Roel Konijnendijk | Session 6 of the Battle of Plataea Conference

So I'm really delighted to be part of this panel, not only because, you know, I'm really delighted to be invited, and thanks Natasha for that, but also because I'm in a panel with two people that I actually collaborated with very productively, with Fernando on an article that isn't out yet, but with Paul on an article that is specifically about this, and he's just presented essentially his part of that argument. What I would like to do is to present my half. All right, so I imagine that a lot of you are going to have fairly strong opinions on this, so I want to be clear from the outside what exactly I'm trying to argue, and that is this. I believe that Herodotus gives us enough reason to suppose that the Spartans at the Battle of Plataea were not fighting yet in what we understand to be a regular, homogenous, classical hotline palace. What I do not mean to argue is that we have enough evidence to reconstruct exactly what their fighting style was. I don't think that we can necessarily pose a detailed reconstruction of exactly what happened, although Paul has given you some very, very nice pointers as to what we may suppose happened on the basis of the evidence that we have, as well as probabilities and comparative material. But what I do want to argue, and I think this is why this matters, is that Herodotus as a source becomes much more important for our understanding of Greek warfare if we do indeed acknowledge that what he's describing at Plataea is not quite the classical hoplite phalanx, because if so, he may be almost inadvertently one of the only sources that actually preserves an intermediate stage, a transitional mode of infantry fighting in Greece, between the fluid, more sort of cloud-like fighting of earlier periods, and the very regularly organized and homogenous hoplite phalanx that we know very well from the writings of Thucydides and Xenophon. So that's fundamentally what I'm trying to argue. And again, I guess if I have convinced you that at the end of this, that the Battle of Plataea did not involve a Spartan phalanx, then I've already succeeded, and you don't need to necessarily accept my suggestions as to what we may be seeing instead, or Paul's suggestions as to how that may fit into a more general narrative of the development of Greek infantry tactics. So my starting point for this, and I just need to make sure I'm in the right screen, my starting point for this is fundamentally that there is a standard account of what hoplite fighting and the Persian wars, and specifically the decisive clash between Spartans and Persian immortals, if we can call them that, what that looked like. And that account, obviously, is based on Herodotus, who gives us a number of pointers that we can work with. He gives us a description of the actual fighting, in which he says, among other things, that the Persians lost because they were unequipped. Now this is an argument, obviously, that we've already covered in some detail. What does that mean? They were unskilled and epistemones. And finally, that the battle was decided when it came to Othismos. Those are three things that can obviously be variously interpreted, as we've seen. We don't know exactly what they mean or what Herodotus meant by them. But it is on the basis of these kinds of hints, these kinds of causalities, that modern scholars have generally assumed that they understood what was going on, which is that Herodotus was describing an encounter by this Persian force of a Greek hoplite phalanx of the kind that we know from descriptions that we find in Thucydides and Xenophon. On account of the idea that the Persians were less well-equipped and less skilled, we can make assumptions about what this Spartan line was like instead. And obviously Thucydides and Xenophon, in their descriptions of this very regularly organized hoplite phalanx, which responds very well to orders and which performs in a very disciplined way in battles like Mantinea, we can see what that would have meant. We can see what this battle was decided by Odysseus. Similarly, we can see, okay, well, this is something that we encounter in later descriptions at Delion or at the Battle of Branea. And then we can use that to fill in the gaps, fill in the blanks. So the scholarly conclusion on the basis of these bits in Herodotus is that Thucydides was essentially a typical hoplite battle, that is to say, followed the rules of classical encounters. And the Persians simply weren't able to cope with that, which leads us to the second point, which is the other conclusion that scholars almost universally have drawn, which is that the encounter of Spartan and immortal was essentially a foregone conclusion. Because the Spartans were so much more heavily equipped, better organized, more disciplined, and because they fought in that particular way that we learn about from Thucydides, with all their discipline and all their unity of command and unity of movement, there was essentially nothing that these relatively lightly equipped Persians with their antiquated tactics that we've seen, you know, derived from Assyrian models, what they could have done about it. So this battle was essentially over before it began. And there's a huge range of scholarly quotes that I could deploy here. The one that I've chosen here, admittedly, is quite old from Howe and Wells. I hope you won't sort of take this as a hint that I'm sort of cherry picking. This is actually something that can be endlessly duplicated in dozens of pieces of scholarship. They wrote that the natural result, the outcome of the battle was the natural result of better arms, better discipline, better tactics. Now, I selected this quote, precisely because of that word natural. This very much expresses how scholars look at this engagement. They perceive this as something that is inherent in the elements. So because the Spartans functioned like a hoplite phalanx of the type that we know from later sources, therefore, the Persians were essentially fated to lose. There was nothing they could do about it. My way of problematizing this, which I've worked out with Paul Vardunius, is to point out that there is a lot in that assumption that, you know, that there is a classical hoplite battle going on, that is actually not explicit in Herodotus, that we are essentially imposing on the account that we have. Obviously, I mean, Peter Krentz and others have pointed out that there are various sort of ritual aspects or protocols of hoplite battle that are simply missing. They don't do things like sing paeans, set up trophies. There are no truces to collect the dead in Herodotus, and these kind of elements are all absent. But more relevant to our discussion is the fact that also both the vocabulary and, to a large degree, the practice of the encounter of phalanxes is absent from this description. Now, Fernando Echeverria has a really great article just to explain that the word phalanx was not in use in these early 5th century sources, and in fact does not occur in a practical sense that we understand it until Xenophon. So in that sense, we don't really need to worry about that too much, because Thucydides also doesn't use the word phalanx to describe Greek battle formations, and yet there is no doubt that what he describes as the Battle of Mantinea is a hoplite phalanx. So we don't maybe need that word. But it's very clear from Herodotus that his understanding of these battle formations is much less strict and regulated than even that of Thucydides. He doesn't have specialist vocabulary. He doesn't have the specifics of the size or maneuvers of individual blocks in great detail. And in particular, he is unable to describe the formation depth of any of these Greek battle lines. Now, this often gets shoved aside with people saying, you know, Herodotus just wasn't interested in those details. But I would argue that he actually was very clearly interested in those details. For one thing, because at the Battle of Marathon, he describes how there were varied depths in the Athenian line, which affected the course of the battle. The Persians were able to win in the center because the lines were thin. But also in Plataea, because he seeks to explain the fact that there was a huge discrepancy in numbers, according to his account, by arguing that the Persians were deployed in much deeper formation. So he clearly had an understanding of how these formations worked and that depth was relevant to their practical operation. But he was unable to give us any kind of solid numbers for any Greek formation anywhere in his work. And particularly at Plataea, I think this is an important thing to recognize because of the way that we hear about formation depths in later sources. So when Thucydides and Xenophon report formation depths, it is usually in the sense that some officer decreed that depth to be adopted, which means everybody who was there should have remembered this if they ever received such an order. It is very odd that that kind of detail is absent from Herodotus' account if he had access to any eyewitness account of this battle. So this is one thing that I think is really important to bear in mind, that these elements, these basic building blocks of a hoplite battle description are missing. And this can be further developed in particular in the Spartan case, because all of the things that we expect of Spartans, the kind of things that Spartans do that make them interesting to authors like Thucydides and Xenophon in particular, the kind of things that they describe with a palpable awe as like, look at the Spartan army performing these things, where you may not have heard about this before, let me describe it to you in excruciating detail. These kind of things, which they stress, and single out, these are unique Spartan skills. These things don't occur in Herodotus' account of Plataea. So while a lot of authors have tended to assume that the Spartan army that was in action here was the same Spartan army that was in action in the Battle of Mantinea in 418, for instance, and had the same level of officer hierarchy, the ability to march in step to the sound of flutes, the ability to maneuver based on commands given in the field, Herodotus simply doesn't give us any indication or even a hint that this is the case. In fact, and I think this is, you know, obviously a minor detail, but I think it's relevant, when he says that the Spartans advance into battle, what he actually describes is no different from how he describes others advancing into battle. There's no indication of this Thucydides' idea of marching in step, being very deliberate and slow, where everybody else charged. In fact, the Thucydides advance first, the word he uses, ekorun, they went forward, and then the Spartans afterwards, also ekorun, also went forward. He uses exactly the same verb, offers no glosses on it whatsoever. So, these are all arguments from silence, obviously, this is just saying what Herodotus does not say. And people have not been convinced by this, and instead have tended to kind of fill in the blanks themselves with what they thought Herodotus ought to have said. And so what happens in a lot of scholarship is essentially that the details that he doesn't mention are simply assumed to have been there anyway, because this is what we're assuming, right, that the formation that we're seeing in action at Patia is the same formation that we see in action at Mantinea, or Lucca, or Cornea, or anywhere. And so this is where we get the quote that Sean Manning alluded to yesterday, briefly, when he mentioned this idea of ordered squares, careful armaments, and deliberate drill. Hansen described the hoplite phalanx in these terms, but he was specifically referring to the Spartans at Patia. So this is his understanding of what this must have looked like, despite the fact that Herodotus gives us no hint of anything like this. And many descriptions of the battle similarly hinge, or scholarly descriptions hinge on the idea that the hoplite phalanx in action in this battle operated in the same way as hoplite phalanxes do in later battles, described by Cassini, for example. So this is just a sample quote. But again, I could offer you dozens of similar examples, in which the Spartan action is specifically described in the same terms, and specifically described to be successful, because it was a hoplite phalanx operating as a hoplite phalanx does. So eventually, the sheer weight of the hoplite phalanx using those terms, which Herodotus obviously doesn't, began to tell. And so the Persians, you know, helpless before this onslaught were driven away. And this kind of assumption extends to the way that the source itself is often translated. One of my favorite examples of that is the old example by Godley of this particular part, which we've discussed, of course, in great detail yesterday, of the retreat, the final retreat of Amonparatus, when he finally does, on the day of the battle, rejoin the Spartan line with his unit. There is a line here in Herodotus, which I translated here as literally as possible. This is a very clunky translation, but I just want to express just how loose and just how vague the terminology is that Herodotus actually uses. What you're seeing here is literally the unit picking up its weapons, Amonparatus led them slowly to the rest of the crowd, stifos, this is a mass of people. But Godley translates this, he accordingly bade his battalion to take up its arms and let it marching in step after the rest of the column. There are at least four occasions where I would quibble with the sheer professionalism, the sheer organization, the sheer discipline that is implied by this particular translation. That is how modern scholars have described the battle of Plataea. But there are things that Herodotus does that are not just reliant on us understanding what he's leaving out, but actually work on what he does say. One of those, which is obviously the most famous one when you're describing the battle of Plataea, is the problem of the Spartan light-armed troops, these helot light-armed, which are mentioned repeatedly, but which specifically according to Herodotus, and this is critical to this understanding, this maybe isn't a hoplite phalanx. What he says is when he describes the numbers of the light-armed, of the Spartia's taxes, there were 35,000 men. Now, this is a possessive, this is in that formation, in that Spartan taxes, there were 35,000 light-armed troops. He does not use the same kind of phrasing for other formations, but this is something he specifically says about the Spartiate taxes. Spartiate is also the noun that he uses there. I'd like to stress the fact that of all the things that Herodotus says about this battle, this is the only thing he says about the Spartan formation. He is unable to give us any other detail about the nature, the makeup, the size, the depth, or anything else about this formation. He has no details. The only thing he says is that 35,000 light-armed troops were in it, were part of it. Obviously, many people have tried to deal with these helots in various ways, but I really do appreciate Peter Hunt's article, although I don't agree with his conclusion, just systematically dismissing all the different reasons that people have offered. These were just protecting the baggage train, they were just body servants, they were just whatever, and saying, no, the only way we can make sense of this is to accept Herodotus at his word and accept that these troops were there and were part of the fighting formation that the Spartans deployed, even if we don't quite understand how that worked, what that would have looked like. We're dealing with something here that isn't a hoplite frontlines. We're dealing with something that mixes things together in a way that Herodotus was very insistent was not like a hoplite battle. This is not like the formations that he would have seen around him in the days when he was living in Athens or anywhere else. This is something that he wanted to stress was different. Similarly, when it moves into action, we see something very strange that a lot of people have mentioned or described as something that goes to the detriment of the way the Persians were approaching this battle, but that actually tells you a lot about the way the Spartans were fighting it as well. Herodotus says that one of the things the Persians did wrong was that they kept coming ahead in very small groups. They would come at the Spartans in singles or in two-man groups or 10-man groups, charging into the line. Obviously, the Spartan formation was very easily able to dispatch those small units because of its cohesion. This is used to explain the fact that the Persians are described as unskilled, but as Phil Sabin pointed out, it also must mean that the Spartans are not doing something that we expect that we would expect them to do if they were a classical hoplite phalanx, which is to keep the pressure on continuously. A hoplite phalanx encounters the enemy in battle and keeps on moving forward if it can until resistance is offered or the enemy runs away. This pressure is continuous or this forward momentum is continuous because that is how a phalanx works. It goes forward until it encounters something that can stop it or until the battle is over, essentially. These kind of one-man or 10-man attacks can only happen if there is room for people to fall away from the Persian formation in order to cross the gap and encounter the Spartans in hand-to-hand combat. If that is the case, there must be a gap between these lines. If that is the case, we must assume that the Spartans were not keeping the pressure on, were not retaining momentum or pushing forward continuously, but rather after throwing down the Persian shield wall had actually stopped in place and allowed the Persians to choose their favorite response, essentially try and deal with the fact that the Spartans were now standing where they had previously stood. This is not about maintaining that momentum in order to drive the Persians off the field. This is about stopping in your tracks and leaving them room to react to you by trying to pick at you in these small groups, trying to open up gaps in the line. In fact, it's not just the Persians doing this. This is kind of the interesting thing where I come together with obviously what Hans Marais has argued about the nature of late archaic warfare. You still get examples of also Greek warriors similarly moving away from their own formation in order to engage the enemy singly or in groups. You still see accounts in Herodotus' battle narrative of single Greek warriors going out ahead of the line, either challenging enemies to single combat or trying to throw themselves at the enemy formation in order to make a hole in it or achieve some personal deeds. Aristodemus obviously on the Spartan side is the famous example, but there are several others in the account of Attia. In fact, when Sophanes the Athenian does this to the Theban army, the implication must be that he is expecting Thebans to do the same in response to him. Hans Marais has argued already that we should not be too tempted to dismiss this and say, well, this is just archaizing, this is just heroic nonsense, but that this may well reflect an actual way of fighting, that they were still able to move ahead of their own formation to challenge the enemy and to disrupt the enemy, even if it was already understood, as the Spartans would later say, that this is actually a bad thing because you're leaving your place in the line. This is where we can bring in this evidence, this very difficult to understand passage from Herodotus' account of Thermopylae, where the Spartans supposedly feigned flight and then turned around and overthrew the Persians who were chasing them, thinking they were running away. This is something that different scholars have dealt with in different ways. One of the theories that I find most plausible is that these were indeed similar forward groups. They would run ahead, try to challenge the enemy, then run back to their main line. When they arrived at that main line, the rest would not follow them, but rather absorb them and offer a united front. These are attempts to try and disrupt a shield wall that is otherwise too big of an obstacle, that simply cannot be encountered en masse. These kind of attempts to needle the enemy and to bring them out of their organized formation, bring them out of their steady shield wall, is something that we're seeing both sides doing. In fact, this is something that received some confirmation, although dubious, and I'd be happy to know if you find validity in this or not, but is seemingly confirmed by this very much later account by Plato, in which he has Socrates recall that they say, obviously, that at Plataea, that the Spartans came up with the men with wicker shields and they were not willing to stand and fight, but they fled. But when the Persian formation was broken, presumably in pursuit of these fleeing men, the Spartans kept turning around and fighting like cavalries, moving back and forth into the fight, trying to pick off stragglers, picking off people who are out of formation, and so won that battle. I've included here deliberately the response that immediately follows this from the experience of Laches, who does not refute this and say, come on, this is nonsense, they were a phalanx, they fought like we do. Laches actually confirms this story, even if that doesn't necessarily mean we should believe it, at least in the narrative it is meant to be convincing. And so this is something that leads me to, I think, a composite picture that is quite different from what we understand a classical hoplite battle to look like. And this is where I want to repeat this solitary quote from Peter Hunt's article on the role of the helots at where he points out that by eliminating the parts of Herodotus that most surprise us, because they don't fit our preconception of a hoplite battle, we have lost the very details most likely to tell us something new. If we try to accept the things of parts of Herodotus that most surprise us, if we try to see if there is any value in those statements, we may be able to re-conceptualize what the fighting in this critical engagement actually looked like. And this obviously is speculative and this is where we tie into, you know, what Paul has laid out for you before, but fundamentally I think what we're looking at is something more like this. Both sides deployed mixed formations of missile troops and heavy infantry behind more or less static shield walls. The Spartans are prompted to respond to the shield wall by a charge of heavy infantry because the Tegeans can't bear the arrow barrage and they know that they're helpless before this, so they have to close the distance. The Spartans are essentially prompted to follow suit. They don't do this in any sort of particularly Spartan way, they simply follow along with the Tegeans who are performing a kind of infantry attack to try and close the gap. But as soon as they have succeeded in their initial charge, have overthrown the Persian shield wall, the wall of wicker shields, there seems to be a resumption of a similar sort of formation of static lines. The Persians have space to come ahead at this new line singularly or in groups in order to try and pick it apart. They are obviously now on the back foot and at a disadvantage because their big wicker shields are gone. So they have to try and pick apart the Spartan line in order to try and even the odds or possibly regain ground so that they may pick up their shields again. These are probing attacks and there's room for that. Neither side is pushing. It is only at the very end that we see a rush on into close combat, which may be what Herodotus means when he says that it was all in the balance until it came to Othismos. We don't know what prompts this, but this is what finally decides the issue. And this may well support Paul Bardunas' argument that fundamentally the Greeks had to realize in the course of this conflict, as the Athenians may have done already at Marathon, that it was the hoplite's function as a close combat specialist that actually gave the greatest advantage to the Greek side. Thank you very much. You brought for a very fresh perspective, I think, on the battle. This should, I feel, stimulate some discussion for sure. And in putting our questions to your talk, we can then perhaps segue into the more general discussion as was indeed intended. Paul, please. In terms of the outrunners, essentially, I mean, we can compare this to the later hegdromoi running out from the ranks. I think particularly at that battle, I can't remember the name, but it happens after where the Spartans die and they're buried at Kerameikos. There's that whole, it plays out beautifully, where outrunners run out and then they encounter a larger force and then hoplites are drawn into it. And later on, we were told that light troops fought before the hoplites engaged. But early on, light troops and the hoplites are not as obviously different. So I don't think it's really a stretch at all, even given what we know from the classical tactics that you had in this early age, you had men who would have been identified as hoplites, but essentially still could act as skirmishers. Yeah, I think, I mean, obviously we have so little evidence that it's hard to form a sort of coherent model of transition. We don't know what the stages are. And it's only at these moments like this, this account in Aurora that we actually get an account, we can say something. I do want to say though, that outrunners in later battles, firstly, they're mostly a Spartan thing. Very few others are able to organize this. And secondly, in later times, in the classical period, there really is, you know, nominal punishment for leaving your place in the line, which at the time of Plataea isn't true yet. Like Ars Ademus, we assume that he's making a mistake because he's leaving his place in the line, but he's not censured for that. This is how Herodotus describes it. He left his place in the line. This is obviously bad. But the Spartans censored him because he had a death wish. Leaving his place in the line is apparently fine. It makes me wonder if maybe there's a time to leave the line and a time to not leave the line, right? So that could be a complaint. And then they need to be aware that if they're throwing missiles at each other, missile range for a spear without an Achilles is only about 15, 20 meters, right? So you're talking about being pretty close. I've also wondered if the hoplite walking charge is actually an archaism because they would have had to walk up to 20 meters, charge at 20 meters and stop and throw, right? So it's possible they all walked back in the day. Very good. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Yes. Thank you. I would like to make a remark that will link Paul's presentation and our understanding of what might have happened to Plataea, but also our understanding of the whole classical and archaic hoplite fighting. So having participated in some of Paul's experiments, I think what we came out of these experiments with was the understanding that othismos is not something that you do. It's not something that you plan or that you want to do. The othismos is something that happens to you. And actually, the verb used in all the sources is not active. It's passive. We're being pushed. Being pushed by whom? Well, being pushed by everyone around them. So this means that you cannot push if you are not being pushed back. And what happens is that when the front ranker is fighting with his spear actively, and there is a second ranker trying to reach the enemy with his spear, but being one rank behind, and even the third man trying to contribute to that, there is a closing of the and when this happens from the enemy, then you have this resistance to the pushing. Even when someone doesn't want to kill you, but anyway, he's not being friendly to you, if he's going to push you, what are you going to do? You're going to resist that. And this resistance in great level creates huge pressure at the front, in the front rank. So the evolution of Greek armor actually bears the signs that the hoplite, the archaic hoplite, did not want to push, and couldn't push. But obviously, it happened to them often enough, as it happened in later armies, and quite possibly in earlier armies that fought pitched battles, hand-to-hand battles. So this is why we have references later of people getting squeezed, and the soldiers that were killed would stay standing instead of falling down, because there wasn't room around them to fall. What the Greeks seem to have done, and how they evolved their armor, shows that they found a way to survive it, when it happened. Because it could not have happened in all battles, because it is not believable that in any battle with a frontage of one kilometer or two kilometers, it is going to happen simultaneously, that at all spots, there will be this resistance at all times. The resistance comes, and then you cannot stand it, and you pull back a meter, and then there is no opposition. At Plata, it seems that Theodotus does not describe an opposition. If the Persians are coming to the Spartans in groups of ten or less, this means that the Spartans were not pushing them, and the Persians were not pushing them. It might have happened at some point, if the Persians resisted, when the shield wall of the Persians fell. If the Persians resisted at all, yes, a kind of ottismos might have happened, but we're not specifically told so. No, but this does occur in the description of the battle. He says it was like an uneven fight, but it dragged on for a long time, until it came to ottismos. Yes, right, but the word ottismos is not used, and it's not used so often in the sources generally, but I wanted to show you why the archaic armor is not made for pushing. So, I have been wearing this cuirass in one of Paul's ottismos experiments. This is an exact replica, both in material thickness and shape, and the way that it fits, of an archaic bell cuirass. And you see that there is this prominent brim on the cuirass. It is a very effective protection from blows coming from above, but it does not allow the man behind you to push you from behind. So, what I experienced was that when I was being pushed from behind, the shield of the man behind me wanted to squeeze down the rim of the bell cuirass, and I said, stop, stop, stop. I'm a very experienced piece of equipment. What did I do? I ran back in the camp, and I wore my leather Kyben yoke cuirass, which was flexible and supposedly wouldn't protect me from the pushing, as well as the metal one. But in fact, what Paul said, the shape of the shield is enough to actually... We see that the Greeks didn't want originally to fight in an ottismos, but obviously they found ways to survive, if and when it happened. Yeah, I think that's a very helpful point to what Paul is saying, that with experimentation, you can actually sort of at least rule out some options and create some plausibilities. So, thank you for that. I put myself on the list here, and I think, thank you for a year, as I said, a refreshing perspective, and I think an ingenious recasting of the battles that were, but I wonder, it may have been lopsided, as you say, with Aerobloi and Epistemones and all that, but is it really perceived or described as a classical, typical hoplite battle? I don't think so. I mean, given the simple fact that one side are not hoplites, they're not even Greek, they're quite different. That's one thing, and another is that when you say that no depth indication is given, which is otherwise an important component, and that's true, up to a part at least, because you cited Fidelidis' description of Mantinea and 418 yourself. I just ran through it, and he doesn't indicate depth for the coalition side there either. So, it's not de rigueur to have shield depth indicated, although I grant you it is common, but it does not prove that there was no coordinated depth, because it's not mentioned. Even Fidelidis is guilty of that sometimes. Another thing, you said Monfortus retreated to the stifos. It does say that, but the stifos, according to Little Scott Jones at least, means a body of men in close array, and it is used as such both in Thucydides and Xenophon, so it's hardly a pack or a throng or what have you. It may be that attempts were made to represent it as too much of a typical hoplite battle, but you can maybe also go overboard in the other direction. So, those are some good comments, and the first point, this is where I would obviously love to describe to you all the different things that I've gathered in the article itself, but the description of this battle as a classical hoplite battle is very much explicit in a lot of scholarship, and they will use phrases like they put the Persians under the same kind of pressure that they would have brought to bear on a hoplite brother. This is very much the idea that they would have fought in a particular way, which is the way that we know from Thucydides and Xenophon, and that this is something they inflicted on the Persians who were helpless before. This is very much how traditional scholarship describes this battle, and it's very explicitly not in any way different from the way that they would describe another battle, except in the fact that the opponents, being Persian, didn't know how to cope with it, weren't able to handle it. No, I see your point, but it is up to a point, I think, natural that the Greek warriors would fight in the manner they knew, insofar as it was applicable and gave results, and then they had to adapt, possibly faced with a different kind of enemy, but it would be surprising if they could just change at will to a completely new form of fighting. Yes, so the argument that Paul and I are trying to make is that this is not a new form of fighting, this is the traditional form of fighting, which is still moving towards the classical form. So exactly for that reason, that people who are drafted for a war that they didn't know was happening until three minutes ago aren't going to be able to prepare a whole new strategy, but rather must adopt the kind of ways of fighting they're already familiar with, which is always the limiting factor on militia tactics. As to your other points, I take the point about the meaning of the word stifos, that can be differently interpreted. The point there that I was trying to make is that there is no more technical use of any kind of terminology related to the Spartan units in particular. In fact, whenever they use something like taxes, except in that one passage that I showed you, they're always referring to their position in the line rather than their formation. So the Spartans in Herodotus' account of the Tia don't have a formation, except in the fact that the helots are part of it. That's the only thing we learn about them. And even in the middle of the battle, they are described as just the Spartians, there is no sense of a battle line or a formation. And that obviously can be taken in multiple ways. I mean, I take your point that the depth of the line is not always mentioned even in Thucydides, but I do think that it is significant that it first appears obviously, as you know well, in the Battle of Delion. In later battles, it is sometimes mentioned and sometimes not. But there is clearly a chronological progression where it becomes easier for people to include it. And if you go further back in time, it seems impossible for them to do so, even when it is critical. Even when at the Battle of Marathon, for instance, it is hugely important that some parts of the line are dense and others are thin. There is no indication that Herodotus knows how deep these lines are, or whether he even had a sense that this could be quantified in this early period. I'm obviously aware that arguments from silence like this don't prove anything, and I completely concede that. But I do think that they together can form a different picture that is just as coherent as the one we already have, but maybe more sensitive to the things that we can't immediately make sense of, if you see what I mean. I do see what you mean. I don't quite agree, but I follow you. It's very interesting. Thank you. Can I jump in real quick? Would that be okay? I don't know if we're in the general here, but I just wanted to address something. One of the things with this whole concept of self-organization and the use of hoplites like this is that there's really very little difference between an ordered phalanx and a bunch of men standing together. That distance between those two has been greatly exaggerated. If you have men standing together in just a primitive wall of men and you were watching it from across the field, would it really matter if there were random file depths between 10 and 12? I mean, does that really matter? Or 8 and 6? I mean, at some point, functionally, it's doing exactly the same thing. And then in terms of coming up with a new strategy, one of the important things is that all of these shield walls that fight as essentially barricades with missiles going over their head, the battle ends with them fighting in what looks like a normal fangling splash. At the end, if you're in a Roman fulcrum, you throw your last spear and you undo your tier of shields and you charge and you fight with swords. So, I don't think it's a question of them learning something new. I think it's really, and this is what I want to get across with that triangle throwing shield wall function, is really what's the emphasis and what's it being changed? Obviously, Persians could fight with spears in the shield walls as well, but their primary function was to defend the archers behind them. But that doesn't mean that they couldn't fight with their spears. So, I just wanted to put that out there. All right. Thank you both. Next up is John. Thank you. Thank you, Paul and Roel for those really fascinating papers. And again, together with the chapter that you wrote for the recently released Plataea volume, you've given us a lot to think about. I think you've, in some ways, you've moved our understanding or our questions about the dynamics of Greek versus Persian fighting forward. Obviously, I still have some questions. And from my point of view, the big problem with trying to reconstruct Plataea, it goes beyond the problems identified by Whatley talking about Marathon, about reconstructing any ancient battle. I think here, the great problem is that we're trying to reconstruct a battle in which we only have detailed descriptive accounts of one of the two armies involved in and one of the two tactical systems. And I think, again, we're aware that the Persian side has been given to the Persian side. Sorry, I just tried to put in before I forget, but this is something that I actually wanted to stress anyway in the paper, but obviously sort of ran out of time. But it is a very interesting fact of this that many scholars have been very happy to overwrite Herodotus' details of what the Greek army looked like with material from later periods. So they just ignore a lot of things that he doesn't say or fill in the gaps, a lot of things that we very optimistically fill in the gaps with everything that we learned from generations later. But for the Persian side, we are kind of beholden to Herodotus' account because we don't have any other accounts of the functioning of Sparabara or Persian infantry in any way, really. And so it's kind of interesting that whether or not we want to doubt and question Herodotus depends entirely on the availability of any kind of other evidence to his detriment. The more evidence you have, the more people start to say, well, Herodotus clearly doesn't know what he's talking about. And I'm really worried that that means that when we rely on him to reconstruct how the Persians fought, that we are on very, very thin ice indeed. And that we have to wonder, wouldn't it actually help us to try and think of him as being more honest than he's widely been considered and that he's describing also the Greek way of fighting in a way that's actually reliable so that we can then also feel more confident of what he tells us about Persian fighting. I would love to have your opinion on that. Sure. I mean, I think that we are gaining more evidence on how Persians fought, but we're not going to find those literary descriptions. But on the other hand, what hadn't really been studied until very recently is the iconography that Christopher has worked on, that Margaret has worked on together with the material evidence for Persian arms and armaments. And again, Sean Manning has some on this in his book. There's a lot more work to do. We have spearheads from Iranian infantry spears in fairly large numbers distributed from several different archaeological finds between museums in Iran and Europe and the United States. But these, the armor scales, other equipment haven't been subjected to the scientific inquiry brought to bear on material from Olympia and from other sites with Greek weapons until very recently people are starting to start to do this. So my big concern is, you alluded to this and Paul brought it up, the idea that the model can only be as good as the assumptions that we bring to it. And we have a lot of assumptions that are built onto the static shield wall as barrier, the sphara as a barrier in front of the Persian line and massed archery behind it. And again, that takes a few details from Plataea, but also some heavy assumptions from things like Xenophon, and from modern reconstructive assumptions that then are applied to all Persian tactical situations, no matter what's actually happening. So my one concern there is, I do like the idea of the small group rushes and I like the comparisons with Sabin's model for Roman legionary combat. I think that may have something to offer us as a way forward. I'd be a little concerned about taking the Persian shield barrier as automatically static, as a wall. If the Greek formation or phalanx doesn't have to be a wall, I'm not sure that the sphara do either from the limited artistic options. One other point quickly is the importance of tactical context. And again, we tend to talk of this in struggle between weapon systems once the lines are formed. But the tactical context of Plataea is a pursuit, which turns into an unexpected encounter, at least from the Persian side, the way Herodotus describes it. I think one of the strengths is the idea of an advance over a substantial amount of terrain in haste. And again, here he brings up the lack of cosmos. But they're covering at least five kilometers from where most ideas place the Persian camp, over rolling terrain with part of the advance not being really able to see the enemy. I think of a comparison with Xenophon on the Battle of Haliardus in 395, where Lysander is killed and the Spartans rout and they flee to a terrain feature across the other side of the plain. And the Thebans pursue and then the Spartans turn and inflict casualties on them. And there, we certainly should think about exhaustion and these effects, not just two tactical systems and hoplites and Persians fight differently and that's that, but also it matters if they've been running for a long time. Are the troops tired? What assumptions are they bringing into the fight? Okay, I'll stop talking. I've said plenty, but I'd love to hear more of your thoughts and Paul's. Yeah, thank you very much for that. This is a really good comment. I've always thought it would be much easier to understand the outcome of Plataea if we went straight from that rush from Mardonius saying, let's go guys, and the rush to the individual attacks on the Greek line. If that were the case, then we could very easily understand why are the Persians so disorganized and scattered and like lacking cosmos, as you say, and why did they lose? Because obviously you're going up uphill against a formed formation of Spartiates and you're just not in formation and you're not doing your best to try and not performing at your tactical best. But the problem is that in between, there is a scene where they set up their shield wall and start firing arrows. And either we sort of say, okay, well, that's a generic description of a Persian army, but that didn't actually happen at Plataea, which is an option. We could say that, or we could say that did happen, in which case the effect of the exhaustion and disorder must be diminished. They had time apparently to recover and to regain order. So I'm not sure exactly how we could resolve that. It's a hard thing to bring in because it's a much later source. But when I read Xenophon's Battle of Timbara, I often think of this because the most important thing about his Battle of Timbara, and he's writing that obviously as a means to overcome the demon tactics. But in a sense, the most important thing there is that that shield wall is not meant to hold for long. It's just meant to hold for long enough for the cavalry to come around the back and destroy the enemy army. And that doesn't happen at Marathon, obviously, or at Plataea. And I think we were thinking about exhaustion and things like this. The worst thing to happen to an army is something unexpected. And if they were holding out, expecting that cavalry to come, then it never did. I mean, that alone is enough to explain why Persians lost at Plataea. I just wanted to add one more thing that I meant to and forgot. But I should mention by way of preview, there's a really good chapter that Geoffrey Rott has written on trying to reconstruct a model of Persian infantry combat. It's not out yet, but it's forthcoming in a volume I'm co-editing. It's going to be a real companion volume on war in ancient Iran. So we've had various delays during the COVID period in that volume coming together, but we are moving towards the point of having a manuscript to turn in. And so Geoffrey's work is also really good, and I hope we're going to see more when that comes out. We will surely do some testing this summer, by the way, so we'll get some spiral data. Right, thank you. Next question or remark is Christopher Toplin. Thank you. Oh, all sorts of things float around in my mind. First, it seems to me John is quite right to refer to terrain. One of the reasons why I really warm the Rawls picture of this is that I've always felt, having wandered around the terrain of Plataea, that wherever exactly it is that the final crucial battle's meant to happen, it is somewhere wholly unsuited to the classical image in one's mind of a phalanx battle. On the contrary, it's terrain that seems to call for fluid formation, if you like, to put it in the kind way, or disordered formation to put it in the unkind way. So I actually think this is a point at which a sense of real topography is crucial. Second thing, the cavalry that I think Paul just mentioned. I mean, the thing, in the Robert Ian account, the cavalry are very visible, but only as a precursor to the final stand-up battle, after which they disappear from sight until they reappear later, playing a role during the retreat of the Persian forces. Apart from the fact, of course, that Mardonius is on a horse, and the Thousand Logades might be cavalry, and that's an imponderable. Next, well, two other more specific things. How long would it take to knock down the Persian shield wall? And coming to the Othysmos, what Herodotus says, and just let me get the text in front of me precisely, I mean, the way he puts it, when the wall had fallen over, then they were into a really fierce battle over a long time until they came to the Othysmos, because the barbarians were grabbing hold of their spears and breaking them. Now, I mean, I don't know how easy it is to break a spear, but I mean, I mean, that's a very specific explanation of why what he calls an Othysmos happened. The way Herodotus constructs his account is curious, of course, because he gets to that point in the narrative, he gets to saying that, and then he steps back for a moment and reels off a number of observations about the battle, and this is where we get the stuff about Hoplites against Annopla and so on, and he works through, I think, four points until he comes back to referring to the lack of armament, and then we're into almost a description of the aftermath of the battle. This is when Mardonius' death started paying back and blah, blah, blah. So, you know, the things about, specifics about the battle clearly meant to belong in that space between the fall of the wall and coming to the Othysmos because the spears had been broken, and once you've got to that point, the implication of the narrative is it is pretty much over. Once it's reached that point, there isn't much more to happen until, oh, Mardonius is dead and the Greeks have won. But what is this spear breaking thing? Why is that highlighted as the thing that flips us into the final stage of the battle, and one in which perhaps, in some sense, it becomes less fluid? I mean, we stop having people running out from each other side, and you're absolutely right. Aristodemus is just, is the flip side of the Persians doing this. I'm sure that's right. But something brings us to an Othysmos. Actually, I mean, the point was made earlier about Othysmos being to do with pushing into a narrow space. I mean, you can find ways of putting this on the ground in Plataea in which that would actually be a pertinent analogy. If you think of that space at the end of where the gap comes through the Asopos Hills and ends up in what I think of as the tilling ground just behind that, well, work it the other way. An Othysmos could be the gathering everyone who is fighting, pushing back into that space. The point being precisely the terrain again where I started, the lack of space may be crucial. But that's reading into Herodotus. What Herodotus actually talks about is broken spears, and I'd really like to know about that. Can I feel this one? Because it's funny that you key in on that because I often describe Othysmos as essentially what happens when they go to the sword. So when you're fighting with a spear, especially in the later classical era, the spears are enormously long, about eight feet long. So you're standing about five feet away from the people you're stabbing. The swords are not very long. So you can't actually sword fight standing next to a guy who's spear fighting because you can't reach the enemy at this. So what I've opined is that there's, it goes back almost to Cockwell except he made the mistake of separating the men out at far distant spacing. But the concept is that there's a spear fighting phase that then breaks down into sword fighting. Men who are sword fighting have no room to fight with spears, and men who are spear fighting have no, they're too far away for men to fight with swords. So Othysmos really is an outgrowth of sword fighting with relatively short swords. And it makes sense to me that what I'm seeing happening here, and that's interesting as you comment on the ground like that, because as Gianna said earlier, you can't force somebody into Othysmos because they can just step back and run away. You have to get them trapped somehow. And this is exactly how it happens. Often you're trapped not by anything like a wall, you're sometimes just trapped by the people behind you who aren't giving ground, right? So I think that's how this battle ended. I think they came up to the defense of Gera. I don't think that they Othysmos through that. I think we're not specifically not told that they did. They didn't push the Gera down, as often said. I think they fought through the Gera. I think it was actually a huge obstacle. I think it took them a while to get through it. But once they got through it, then they regrouped again and started to fight in their normal fashion, only to have the resistance lead them into this sword fighting phase, and then Othysmos. And I think the thing that the Persians are not trained in, that they don't have the training, is fighting in that really close sword fighting distance like that in a crowd. I think that's the one thing that the Hoplites probably have been doing for generations, is ending their battles sword to sword, smashed together in this crowd. And you can still fight really quite well at this crowd with the sword. We've tested this. And if you can't, so if you don't have a shield, and if you don't have any kind of tradition of fighting in this really tight formation, I think that's really the technique that they're lacking. That's what they're really not able to match with the swords. Okay, just coming on the other point about how long do things take. I mean, I hope I'm paraphrasing Adam properly, because he's really the one who's studied these time words in Greek battles in most detail. But this is like, we just don't know. Very often, they will say that fighting went on for a long time. And we just can't quantify that, except in the solitary exception of pursuits lasting until nightfall. So generally, we just have no way of knowing how long any phase of this took, as far as I know.