The Timing and Development of the Ouragos

[Sean Manning]

We seem to be in danger of losing our topic focus of 'ouragoi' and drifting off into the early phalanx instead.

No, I think it is a question of method.

Generally speaking, until the 1990s researchers tried to find one early Greek way of war and extrapolated practices from Thucydides and Xenophon backwards into the archaic (Roel K's "Prussian school").  To this way of thinking, of course there were files, front-rank officers and rear-rank officers from an early date, just like the first warriors with an Argive shield and crested helmet 'obviously' fought like Agesilaus' troops.  Connolly's idea that early Greek armies were organized around 50s was a beautiful example of this method: he postulated one common Greek practice, introduced at some vague time in the 7th or 6th century, based on texts written after 430 BCE.

Beginning in the 1990s this switched to a much more scientific approach which emphasized that if we look at the actual sources from the archaic (mostly art and weapons) its clear that warfare changed over time and space, that its possible that the style of warfare in Thucydides was a creation of the middle of the 5th century BCE, and that previous theories about what was "typical" were based on cherry-picking evidence.  To this way of thinking, if you want to argue that ouragoi existed before the first source which mentions them, you have to argue, you can't just assume that it was so.

That battle over how to use evidence is all over but the dying, even though people can still disagree whether they see a phalanx of ranks AND FILES on the Chigi vase and whether the difference between men on the Chigi vase armed with two spears, one to throw and the other to thrust, and Sophocles' hoplite with just a single ashen spear to defend himself from death reflects a different kind of fighting: I tend to sympathize with Peter Krentz, Hans van Wees, and Josho Brouwers.