Notes to Page 93 181
8.556b–e. As should be clear, for my purposes here, it does not matter one whit whether the hop-
lites of the archaic period were for the most part smallholders—as, Hanson contends, they were—
or gentleman farmers, as some now think: cf. Hanson, The Other Greeks, with Lin Foxhall, “The
Control of the Attic Landscape,” in Agriculture in Ancient Greece, ed. Berit Wells (Stockholm: Paul
Åströms Forlag, 1992), 155–59, “A View from the Top: Evaluating the Solonian Property Classes,”
in The Development of the Polis in Archaic Greece, ed. Lynnette G. Mitchell and Peter J. Rhodes
(London: Routledge, 1997), 113–36, and “Can We See the ‘Hoplite Revolution’ on the Ground?
Archaeological Landscapes, Material Culture, and Social Status in Early Greece,” in MB, 194–221;
and Hans van Wees, “The Myth of the Middle Class Army: Military and Social Status in Ancient
Athens,” in War as a Cultural and Social Force: Essays on Warfare in Antiquity, ed. Tønnes Bekker-
Nielsen and Lise Hannestad (Copenhagen: Det kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2001),
45–71, “Mass and Elite in Solon’s Athens: The Property Classes Revisited,” in Solon of Athens: New
Historical and Philological Approaches, ed. Josine H. Blok and André P. M. H. Lardinois (Leiden:
Brill, 2006), 351–89, and “Farmers and Hoplites: Models of Historical Development,” in MB, 222–
55; then, see G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, “The Solonian Census Classes and the Qualifications for
Cavalry and Hoplite Service,” in Ste. Croix, Athenian Democratic Origins and Other Essays, ed.
David Harvey and Robert Parker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5–72. In the circum-
stances, this is a socioeconomic distinction without a political difference, for it is hard to see why
either group would have been willing to defer to the horsey set. For a corrective, see Cartledge,
“Hoplitai/Politai: Refighting Ancient Battles,” 74–84; Viggiano, “The Hoplite Revolution and the
Rise of the Polis,” 112–33; and Victor Davis Hanson, “The Hoplite Narrative,” in MB, 256–75. To
reconcile the unorthodox Marxist analysis of the family farm as a new and hitherto unnoticed
mode of production that Hanson articulates in The Other Greeks with Lendon’s admirable account
—Soldiers and Ghosts, 20–90—of the aristocratic ethos driving hoplite warfare and of the manner
in which the “passive courage” expected of the hoplite came to substitute for the prowess of the
Homeric prómachos, one would need only adjust Hanson’s depiction of the hoplite ethos in mod-
est ways with an eye to the presence of slaves on the estates of most hoplites and then consider the
fact that his smallholders, for all of their apparent ordinariness, nonetheless constituted what
Tocqueville once aptly called “an aristocracy of masters”: see my review of his book in AJPh 118:3
(Autumn 1997): 459–62; and, on this particular point, consider Michael H. Jameson, “Agriculture
and Slavery in Classical Athens,” CJ 73:2 (December 1977–January 1978): 122–45, and “Agricul-
tural Labor in Ancient Greece,” in Agriculture in Ancient Greece, 135–46, as well as Lin Foxhall,
“Access to Resources in Classical Greece: The Egalitarianism of the Polis in Practice,” in Money,
Labour and Land, ed. Paul Cartledge, Edward E. Cohen, and Lin Foxhall (London: Routledge,
2002), 209–20, and “Culture, Landscapes, and Identities in the Mediterranean World,” MHR 18:2
(2003): 75–92, who make a strong case for a reliance on dependent labor on the part of those
smallholders who possessed enough land to be able to serve in the phalanx. The survey data Fox-
hall cites, however, casts little light on the archaic period, as she acknowledges; and, unless one is
willing to take an absence of evidence as evidence for absence, it is insufficient as a support for her
implausible claim that the colonization movement had nothing to do with land hunger. Moreover,
her attempt to evade the evidence, both literary and archaeological, that there was a modicum of
equality in colonial land distribution is not at all persuasive. For a corrective to her argument that
early Greece was radically inegalitarian, which is to a considerable degree consistent with Hanson’s
argument, see the discussion of Greek egalitarianism in Ian Morris, Archaeology as Cultural History:
Words and Things in Iron Age Greece (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 109–312, who—by deliberately
ignoring what can be learned from Aristotle and by quarantining archaic aristocratic discourse as
countercultural—nonetheless overstates the case for an early egalitarianism and underestimates
the time that it took for equality to become the norm.
- Spartan adjustment to brute fact of hoplite warfare: Cartledge, “Hoplites and Heroes,”
24–27.
6 8. Laconia as Peloponnesian acropolis: Diod. 14.82.4. Euripides on Laconia: F1083 (Nauck^2 ).
69.Size of Spartan domain: Cartledge, SL, 6. Two-fifths of Peloponnesus: Thuc. 1.10.2.
70.Terpander of Lesbos sings of justice at the Carneia in 676: Hellanicus FGrH 4 F85, Sosib-
ius FGrH 595 F3. See W. G. G. Forrest, “The Date of the Lykourgan Reforms in Sparta,” Phoenix
17:3 (Autumn 1963): 157–79. Cf. Arnold J. Toynbee, “Sparta’s Constitutional Development,” and