Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience by Hanson Victor Davis

Author:Hanson, Victor Davis [Hanson, Victor Davis]
Format: mobi
Tags: Humanities
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2002-11-01T05:00:00+00:00

sophistic rhetoric.82 Sophocles would indirectly discuss the ideal general in 409 BC with the contrast of Odysseus and Achilles as a major theme of the Philoctetes. Second, techne denoted a teachable skill. Hence generalship could be learned from Homer, lessons from hoplomacboi, or by digesting this skill from didactic handbooks, a genre the sophists developed.83 Thucydides sought to teach strategoi their craft through the medium of history, but Xenophon in such works as the Hipparchikos and the Cyropaedia and Aeneas Tacticus in his Strategika, a military encyclopedia, founded the new genre of military theory.84 Third, these changes affected not only strategoi but also the hoplites. Courage (arete, andreia) could now be taught as well as inherited, and excessive emphasis on bravery alone could be disastrous (Eur., Supp. 161–2). A basic tenet of the hoplite's ethos established by Tyrtaeus was being questioned.85 Aristotle (EN 3.7.13–8.9) continued this discussion in his tripartite distinction of courage, whereby he rejected the new military trends: courage through fear and discipline and courage through the mercenary's professionalism were morally inferior to the citizen-hoplite's desire for honor and avoidance of cowardice—the shame culture which constituted the hoplite's Homeric inheritance.86

Definition of the good general, growing military professionalism, and the emergence of a new type of commander preferring intelligence to bravery, all form the background for the transition from phalanx general to the battle manager. Still another trend, however, also comes into play—the rise of great individuals, all commanders at one time or another, who resisted or refused to be bound within the restraints of the polis. Pausanias and Themistocles in the Persian wars, Alcibiades and, to a lesser extent, Brasidas and Lysander in the Peloponnesian War, the famous mercenary commanders of the fourth century, and the tyrants Dionysius I and Jason of Pherae mark stages in a progression toward military monarchy, often seen as a trend divorcing civil from military functions within the polis, and culminating in the greatest of all the 'great individuals,' Alexander the Great, and subsequently the apotheosis of the charismatic in Hellenistic ruler-cult.87

A few examples will suffice to demonstrate the growth of the general's personal importance. After Marathon Miltiades desired to claim sole credit for the victory by having his name inscribed on the depiction of the battle on the Stoa Poecile. The Athenians refused this honor, although they compromised by allowing Miltiades' figure a prominent place in the painting. Similarly, Pausanias had the tripod

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