This succinct study (128 pages of text, 86 pages of endnotes), based on C.'s doctoral dissertation, sets out to provide a ‘clear understanding of the sociology and psychology of the Athenian phalanx, which enabled amateur Athenian troops to face the terrors of close-quarters battle’ (p. 3). It innovates in drawing on the methodology of the scholarly field of ‘combat motivation’, which seeks to identify factors shaping the battlefield behaviour of soldiers in diverse historical societies. In my view, C. is more successful in setting forth an analytical framework for assessing some of the forces that acted upon Athenian hoplites than in applying this rubric to the complex situation of democratic Athenians conscripted to risk their lives for the fatherland.
Chapter 1 surveys the models that scholars have set forth to explain what determines soldiers' ‘will to combat’ in different historical contexts, and argues for a model in which a soldier is subject to pressure from three concentric circles of influence, first that of his ‘primary group’ (the small group of individuals with whom he associates most closely on campaign), second that of his larger military unit and third an outermost ring of his ‘national socio-political’ system' (p. 17). According to C., however, these concentric pressures must be ‘focused upon and accepted’ by the soldier, and this requires a ‘compliance relationship’ that may entail coercion, monetary incentives or norms that appeal to a ‘combatant's sense of civic obligation and ethical correctness’ (p. 19). Although I am not convinced that the spatial metaphor of concentric circles conveys very well the complexity of a soldier's experience (for example, it seems to me that a soldier's socio-political system is likely to define and pervade his relationship with his primary group or larger military unit), it is reasonable to analyse combat motivation with reference to these pressures. C. may be too optimistic, however, in positing that ‘this model can, despite its modern foundations, help to explain and evaluate the will to combat of any type of soldier of any historical era, as long as he is held by at least one of its three layers of integration and subject to a viable compliance relationship’ (p. 21).
Chapter 2 lays the foundation for the remainder of the study by reviewing methodically what we know of the recruitment, mobilisation and deployment of Athenian hoplites. C. accepts for the most part my account of conscription (CQ 51 [2001], 398–422), but also embraces van Wees' position that formal recruitment of hoplites was based on a property qualification; in my view, this over-reads the evidence of Thuc. 6.43.1. C. emphasises the importance of the demes in providing lists of men who could serve as hoplites; observes that fellow conscripts of the same deme at least sometimes set out to the central muster point together; but rightly cautions that we must not assume that the mysterious lochoi into which tribal contingents were divided are equivalent to deme levies.
Chapter 3 focusses on the interesting question what would constitute an Athenian hoplite's ‘primary group’ on campaign, and argues that the most appropriate candidate for this is the ‘deme levy … as a socio-psychological association of interconnected individuals’ (p. 43). C. acknowledges the frustrating limitations of the ancient evidence for the organisation of Athenian troops below the level of the tribal taxis, but argues that demesmen likely remained together on campaign and fought in close proximity to one another within the same lochos. This is plausible, but C. goes too far in positing that the deme levy, as a primary group, must have been an extraordinarily tight-knit and mutually supportive fighting unit. C. invokes an ideal of deme solidarity that goes beyond what Whitehead and others have embraced, speaking of the deme as a ‘profoundly cohesive’ unit (p. 45), whose members engaged to a high degree in mutual assistance of one another on the home front; such men, he believes, would strongly support one another on the battlefield, as friends and family members. This overlooks the evidence for enmity as well as friendship among fellow demesmen, as law-court speeches attest, and assumes too high a degree of familiarity and intimacy among the individuals who happened to be conscripted on any given occasion, especially those from larger demes like Acharnae. C. also assumes that it was possible for demesmen to monitor closely each other's behaviour within the hoplite phalanx in the heat of battle, but the ancient evidence casts doubt on this.
Chapter 4 turns to the larger military unit of the tribal taxis, and makes a good case that we should not overestimate how much the cohesion of this increased the hoplite's will to combat. As C. points out, recent scholarship casts doubt on the extent of intra-phyletic solidarity at Athens, and the tribal taxis on campaign is too large to constitute an intimate primary group. None the less, it is not clear that it was ‘little more than an administrative and tactical convenience’ that provided the hoplite with no sense of ‘military unit cohesion’ (p. 79).
Chapter 5 surveys Athens' ‘socio-political system’ and seeks to demonstrate that it exerted so powerful and unified a force on Athenian men as to leave them little choice but to embrace fully war, military service and combat. While C. draws on the work of recent scholars who have explored Athenian values and ideology, few would endorse his extreme view of Athenian militarism, belligerence and pugnacity. Athens, according to C., was ‘the most warlike, aggressive and militaristic state that the Greek world had ever seen’ (p. 99) – what about Sparta? C.'s Athenians ‘accept and adhere to a common set of norms and values’ (p. 84), which privilege battle above all else as a testing ground of all-important manliness. ‘For the Athenians, there was only one ideal man: the hoplite … Athenian men accepted a concept of manhood that was singularly pugnacious and rooted in that of the warrior’ (p. 104). Consistent with this view of Athenians as single-mindedly pugnacious, C. posits ‘for Athenian men, combat was entirely unproblematic’ (p. 104), and rejects modern attempts to reconstruct the human dimensions of the hoplite experience: ‘there is no evidence to suggest that Greek hoplites experienced any resistance to killing or, having overcome that resistance, that they suffered any form of combat trauma as a result’ (p. 191 n. 158). All of this would benefit from significant qualification and nuancing.
As C. embarks on Chapter 6, which focusses on ‘the compliance relationship’, his view of Athens' socio-political system not surprisingly leads to the conclusion that Athenian hoplites embraced combat because they had been conditioned to do so: ‘it is no exaggeration to say that the full force of Athenian society was dedicated to reinforcing compliance through an almost Skinnerian system of social conditioning’ (pp. 117–18). C.'s Athenian hoplites fully internalised what he characterises as the city's emphatically martial values and culture, and fully accepted ‘the legitimacy of the demand to fight and the legitimacy of the leader making it’ (p. 109). C. concludes, ‘It is no wonder then that, when the time came, the Athenian hoplite unhesitatingly closed with and killed his enemies’ (p. 126) and that he ‘undoubtedly deserves a central place in the ever evolving discourse of military history’ (p. 128).
This paean to the Athenian hoplite is not entirely without justification. When Athenians fought successfully, as they often did, this no doubt reflected a democratic environment that encouraged zealous service to the city on and off the battlefield, and that placed a high premium on martial courage (C. misses R. Balot's important work on the city's formulation of a specifically democratic vision of courage). C. does not sufficiently take into account, however, that Athenians were conscripts and evasion of service was a familiar phenomenon, and that Athenians, like other Greeks, were frequently routed (C. speaks only briefly of ‘conditions of progressive, usually irreversible, ataxia’ [p. 107]) and abandoned their shields in flight (see my The Bad Citizen in Classical Athens [2006]). At one point, C. acknowledges that democratic troops could be unruly and difficult to discipline in camp (p. 107), but does not pursue the possible implications of this for their behaviour as individuals in battle. And despite the reference to psychology in the book's title, there is little attention here to how fear, terror and panic affected the behaviour of Athenian and other Greek hoplites, as V. Hanson and others have amply demonstrated.
In brief, I found this to be an interesting but problematic account of the Athenian hoplite on campaign. In my view, the ancient sources present a considerably more complex view of the Athenian experience of conscription and battle.
