponnesian War, a series of ruptures with his discourse (which leaves aside the question of how old that discourse is – it need not be very old!).

Alternately, breaks in discourse can be compartmentalized by a given kind of violence being segmented away from ‘war’ or ‘proper war.’ We see this all the time today with ‘military operations other than war.’ In history this often happened with counter-insurgency operations, colonial conflicts and distant imperial wars: soldiers operating outside of ‘real war’ were free both to dispense with the expectations of ‘real war’ but also to discard the lessons of such conflicts as they prepared for “war as it should be” to use Lynn’s phrase.

Both ‘discourse breaches’ are at work in the Classical period in ways that complicate efforts to read exceptions against expectations. The Greeks even have a category to explain this idea, the notion of war “without heralds” or “without truces” meaning war conducted outside of the normal expectations that govern ‘real war.’ Likewise stasis within a polis or colonial warfare against ‘barbarians’ at the edges of the Greek world operated with different expectations. The tricky problem is that in arguing against the ‘rules’ heterodox scholars often include these examples, even when it seems that even the Greeks at the time recognized them as a discourse ‘other than war’ (and that such distinctions, while perhaps trivial to us, meant something to them). Likewise, the expectations for pitched battles – in the Greek context, clearly the most culturally important (if perhaps not strategically important) kind of violence – were not the same as expectations for the raid, the ambush or the siege.

To cover all of these points in detail would mean essentially rewriting Roel Konijnendijk’s Classical Greek Tactics (2018) but coming to different conclusions, so I will simply hit what I view as the ‘high points’ that I think synthesize the rules with the exceptions. First, we must take all of the things which are not pitched battle and not ‘war’ in Lynn’s sense and set them aside for now. Colonial wars had different expectations, as did civil wars, as did sieges and so on. We may imagine a single category of ‘violence,’ but the Greeks did not (and we don’t really do so in practice either), as their discourse about war without truces or heralds shows.

While ‘encounter battles’ (where armies blundered into each other) could happen, for the most part hoplite battles largely followed an ‘offer battle’ model: one army formed up on terrain it preferred and the other army could either accept the offer (and attack) or decline (and form up on their own terrain). We’ve discussed this sort of ‘negotiation’ (in the sense of offer-counter-off, not that they’re talking to each other) before. Greek armies seem generally to have preferred relatively open ground in offering battle (famously noted, Hdt. 7.9b.1), but did at times offer battle in narrows or on hills; the use of terrain for advantage was not ever unknown to them (as Konijnendijk rightly notes).

Generally they formed up with the position of honor and thus the general on the right. Konijnendijk presents a list (op. cit., 121-2, table 3) of general placements, 12 on the right, 7 in the center and 10 on the left with one either center or left, which is already right-heavy. But if we sort out the conjectures, things like generals caught mid-speech out of position (Athens at Delion) or ambushed (Sparta at Stratos) or non-leading states given positions of honor because the battle was in their country (Argives at Mantinea) and the like, we end up with something like 12 right, 5 center and 6 left. In short it seems there is an expectation that the right is the position of honor, but an expectation that could be deviated from if needed for tactical or diplomatic advantage. So I find myself taking a softer version of Konijnnedijk’s view: there was an expectation that the right was a position of honor, but it was not an infinitely strong expectation.

The role of light infantry and cavalry at this point – in the Classical period – is more complex. On the one hand, light infantry and cavalry are simply not reported in a lot of these battles. For all of the battles in Thucydides only once does a light infantry skirmish explicitly proceed a pitched hoplite battle (6.69.2-3) and this is in Sicily. Regional distinctions here clearly matter, of course: non-polis regions like Aetolia were mostly light infantry, while Boeotia was famed for its light infantry and Thessaly for its cavalry. By contrast, from Attica southwards, we seem to see the classic very hoplite-heavy armies. The Athenian expedition to Sicily – country in which it would turn out light infantry and cavalry were really important involved an initial wave of 5,100 hoplites, but just 1,300 light infantry and thirty (30!!) cavalry (Thuc. 6.43); later reinforcements would bring up the cavalry numbers to 460, for an army that by then had roughly 10,000 hoplites in it and perhaps 2,600 lights.¹⁸ By contrast, we’d expect a standard Roman army of the Middle Republic to have 12,000 heavy infantry (two legions, two alae), 4,800 light infantry and something like 1,200 to 1,800 cavalry.¹⁹ The Syracusan cavalry is both better and more numerous but the overall balance of their forces is also remarkably hoplite heavy as presented to us. That is not to say polis armies had no light infantry, far from it. But it is clear that in the poleis south of Boeotia, the trend towards deemphasizing cavalry and light infantry had gone quite a long way.

Determining what these fellows do is also tricky because, as noted, our sources often don’t tell us what they are doing very clearly. That is reflective of a belief by our sources (note Thucydides’ dismissive tone, 6.69.2) – one which continues through to the Hellenistic period and is sometimes made explicit – that while light infantry are very important in irregular engagements (ambushes, sieges, etc; actions like Sphacteria/Pylos), in pitched battles they generally were not decisive.

Konijnendijk, in an effort to understand the role these fellows might have, explores the idea of a ‘cascading charge:’ with cavalry attacking first, followed by light infantry, followed by the youngest, fittest hoplites, followed by the main force. I fear I do not think this point goes as far as Konijnendijk thinks. As has been elsewhere noted, none of the examples given save for an interpretation of Leuctra, involved pitched battles.²⁰ More to the point, Konijnendijk points to Aeneas Taktikos to provide a description of this method, but I don’t think Aeneas is Tacticus is actually describing a pitched battle tactic. What he says is:

For when your supporting force is ready at the appointed place, and the enemy has already scattered for plunder, then and only then you should anticipate [προκαταλαμβάνω, ‘to preoccupy, apprehend before, anticipate, surprise”] their retreat with cavalry, make ambushes [ἐνέδρα] with picked men, and, displaying [ἐπιφαίνω] your light-armed troops, lead your heavy-armed men in formation not far behind those already sent.
(Aeneas Tacticus, 16.7; trans. Illinois Greek Club, with some modifications for clarity)

This is not a recipe for a pitched battle but rather ambushing a force that is looting or foraging in the context of a siege. Moreover, it is also not a cascading attack! The cavalry and picked men are not charging ahead of the main line, but rather heading off retreat or lying in ambush, while the light infantry is displayed or presented [ἐπιφαίνω], which is to say that you are demonstrating with a weak force (perhaps to invite attack) while a far heavier and more formidable force is coming up and your other troops are in ambush positions.

The other reason I have to doubt the regular employment of cavalry or light infantry in this fashion is that Greek hoplite armies were not constructed to this purpose nor well-suited for it. The obvious parallel here is the Roman legion which did imagine a ‘cascading’ attack: light infantry, then the youngest heavy infantry, then men in their prime. But as you will recall from our discussion of it, making that tactical structure work demanded a remarkably complex, ‘fussy’ tactical system with dozens of independent maneuvering units in order to create the lanes to allow each stage in the attack to retreat effectively without disrupting the formation of the line behind them. Greek hoplite armies do not have any of that organization, as Konijnendijk rightly notes.

Instead cavalry and light infantry seem to have had a mostly screening role. Hoplites were potentially vulnerable, after all, to light infantry harassment, but a modest screening force of your own light infantry could prevent this and then get out of the way when the ‘real’ battle was joined. Likewise, light infantry and cavalry were important for foraging and scouting, though it is worth noting that scouting arrangements in polis armies seem to have been pretty modest, reflecting, I’d argue, the meaningful expectation that another polis army is likely to meet them in an offered, pitched battle in a relatively open place, not lie in ambush.

Finally, we have the question of stratagems and trickery. Ruses of war and trickery were certainly not new to the Greeks, but neither are they new to us and yet our ‘discourse’ around the rules of war is so strong we went and codified it into an international legal system far more rigid than anything the Greeks could have constructed. But such tricks and surprises worked precisely because there was an expectation for what war was supposed to look like and there was a lively discourse in antiquity as to if they ought to be practiced or shunned.²¹ Konijnendijk is thus absolutely correct to note that the ‘Prussian’ ‘rules’ were not absolute, but just because they were not absolute does not mean that they were unreal.

The hoplites’ code, like the pirates’ code, turns out to be more guidelines, or as I prefer the framing here, expectations. Those expectations persisted because many battles did, in fact, resemble them, even as they were occasionally ruptured by trickery which did not and even as the Greeks understood there were zones of warfare either beyond the polis (colonial wars) or within it (civil wars) rather than between poleis, where the expectations did not apply.

The Collision At Last

Finally, our field clear of light infantry and cavalry, our ruses used (or not), our formations drawn up, we are ready to smash together two opposing lines of hoplite heavy infantry.

How did that work?

As we’ve already discussed, the ‘shoving’ model of the orthodox is simply not workable here. Likewise, if hoplites did not fight as skirmishers in the Archaic period when such light troops still seem to have been quite active on the battlefield, they surely cannot do so now. This must be a shock engagement but therein lies the trickiness because we do not have a good sense of how shock engagements work: modern military writing was very young when the last major shock infantry engagements were being waged and of course film was farther off still.²²

First, we need to be aware that practices differed between poleis. Most poleis charged at a run, while the Spartans famously did not (Thuc. 5.70) and we have to imagine – this is a topic for next time – that the emergence of more training and semi-professional mercenaries may have meant different approaches as well.

But it seems like what we might imagine would be typical for a pitched battle (again, that’s an important category; there are other kinds of fight, but the hoplite is, I’d argue, built for this kind), the general would offer a final pre-engagement sacrifice before sounding a charge (using a trumpet). As far as we know, once that order was given, the general – who more often than not was fighting as a hoplite with his men – basically lost control of the battle. The only other easily available signal was ‘retreat.’ Generals could make last minute adjustments (or try to) to their formations – Konijnendijk again (op. cit., 149) very ably catalogs all of the examples (and they often don’t go quite right) – but the phalanx was a ‘dumb-fire missile’ once launched: it went straight forward and broke things. As we’ll look at later, part of this is because of the relative (lack of) training for our hoplites.

Beyond this point, we actually have fairly few details about the mechanics of charge and contact. That may seem strange, but it is actually very typical for pre-gunpowder cultures: what happens in the moment of contact was evidently hard to describe and in any case their intended audience had experienced it and so a detailed, mechanical description was unnecessary. Once the advance was sounded armies might join in a song or chant in the advance called the paean (παιάν); evidently different poleis had different songs.²³ Finally, probably right before breaking out into the final charge, the soldiers issued a war-cry, which we can actually somewhat guess at the sound because it has an onomatopoetic word: ἀλαλή (alale, a-la-lay) and an associated verb ἐλελίζειν (elelizein, e-le-li-zane, ‘to issue the war cry’), suggesting it was something like a high-pitched keening or ululation sound.²⁴ It was in this advance that Thucydides reports (Thuc. 5.71.1) the rightward drift of the formation began as men sought to protect their unprotected side; of course however a hoplite stood while fighting, while marching he was head-on to the enemy. Then came the charge.

The orthodox school assumes these men charged into collision, either hoping to physically push through the enemy or else to use their charge to add such impulse to their spears – like ‘horseless lancers’ – to stab through shields and armor. No infantry works this way and we’ve been over the reasons this is not very plausible.

By contrast, Hans van Wees argues hoplites slowed to a stop eis doru (εἰς δόρυ ‘within spear’s reach’). It is striking to me that van Wees offers this specific phrase to underline his point, because both of his examples (Xen. Hel. 4.3.17 and 7.1.31) share something in common which is no one is doing the thing he is describing. Instead, both cases describe an army doing what we would call ‘routing on contact’ – soldiers losing their nerve and turning to run in the split-second before impact. That is not an uncommon moment for cohesion to fail (indeed, in the last period of regular shock warfare scholars regularly observe that infantry almost never actually received a bayonet charge because they would rout on contact or before it).²⁵ Xenophon is not describing hoplites slowing to contact at spear’s reach, he is describing one group of hoplites, seeing that the incoming enemy is not stopping losing their nerve and turning to run at spear’s reach.

That, in turn, is a psychological response that, at least to me, only makes sense if it seems to the soon-to-be-running opponent that the incoming charge will be delivered, not that it will politely stop six or seven feet short. Once again, training for bayonet charges is instructive: quite a lot of generals knew that bayonet charges did not usually result in lots of ‘bayonet fencing’²⁶ but they trained for me to charge with bayonets, shouting, at full tilt anyway because you needed the other guy to think you intended to plow into him, even if you didn’t, in order to get him to run away.

At the same time, the same psychological pressure is working on the man charging: the same pressure that makes his opponent flee encourages him to slow down. And now we have to remember that both lines are advancing: hoplite armies almost never patiently ‘received’ charges.

I would thus suggest that the outcome at impact probably varied a lot: in some cases both sides lost their nerve and started to slow and the van Wees ‘slow to stop at eis doru‘ probably happened. But I suspect in most cases there is an effort to maintain momentum and cohesion so that the formation at least looks like it is going to crash into the enemy and thus in many cases if neither side blinks it must have done so; at the very least individually brave or foolhardy fellows must have considered putting their shoulder into the dish of their shield and simply impacting to try to throw an enemy down. Given that hoplites were – again, next time – relatively untrained, I imagine you had a bit of all of these options – men slowing to a stop, men slowing and colliding at lower speeds and full speed collisions – all happening up and down the line.

The danger, of course is that this produces something like crowd collapse (once again, Paul Bardunias discusses this) but for formations that are only 4 to 16 men deep and have nothing behind them the release for that pressure is easy enough: the formation can ‘accordion’ back out as men naturally back out of the pressure.²⁷

So we might imagine the two formations first accelerate towards each other. As they near ‘spear’s reach’ one might collapse-at-contact from the psychological pressure, but ideally both are seeking to deliver the charge. That doesn’t mean everyone slams into each other full tilt – most men probably slow down at least somewhat, but we certainly get descriptions of men fighting ‘shield on shield’ suggesting to me that sometimes guys got close enough to make shield-to-shield contact (Tyrtaeus fr. 11 West). Shield-to-shield contact, especially with aspides that can’t extend as far, is a lot closer than ‘measure’ with thrusting spears (and thus a more dangerous place to be) but one can imagine a hoplite carried forward by the momentum of his charge clashing shield-into-shield before pushing back out. I know I keep bringing it up, but watching the movement patterns of Paul Bardunias’ experimental fighting line (below, on the left) I think gives a good sense of how these ranks might close up and accordion back out.

After that initial impact – which again, might range from a slow-to-stop-at-measure to folks slamming into each other, with every variation of those outcomes happening somewhere as the lines meet – assuming both formations remain cohesive, you are going to get a stabbing fight at the front line. I suspect the increasing frequency of this kind of fight is what propelled the development of the ‘all hoplite’ phalanx because lighter infantry would be at an extreme disadvantage in this kind of fight. Close-quarters engagements between heavy infantry and light or even medium infantry tend to be shockingly one-sided both because the heavier armor enables the heavy infantryman to be much more aggressive against his unprotected foe and because the mismatch leads to rapid cohesion collapse.

However, since these are both heavily armored and well-protected lines, the casualties here will be tolerably low, probably around 5% of the total engaged force, which wouldn’t even represent a majority of the front line of an eight-man-deep phalanx (it’d be c. 40% of that line) even if every single casualty was from the front line, and we have to imagine some unlucky second or third line fellows are likely struck either in position or once they move forward to replace a downed comrade.²⁸ This phase simply could not last very long because these formations have no way to ‘trade out’ the front ranks and exhaustion would hit fairly fast. A looser formation might be more able to trade out men, but as Bardunias’ own experiments demonstrate, if you adopted that looser 180cm formation, a tighter 90cm or 60cm formation would cut through it much too quickly.

As Ardant du Picq observes, under these conditions collapse comes not from the front, but from the back: the men in the back can see the carnage, they are stuck with the anxiety and fear of ‘waiting their turn’ but have none of the impetus to action of being in the fight. This kind of fighting is effective, but it pushes human psychology well beyond its intended limits and at some point something must break. Victor Davis Hanson’s ‘gaps and tears’ – break-down from the front – are thus unnecessary for formation collapse. Once basically anyone starts fleeing, cohesion collapse is rapid: every man who turns to run increases the psychological pressure on everyone else and all of these men are near the breaking point. As the formation collapses, the great majority of the killing occurs, probably around 10% or so of the fleeing army killed in the rout, most within a few moments of collapse.

Then the question becomes pursuit. The orthodox generally argue that the ‘rules’ of war and the heavy equipment of hoplites prevented long pursuits, while heterodox scholars²⁹ argue that pursuit was broadly unrestricted. My view here, to be frank, is that they are both half-right. Within the ‘agonal’ war discourse – that is to say, in wars with truces and heralds between poleis – it sure does seem like pursuit after a battle was often limited. Outside of that discourse – wars in colonial areas, in civil wars, during actions other than pitched battle or wars that had broken the ‘truces and heralds’ bonds – pursuit could be and indeed often was long and savage.³⁰ That said even ‘short‘ pursuits could be very bloody indeed if some obstruction or terrain prevented one side from getting off of the field quickly: Greek hoplites had little problem butchering enemies who did not or could not escape after a pitched battle between poleis, even if they might not chase them once they did so.

Notably, when thinking about pursuit, we probably ought to think about the strategic context here and this is a point on which I think the orthodox school may have things almost exactly backwards. The orthodox school imagines a sort of limited, ritualistic warfare dominating the Archaic period which then broke down under the pressures of the Classical period (the heterodox school imagines few limits to such warfare at any period). By contrast it seems to me that if we glimpse Sparta’s early history we can see a different pattern: a series of eventually ‘unlimited’ wars in the seventh century – during what should be the heyday of ritual, ‘agonal’ warfare – which destroy the Messenian polity and reduce its population to slavery. Some time in the mid-500s, they tried the same thing to tiny Tegea, but were defeated a the ‘Battle of the Fetters’ (Hdt. 1.66) and forced to back off their policy of direct conquest. Yet by Thucydides’ day, if not earlier, the idea that a war would extinguish a polis was a shocking breach of norms and expectations: the destruction of Plataea and Melos are major events in his history for this reason.

What I think is happening is not some utterly ancient Archaic ritual warfare, but rather that the emergence of a state system of reasonably well-fortified poleis produces a period of, effectively, ‘Kabinettskrieg‘ in Greece (in the sense of war aims, not in the sense of army structure). What had happened during the age of Kabinettskrieg in the early modern period was simply that the nature of warfare had made vast, sweeping conquests mostly impractical (lots of well-fortified towns were a major factor), so a system of more limited warfare developed, later to be, eventually, decisively disrupted by the Wars of the French Revolution. I think the same thing is happening here: as the Greek state system solidifies around fortified urban centers, war aims get limited because they essentially must. Greek armies, after all, are terrible at siege-craft, not just compared to the feats of later Macedonians or Romans, but even compared to earlier Neo-Assyrian armies. Major walled cities were almost impossible for them to capture with the kind of weekend-warrior militia armies they had, at least until the scale and intensity of the Peloponnesian War enabled modestly effective siege warfare again, at which point the period of ‘Kabinettskrieg‘ started to collapse, breaking those expectations, which in turn we hear about through the discourse and culminating in Philip IIs conquests at the tail end of the Classical period.

What to Expect When You Are Expecting Hoplites

To conclude this part then, I think the first step in trying to untangle this debate is to allow our definition of ‘phalanx’ a little more flexibility. The second step is to think in terms of expectations rather than rules, allowing our sense of Greek battle to have a little give in the joints: not the complete no-rules absolute murder-war of the heterodox school nor the ultra-rules-bound inflexible system of the orthodox.

If we were to simplify our model, the Greeks of the Classical period expected pitched battles to be won primarily by engagements with hoplites. Light infantry and cavalry were mostly for other kinds of military action or for distinctly subordinate roles around as much as ‘in’ a pitched battle. Pitched battle in turn was the most culturally important kind and could often be decisive, but was hardly the only sort of military action one might engage in.

In a pitched battle, the polis Greeks expected that both sides would ‘offer battle’ by forming up on terrain they were willing to fight on, eventually arriving on ground they were both willing to risk a battle on, which tended to eventually mean fairly open ground, but not always. They would draw up by detachments – for Greek poleis almost always fought in multi-city alliances in this period – probably with small intervals between them but these were not intended as precision maneuver-units so much as cohesion units (more on that next time). These formations would generally be about 8 men deep, sometimes deeper, sometimes shallower, though 8 seems to have been the normal, expected depth, with each file occupying around 90cm or of width, perhaps getting a bit tighter during that rightward-drift we hear about from Thucydides. The position of honor was the far right,³¹ but all sorts of expediencies both diplomatic and tactical might cause different dispositions.

Again, expectations, not rules.

Before deployment generals usually offered a sacrifice to the gods to determine if the gods endorsed offering battle. Another sacrifice was made as the deployment completed moments before, which was to please the gods rather than ask for information – it was too late to do much in any case. If light infantry were to do much, they might skirmish against each other during the deployment, before getting out of the way for the main show; cascading attacks were not a thing for pitched battles, for Greeks were not Romans and the hoplite phalanx not a legion. Generals tried to use terrain as much as they could and set out their formations as cleverly as they might and could in some cases give pre-made battle plans, but for the most part these armies were dumbfire missiles. The general signaled the advance, a trumpet rang out and the missile fired; a song was taken up on the advance, punctuated by a shrill war cry as the two advancing lines sped to a charge over the last few hundred meters.

Sometimes a phalanx collapsed before impact, or right in the moment of it, to general disaster. But generally once both sides ascertained that the other was not stopping they likely slowed a bit: individual impacts probably occurred but no mass shoving effort. The ranks probably compacted together and then, to a degree, accordioned out. In place of the shoving othismos, the front ranks probably backed out to ‘measure’ (spear’s reach) and thrust at enemies, with both lines irregularly wavering forward and back as men pushed forward to strike and backed up to avoid enemy strikes. Men who were struck fell and likely tried to crawl or were pulled by their mates back through the line. Behind, the ranks not yet in battle felt their courage slowly wither with the sounds of shouting, the cries of the dying, the sight of wounded comrades.

Eventually, the terror became too much and some of them men, likely men not yet in contact, began to back up. The rout would quickly be contagious as their fellows – every bit as scared and knowing full well that being the last man to retreat in a rout was a death sentence – noticed the weakening cohesion. As the formation collapsed, there was a tremendous burst of killing – we might imagine half of the killing might happen over the several minutes of charge, contact and sparring and the other half in the few seconds of the rout. But most of the retreating men got away: hoplite armies were not well designed for long pursuits and they weren’t expected or generally necessary for pitched battles against other poleis in any case. An enemy so defeated was unlikely to offer battle again soon, clearing the way for a siege or – in the age of ancient Greek ‘Kabinettskrieg‘ – more likely a negotiation over the recovery of dead.

Of course against non-Greeks, or in kinds of battle that were not pitched battles between ‘gentlemen’ hoplites, the rules were quite different, pursuits could be long and Greek armies recognized few if any distinctions between combatants and non-combatants.

That is, more or less, my effort at tactical synthesis. It will not, of course, describe every battle or even exactly describe any battle. Instead, it is an effort to lay out what the expectations were, particularly on the even of the Peloponnesian War (431-404) after which expectations clearly begin to shift and collapse.

Next time we’re going to look at society outside of the battle and talk about how the hoplite fits into the polis: what his social status is, how he is (not) trained and what the implications are for the nature of the polis and indeed how many Greeks there even were.

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