Men of Bronze by Donald Kagan

Author:Donald Kagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

The Nature of the Phalanx

From a strictly literary point of view, the hoplite phalanx did not exist until the fourth century, when Xenophon refers to “the phalanx of hoplites” (Anabasis 6.5.27).13 The word “phalanx” apparently derives from a root meaning “log.” Neither Herodotus nor Thucydides uses it in a military context, and with a single exception, the Archaic poets use it only in the plural, phalanges, with one exception in the Iliad.14 The word “hoplite,” which derives from hopla (military equipment), first occurs in the fifth century as an adjective in poetry; it becomes common as a noun in the second half of the century, first in Herodotus, then in Thucydides, Aristophanes, Euripides, and inscriptions.15 When discussing Archaic warfare, we might do well to avoid the expression “hoplite phalanx” and refer simply to phalanges or ranks, without prejudicing the issue of who fought in them.

Who did fight in the Archaic phalanges? By the time of the Peloponnesian War, lightly armed troops fought separately from the hoplites, as emerges clearly from Thucydides’ description of the battle of Syracuse (6.69.2): “The stone-throwers, slingers, and archers of either army began skirmishing, and routed or were routed by one another, as might be expected between light troops.” Following this inconclusive skirmishing, the seers sacrificed and the trumpeters blew, and only then did the hoplites move forward. So the phalanx of hoplites existed before any surviving source names it. When was the exclusive hoplite phalanx invented? How historians have answered this question makes for an interesting story.

Before George Grote, historians maintained that the Dorians introduced “the method of fighting with lines of heavy armed men, drawn up in close and regular order,” since Homer describes a different mode of combat and an anecdote in Polyainos credits the Herakleidai Prokles and Temenos with using pipers to help their men advance in rhythm in an unbreakable formation against the Lakedaimonians.16 Grote objected that the correctness of this view “cannot be determined … we have no historical knowledge of any military practice in Peloponnesus anterior to the hoplites with close ranks and protended spears.”17 Late nineteenth-century scholars then limited themselves to claiming that the Lakedaimonians had a trained mass formation by the time of the Messenian Wars in the eighth and seventh centuries. In his narrative of these wars, the traveler Pausanias says that it was traditional for the Lake-daimonians not to pursue too quickly, because they preferred to maintain their formation rather than to kill anyone running away (4.8.11). Several ancient sources, starting with Thucydides, say that pipers helped the Lakedaimonians maintain formation.18 “In this context,” opined Hans Delbrück, “the piper is nothing other than the tactical formation.”19

In the nineteenth century, no one mentioned any of the soldiers’ equipment as suitable only for a close-order formation. No one was talking about how heavy and unwieldy the porpax shield was—no doubt because, according to the conventional wisdom of Rüstow and Köchly, it weighed only half as much as the earlier great oval shield (6–7.5 kg compared with 14–15 kg).

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