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.
Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, PhDProfessor
