Conquest 91
up to an inadequate command of the tactics that had all too recently become
requisite or to a failure to deploy an army sufficient in numbers.
This last possibility deserves attention. Greek mercenaries, operating in As-
syria and Egypt, may well have adapted the round shields of the neo-Assyrians
for use in a phalanx by increasing their size and substituting for the single grip
in the shield’s center the pórpax and the antılabē ́. But phalanx warfare, which
required ready cooperation and a spirit of solidarity not always to be found
among soldiers of fortune, suited far better the moral dispositions of neigh-
bors united by familiarity and a determination to defend hearth and home.
Aristocrats are quite likely to have pioneered this species of combat in Hellas
proper—for, in the beginning, they were almost certainly in charge. But fight-
ing in phalanx was not, in principle, an aristocratic endeavor. It privileged not
prowess but endurance, and it left little, if any, room for individual distinc-
tion.^63 The strength of this formation was determined by the weakest link in
the chain of men composing it. Moreover, success with such an instrument
required the recruitment of a great many more men than could be found
within the narrow class of exceedingly wealthy warriors who had in the past
fought from chariots or on horseback or who had ridden off to battle each on
a chariot or the back of a horse.
The requisite expansion in the size of the warrior class had consequences.
It is by no means fortuitous that almost all of the tyrants who emerged within
early Greece in its wake were associated with war; that they were at odds with
the traditional aristocracy; and that they are said to have been favorable to the
dēˆmos. No one understood the political sociology that occasioned this devel-
opment better than Aristotle. In judging these matters, as in commenting on
the aspís, he had advantages that no modern scholar (no matter how well in-
formed) can ever hope to equal. He spoke classical Greek as his native lan-
guage, and he lived in a pólıs. He understood instinctively what we can only
with difficulty and a supreme effort of the imagination ascertain; and, as we can
see in his Polıteía of the Athenians, he devoted a great deal of effort to learning
about the developments early on in the various Greek cities that had in time
given rise to the mature pólıs and its characteristic institutions and practices.
To this end, almost certainly with the assistance of those who flocked to the
Lyceum to study with him, he had collected material on the political develop-
ment of one hundred fifty-eight different póleıs, and he or one of his associates
had penned a brief treatise on each akin to the one that survives. When, in
passing, he tells us that the introduction of the hoplite phalanx gave rise to a