The so-called Hoplite Revolution
Despite the only limited equality characteristic of the Greek city-state, the creation
of this new form of political organization nevertheless represented a significant break
with the past, and the extension of at least some political rights to the poor stands as
one of the most striking developments in this process of change. Unfortunately we cannot
identify with certainty the forces that led to the emergence of the polis
as a political institution in which even poor men had a vote on political matters. The
explanation long favored by many makes a so-called hoplite revolution responsible for
the general widening of political rights in the city-state, but recent research has
undermined the plausibility of this theory as a completely satisfactory explanation.
Hoplites1 were infantrymen clad in
metal body armor2, and they constituted the main strike force of the citizen militias that
defended Greek city-states in the period before navies became important. Men armed as
hoplites marched into combat shoulder to shoulder in a rectangular formation called a
phalanx3. Staying in line and working as part of the group was the secret to successful
phalanx tactics. A good hoplite, in the words of the seventh-century B.C. poet
Archilochus, was “a short man firmly placed upon his legs, with a courageous
heart, not to be uprooted from the spot where he plants his feet.” Greeks had
fought in phalanxes for a long time, but until the eighth century B.C., only aristocrats
and a relatively small number of their non-aristocratic followers could afford the
equipment to serve as hoplites. In the eighth century B.C., however, a growing number of
men had become sufficiently prosperous to buy metal weapons, especially since the use of
iron had made them more readily available. Presumably these new hoplites, since they
paid for their own equipment and trained hard to learn phalanx tactics to defend their
community, felt they, too, were entitled to political rights. According to the theory of
a hoplite revolution, these new hoplite-level men forced the aristocrats to share
political power by threatening to refuse to fight and thereby cripple the community's
military defense.
The theory correctly assumes that new hoplites had the power to demand an increased
political say for themselves, a development of great significance for the development of
the city-state as an institution not solely under the power of a small circle of
aristocrats. The theory of a hoplite revolution cannot explain, however, one crucial
question: why were poor men as well as hoplites given the political right of voting on
policy in the city-state?
