of combat from a battlefield point of view, describing the actions, emotions, and concerns of the hoplites standing in the ranks of the phalanx.53 Fourth, he presented a “hoplite system” as the origin and foundation of a distinctive, Western “world system,” in which modern warfare and democracy are both the descendants and the unmediated counterparts of hoplite warfare and democracy.54 Armed with these tools, Hanson broadened, deepened, and reinforced the orthodoxy of the previous generation, and turned it into a comprehensive, holistic “narrative”—his term. The impact of Hanson’s scheme on Greek military and political history has been massive.55
Critics soon challenged his methods and preferences—his American-centric perspective, his tendency to anachronism and presentism, his cavalier treatment of the literary sources, and his omission of new archaeological data.56 The initial, fundamental challenge concerned the mechanics of hoplite combat. Hanson and earlier proponents of the orthodoxy envisioned a massive collision of troops culminating in a shoving match, or othismos. Critics such as Latacz and Snodgrass had not rebutted this view, which was nonetheless controversial. Krentz entered the debate on the othismos and argued that hoplite battle consisted of a multiplicity of individual combats; this strengthened the gradualist position at first, but later invited connections with van Wees’ new approach to Homeric combat. Van Wees reinterpreted the dynamics of Homeric warfare as an open and fluid battlefield in which the individual leaders moved freely followed by their “hosts,” and engaged intermittently in the fighting only to retreat to the safety of the rearguard.57 This marked the greatest shift in the interpretation of Homeric warfare since Latacz, with the consequences still to be explored. Van Wees argued that his open battlefield could be detected in the fragments of Tyrtaeus and Callinus, thus allowing the phalanx to operate in a looser, open fashion during the Archaic period. Krentz projected this kind of phalanx further, into the Classical era.58 He differentiated between an “inclusive” and an “exclusive” phalanx, depending on the presence (or in the second case, the absence) of troops other than hoplites in the formation.59
Krentz also targeted an originally French contribution to the hoplite orthodoxy—the ritualistic character of warfare, in particular Ober’s dozen rules of early Greek war. These rules resulted from misreading the literary sources, which either described religious duties, not rules, or reported rules without indicating how often they were followed, or how much weight violations would carry. Most telling was the terminus post quem, which was usually sometime in the fifth century.60 This crucial contribution was especially damaging for Hanson’s hoplite narrative, with its idealized view of Greek warfare as a bloody but straightforward and honorable encounter setting a standard for all of Western civilization. In gruesome truth, the literary sources report frequent Greek military brutality, not only toward foreigners, but also toward fellow Greeks, including both soldiers and civilians, and Krentz had helped explained why: the rules of war were few, tardy, and weak.
Van Wees contributed to the new trend less in regard to Homeric combat than in connection with several assumptions made by Hanson and older scholarship. Van Wees first attacked the 150-year-old assumption of a gap between the Homeric and the “historical” worlds. Then he attacked the centerpiece of both Hanson’s views and those of the preceding orthodoxy—the emergence of a hoplite middle class.61 He argued that both analysis of the literary evidence and quantitative assessment of the economic conditions of the Archaic period revealed a polarized society. The sharp divide between rich and poor left no room for middle classes. The elite were the group mainly associated with the various phenomena regarded as “middling,” such as the moralizing passages in Hesiod’s Works and Days, the position of the Athenian zeugitai, the Greek norm of service in the militia, and the slogans of isonomia and the like. This critique endangered another assumption made by Hanson and the orthodox—that of a vertical, if not Marxist, class struggle. It focused attention elsewhere, on horizontal, not vertical, competition and conflict within the elite.
Other scholars entered the fray. Foxhall argued for unexploited and comparatively vacant landscapes during the Archaic period, thus questioning Hanson’s pattern of “family farms” that supported the rise of a yeomen class.62 Rawlings presented the wide range of military tasks and contexts that the Classical hoplite was expected to cope with, undermining the traditional connection between the hoplite and the phalanx.63 Raaflaub, finally, explored the nature of ancient Greek democracy and the rise of the polis and connected them to the activities of the elite and the gradual definition of a “public” sphere. This political process interacted with the military transformations of the period, but slowly. It took centuries for closed combat and the Classical phalanx to result.64
This 20-year wave of scholarship affected hoplite warfare, scholarly assumptions, and Hanson’s narrative. The cornerstone, the panoply, was not what scholars had thought, and it no longer could serve as part of the foundation of the large historical construct of hoplite warfare and Archaic society. Neither could the phalanx. This formation now had a problematic history, and the hoplite had a problematic relation to the phalanx. As for a middle class of hoplites during the early Archaic period, no such class existed. It followed that there could be no social reform to name after hoplites, still less a social revolution resulting from struggles between upper and lower classes. Ritual played an ancillary role in Greek warfare, and the same was true of rules obeyed in a ritualistic spirit. Democracy had as little to do with these military developments as Marx or Livy did, for throughout the period in question oligarchies dominated Greece. Hanson’s agrarianism was misplaced, as was his concept of Archaic military history as an epochal starting point. Even Keegan’s face of battle had a new mien, now that the othismos had yielded to more maneuver, yet also to more confusion.
More broadly, van Wees proposed an alternative narrative for the Archaic period, one presenting multiple social, political, and economic processes that prompted different responses at different times in different Greek communities. Vanished was Hanson’s—and Grote’s—sequence of causal steps taken from a single point of origin.65 This possible reconfiguration of the past—as yet to be examined and evaluated—brings us to the topic of the present intellectual situation in the field of Archaic and Classical military history.
Future Prospects
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