Fig. 268.—‘Hoplites’ (Heavy Armed).[841]
Fig. 269.—Greek Combatants with Sword and Lance.
Then came the intellectual age of Greece. Already in b.c. 450 Protagoras the Sophist, of the Cyrenaic school, had made ‘man the measure of all things.’ The individual becomes a duality; as Aristotle expresses it, the animal life is one of sensation, the divine life of intelligence. And this change of view gradually extinguished the holy fire of art.
The Hellenes, even in their best times, did not pay that attention to the use of arms which was a daily practice with the more practical Romans. They had no gladiatorial shows, the finest salles d’armes in the world. The ὁπλοδιδακταὶ (ὁπλοδιδασκολοὶ) or army maîtres d’armes, and professors of the noble arts of offence and defence, were not required by law in Lacedæmon. They practised the Sword, as we learn from Demosthenes; he compared the Athenians ‘with rustics in a fencing school, who after a blow always guard the hit part and not before.’[842] Yet they preferred the pentathlum, the pancration, and military dancing; the fencing-room was a secondary consideration. Indeed, Plato objected to the useless art of Sword-exercise, because neither masters nor disciples ever became great soldiers—a stupendous Platonic fallacy![843]
Nor did Hellas greatly prize herself upon mere arms. The soldier at Athens and amongst all the Ionian and kindred races occupied, it is true, an honourable position; in the four castes[844] he followed the priestly, and he preceded the peasants and the mechanics. But the Hellene was essentially a citizen—a politician. He chose his magistrates and pontiffs, and he could aspire to become one himself. He spent his life in the Agora, canvassing laws and constitutions, treaties and alliances. His minor delight was gossip, euphuistically expressed by ‘hearing new things.’ Hellas soon learned that her forte lay in literature, poetry, oratory, and philosophy, in engineering, and in the fine arts. She excelled the world in the exquisite rules of proportion; in the breadth of idea, and in the clearness and perfection of the literary form: these arts she bequeathed as a heritage to mankind, who have nowhere and never surpassed her. While the grand old Kemites built for eternity, and subjected even size[845] to solidity, Hellas elaborated the principle of Beauty and carried it to its very acme. Her spoilt children were avid of novelty: they constructed every possible system of cosmogony, of astronomy, of geology (except the right one); and they ‘paraded their knowledge,’ as Bacon says, ‘with fifes and drums.’ Hence their teachers of the Nile Valley told them ‘they were ever children’; and hence they excelled their teachers.
This is not the place to discuss Greek tactics, nor is there anything new to say about them: authors are contented with borrowing from the treatises of Ælian and Arrian, who lived in the days of Hadrian. I will only remind the reader that even during the ‘Iliad’-ages the Greek army had its scheme of battle. Nestor advises his warriors to keep their ranks in action after the wont of their forbears; and in two places[846] we have allusions to a rude phalanx or oblong rectangle of civilised Egypt and Khita-land. Xenophon[847] tells us that the army of Agesilaus appeared all bronze (χαλκὸν) and red (φοίνικα); the latter survives in our most inappropriate British scarlet. For the heavy-armed Hoplite-swordsmen and the light Peltasts, who had apparently no Swords, the student will consult any ‘Dictionary of Antiquities.’
Another unpleasant feature in Greek warfare was its indifference to human life, so much regarded by the Romans. The former preserved their old barbarous practice of putting to death their war-prisoners; whilst even during the first Punic War the latter had a system of exchange combined with a money-payment for any number in excess on either side.
Greece rarely appears in arms except in defensive warfare (as against the Persians), in civil wars between citizens and citizens, and in semi-civil wars, as between the Athenians and the Spartans, the Dorians, Ionians, and Æolians. A glance at any of their campaigns—the ‘Anabasis,’ for instance—gives us their measure as soldiers; and what else can we expect from a race whose typical men were Themistocles and Alcibiades? They were too clever by half; too vain, too restless, too impulsive (ever ‘shedding tears’), too self-assertive to become disciplined men-machines. They were always ready for a revolt, for a change of officers; and it must have been a serious thing to command them. In this point, perhaps, they are rivalled by the Frenchman, one of the best soldiers in Europe, and also one of the most difficult to manage. Great captains—Turenne and Napoleon Buonaparte, for instance—shot their recalcitrants by the dozen till the survivors learned to ‘tremble and obey.’[848] Like the French, too, and the Irish, the Greeks had more dash than firmness. They gained victories by the vigour and gallantry of their attack, but they did not distinguish themselves in a losing game. Here England excels, and hence Marshal Bugeaud said, ‘She has the best infantry in the world; happily they are not many.’ We must make them so.
Hellas owed her successes in foreign wars mainly to the barbarous condition of her neighbours. The Romans and all the peoples of Asia Minor, save her own colonies,[849] were far behind her when, after the fashion of the equestrian races of Northern Asia, she had exchanged the chariot for the charger;[850] and when she borrowed from Egypt the arts of warfare by land and sea, the paraphernalia of the siege, the best of arms and armour, and even the redoubtable phalanx. But she lost pre-eminence, physical and moral, when the rival races rose to be her equals, and even her superiors, in weapons, organisation, and discipline. She began with beating, and she ended with being thoroughly beaten by, the Romans.