War is a product of culture, not of science.  No matter how much modern warfare owes to science and technology, no matter how much effort modern soldiers have devoted to rational consideration of the problems of war, the way we fight is influenced by habits, traditions and customs which can be traced to the beginning of recorded history.

The way the US Army, for instance, takes to the field, fights and the ultimately wins or loses, is influenced by techniques and strategies developed in Europe during the Renaissance  (around 1500AD) when the use of gunpowder first became widespread.

However Renaissance generals and their armies did not invent their trade; they derived tactics and traditions from the great armies of medieval Europe (1000AD), who in turn inherited the customs and traditions of the armies of the Roman Empire (Beginning of the Christian Era).  The Romans, great innovators that they were, likewise inherited a set of military customs and traditions from the ancient Greeks (500BC).

Each generation produced its own quirks, innovations and prejudices, adding these to the inheritance.  However a direct line of decent can be traced from the mechanised United States Army, at the dawn of the Twenty First Century, right back to a group of Greek farmers, standing shoulder to shoulder in a field in the Sixth Century BC (600-501BC).

Of course the ancient Greeks didn’t invent warfare either.  It’s just that here Europe runs out of written history, and to trace the specific evolution of warfare further back we must move to Egypt and the Middle East, where written records go back another two thousand years or so.  But as these early records are patchy; it is fair to say that the armies of Ancient Greece are the earliest European armies which we know much about.

This series of articles will explore the military heritage which has shaped warfare as we know it.  In particular I will concentrate on soldiers, rather than armies or generals.

In the past military historians were concerned with great men, like Julius Caesar or Kublai Khan, and the armies they raised.  However over the last few years historians have become more and more interested in the ordinary men, the soldiers, without whom the plans of all the great generals would have come to nothing.  What were their lives like?  How different are they from soldiers of today?  And in particular, given that this is a martial arts magazine, how did they fight?

In the rest of this article I shall introduce you to the Ancient Greek hoplite.  In Greek the word hopla means armour and weapons, but the word hoplite came to mean a soldier who fought in a very specific way with a very specific set of armour and weapons, and the style of warfare fought by these men is called hoplite warfare.

Ancient Greece had a grand past.  During the Bronze Age (2500-1000BC) Greece was dotted with small but evidently immensely rich fortified cities, controlling vast tracks of fertile land.  Each was independent, but according to legend a confederation of the greatest of these cities attacked and laid siege to the city of Troy, on the other side of the sea in what is now Turkey, and after ten years destroyed Troy, around 1200BC.

According to the legend this was the highest point, and the end point, of the greatness of Greece.  Archaeology seems to support this, for after 1000BC many of the richest cities in Greece fell to ruins; even the art of writing was lost, and Greece fell into a dark age until 700BC.

When Greece emerged from this dark age it was not a unified state but instead a collection of dozens of small city-states, the largest being perhaps 100,000 people.  These city-states were unified by language, customs and religion, but they had no sense of ‘Greekness’.  Rather each city was fiercely independent, and there was constant war between the Greek cities from 700BC onwards.  The armies which fought these wars, in almost exactly the same manner for 300 years, were hoplite armies.

The Greek hoplite soldier was a citizen volunteer.  Citizenship and military service went hand in hand.  The soldier had to provide his own equipment, so in practice citizenship was restricted to men wealthy enough to afford expensive weapons and armour.  But military service was not organised into standing armies, as in Rome three hundred years later.  Instead when danger reared citizens were expected to take their armour and weapons off the wall of the family home and report for duty as needed.  Greek hoplites, therefore, were farmers and landowners first, soldiers second.

Greek hoplites could not afford to spend long months training and campaigning when there was farming to be done.  Therefore the Greeks evolved a style of warfare which relied on guts over skill and which gave a quick decision to any conflict.

Hoplite warfare went like this:  The two sides would gather their soldiers on a flat, uncluttered plain.  Sometimes the place of battle might be the result of some strategic manoeuvring, but often it could be prearranged, like fixing a ground for a sports game.  The two sides would then arrange their soldiers into tightly packed ranks of spear men, usually eight men deep.  The fence of men and spearheads formed was called a phalanx.  Then, and this is the best bit, the two sides would walk straight at each other and try, by stabbing and pushing, to force one another off the field.  Once one phalanx had given way the victors used the possession of the dead to extract a formal declaration of defeat from their opponents.  Then everyone could pack up and go home, the whole war being decided in the space of a morning.
This style of warfare may seem simple, even crude, but it was in fact the result of centuries of evolution.  The Greeks saw its simplicity as an advantage since results depended on the courage of combatants rather than cunning or tricks.  Its formalities and rituals served to minimise the expenditure of time and lives whilst it ensured an unequivocal result.  It was fought by the men who owned the land, in protection of that land, and yet it was fought away from the cities themselves so that non-combatants were largely spared the usual miseries of war.

It was a very gentlemanly form of warfare.  Because of the cultural mechanisms which had evolved to limit the destruction caused by war, the Greeks were able to wage virtually continuous war on each other for three hundred years.  After the year 500BC, however, the temptation to innovate began to transform hoplite warfare from the sport of gentlemen into one of the most savage forms of combat in history.

In the next article I shall discuss the Greek hoplite soldier; what he looked like and how he fought.