Читать книгу A Companion to Greek Warfare - Группа авторов - Страница 71

In their Introduction to Men of Bronze, the most recent and influential synthesis on the subject, Kagan and Viggiano declare that they had intended that the 2008 Yale Conference inspiring the book should “bring together the leading scholars from both the orthodox and the revisionist schools of thought to examine the current state of the field.”⁶⁶ Eventually, they lament, “Each side sharpened its position in response to the latest research … instead of working toward a consensus.”⁶⁷ Considering the history of hoplite warfare and its congeners, that outcome might have been anticipated. Since the appearance of the first criticisms of hoplite orthodoxy in the 1960s, the debate has veered between reactions and counter-reactions involving the “orthodox” and their foes. Consensus has rarely resulted.⁶⁸ When, for example, doubts about the “hoplite revolution” started to grow in the 1970s and 1980s, the orthodox reaction took the form of Hanson’s “Western way of war” and hoplite narrative. The situation has been, and remains, polarized.

This, too, is no surprise. Each of the two positions entails implications that go well beyond soldiers and their weapons—implications for conceptions of historical change and causality, for the relations among political and social structures, and for the nature of the polis. On the one hand, the orthodox thinks of the polis as an advanced form of ancient state that was the product of rapid but logical social and military changes, and that, by inaugurating democracy and the rule of law, set important precedents. On the other hand, revisionists envisage the polis as “little more than a stand-off between the members of the elite who ran them,” that is, a less orderly, less formal political community that did not result from a sequence of military and other changes and that led to democracy only in certain circumstances—circumstances in which the rule of law was a rallying cry rather than an institutional reality providing a precedent for modern societies.⁶⁹

Despite the revisionists, the hoplite narrative rules the intellectual field, particularly outside Academia, where its capacity to produce simple, all-encompassing historical schemes is much applauded. Within the scholarly world, meanwhile, the narrative has lost ground, but the older notion of “hoplite warfare” remains the chief model for reconstructing early Greek military dynamics. Orthodoxy holds that “hoplite warfare” should remain the chief model until revisionists achieve “a coherent theory that even begins to replace the orthodox model.”⁷⁰ The burden of proof thus rests with those who wish to overturn received views.⁷¹

This flawed claim merits rejection. “Hoplite warfare” is a general concept missing from ancient Greek sources, and impossible, indeed, to render into ancient Greek. The burden of proof rests with those who wish to give this concept the authority of some heading for an omnibus Greek military inscription that does not and cannot exist. This concept has, admittedly, garnered approval, but only because it seems to bring clarity to complicated and obscure aspects of ancient Greek warfare and politics. Alas, this clarity is illusory, as scholars since Snodgrass and Latacz have shown. Clarity will more likely result from analyses that allow for a greater degree of inconsistency and singularity among the hundreds of different Greek poleis of the Archaic period, as in the work of van Wees.⁷²

The hoplite in “hoplite warfare” resembles the apex of an inverted pyramid. Identified as a reactionary revolutionary, a tyrant-cheering democrat, and a rigidly disciplined military amateur, he has carried too much historical weight for too long. We should put him to rest and pay due attention to other kinds of Greek military personnel described in this volume, from amphibious forces to cavalry.