And a right good shield of hides untanned
Which on my arm I buckle.
With these I plough, I reap, I sow,
With these I make the sweet vintage flow
And all around me truckle.
But your wights that take no pride to wield
A massy spear and well made shield,
Nor joy to draw the sword,
Oh I bring those heartless hapless drones
Down in a trice on their marrow bones
To call me king and lord.’
‘King and lord’--they are the only words that the lyrists
have for the soldier, and the elegiac poets repeat the idea in the more
serious fashion appropriate to their poetical form. Tyrtæus, for
example, the lame schoolmaster lent by Athens to Sparta, in those poems
which the Spartans regarded as one of the chief causes of their military
success, emphasizes the supreme importance of martial valour:
‘I would never remember a man nor hold him of any account
because of his speed of foot, or skill in wrestling, his bigness, or his
strength, his beauty, or his wealth. He might be more kingly than
Pelops, more eloquent than Adrastus; but all his fame would avail him
naught unless he were a man of mettle in fight. This is the supreme
virtue, the best sport, the highest prize that a young man can win.’
Tyrtæus, as we see in his verses, regarded the art of poetry as
ancillary to the art of war, and the greatest of the Athenian dramatists
shared his views. The real gravamen of Æschylus’ attack upon Euripides
in the _Frogs_ is that the latter did not sufficiently exalt the martial
spirit among a nation, of whom the old poet says:
‘Their life was in shafts of ash and of elm, in bright plumes
fluttering wide,
In lance and greaves and corslet and helm and heart of seven
bulls hide.’
Prose literature gives us the same evidence as poetry. Thucydides and
Xenophon look upon history chiefly as a succession of battles and
campaigns. Of the social history of their time they tell us scarcely
anything, but they will dilate with the most intense interest on the
smallest details of a skirmish. To them, as to most of their
contemporaries, war was the one thing that mattered, the great business
and the great sport of life, and our historians have only in
comparatively recent times escaped from their point of view.
It is probable indeed that many of those Athenians, whom we think of
only as men of letters, were viewed by their contemporaries in rather a
different light. Æschylus was perhaps better known as one of the heroes
of Salamis than as a dramatist. Sophocles was an admiral in charge of
the Athenian fleet the year after the performance of the _Antigone_, and
the anecdote that his military position was due to his literary skill is
probably a literary invention. Thucydides had been appointed to the
command of the Athenian troops in Thrace long before he set to work on
his history. The stubborn courage of Socrates was proved upon the field
of Delium, and Euripides, that keenest critic of the war spirit, served
his forty years in the Athenian army when fighting was at its fiercest.
We generally imagine Pericles and Nicias as being civilian ministers,
men holding the same sort of position as Pitt and Walpole: in reality
through most of their lives they were soldiers on active service, and
Cleon, who was almost a professional politician, was ready and willing
at a moment’s notice to take command of a difficult and dangerous
military expedition and, what is more, had enough technical knowledge to
bring it to a successful termination.
As every Athenian citizen was a soldier serving under equal conditions,
there was no military caste and no military discipline as we know it.
The cavalry, once the preserve of the richer classes, was in the fifth
century B.C. confined to decorative peace functions. The higher officers
of the army were elected by their fellows, walked in the ranks, and had
no distinguishing badges.
The Athenian, who supplied his own elaborate equipment and was trained
to a particular kind of fighting, refused to become part of a military
machine. A general was forced to adapt his tactics to the temper of his
men, and the personal element entered very largely into all questions
of army organization. The accoutrement of the hoplite was the deciding
factor in strategy and tactics, and the character of fifth-century
fighting can only be realized by considering first the weapons with
which the citizen soldier was armed and the fashion in which he was
accustomed to use them.
If a citizen were to play his part properly in the great war game, long
and constant bodily training was necessary. At Sparta, the complete type
of a militarist state, everything was made subservient to physical
fitness, and even at Athens the claims of the body came before the
claims of the mind, so that when Socrates wanted patients for his
dialectic he had to go to the gymnasia to find them. And this was
reasonable, for only a man in perfect condition could fight under the
conditions imposed upon a Greek heavy-armed soldier. The mere weight of
a hoplite’s accoutrement would astonish a modern infantryman. His
defensive armour consisted of four pieces: helmet, cuirass, greaves, and
shield; and even the first of these, especially if it were of the
Corinthian type, was a considerable burden and involved a severe strain
on the neck muscles. It was very heavy, twice as heavy as any of the
mediæval helmets that we possess, was made usually of thick iron and
completely covered the head and neck. Holes were left for eyes and
mouth, the nose was protected by a vertical strip of metal, and a
lining of felt or leather was sewn inside to save the skin from
abrasion. After the fifth century, it is true, the Corinthian type began
to go out of use, and the Attic shape became more common. This was
considerably lighter and in appearance resembled a metal cap with extra
pieces protecting neck, cheeks and nose, which could be detached at
will. It was graceful both in its proportions and its adornment: a
crest, and often a triple crest, was usually worn with it, the three
plumes being carried in elaborately modelled supports.
The cuirass in its first form consisted of two bronze plates, roughly
carved to fit the body and fastened on the sides and shoulders. The
bottom edge was turned up to leave the hips free and the lower parts of
the body were thus dangerously exposed. Moreover, the rigid metal
seriously hampered all movement, and this type was generally superseded
by the cuirass proper, a garment worn much in the fashion of a modern
corset, but made of leather plated with bronze and buckled down upon the
breast by means of shoulder straps. The bronze plating was mostly in the
form of round scales sewn on to the leather with wire and overlapping so
as to present three thicknesses of metal.
The greaves were thin sheets of bronze shaped to fit the leg, which they
clasped and held by their own elasticity. They were often adorned with
embossed work and the fittings were sometimes of tin or ivory. Their
length varied; some went only to the knee, others covered part of the
thigh and an ankle pad was worn to keep the bottom edge from chafing the
foot. They were a protection against minor hurts, scratches, bruises,
etc., rather than a defence against spear thrusts, but their general
adoption is synchronous with the disappearance of the oblong covering
shield in favour of the smaller oval, carried on the left arm.
The Homeric shield, ‘great as a tower,’ and large enough to cover a man
from head to foot, had in the fifth century gone completely out of use.
In art we have no representation that corresponds to the descriptions in
the _Iliad_, and the heroes whose combats are pictured on the Attic
vases are armed either with a round shield which protects their body
only, or else with the oval shield about three feet long which after 500
B.C. had become the normal type in Greece. These shields bore usually
the blazon of their owner and often served to identify his body: man and
shield were inseparable and the fighter who threw his shield away
revealed himself as destitute of knightly honour. The character of the
blazonry varied as much as our heraldic designs. Sometimes it was
decorative and depended on individual caprice; Capaneus, in Æschylus’
play, carries as his device a naked man with a torch; beneath, the words
‘I will burn your city’; Alcibiades had merely a little Cupid with a
toy thunderbolt. In other cases it was the city or a god who supplied
the design: for example, the Mantinean hoplites had on their shields a
trident, the symbol of their state god, Poseidon; the Thebans, a sphinx
in memory of Œdipus; while others were merely marked with an initial
letter, the Argives with an A., the Sikyonians with the Doric San. These
devices were on the outer surface: the inside of the shield was supplied
with a leather or metal strap across its middle through which the left
arm was passed, and one or two grips of cord or leather at the side and
end to give a firm hold; for this shield was a heavy implement, very
different from the light buckler, with which the cavalry and the
skirmishers were armed, and it required strong and well-trained muscles
to wield it effectively in the stress of battle.
The race in armour, therefore, often called simply ‘The Shield,’ was not
only one of the most popular of gymnastic contests, but also had a very
practical value; although as a concession to human weakness the runners
were usually allowed to divest themselves of cuirass and greaves. The
picturesqueness of the race appealed especially to the vase-painters,
and we have many pictures of it, the best perhaps being those on a red
figured cup in the Museum at Berlin. On one side is a group of three
runners, the right-hand one bending ready to start, the left-hand one
turning the half-way post, and the central one hastening back on the
home stretch. On the other side are three runners one behind the other,
while in the interior of the vase is a single figure looking back, in
rather unsportsmanlike fashion, as he runs.
So far for a hoplite’s body armour; but he had also to carry his weapons
of offence, his sword and his spear. The first was of many different
shapes and has many different names in Greek, but all its varieties
belong to three main types.
In the first, dating from the earliest age, the blades are short and
heavy, made in one piece with the hilt. The guard is usually straight,
the pommel a round knob, the space between being filled with bone or
ivory to form a grip. This pattern, really a survival from the Bronze
Age, was transferred to the iron sword and is occasionally found even in
the classical period.
But the ordinary Greek sword of the fifth century is of quite a
different shape. The hilt is round and the long thin blade swells from
the hilt towards the point, showing that it was meant for cutting rather
than thrusting. Flat scabbards, often highly ornamented with the
precious metals, were used and occasionally the spear would be discarded
for single combat and two swords employed, one in the hand, the other
hanging ready in its sheath, as we see it in the well-known vase
painting of the combat between Achilles and Memnon. This was the usual
infantry sword, but there was another cutlass shape, the ‘machaira,’
which was especially suited to the cavalry soldier. Here the blade
curved and the whole weapon was heavier, with knife-like cutting edges.
The hilt was usually bent--often in the shape of a bird’s head--and gave
a secure grip, so that it was possible to deal heavy blows from above.
The spear, however, rather than the sword, remained always the chief
item in a Greek soldier’s equipment, for the Mediterranean peoples,
unlike the northerners, have always preferred the thrust to the cut. In
Greek poetry the word for spear is used indifferently for any weapon and
includes sword, while on the drill-ground the commands--‘To the spear,’
‘To the shield’--corresponded to our ‘Right’ and ‘Left Turn.’ In shape
there seems to have been but little variation. The iron head was
sometimes formed like a spike, with three or four blades tapering to a
point, but more commonly it was of the flat dagger type, with a raised
central rib and two cutting edges. The shaft, usually of stout ashen
wood, was about six feet long and the weapon was chiefly used for
thrusting at close quarters. Occasionally it was thrown from a distance,
but for this purpose the light cavalry lance of cornel wood was more
suitable. The spear, used like a pike, was too heavy for any but close
fighting, and there was a constant tendency to increase its length and
weight until the Macedonian sarissa reached an average of twelve feet
and required both hands for its effective use.
Such was the accoutrement of the Greek citizen soldier, and the
character of his arms fixed the character of his fighting. It was not
stupidity and lack of judgment that led the Greeks to fight in the way
that Mardonius the Persian thought so foolish, but rather the fact that
a Greek fighting man was almost useless on rough ground. ‘These Greeks,’
the old general told his young master, ‘when they have declared war upon
one another choose out the best and most level piece of ground they can
find, and there go down and fight so that the winners get off with the
maximum of loss: as to the beaten side I need not say anything; they are
completely wiped out. Speaking all the same language they ought to
settle their differences by any method rather than battle. But if in
spite of everything war becomes inevitable, then each side ought to
discover its strongest points and try to take advantage of them.’ The
passage is interesting, for it shows that total inability to comprehend
the psychology of any nation but one’s own, which is one of the most
pathetic things in history. Mardonius was among the wisest of the
Persians, but he could not understand that to the Greeks war was not
merely a business, but also the highest form of sport, and that it may
be carried on under rules of honourable conduct which rob it of most of
its worst features. In the great age, from causes partly physical,
partly moral, a Greek battle was fought on a system as formal and well
defined as the precepts of mediæval chivalry. The herald was an
important figure; due proclamation had to be made to the enemy; there
was a definite acknowledgment of defeat; and an elaborate ceremonial of
triumph and trophy. The battle once over, no bad blood was left: it was
a fair fight with equal weapons on the plain, and no attempt was made to
annihilate the enemy or to annex his territory. The losses in killed and
wounded were by no means as heavy as Mardonius believed, for these were
not big battalions directed by invisible generals, but citizen soldiers
who were sensible enough to know when they were beaten. The procedure
was fixed. The army marched out from the city at dawn until it found
itself face to face with the enemy on the traditional battle ground, one
of those alluvial plains, comparatively rare in Greece, upon which the
city depended for its supply of corn, the prize of victory being indeed
the ground on which the fighting took place. Then the generals on either
side would address their men with some final words of exhortation (there
was a special style of rhetoric held appropriate for such occasions)
and the two armies would advance to the attack.
With waving plumes and glittering spears, the sun striking upon the gold
ornaments of breastplate and sword-belt, the hoplites pushed forward,
slowly at first but quickening their step as they approached the enemy,
and at last the two lines, moving now at the double, would meet with a
crash in the shock of battle. Then came the moment for which the Greek’s
whole life was one long preparation: swaying, struggling, heaving, with
every muscle tense and every limb engaged, the opposing masses strove to
hurl one another back. All the tricks of the wrestling school and the
boxing match were designed for use in this hour, and even courage was of
little avail unless it was supported by that perfection of physical
fitness which the ancient Greeks alone of all nations attained. Success
in an ancient battle depended upon the quality of the men engaged, and
the men derived little aid from external sources: cavalry, engineers and
artillery played no part. The issue was decided by the final shock of
two bodies of heavy armed infantry relying on solidity and weight, and
momentum in the attack was all important, for the ranks once broken
could seldom be reformed. Long training in the drill ground must have
been necessary for the orderly advance of formations so dense as these
(the average depth of men in the fifth century seems to have been about
eight, but at Delium in 421 the Bœtians massed their men in files of
twenty-five), and however good the marching there was a constant
tendency for the front line to slant as each man edged under his right
hand neighbour’s shield. A Greek hoplite like a modern Rugby forward
depended upon his formation, and without a comrade on either side of
him, and ranks of men behind or in front, he felt himself lost. His
formation broken, the natural impulse was to retire, and a withdrawal to
the city walls was the usual result of defeat. Once behind his ramparts
the citizen soldier was safe, for in the fifth century sieges were
costly, tedious, and usually indecisive. Open fighting was the cardinal
rule: cunning surprises and unforeseen attacks were as difficult for an
Athenian hoplite as they were for an English knight. Both, when encased
in their armour, were conspicuous figures incapable of any very nimble
movements, and needing an attendant squire to take charge of their war
panoply. With both physical conditions led to a moral code of ‘noblesse
oblige,’ and for a time war became almost a gentlemanly diversion. In
neither case it is true did these conditions last long: the moral
degeneration caused by the Peloponnesian War destroyed the one, and the
physical changes brought about by the invention of gunpowder put an end
to the other.
Ancient as distinguished from modern warfare really ends with the fifth
century B.C., for the next age brought a revolution to Greece. War
ceased to be an art and became a science. The end of the Peloponnesian
War coincided with the spread of the Sophistic spirit; warfare was
subjected to the same sort of investigation and criticism as the other
departments of life; and specialization, with all its advantages and
disadvantages, began.
The later years of the Peloponnesian War had shown the importance of
cavalry and its proper functions in the attack and support of infantry;
but the first great change came when Iphicrates the Athenian discovered
that a hoplite force was not invincible by light armed troops, if these
latter were properly handled. His defeat of a detachment of Spartan
heavy armed infantry was in itself an insignificant event, but it
created a revolution in military tactics comparable to that brought
about by the success of the English archers over the French knights at
Creçy. Up till that time the hoplite in popular estimation held much the
same position as a battleship does in modern sea warfare; it was
considered as hopeless for peltasts to engage hoplites as it would be
for a light cruiser to attack a Dreadnought.
With the fall of the citizen soldier came the rise of the mercenary and
the professional fighting man. A Greek force ceased to be a homogeneous
unit and split up into the component elements of a modern army. ‘The
light armed men are the hands, the horse the feet, the infantry the
breast, and the general the head’; such was the saying of Iphicrates;
and the Theban tacticians, notably Epaminondas, followed him in
combining cavalry and light infantry with the heavy armed phalanx.
Philip of Macedon improved upon his Theban teacher’s example and soon a
standing army was established which disregarded all the old traditions
of chivalry. The Greeks had their first warning in the ruthless
destruction of Olynthus and the two systems met in final conflict at
Chæronea. The professional soldier won, and by the end of the fourth
century the ancient ideals had disappeared.
But it is well still to remember them. The system of orderly combat in
the open remains the best for developing the manly virtues; and any
nation that relies over-much on the mechanical and the unseen in war
will inevitably fall away from those standards of conduct which we in
our half humorous, half depreciatory way call sportsmanlike, and to
which the Greeks gave the truer name of ‘Aidôs,’ the quality alike of
the sportsman and the gentleman. Aidôs is ‘ruth,’ and the man who has no
aidôs in him will be ready to employ all means to achieve his aims, and
in the end perhaps will even delight in ruthlessness for its own sake.
3
Physical Education
Education, mental and physical, falls into three sections, according as
it deals with the training of the child, the boy, and the man; the word
boy including girl, and the word man woman. Of these three stages the
second seems to us so much the most definite that it has almost
appropriated the word to itself. Education in common judgment does not
begin until the boy goes to his school, while it ceases when he leaves
his university.
The Greeks, or rather the Athenians, looked at things differently. They
paid much less attention than we do to the training of young children,
and in this respect were distinctly inferior to most modern nations.
Even the second stage, that of boyhood, was not taken very seriously,
and the word for youthful education, Paideia, by the slightest of
changes gets the meaning of ‘a joke.’
Education at Athens began when the youth reached years of discretion,
and the true Greek word for education is neither Paideia nor Didaskalia
but rather Philosophia, love of knowledge. The real teacher was not the
Grammatistes but the Sophistes, the ‘sophist’ whose business it was to
train men in practical wisdom. Adult education in fact was the most,
not the least, important of the three stages.
Furthermore, in the early stages of life the training of the body was
regarded as more essential than the training of the mind. When his
education was finished, the Athenian boy knew his elements, he could
wrestle and box, he could recite Homer and play the lyre, he could swim
and dance: but of ‘useful’ knowledge, so called, and especially of that
horrid travesty that we call ‘technical education,’ he possessed
nothing. In most of the qualities of discipline, as Plato complains, the
Athenian system was lacking; but it had one great practical virtue: it
kept the mean, and neither over-stimulated nor yet over-repressed a
boy’s natural attitude towards imparted knowledge. An Athenian, when he
emerged from boyhood and became a man, was neither a pedant nor a
barbarian. In the fifth century B.C. it was realized that with growing
animals the demands of the body must come before the demands of the
spirit. Physical perfection, if it is to be won at all, must be secured
in youth: the final training of the mind can be left to a later stage of
life. The method had its obvious defects, but at least it did not create
that distaste for all study which more perfect theories of education
have often produced. An Athenian till the end of his life was always
eager and ready to learn.
There were two systems of education known to the Greek world, that of
Athens and that of Sparta; but in an Athenian, as in a Spartan,
household, the first six or seven years of a child’s life were spent at
home in the women’s quarter of the house. A Spartan mother, however,
only received her child to rear after it had been carefully examined by
the elders of the tribe to which the parents belonged: if its physical
condition was unsatisfactory it was exposed on Mount Taygetus, there to
die or be brought up by Helots. Consequently the Spartan women, who were
famed all over Greece for their skill as nurses, had only the best
material to work upon.