10-26-2009, 01:07 PM
Quote:Christian / Kineas raised the notion that many see Thucydides as a “veteran hoplite” and that this might not be true. I agree here too, though with the proviso that there is the argument that his description of the campaign of Samos speaks to an eye-witness. Certainly Xenophon was – a “veteran hoplite” that is (even if he made certain to have his horse nearby). Either way both wrote for an audience that likely did not include the average Athenian rower. They wrote for the literate and that meant, by and large, the more “wealthy” and educated class. Thus they wrote for trierachs, “taxiarchs”, those that debated philosophy and, therefore, more than the odd hoplite. For this audience Xenophon felt no need to fully detail military hierarchy or, more importantly, changes to same. Thucydides, although writing “for the ages”, certainly did not have in mind the 21st century. Although he sometimes explains matters a little more, he too expected his audience to understand much.
No argument there--complete agreement, in fact. In general, I prefer Xenophon to another source, if the subject is war. Nor would I quibble that Thucydides had seen service--but we ALL know the Victorian stock character of Colonel Blimp, who's been places and knows nothing. Limited military service wouldn't necessarily make a man "expert." Xenophon, it seems to me, was an expert.
That said, one of the things I truly like about Cartledge's brief article is that he's willing to accept that each of the Historians understood part of a changeing system--that there's more truth than falsehood in each writer. Herodotus, for instance, names his source--the Spartiate Archias--one of only three individual sources that Herodotus names in the course of a zillion pages of the History. He also indicates that he personally visited Sparta.
I'll sum up Cartledge's argument. He argues that Herodotus had a source, a Spartiate, named Archias, who was of the village of Pitana, one of the "original" four villages that constituted 'Sparta." Later, Herodotus refers, in the Battle of Plataea, to a "Pitanate Lokhos" (9.53.2). Thucydides "pours scorn" on this notion (1.20.3) and his scorn for Herodotus's lack of knowledge about Sparta is the cornerstone of the Victorian preference for "modern" Thucydides over that rotten socialist, Herodotus...
What Thucydides mistook was that Spartan traditions were "ancient." (See 5.75.2). Like most ultra-conservative states, Sparta seems to have claimed that all their laws and customs were ancient, but even we amateurs can see that there was immense change in the Spartan military structure from 550 to 350.
Cartledge goes on to suppose that the Lokhos gave way to the Mora--neither was a subunit of another, but the Lokhos represents another system entirely, and that there was a major reform between Plataea and the Peloponessian Wars. Cartledge theorizes that the reform was a result of a manpower crisis, possibly as late as the 440s, and represented the first formal inclusion of Periokoi hoplites in the Spartan phalanx, directly, rather than in their own separate organizations.
I find this interesting, as the current academic view does seem to be that Sparta had a major manpower crisis, possibly as a result of the earthquakes and Helot revolts of the 460s, that led them to undertake emergency measures and new laws. This would be a fascinating revision of history, if accurate--after all, it would suddenly cast Sparta as the underdog rather than the ancient military power in the looming contest with Athens. it would suggest, if true, that it was not plucky Athens deciding to resist Spartan hegemony, but perhaps plucky Sparta throwing the dice against the encroachment of mighty Athens...
Qui plus fait, miex vault.
