The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization by Victor Davis Hanson

Author:Victor Davis Hanson [Hanson, Victor Davis]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780520209350
Google: sbcwDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0520209354
Published: 1995-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

Greek hoplite battle between phalanxes before the Peloponnesian War was predictable in time, place, sequence, and aftermath of infantry fighting. This prompts us to ponder just how one particular Greek hoplite phalanx in a climate of utter violence actually defeated its adversary. Can some general trend be detected to explain the outcome of a typical hoplite battle? Perhaps no more than in European warfare of a later age, but to my knowledge such a query has never even been raised, much less answered, about hoplite fighting. The question goes right to the heart of Greek warfare in general. Like the hoplite protocols themselves, the etiology of victory may once again illustrate the agrarian foundations of the entire practice, cementing the notion that the primary concern of Greek combatants of the early polis was agriculture.

Was victory between Greek phalanxes achieved through one army’s preponderance of muscular strength? Steadfast nerve? Maneuver and articulation? Strategic and logistic superiority? Supremacy of numbers? Blind luck? Advantage in weaponry and military technology? Since there are accounts from historical sources in various degrees of detail of some twenty or so major hoplite battles between 650 and 338 B.C.—the period roughly contemporaneous with the life of the free Greek city-state—the question is perhaps resolvable. But it remains partially shrouded in an agrarian morality that transcends questions of simple military efficacy.

Because there was no real military science in the great age of hoplite battle, there is no need to discuss Greek warfare in anything like traditional military terms. “Breakouts,” “articulation,” “maneuver,” “preparedness,” “mobilization,” and “assets” are all terms, I believe, that do not belong in the world of hoplite battle. Its conflict knew no “theaters,” “fronts,” “reserves,” or “salients.” These are modern concepts that have few equivalents in the Greek military mind (much less in the ancient Greek vocabulary; cf. Hanson 1991: 8-11).

Even in a simple contest of brute force, was there superior skill, size, or strength among the farmers of any one particular hoplite army? Herodotus believed the Greek successes at Marathon (490 B.C.) and Plataea (479 B.C.) against the Persians were in part a result of their superior training and armament (Hdt. 9.62.4, 9.63.2; cf. 5.97.1, 7.211.2; Diod. 11.7.3; but cf. Lazenby 1993: 256-261). Even if true, Herodotus’s logic cannot be directly applied to the wars of phalanxes, fought, after all, almost exclusively between fellow landed Greeks, homogeneous infantrymen of the poleis who worked on similar farms, who were armed identically, and battled almost entirely alike, who observed religiously the formal regulations of Greek military practice.

That uniformity may explain why even later military analysts of the Hellenistic and Roman periods seem confused about how and why a Greek phalanx engineered the defeat of its particular adversary. The first-century A.D. tactician Aelian (Tact. Pruef. 146) drawing on sources going back at least to Polybius (second century B.C.), and perhaps incorporating a tradition rooted in phalanx warfare of the early polis, could only list (without qualification) a gamut of possible explanations. Aelian’s puzzlement might suggest that few Greeks themselves knew which factor in a phalanx battle was the most influential in eventual success.

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