The Battle of Coronea, 394

Peter Connolly's imagining of Coronea

Dear Reader,

Today, we are going to apply the lens of what we have previously established about Hoplites- that they did not charge into battle before Marathon, and most Hoplite armies aside from the Spartans adopted this advance after Marathon, to an in-depth analysis of the Battle of Coronea as described by Xenophon. At Coronea, a Spartan army with its allies met a Boeotian and Argive force on a plain. The Spartans on the right wing of their allied army, opposite the Argives, while the Thebans were on the right of their army, opposite the Spartan allies. 

The armies approached each other in silence until they were around 600 feet apart, (maybe a bit more or less depending on which Stade Xenophon means), after which the Thebans, "came on racing." (Θηβαῖοι δρόμῳ ὁμόσε ἐφέροντο.) Here, the Thebans employ the second method of advancing as discussed in the previous post. The Spartans and their allies continued to advance evenly, until about 300 feet apart (three plethra) the troops in the center of the Spartan line: Ionian, Aeolian, and Hellespontine Spartan allies, "charged out of (King) Agesilaos'  battle line...and advanced together at the run." (ἀντεξέδραμον ἀπὸ τῆς Ἀγησιλάου φάλαγγος ... καὶ πάντες οὗτοι τῶν συνεκδραμόντων τε ἐγένοντο.) When these Spartan allies reached the enemy line (probably part of the Argive contingent), their opponents fled after a brief contact. The Argive troops directly opposite the Spartans did not make contact the Spartans, but instead fled back the way they had come, towards Mount Helicon. However, the charge of the Thebans had smashed into the opposite end of the Spartan line, where the Orchomenains, Spartan allies, were stationed, breaking through this part of the Spartan army. 

At this point, both the Spartan contingent and the Theban contingent wheeled to face the other. One modern translation indicates that the Thebans, "massed themselves and approached boldly." (Strassler, Landmark Xenophon, 138) The exact language is "συσπειραθέντες ἐχώρουν ἐρρωμένως." (Xen Hellenica 4.3.18) This could be translated to say that the Thebans, "formed  in order and approached with vigor." Was this a running charge? Xenophon's language is unclear, so it is impossible to say with certainty. I would argue that it was, based on the following description of events. 

It now, in the second phase of the engagement that Xenophon gives his famous passage, that the combatants, "Crashed their shields together, shoved, fought, killed, and died, and in the end, some of the Thebans broke through to Mount Helicon, many were killed..." To me, this seems a perfectly reasonable result if a phalanx charging at the run met a ordered Spartan phalanx head-on. We see both that the Thebans appear to have taken more causalities and lost the battle, but also that groups of Thebans were able to drive into the Spartan phalanx and break its cohesion, moving through to join the Argives as Mount Helicon.  

However, in the interest of fairness, the battle can certainly be imagined another way, with the Thebans advancing at a slower pace to meet the Spartan onslaught. This is certainly how Peter Connolly envisioned the battle when drawing the picture above. In  Surely if both advanced slowly, the Spartans and Thebans would have advanced with order, which accounts for Xenophon's description of the Theban line reforming. In such an instance, however, why would shields be the first thing to crash? Also, unless the phalanxes became mixed, how can we account for groups of Thebans breaking through the Spartan line to reach the Argives at Mount Helicon? If the Spartans did not break, (which doesn't seem likely, considering that they won the battle) then in parts of the line, the Thebans must have killed large numbers of them, which Xenophon does not mention. If the Thebans engaged in othismos mass shoving to push through the Spartans, surely they would have won the battle? 

Xenophon, who had an immense amount of soldierly experience, would have been aware of jarring impact of two aspis in the moment of contact. His language cannot be taken as a literary device, but an actual description of events as they played out. In battles where the Hoplites advanced to battle at the run, they would have been too disordered to engaging in mass shoving at the moment of impact as Thucydides indicates at Mantinea. Since ancient sources clearly depict Hoplites charging at the run after Marathon, in my mind, mass shoving cannot be the only way Hoplites engaged one another, even if, in all likelihood, it is described in some battles.  

Thanks for reading,

Alex Burns