0:06
How many changes can a culture go through at one time?
It's almost like a quiz that the Greeks have given us with the Archaic age.
We've seen how many changes already. I'll let you figure that one out for
yourself. There's one or two more yet to talk
about, one of them is economic. This is slightly anachronistic, this is a
later Athenian coin, a so, a so called silver tetragram, a fore drachma coin
with Athena on one side and her owl on the other.
I put it up here just for the moment to illustrate a huge economic change that is
also occurring in the archaic age. Up to this time wealth had been defined
by the corn one has in one's barn, as Hesiod says.
That is, by agriculture and its produce. Now, probably due to a, contact with the
more highly developed mercantile societies of the Middle East, the Greeks
start to adopt new standards of wealth called movable wealth.
1:39
And eventually, you get communities issuing coinage as a sign of citic
identity. It's difficult to convey what a, what an
enormous change this must have been. That is all of a sudden, or not even all
of a sudden, but gradually in a relatively brief period of time, let's
put it that way. Wealth was not just in terms of land
ownership, passed from father to son to son to son, et cetera.
But now a little bag of gold, you can trade that for oxen, for a ship, or for
armor. We have the rise of a new standard of
wealth, a new middle class. We'd be very careful about how we define
this. We don't want to think of this in any way
as a [UNKNOWN]. But this is a class that is between the
old hereditary agathoy, the good people and the barely scraping by subsistence
farmers, the other side. And what we have, as well, is a change in
military tactics, a new kind of fighting. When you read the Iliad, what you see is
a mass of anonymous warriors interspersed with the heroes, and Homer spends most of
his time describing heroic individual combat one hero against another.
3:18
There was some kind of battle line, this is certainly the case.
How organized it was is very difficult to tell, because Homer wasn't interested in
that. But this brings up another topic for us,
as well, because up until relatively recently, people would talk about the
Hoplite revolution. Now it seems more like a hoplite reform.
What's a hoplite? It is a heavily armed foot soldier who is
fighting in close formation, these would be the members of this new class.
The farmers, with their intensively worked plots of private land.
Setting aside a certain amount of this new kind of wealth and equipping
themselves with this heavy armor. The panoply for a Hoplite consisted of a
helmet, a breast plate, a large, probably almost a meter across, circular shield,
which would have inside it one a kind of of cable that you could slip your arm
through and then a grasp at the edge so that you could hold it like this and in
your other hand, you would have a short stabbing spear.
We have a number of representations of this.
One of the most famous is on the so-called Chigi Vase which seems to show
2 Hoplite forces about to collide. There's been a lot of attention paid
recently to what the realities would have been of this kind of combat.
Think about this, You're wearing bronze armor, Breastplate, helmet, as I said.
Perhaps some kind of corset and shinguard's, or greaves.
You're carrying a shield that probably weighs between 16 and 20 pounds, and you
are lined up very, very closely because your shield side provides some protection
to the man on your left, whose right hand is unshielded, has the spear.
A rank of about 8 men deep would have been the phalax, the hoplite formation
and Greek battle at least this time, was highly ritualized, highly formalized.
[UNKNOWN] has one of his Persian characters make fun of it.
The Greeks would send hoplite warriors out into a field, they would face off
against each other They would then close at probably a slow run, and then there
would be a collision. And there occurred what was called the
pushing, that both [UNKNOWN] the shoving. Imagine what this was like, you have a
metal helmet on your head, obscuring much of your vision and much of your hearing,
can see out of the eye holes in front of you, the guy in front of you is trying to
kill you. All around you you hear, the sounds of
combat, the clash of metal on metal, the shields would have had a wooden frame
with a bronze covering over it, probably not so much for protection as for
display. Can see one of them has a wonderful
gorgon face here and, the idea was, the ideal was to maintain your place in line,
because hoplite combat depended on massive amounts of brute force against
each other and whichever line broke first, the other side would, likely, win
the victory. It's an odd way, one might say, to
conduct warfare, but it had certain advantages, first of all, it was
relatively limited in scope. One could be sure that the injuries were
horrific as, these spears stabbed, either beneath the shield, toward the groin, or
the belly, or above the shield, toward the part of the neck or the collar that
was exposed. But it was relatively restricted, it was
restricted to these warriors. The battles could last a very long time,
but when they were done the winning side would allow the losers generally to
collect their wounded and their dead. The winners would set up a trophy, and
the army's would disperse. There seems to have been, at least at
this time, no wholesale slaughter of the defeated side, much less, a general
involvement of civilian population. Applied ideology as well fits with the
ideology of the polis. What we're seeing is new kind of
structure in order in so many different sorts of ways, we've talked about this
already. Communities defining themselves as polis
with constitutions. Who gets to be a citizen and who doesn't?
Law givers and law codes, at least nominally, making everybody equal under
the law. And now, in the line of battle as well
communities defending themselves. There isn't much room in this kind of
combat for the individual heroics that define Homeric battle.
In fact, they worked against the solidarity of that line.
We'll see when we talk about the lyric poets that the poem, the poets talk about
the need for a man to stand firm, maintain his place, protect his fellow
soldiers. We find numerous representations of this
kind of combat in art, as here you can see the close up, you can also see how
he's holding his shield in the way I was describing.
10:42
It wasn't like the national armies that we have today.
There were also other kinds of troops. Here we see a vase that shows a hop light
and an archer leaving home. And the archers were probably less well
to do and certainly had less status in the battle line.
This brings us back oddly enough to Odyssus.
We talked about his status as an archer in the homeric scale of things where he
was great but a little bit safer then the guys who were chest to chest, shoulder to
shoulder, sword to sword. What we're going to see now is Hoplite
warfare, defining Greek interstate combat for a very, very long time.
And we see it formed here in the Archaic age.
I was thinking before, there's this famous phrase from Marx, that all that is
solid melts into air It must have felt like that to the inhabitants of Greece,
of the Greek world at this time. Things are changing so enormously and so
fast, it's a time of incredible activity and creativity and evolution and change.
We're now going to pause a little and looking at some of the new literary
expressions of this kind of change.
Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, PhDProfessor
