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One of the reasons for the emergence of the people as a political force was military. Sometime between 700 and 650, a breakthrough took place in Hellenic warfare, which had important political consequences for hundreds of years. It determined the balance of power in the polis and put paid once and for all to aristocratic hopes of a return to undiluted power.
We know little of military tactics in the deep past, but it seems to have consisted largely of bands of men with warrior leaders and ad hoc citizen militias. If we can trust Homer, Achilles and his like would fight duels and seek out one-to-one encounters after which general fighting would confusedly ensue. We hear little of battlefield maneuvers, and a great deal about courage and glory.
Mirroring the retreat of the nobles and the advance of the citizens, new, well-trained armies of heavy-armed troops gradually replaced the old heroes. These men were called “hoplites.” They were equipped with bronze greaves and corselets—two bronze plates connected by a hinge, which protected the upper part of the body—and bronze helmets. With their left arm they held a circular, convex wooden shield or hoplon (hence the name “hoplite”). They were armed with a short stabbing sword and a long stabbing spear about one and a half times the soldier’s height.
All this metal reduced vulnerability, but by the same token hindered visibility and mobility. However, the hoplite never fought as a lone individual, but as part of a tight formation. This was the famous Greek phalanx. Men stood in close ranks of between four and eight men deep. So long as it stayed in line and did not break up, the phalanx was extremely difficult to beat.
The Spartan poet Tyrtaeus, who lived in the seventh century, summed up the hoplite ethos:
Let each man come to close quarters and wound his enemy
With his long spear or his sword. Also let him set foot
Beside foot, press shield against shield,
Crest upon crest, helmet on helmet
Breast against breast.
This new ethos did have two weaknesses. First, it required flat ground; otherwise soldiers would find it hard to keep together and could be picked off one by one. It is a little odd that the phalanx was invented in a land as mountainous as Greece, and one constraint on hoplite warfare was that there were few places where a battle could actually take place.
Second, a hoplite carried his shield on his left arm and so protected both himself and the right-hand side of his comrade on the left. The closer they were together the less likely they were to be wounded or killed by hostile weapons. But the men who stood at the end of the lines on the right were left partly unguarded. They would involuntarily shift to the right if they saw any danger of being outflanked by the enemy; the comrades on their left would tend to follow suit to avoid their right sides being exposed. The danger was that the line would thin and a gap would open up, which the enemy would attack and widen. Whereupon the phalanx would be either outflanked or penetrated; and the battle would be lost.
Despite these problems, the hoplite army, if well trained and led, was almost invincible. Throughout the Mediterranean world this was widely recognized and trained Greek soldiers found that they could make a good living as mercenaries if for whatever reason they left their native land. The Spartans with their commitment to lifelong military training were particularly effective on the battlefield.
One advantage of hoplite immobility was that casualties in battle tended to be low because hoplites were nervous of running after a defeated enemy and risking a loss of formation. Heavy-armed troops could not run far or fast. Victors mostly allowed the losers to make their escape unharassed, and restricted themselves to stripping the dead and erecting a victory trophy.
Cavalry played a relatively small role in Greek warfare; horses were very expensive to maintain and neither stirrups nor horseshoes had been invented. Riders were usually upper-class men, politically unreliable and of suspect loyalty to the people.
Hoplites were also citizens. Called up from civilian life when circumstance required, they were of the middling sort, affluent enough to afford to buy their own armor and weapons. They were men with a stake in the community, in the success of their polis. Their arrival on the scene and growing influence in the public square meant that, whatever the exact nature of the regime in power, their interests had to be taken into account. Indeed they expected to have a share in political decisions.
The counterpart of the politically active polis was the hoplite army.
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In the agora near the town hall stood a grand monument. It had a marble base about sixteen meters long by two wide, and on it were set ten life-size bronze statues and at either end two metal tripods, looking like the one the priestess sat on when delivering oracles at Delphi. Around the monument a wooden railing was supported by stone posts. Here public notices of various kinds were displayed—muster rolls for the army, notices of lawsuits, draft laws, lists of young men who had come of age (ephebi). It must have been a busy spot with ever-changing clusters of people looking for information and instructions.
The statues depicted ten legendary heroes of Athens. They were mainly early kings, such as Theseus, and heroes or demigods, such as Heracles. Their collective title was the Eponymous Heroes because they gave their names to ten new tribes into which Cleisthenes divided the citizenry and which replaced the old quartet. These were the guardians of the city and worshipped as such.
The reformer’s reason for inventing new tribes was to eliminate or at least weaken the main political factions (the Coast, the Plain, and the Hills), which were causing all the trouble, creating dissension and instability. He also wanted to reduce the power of the brotherhoods or phratries, which were hereditary subgroups of the old tribes. Every citizen had to belong to one of them and they may have been exploited by aristocratic clans to exert political influence.
Cleisthenes achieved his objective in a very remarkable way. Each of the ten tribes was made to draw its membership from three different regions of Attica: the coast, the interior, and the city of Athens itself. Called trittyes (the thirds), they were usually not contiguous. This meant that members of the same tribe came from different parts of the country. Old local and territorial loyalties were dissolved.
The basic political unit of Athens was the demos: this word did not only mean the whole people (as already explained), but also the village or city ward. Cleisthenes divided the territory of Attica into 139 demes (as they are usually referred to in English). Each deme was allocated to a trittys and so to a tribe. He understood that a democracy at state level would not succeed unless there was also democracy at home and power was devolved to localities.
The deme was a miniature version of the polis. It had its own assembly that passed decrees about local affairs, and elected officials or demarchs. It was in charge of the numerous local festivals and religious ceremonies. It took over from the phratries the responsibility for keeping citizen lists up-to-date and endorsing new citizens when boys came of age. In official documents men were distinguished by their deme rather than (as previously) by their father’s name. In the first instance, a man’s deme was where he lived; but even if he and his descendants moved away to another part of Attica, they remained forever members of the same deme.