Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece Read Online Free
Author: Donald Kagan, Gregory F. Viggiano
received text was still potentially exposed to the influence of the age of the hoplite: on the contrary, it may now be their extreme rarity that occasions surprise.
The ramifications of the evolutionary model of course extend very much more widely. New explanations may emerge, whether for long-standing textual debating points such as the description of the shield of Achilles in Iliad xviii, with its surprisingly advanced development, both in the society portrayed and implicitly in the techniques of artistic execution; or for notorious iconographic problems such as that posed by the “Euphorbos plate,” showing the fight to secure the body and arms of Euphorbos, with Menelaos apparently prevailing against Hektor in a way that not merely differs from, but flatly contradicts the narrative of Iliad xvii, 1–113. In these as in other cases, the main effect of the model may appear to be that of increasing the range of the uncertainties—not necessarily a bad thing.
The iconographical approach, in general, is perhaps the one whose weaknesses are most apparent to us. I content myself with quoting a couple of phrases from the paper published earlier by Adam Schwartz (Schwartz 2002: 54): “any attempt towards interpretation is bedeviled by the sheer amount of ambiguity inherent in such early iconography. There is no external criterion of control to iconography.” One might contest the last comment by saying that actual finds of objects, corresponding to those shown in the images, constitute a partial external control. But in general these comments are truer of the iconographical approach than of either the philological or the historical one.
None of these three approaches can in fact progress very far on its own, without recourse to the other two. Above all, this must not degenerate into a game of stone/scissors/paper, in which the “stone” of the textual evidence competes with the “scissors” of history and the “paper” of iconography. Our difficulty is that few of us can muster the skills necessary to judge authoritatively in more than one of these categories, let alone all three. We have instead to assess the reliability of the conclusionsreached by colleagues in other disciplines; and the essence of my argument so far has been that we have sometimes fallen short in such assessments.
Yet my conclusion, in the light of the contributions to this volume intended to represent the full range of divergent views, and of the conference at Yale from which the volume sprang, is an optimistic one. I recall something said by Donald Kagan in the first session at Yale. He referred to the “search for self-differentiation” that once preoccupied the epic poets, but which today instead affects research—in that scholars tend to accentuate, rather than play down, the differences between their own views and those of colleagues. I agree: I think that the degree of consensus present in the current study of hoplites is greater than has often been acknowledged by the participants in that study. I would include myself, and this present article, in that judgment: it is more important that I share in the fundamental consensus, founded on Latacz’s work, that mass armies are the decisive force in the warfare of the Iliad , than that I reject every one of the later inferences that he bases on that insight.
Some of the apparent disagreements have turned out to be derived from simple misunderstanding. Thus, Hans van Wees did not deny the presence of mass combat in the Iliad , but that of massed combat, a different thing (van Wees 1994: 15, n.7); and Kurt Raaflaub (this volume) does not support Latacz’s identification of the close formations described in the Iliad with the hoplite phalanx. It is helpful to have these matters clarified, but what I argue is that there is a deeper level of convergence between ostensibly competing views.
I do not wish to overpress this point. But one man’s “hoplite revolution” may not differ all that
The ramifications of the evolutionary model of course extend very much more widely. New explanations may emerge, whether for long-standing textual debating points such as the description of the shield of Achilles in Iliad xviii, with its surprisingly advanced development, both in the society portrayed and implicitly in the techniques of artistic execution; or for notorious iconographic problems such as that posed by the “Euphorbos plate,” showing the fight to secure the body and arms of Euphorbos, with Menelaos apparently prevailing against Hektor in a way that not merely differs from, but flatly contradicts the narrative of Iliad xvii, 1–113. In these as in other cases, the main effect of the model may appear to be that of increasing the range of the uncertainties—not necessarily a bad thing.
The iconographical approach, in general, is perhaps the one whose weaknesses are most apparent to us. I content myself with quoting a couple of phrases from the paper published earlier by Adam Schwartz (Schwartz 2002: 54): “any attempt towards interpretation is bedeviled by the sheer amount of ambiguity inherent in such early iconography. There is no external criterion of control to iconography.” One might contest the last comment by saying that actual finds of objects, corresponding to those shown in the images, constitute a partial external control. But in general these comments are truer of the iconographical approach than of either the philological or the historical one.
None of these three approaches can in fact progress very far on its own, without recourse to the other two. Above all, this must not degenerate into a game of stone/scissors/paper, in which the “stone” of the textual evidence competes with the “scissors” of history and the “paper” of iconography. Our difficulty is that few of us can muster the skills necessary to judge authoritatively in more than one of these categories, let alone all three. We have instead to assess the reliability of the conclusionsreached by colleagues in other disciplines; and the essence of my argument so far has been that we have sometimes fallen short in such assessments.
Yet my conclusion, in the light of the contributions to this volume intended to represent the full range of divergent views, and of the conference at Yale from which the volume sprang, is an optimistic one. I recall something said by Donald Kagan in the first session at Yale. He referred to the “search for self-differentiation” that once preoccupied the epic poets, but which today instead affects research—in that scholars tend to accentuate, rather than play down, the differences between their own views and those of colleagues. I agree: I think that the degree of consensus present in the current study of hoplites is greater than has often been acknowledged by the participants in that study. I would include myself, and this present article, in that judgment: it is more important that I share in the fundamental consensus, founded on Latacz’s work, that mass armies are the decisive force in the warfare of the Iliad , than that I reject every one of the later inferences that he bases on that insight.
Some of the apparent disagreements have turned out to be derived from simple misunderstanding. Thus, Hans van Wees did not deny the presence of mass combat in the Iliad , but that of massed combat, a different thing (van Wees 1994: 15, n.7); and Kurt Raaflaub (this volume) does not support Latacz’s identification of the close formations described in the Iliad with the hoplite phalanx. It is helpful to have these matters clarified, but what I argue is that there is a deeper level of convergence between ostensibly competing views.
I do not wish to overpress this point. But one man’s “hoplite revolution” may not differ all that
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