Читать книгу A Companion to Greek Warfare - Группа авторов - Страница 68

Notions of “hoplite warfare” date back to the 1850s.¹⁵ The English Classical scholar (and Classical Liberal) George Grote then posited that the kind of warfare practiced during the historical period in Greece differed from the heroic warfare of the epics because of introduction of the phalanx. Individual prowess became secondary to the discipline of the group.¹⁶ In the following decades, a group of German scholars, some of them Prussian officers, built on Grote’s ideas and established the principle that Greek war centered on pitched battles.¹⁷ According to these writers, Greek wars were decided by short clashes of two closed formations of heavy infantry arranged in neat ranks, with little room for tactics, maneuvers, or inventiveness; battles were planned in advance, and troops other than heavy infantry were regarded as auxiliary. It has been argued recently that the Prussians elaborated this model of combat in order to produce a contrast between the Archaic and Classical periods, on the one hand, and, on the other, fourth-century developments that interested them thanks to the emergence of great generals such as Alexander the Great, envisioned as models for Germany’s own military.¹⁸ Whatever their motives, they were authoritative; for example, the dictum that the standard depth of the phalanx was eight ranks derives from them, not from the ancient sources.¹⁹

In the early twentieth century, Anglo-American scholars adopted the German model without reservations.²⁰ An orthodoxy had emerged: the simple battles of phalanxes, the exclusive presence of hoplites, the deterministic correlation between hoplite and phalanx, and the homogeneity of equipment. English-language writers made several contributions, first, formulating an important paradox of Greek warfare, this being the prevalence of the heavy, rigid phalanx in the rugged landscape of Greece; second, explaining the common practice of devastating enemy fields and orchards as a bait to lure the enemy to give battle; and third, focusing on hand-to-hand combat in closed formation (giving rise to the debate on the othismos, or “push,” and the analogy of the rugby scrum).²¹ These ideas have shaped the study of Greek warfare up to the present.

The elaboration of the ideological framework of hoplite combat came during the 1960s and 1970s. Since Grote, the hoplite soldier had been an anti-aristocratic, if not democratic, figure, but now, thanks to a group of French scholars, equality and ritualism became aspects of a new ideology.²² The conditions of the panoply and the phalanx (homogenous equipment, fixed positions in the formation, restricted movements, and rigidity) were said to enforce strict solidarity and equality on fighters, and aristocratic individualism thus yielded to collective values (keeping formation, cohesion, rejection of individualistic behavior, and sacrifice).²³ The hoplite was now expected to collaborate in the mass of fighters for the common good, as in the fragments of Tyrtaeus; the egalitarian principle of the polis resulted from transferring these military values to the political and social spheres. Egalitarianism, in turn, reinforced protocols of the phalanx and hoplite combat, encouraging solidarity, anonymity, and simplicity.

The German scholars of the nineteenth century had already described hoplite warfare as simple and unimaginative because of the limitations of the phalanx.²⁴ From the 1960s onward, however, this simplicity was reinterpreted as a choice made by the hoplites so as to materialize their ideas, principles, and interests (and thus solve a problem noted by Grundy and Gomme, which was that phalanx fighting was not feasible unless armies were thoroughly and profoundly unified).²⁵ A strict code of unwritten norms and protocols, one that emanated from the material conditions and ideological principles of the “hoplite class,” would supply this degree of unity. The “simple battle” described by the Prussians thus became a “ritualized battle.”

Ritualism drew on studies of Greek athletic competitions to conceive battle as a regulated contest or agon: a setting (the battlefield), a board of judges (the gods), two participants (the rival armies), and a prize (military victory). The rules for the competition were distilled by Ober in a list of 12 norms that included a formal declaration of war, sparing of “civilians,” and the ransom of prisoners.²⁶ Ritualism seemed to fit the hoplite agenda of economy of effort, the social background of yeomen soldiers, uniform reliance on a heavy and cumbersome panoply, and the tidy reduction of war to quickly resolved battles. By the 1990s, it had become the prevailing view on the mechanics of Greek warfare.

The expanding construct of “hoplite warfare” met with criticism from revisionists writing after the 1960s.²⁷ They addressed the problems posed by the fractious evidence for hoplite combat and also embarked on a reconsideration of Greek warfare that has led to the gradual articulation of an alternative view of the Archaic period and of the origins of the polis. In the first place, Snodgrass questioned the notion of a uniform panoply, which he termed a “motley assemblage” of weapons and armor.²⁸ It spread “piecemeal” through Greece.²⁹ Snodgrass suggested that the adoption of the equipment and the introduction of the phalanx were not successive steps but instead were separated by a sizable lapse of time. He presented middle-class farmers as “reluctant hoplites,”³⁰ undermining the notion of a hoplite mindset. Snodgrass accepted other popular ideas, such as the military superiority of the hoplite and the phalanx, and hoplite military service as an important feature of social and political life, but with nuances. He inaugurated a gradualist line followed by some scholars in the ensuing decades.³¹

Another revisionist, the Homeric scholar Latacz, attacked the construct in a more profound fashion.³² His analysis of the Homeric poems concluded that heroic combat was only a phase in Homeric battles and that an anonymous mass, arranged in a closed formation that he recognized as a forerunner of the Classical phalanx, did the most important fighting.³³ The impact of this discovery cannot be underestimated: Latacz had questioned the gap between Homeric and historical combat that Grote had established more than a century before and that had led to hoplite warfare being regarded as an important military innovation—an innovation for which Ritualism could provide a cultural context. Latacz’s work thus struck a blow against a century of scholarship.³⁴ Most later writers, however, chose to embrace Latacz’s idea of a proto-phalanx without questioning the larger notion of hoplite warfare and ideology.³⁵