Vincent J. ROSIVACH Hoplites and Zeugitai: A Military Role to a Political One?

     We are all familiar with the view of the Greek hoplite as a middle-class farmer/soldier whose increasing military importance opened up an increased political role for him in the evolving archaic polis. This view of the hoplite appears to be in no small measure the result of a conflation of two etymologies of the Greek word zeugites, the name of members of the next-to-lowest of the Solonic census classes, together with an unconscious extension of conclusions about Athens to Greece in general.

    The older of the two etymologies, that the zeugites was the owner of a zeugos, a yoke of oxen, explains how the zeugitai came to be thought of as working farmers. The etymology, however, is based on a somewhat corrupt version of a passage in Pollux (8.132), which is probably talking about taxes, not the Solonic classes (which are discussed at 8.130).

    No ancient source identifies zeugitai as hoplites or hoplites with zeugitai. The identification can be traced backed to A. Böckh (1817), who, thinking of the Roman centuriae, assigned distinct military roles to the four Solonic classes. The identification was picked, via G. Gilbert, by C. Cichorius, who in 1894 proposed the "military" etymology of zeugites, that it describes a member of a rank in a hoplite phalanx. This etymology has problems of its own, principally that the use of zugon is limited to descriptions of the Spartan and Macedonian/hellenistic armies.

    Böckh, Gilbert and Cichorius have been largely forgotten in modern discussions of archaic Athens, but thanks especially to Cichorius' etymology, their identification of zeugitai and hoplites has, as it were, taken on a life of its own. Combined with the earlier identification of zeugitai as middling farmers ó the "yoke-of-oxen" etymology ó it has in fact produced the image of the farmer-hoplite citizen-soldier with which we began.

    Athens, however, was simply not a major military state in the late seventh and early sixth centuries. Indeed, there is little evidence of a "national" army (as opposed to forces raised by local power figures) before the reforms of Kleisthenes. This makes it a priori unlikely that Solon would have used military categories for the allocation of political power. Once we assume, however, that the zeugitai were identical with the hoplite phalanx it becomes quite easy to reason from the success of the zeugitai in gaining partial access to political power under Solon that in the early sixth century Athenian hoplites played a greater military role ó and indeed, in order to mobilize an effective phalanx, that the polis itself was more politically integrated ó than the historical record would otherwise lead us to believe.

    And so, if there is in fact no convincing reason to accept either the "yoke-of-oxen" or the "military" etymology of zeugites perhaps it is best to admit that the word's etymology, like that of thes, is still a mystery, and stop confusing military roles (service as a hoplite) with political ones (membership in the Solonic zeugite class).