Well by now, I should have pointed out that we know that before you started out the battle that your general gave you a meal and he also gave you plenty of wine, so that by the time you're in this position, you've had a few and there's--I mean, there's a science to that too as perhaps some of you know. No you don't. College students do not have a science of this at all, they just pour the stuff down their throats with the goal of becoming drunk as fast as they can. That's barbaric in the technical sense.
I mean, the Greeks didn't--Plato's Symposium, all of these guys are sitting around having a drinking party. That's all they do all night, but they also are talking and they're talking very well as a matter of fact, and the goal of this conversation is, or of this party rather, symposium means by the way drinking together. So they're drinking and they're talking, and both of these are supposed to go on at the same time. And here's the thing; the idea is to drink as much as you can without passing out and at the end of Plato's Symposium everybody is out, except for Socrates who looks around and says, "oh well no more conversation everybody's asleep." Off he goes, and we know who won that one. Why could they do that?
Well, they weren't ignorant undergraduates, but beyond that they drank wine, not those barbarian liquids that you drink, and also they mixed that wine with water, so that it shouldn't get them drunk too fast. Think about how the world has decayed, since those days. So anyway, it still has its alcoholic consequences, and I like to think that the trick for these guys was to get to that level of inebriation before it affects your nerves and your physical ability to act. But it's worked on your brain to the point where you get to that sort of what I like to think of that bar room militancy, whereby if a guy says, "would you pass the peanuts," you say, "oh yeah!" I'd like to think that's the ideal hoplite mode.
And this is good too :
f you can see it, all adult males fought. I should back up; that's not quite true. There's an important point I didn't make. Not everybody gets to fight in the hoplite phalanx. The town, the city, the polis does not provide the fighters with their defensive armor. They might sometime give them their weapons, but not their defensive armor. You can't fight as a hoplite, in other words, unless you can afford to pay for your equipment and that excludes a goodly number of citizens who are too poor to fight in the phalanx. This becomes a very, very large issue because the notion that there should be a real connection between citizenship in the full sense and military performance is totally a Greek idea--I mean, the Greeks just totally accept that idea. Actually, later on at the end of the fourth century when Aristotle is writing his Politics, he makes really a very clear connection as to the style of fighting and the kind of constitution that you have.
He said very clearly, if you use cavalry as your major arm, your state will be an aristocracy. If you use hoplites, your state will be, what he calls a politea, a moderate regime. If you use a navy, your state will be a democracy in which the lower classes are dominant. So, there's this real connection and that's the way they really thought about it. So, what we will see as the polis is invented, moving away from aristocratic rule in the pre-polis days or in the early polis days--you will see a middling group of citizens who are, according to this interpretation, Hanson's farmers who are also going to gain the political capacity to participate in the town councils, and who are the hoplites but it will exclude the poor, who will not have political rights. Most Greek states, just as they never moved beyond the hoplite style of fighting, never go beyond the oligarchical style of constitution which gives only hoplites political rights in the state.
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