Introduction
As a hoplite, we were the Greek citizen soldiers who were basically the strongest, bravest and able-bodied adults who were middle aged. Our obligation was to do anything to protect our geographic coverage. The general types of weapons we use are spears, shields and arrows. During the Battle of Marathon which took place in 490 BC, we the Athens and Persians met under the intensive culmination of the first and only attempts from the Persians to subjugate the our land under their king who was named king Darius l (Hanson 69). Despite our minority in numbers, we decisively defeated the Persians. This made a great impact by putting a stop to the Greco-Persian wars.
In his analysis, Dr. Hanson clearly analyses us and our fighting tactics. As the book narrates, the Assyrians were greater in number and strength. Our hard training and tactics organization and intense training made us more ready to fight the battle and win through our application of the gained tactics (Hanson 54). Throughout this battle, we proved to the Persians that we could easily beat them.
As our legendary king of the Greek, Odysseus was known to be the strongest of the fighters in the book Homer's Odyssey epic story. We as the hoplites highly honored him as the leader and king. Anything involving him was bound to be bowed to with great honor and salutation. In the story that the rhapsodist recites, we gained lots of happiness since its tour king that wins.
With other soldiers having that morale and overwhelming feeling of victory from the battle field, every single word altered by the rhapsodist with lots of emphasis and skills was like adding flammable gases to the fire to blow it off. As a strong fighter, I was among the first to shout, “Long live the King!” This, I shouted not only with my voice but strongly with my heart as I know that it takes more than chewing of a bone to survive out there in the battlefield.
War has no shortcut. It is either you kill to survive or someone kills you to live. It is a great victory knowing that you escaped the fate of death by strongly and efficiently working with other comrades to defeat the enemies (Hanson 55). The memories of the soldiers who died a brave death beside me, restlessly fighting to protect our own kind, will always remain in my heart built of bronze that no arrow, blade or spear can pierce through.
We were hoplites were intensely and hardly trained to fight not just with strength but lots of integrity in the battle field. For a hoplite to fight successfully and win, as indicated in the book by Stanley Lombardo, the battle and not just the fight, he has to learn quickly and understand the strengths and weaknesses of his opponent with the first few seconds the fight starts. To get the chance to dodge and at the same time attack, one has to be relatively swift, fast and keen to mark and attack the weak points of the opponent.
Gaining a stable stand in a state that ensures your weight lies on your lower part of the legs, This will give one a good basement to attack while at the same have the added advantage of dodging any weapon used by the attacker. It is always a wise idea to wait and take your time to calculate on what time to attack as the opponent might be hiding some tricks that you cannot easily foresee until they are applied on you. As good soldier, always ensures every bit of energy or shot counts.
I can confirm that we the hoplites have been fighting and we fought a decisive war during the Battle of Marathon. Our middle class groupings remained the precursor of our warfare. They were mostly the middle majority which the narrator documents correctly that we directing our efforts to defend the economy and the political interests of our middle class grouping who were free property owners, voters and militia men. As the defense organ in the city, we had to defend territories. Since agriculture was the main economic idea that was viable in the ancient Greece we had to do all that we can to defend our territories against any aggression that put into risk the middle class agriculturalist. The warlords at this time were the agricultural middle class thus they were the financiers any empire defensive or conquer missions of the Greek empire. Furthermore, some of us were members of the middle class.
The narration of the rhapsodist is true on the account that we had to defend the agricultural fields which were subject to destruction in cases of our defeat by the enemy. “A man who whose life is rooted in that of his city, his farm, and his familybetter the risk of death tomorrow ”(Hanson 8). However, the narrator shows some lack of knowledge about war as he wonders on why the devastation of agriculture of the enemy at times of defeating its soldiers. “It still makes me wonder why the devastation of the fields”(Hanson 29) However, this could only be common sense to us and not a Rhapsodist. It was essential to destroy the enemy’s resource base as a way of destroying it completely. We fought decisive war for the sake of our rooted connection to the cities of our territories and our economic way of life which was based on agriculture thus deserving democratic war.
Homeric warfare bases war as a fate. We at all time had the connotation that we are always the winners at any war. We fought for a purpose and nothing like fatalism existed in our minds. The order was to win at all means possible. Homeric warfare considers war as to occur as a fate with no clear ends of who started or who will end it. War is a fate that every fighter goes with a neutral mind (Lombardo 98). Every soldier goes to war with no optimism or pessimism. It clear depicts that war is a fate that the war lords may be aware of the situation but have nothing to do about it. To my experience of the wars that we fought it is clear that the Homeric warfare used one occurrence to deduce all that happened in other wars including the Battle of Marathon.
The Homeric warfare asserts that the war fighters are free to change their situation of fatalism at one condition. The condition is that, soldiers are like any other human beings free agents having the capability of choosing how to individually retaliate to any prevailing conditions. The hoplite Rhapsodist analysis of the hoplite warfare considers war fighting has an individualistic attempt to sacrifice for the sake of the society. The ideas of Homeric warfare are more of modernized war unlike the narrative on our account of war and the defeat of the Persian at the Battle of Marathon. The narration is more of fictions and lacks evidence of specific occurrences during the actual war “My vision is deliberately focused, instead, on the infantryman in the phalanx at the moment he fought. I provide only a few speculative glimpses, rather than a comprehensive account” (Hanson 10).
Works Cited
Hanson, Victor Davis. The Western way of war: Infantry battle in classical Greece. Univ of California Press, 2009.
Lombardo, Stanley, ed. The essential Homer: selections from the Iliad and the Odyssey. Hackett Publishing, 2000.
