Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece by Donald Kagan, Gregory F. Viggiano Page B

held at the Hall of Graduate Studies on the Yale campus. Our first concern in putting together an international workshop was making sure that the scholars would be willing to come and debate, so we are grateful to all the participants for sharing our enthusiasm for the idea. We were very fortunate to have Susan Hennigan’s superb assistance in arranging the travel and stays of the participants, and in taking care of all the logistics (meals, programs, audiovisual equipment, etc.) for the event. One scholar remarked that everyone got along so well because there was so much good food to eat. The panel sessions were well attended by faculty, undergraduate and graduate students from Yale, as well as faculty from Sacred Heart University, especially the Department of History. A number of scholars and graduate students from universities as far away asthe West Coast came to attend the sessions, in addition to people from the New Haven community. Therefore, we owe special thanks to International Security Studies (ISS) at Yale, as well as the Yale Classics Department; for without their kind generosity there would not have been any conference. We make special mention of Ted Bromund of ISS and his dedication to the project, and the support of Professor Christina Kraus, the chair of Yale Classics. Rob Tempio of Princeton University Press has given invaluable support and inspiration at every stage in the production of this volume.

 

CHAPTER 4
    Setting the Frame Chronologically
    ANTHONY SNODGRASS
    If there is nowadays a consensus that discussion of the Greek hoplite must start from Homer and the descriptions of fighting in the Iliad , then this is a fairly recent development. For most historians and Homerists of little more than a generation ago, Homer stood outside the issue and the Iliad ’s battles would be mentioned only to be excluded from the discussion. There is an obvious analogy here with a bigger topic, one so closely linked with the hoplite as to be often thought inseparable from it: the rise of the polis. The same shift has occurred here: where there was once widespread agreement with Finley’s view of the Iliad and Odyssey , that “neither poem has any trace of a polis in its classical political sense” (Finley 1956: 39), it is common practice today to scrutinize both texts, the Odyssey especially, for features that betray the poet’s familiarity with elements of early polis society. Recent scholarship has detected a number of such elements there and indeed has held that, for the Iliad , the hoplite style of fighting is itself one of them.
    In the specific case of hoplite warfare, this collective change of heart is, I think, relatively easily accounted for. It began with the appearance of Joachim Latacz’s Kampfparänese, Kampfdarstellung und Kampfwirklichkeit in der Ilias, bei Kallinos und Tyrtaios in 1977. I would not go so far as to say that, without Latacz, the old orthodoxy would have continued to prevail, and the Homeric evidence to be set aside; but I would maintain that the momentum and concertedness of this change in opinion derived from the publication of his book and, more especially, to its favorable reception on the part of historians. The prime contention of that book, that mass armies and mass combat play a far more important role in the battles of the Iliad than anyone had hitherto been prepared to admit, has won almost unanimous acceptance and, on its own, constitutes a major advance in the debate.
    For Latacz, however, it served as the foundation for a series of more far-reaching inferences, which carry his argument far beyond the philological domain and progressively further into the historical one. At this point, radical dissent intervenes. It begins with a mainly philological issue: how far is Latacz justified in arguing that the picture of fighting in the Iliad , his Kampfdarstellung , is a homogeneous, consistent, unified, and coherent one? One critic who, at an early stage, gave a firmly