New hoplite book

[PMBardunias]

"...the ranks behind [the front line] in turn stemmed their shields against the back and right side of the main in front in a 3/4 angle..." (184).

As I feared, this stance cannot be held with any significant pressure- your elbow would have to take all of the force. You always collapse forward into your shield and end up belly to back- absorbing the force of them men behind in the process.

The quotes of Franz's work will be worth the book to me. I have seen this referenced, but the language barrier has kept it opaque to me. Had I known that he mentions crowds to this extent, I'd have saved myself a good deal of argument and referenced him in support of my theories. I have the book on interlibrary loan, which means I'll probably receive it just as his next one comes out.

He quotes Franz 2002 as discussing the fact that many wrongly consider the strength of the othismos to derive from bodily weight, and stating that "The mass pressure was not achieved by the weight of the warriors, but by their muscles, especially their leg muscles. The weight - or rather, the mass - of the hoplites played a relatively minor role.

I hesitate to critique him as quoted without context, but this is wrong. Leg strength has very little to do with crowd forces. Based on this my guess would be that he has seen that the crowd is an important analogy with othismos, but did not fully understand the way force is generated and propagated in a crowd. Without getting too deep into it, the fact that the men are standing relatively upright limits the force they can generate by leg thrusts. Most of it goes directly down into the ground. The killing forces in crowds do come primarily from weight, when individuals simple lean against each other like dominoes. That is not to say that a phalanx of more massive men will necessarily have more force- which may be a statement that Franz was responding to. My hat is off to him for taking it even this far though.

He considers that hoplites wearing amour, "especially if made of bronze, would help alleviating the pressure [of othismos] somewhat" (189).

This is unlikely. Many years ago I considered this. In particular I wondered if the bell shape of early cuirasses flared as it does to build the type of space around a hoplite to allow breathing that I have shown as aspis could. They are too thin. My guess is that the sides would buckle under pressure sufficient to need protection from. But again, good thinking to look to the panoply for evidence of such forces.

He further quotes Franz: "'When people behind sense that the pushing does not bring about any immediate advantage, they stop pushing. The result is a kind of reverse thrust. The pressure drop spreads slowly forwards, due to the inertia of a crowd of people. The relieved front rank men may even press backwards in order to procure some air temporarily. Such phases of decreasing pressure are necessary, especially in long mass actions, to allow the participants to recover.

This is a perfect explanation of why you don't see prolonged othismos outside of Greek hoplite battles. I have been critical of Goldsworthy and others who try to explain elements that are peculiar to hoplites, such as the great depth of files, through necessities that are common to all fighting men. Thus, I reject the notion that a phalanx needs files many men deep to keep men in the front ranks from fleeing, whereas 2 ranks of Englishmen need only a man with a pointed stick, for example. My othismos would fail for precisely the same reason if the above quote from Franz were true. The Key is that the aspis allows men not to do what he describes, not to resist the push of their own rear ranks due to lethal crushing, but to ride that wave of force. Crowds of hoplites could and surely did loosen up due to fatigue or random processes, they perforce loosened with every step forward, but not for the reason described above which would be common to non-hoplites.

Conversely, crowd pressure where no progress can be made - such as at Corinth in 392 - may often result in accidents: this can be compared to not entirely dissimilar conditions at modern rock concerts where spectators often suffocate, faint or even die from asphyxiation due to the pressure...." (189, n. 797)

This is not a comparable situation in that the disarray probably nullified much of the hoplites ability to defend against the crush- many would have dropped their aspides presumably by this point for example. But it does show, and with the same wording as hoplite battle, that such crowds are lethal.

He notes that the "non-linear, undulating pattern" of surges in crowds "cannot be gauged regularly, but is most certainly a real part of crowd movements. The pressure in a phalanx could likely at times be very oppressive, but in essence it was usually like any other crowd moving in a particular direction: rippling movements, always in one direction, and often quite powerful, but increasing or decreasing in force as it was perceived to gain headway" (189).

This is very good. I'm not sure if he is using "linear" in the sense we would mathematically, but the essence is there. Of course, it can't all go one way or the phalanx in that direction would win handily, the force moved both ways through a "crowd" of two combined arrays of opposing files. Imagine two earthworms in a head butting competition

That's just the excerpts I found from a quick reading, but I didn't see anything about your concepts of the structural integrity of the shield and its importance in protecting the individual from being asphyxiated.

I thank you for them. Franz would seem predisposed to agree with me, I shall have to hunt him down and send him some material. Schwartz perhaps less so. People assume that my crowd-othismos is an extreme form of Orthodoxy, I once thought so too. But it in fact destroys the current orthodoxy and brings us back to a scenario where othismos was not obligate and did not begin a battle, by rendering the crashing charge directly into pushing not only unneeded, but in fact deleterious to generating pushing force.

On a related note, I just recieved Chris Mathews 2009 Othismos paper "When push comes to shove: what was the othismos of hoplite combat" if any are interested. I'm going to do a review on my blog. I like the idea of a reenactor writing about this, and Chris raises some excellent points against charging into a spear armed phalanx, but the paper falls apart under many of the details that are mistaken in my opinion.