Broadsheet

This is also, I think, why John Ternus is so heavily rumored to be named Tim Cook’s successor as CEO, and everyone feels cautiously optimistic about that. In the entire 50-year history of the company, Apple has never been on a longer sustained streak of excellent hardware than they are today. No one feels the same way about Apple’s software, services, or marketing. ↩︎
If Hackett weren’t so lazy, he’d document the classic Mac system software era too. ↩︎︎
Now that I think about it, if Apple’s representative had answered my question by saying something like, “Yes, we’re definitely thinking about other types of media that we could add to the Content Hub in the future, and that’s why we gave it that name,” I would have plotzed. ↩︎︎
Another is that Adobe Creative Cloud includes access to Adobe’s entire library of fonts, the biggest type library in the world. But like I wrote above, Apple Creator Studio’s “Content Hub” is an open-ended name. I’d love to see Apple work out licensing deals with a broad assortment of typography houses. ↩︎︎

The Federal Reserve has been in the news, for all the wrong reasons, with an obviously political criminal investigation into Jerome Powell, the Fed chair. So I thought it would be good to talk again with the inimitable Claudia Sahm about what it means. Transcript follows.

. . .

TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Claudia Sahm

(recorded 1/15/26)

Paul Krugman: Hey, everyone. Paul Krugman again and talking again with Claudia Sahm, who’s one of my real go-tos and a tremendously influential voice on macroeconomics. I’ve been looking at the Real Time Sahm Rule series on Fred, which is where those blue background charts on my Substack come from. Claudia’s my favorite Fed expert, or one of my favorites. Hi, Claudia. I thought we could talk for a bit about what’s been a pretty eventful week. Obviously on many fronts, but certainly in the Fed area.

Claudia Sahm: Happy to be back and to have this conversation. Sad that we are having the conversation and that it’s necessary, but it’s important to unpack it and see what this possibly is.

Krugman: Before we get into the criminal investigation of Jerome Powell and all of that, there’s also the state of the economy that is kind of interesting—that’s like when my mother had a recipe that failed my father would say it was “interesting”—but anyway, the state of the economy is interesting. Depending on which data you look at there are different conclusions or different stories that people tell. So what do you think is going on with the labor market?

Sahm: First, I’ll start with what I don’t think is happening. I don’t see a recessionary dynamic in the labor market, but that actually is a pretty strong statement, given the fact that we saw job creation really fall off a cliff last year. Frankly, it had been slowing for some time. So this is not just about last year, but job creation is very low in the United States, and we’ve seen the unemployment rate move higher. The jobs aren’t keeping up with the people who are out there looking for work, but this doesn’t look like our typical business cycle.

The unemployment rate drifted up last year, but it drifted up the year before as well. We are a full percentage point off the lowest point of the unemployment rate in the cycle, which was close to 3.5%; you look back all the way in the post-World War Two period, that has never happened. We’ve never had that much of an increase in the unemployment rate and not gone into a recession. But this is very different, it’s been very gradual. It’s not really picked up and gone from a slow increase to a really rapid increase that would be normal, so it is puzzling. At the same time, this past year, we’ve seen economic activity continue to expand. Those GDP numbers, they might overstate the case of how much strength there is in consumer demand and business investment, but they look pretty good. You have a really unusual set of signals from the economy. At a moment like that everyone at the Fed ought to be totally focused on “how do we interpret the economics”, “what’s the right interest rate”; there could be policy responses that go way beyond the Fed or tax cuts.

I’m very concerned about what’s happening in the labor market. It’s hurting people coming in. Young people looking for jobs, people on the margins looking for jobs—there’s some problems here, but we need to really focus on the economics of it, unpacking it. We don’t have the usual go-tos because it doesn’t look like historical periods. Then we have a moment where politics just floods in.

Krugman: We’ll talk about the politics in a minute, but for what it’s worth, that Real Time Sahm Rule indicator—let’s not go through what the indicator is again—but .5 was your criterion, it’s .35 now, which is kind of a little bit worrisome. But on the one hand, it doesn’t feel like that. Or it doesn’t look like, as you say, a recessionary dynamic. On the other hand, it’s extremely difficult to get a job. So if you have a job, we’re not having mass layoffs, but as you were saying, people do get laid off one way or another still, and even if it’s not en masse—then it’s really hard to find a new job. There’s a lot of debate about what’s going on there.

Sahm: I think this has been a real lesson. The problem in the labor market right now is a very low rate of hiring, the problem is not layoffs. Often we think, “layoffs, that’s the big problem. That’s the recession.” That’s why we get agitated and you say, “oh, there have been layoff announcements,” but we’re not actually seeing people losing their jobs. Jobless claims are not really up that much. So “oh everything’s okay,” right? But in fact a low hiring rate can be very problematic because over time as new workers come in and people who finish their education, whether it’s high school or college, other training, they really struggle to find jobs. So their underemployment rises, and that can be a big problem, not like in kind of a business cycle recession problem, but not bringing people in at their full potential, that we could pay for over a long period of time.

It is hurting groups on the margins of the labor market. We’ve seen the black unemployment rate really move up in the past year. So it’s not about layoffs. It’s about this low level of hiring. I think again, back to what’s happening in the broader economy, it’s kind of puzzling. It’s not that businesses don’t have the customers, it’s not that they aren’t making profits, they’re just not hiring. There could be a lot of explanations for it. But it’s an unusual problem, and just the fact that layoffs are happening or they’re still very historically low, that’s not a “coast is clear,” right? There’s still an issue for policymakers, but it may not be just as simple as cutting interest rates and doing tax cuts.

Krugman: Yeah it’s this kind of—freeze. So if you don’t have to move—in terms of jobs, you’re doing okay. But it’s really terrible. I have been sort of saying, “extreme policy uncertainty”—it’s a story, it’s probably the simplest story, but we don’t really know. As you say, it would be really something to try to figure out.

Sahm: There could be an explanation as simple as: early in the recovery from the pandemic, we had a very dynamic labor market; we had workers moving jobs, we had labor shortages, we had wage increases. It may just be the slower hiring now is a reflection of the fact maybe there was some over-hiring before, businesses have kept workers longer. People get more productive when they’re on the job longer. So there may be just this normalization. We had a job-full recovery in the beginning, which was unusual for the US in many decades, and we have shifted into a jobless expansion. It may just be part of the normalization, but it is worrisome, and particularly as it drags on.

So then there’s a question, is it uncertainty about the political environment? Is it uncertainty about technological changes that might be affecting the workforce? I don’t think AI can explain where we are right now in the labor market. We haven’t seen the diffusion of those technologies, but it could be holding back businesses from hiring. There’s a lot of possibilities here. But it’s a slower moving problem than a recession. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a problem and deserves potentially a policy.

Krugman: Policy response, but maybe not monetary policy response. It’s as you said, it’s maybe not something that cutting interest rates could solve.

Sahm: It may be. The Fed took action last year, right? They cut the Federal funds rate by 75 basis points over three successive meetings, despite the fact inflation was still elevated. We really didn’t make any real progress on inflation last year. Complicated situation: upside risk to inflation, downside risk to employment, and they stepped in. I think it was appropriate by saying “the labor markets are not in a bad place right now, but there’s a chance that this gets much worse. So we need to act preemptively, take out some insurance.” That was the path the Fed took. There were disagreements even at the Fed over what’s the right thing to do. But they’ve taken out the insurance, and we’re coming into the year where there are some tax cuts to households and businesses coming online, which also ought to give some support to stabilize the labor market.

I think the Fed is going to want to see their actions play out, see what these tax cuts do. So we’re kind of in a wait-and-see. I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll see the hiring rate stabilize and move up, given the support from the Fed and the tax cuts. But if there’s something deeper, this uncertainty—I think we’re going to learn a lot about the labor market early this year. If there are deeper problems, more structural problems. Well, then that’s not where the Fed has very effective tools. That’s a different kind of conversation.

Krugman: People insisting that that stuff is structural and can’t be fixed by monetary policy, that’s been abused so often in the past, but this actually looks like it. This does not look like a simple problem, that “money is too tight.”

Sahm: The Fed should use the tools they have; the Federal funds rate, they have plenty of room to cut. Their dual mandate is maximum employment and price stability. If employment is really starting to slide, the Fed should be stepping in. It’s just a question of: we want to resolve the problem, right? The Fed may not be the solution to the problem but it doesn’t, as you said, it wouldn’t excuse them from staying on the side—it doesn’t. They haven’t stayed on the sidelines, they are in the mix. Because this is such an unusual dynamic with the labor market and the broader economy, it just raises questions about: what’s the right lever to pull? Frankly, we ought to pull a lot of levers, take uncertainty out of the economy. I think there’s a lot of conversations around AI that could probably benefit the labor market. So the market should be trying lots of different things because even though the layoffs aren’t with us right now, this is a real problem that is going to build over time.

Krugman: This is a time when you would really want a lot of calm, detailed analysis—but won’t necessarily get it, this is why we have professionals at the Fed but that’s not what higher management seems to want.

So, what was your reaction? We know that there’s been a lot of hectoring of Powell and the Fed from the White House, but this astonishing criminal investigation, how did you feel about that? I mean, obviously you weren’t happy.

Sahm: There’s a lot to unpack from this week with the Fed. First, I’m deeply concerned about the ongoing escalation of pressuring the Fed to lower interest rates. Taking out a criminal investigation against the Fed chair is very serious, this is past using words to insult, this is a pressure campaign and it’s one that’s being used not just against the Fed. So there’s a really big issue with the actions that were taken by the Trump administration. I fully support Jay Powell coming out with a public statement and being very clear—using the words of the renovation, this is a pretext, right? Jay Powell’s two minute public video statement was extraordinary. He has stayed out of the politics. He has not said “the White House is pressuring us to lower interest rates” until Sunday and it was a very clear and direct and brief message unlike what usually comes out of the Fed.

One thing I really appreciate in his statement, Powell didn’t refer to the “Fed independence” or similar jargon. He laid out, very clearly, what’s at stake. Are interest rates going to be decided by evidence and economic conditions, or are they going to be decided by political interference and intimidation? This is not just about the Fed. Frankly, we’ve seen other efforts from the White House just in the last week to try to push down interest rates in other places—the president saying “credit card companies cut rates to 10%” just by edict. So really focusing on: this is not about the Fed. This is not about what we do in the institution, it’s about the economic outcomes that are going to affect people, because it might sound to everyday Americans, “lower interest rates are great.” Who wants to pay more in interest, right? If you’re a borrower, if you’re saving, you want interest rates to be higher. But you want experts who can play through: “what does this mean?” Not just on day one when the interest rates are cut, but what does this mean two years, five years from now in terms of economic outcomes?

I really appreciated Powell for calling out the politics. Calling out the escalation that’s been very clear and centering on: “what are we really talking about here, this is either about economic evidence or about politics?” There was a big outpouring of support, including from some congressional Republicans who are close to the president. This does not seem like this was a successful campaign, Powell did not back down. He did not resign. He is probably not going anywhere anytime soon. I find that, somewhat, this is good for the Fed. But I am deeply concerned that a lot of the outpouring of support goes back to—this is Jay Powell, this is an individual who is a lifelong Republican. He has worked in Republican and Democratic administrations. He is the last of the bipartisan Fed members. He was elevated to a governor at the Fed by Obama and then brought to being Chair by Trump and renewed in the chair position by Biden, the kind of credentials and support that he has built over decades of his career in Washington working in politics, also working in private industry. Nobody else at the Fed has that kind of backing. And so, if Jay Powell had three more years left on his chair and the president had four months, I’d be like, “okay, we’re going to get through this.” But it’s the opposite. Jay Powell is out in four months as Chair. The Fed is in a very precarious position.

Krugman: Just to say, you and I are accustomed to reading Fedspeak and know that this is not how central bankers usually talk. In fact, that statement by former Fed chairs was largely unreadable by normal human beings. But Powell’s statement was really crystal clear, which was totally amazing. This tells you in a way just how great the things are, because there’s a reason why central bankers usually avoid being too direct, so as not to rile markets and so on. But, what happens? Trump will replace Powell with presumably whoever he chooses—and we may want to talk a little bit about those choices, but presumably whoever he chooses will be chosen—at least in the White House belief—that he’ll do what they say and cut rates. But what actually happens? Because it’s not that simple, the Fed isn’t simply run by the dictat of the Chair.

Sahm: We’re at a place where the president is going to make his nomination for Fed Chair. This has been a long drawn out, “Fed Chair-Apprentice series.” So we don’t know who that person is yet. But president Trump has made a very unusual and I think very problematic statement that he’s not putting anyone up unless they are in favor of much lower interest rates. So again, this is not about the evidence, economic conditions, the president’s like “I want rates lower” and he’s only going to put people in that are committed to getting rates lower. There’s a lot of problems with that. But this person has to then get through Senate confirmation. It was really important that some of the first and very influential members of Congress who stood up for Powell this week, they’ll be instrumental in getting Trump’s nomination for Fed Chair in place as Fed Chair. And in fact, Senator Thom Tillis, who’s on the Senate Banking Committee said, “until this investigation is closed up, he’s not advancing any nomination to the Fed, including the chair.” So, again, Powell’s term as Fed Chair ends in May, it’s problematic, this is the time where things should be moving. So there could be hurdles in the Senate. But in all likelihood, I think we should assume that Congress is going to give the president who he wants as Fed chair.

The Fed chair, it’s a leadership position, it’s incredibly important, but at the end of the day, the Fed Chair has one vote. There are 19 Fed officials, 12 of them are voting, to move interest rates down, you would have to have seven votes. So a Fed Chair coming in committed to lower interest rates has to win over other Fed officials to make that happen. We already knew coming into this year there was a lot of disagreement about Fed officials, even with the rate cuts last year, that Jay Powell was able to lead the Fed through because there’s economic concerns. There’s a case that could be built, if the data come in to support it, that would lower interest rates. Powell has said, and many Fed officials, they expect the next move of the Fed to be a rate cut. They’re just waiting for more evidence in particular that inflation slows. So I do expect the Fed to cut interest rates. I think it will take some time. But the president wants rates down now, and down rapidly. I think there’s been a lot of worries about Trump putting a loyalist at the Fed and somehow this individual being able to strong arm other members, and they make an assist from the Supreme Court: if the president’s allowed to remove Lisa Cook and other members, where they can pack the Fed and get the votes, that may be the path around we’re on. That would be very bad in terms of interest rates, because ultra low interest rates are not what the economy needs right now.

But I think there’s another path that hasn’t been discussed as much is that we might have a very weak Fed Chair. We could have someone in who is a loyalist to the president, who uses the bully pulpit of the Fed—and the Fed’s got a big bully pulpit—to just amplify the White House economic messaging, isn’t able to build a consensus, doesn’t have the trust of other members and then can’t get interest rates down and then the president gets mad and steps in. The next Fed Chair may be the one that actually gets fired, because who’s going to stand up and defend the loyalist Fed chair? He’s not Jay Powell, whoever it is is not going to be Jay Powell and have the kind of respect. Moving interest rates around because of political reasons, that’s bad; a weak, ineffective Fed, where the only people who are willing to go work at the Fed are political loyalists who don’t have skills, that is an incredibly dangerous situation for us to be in because crises happen. Things happen in the economy, things happen in the financial markets, to have a Fed that isn’t on top of its game, that’s a really bad place for us to be. I think that a very weak Fed could be the direction we’re heading in right now. It’s hard to see how this plays out in a good way unless some of the guardrails of the Fed are strengthened. That has to come from the Supreme Court strengthening removal protections from Congress, taking its responsibility of putting independent people at the Fed. But until that happens, I’m not going to be optimistic about this.

Krugman: People have largely forgotten it, but in early 2000, as the pandemic’s magnitude became clear, we came very close to a really complete financial meltdown. Basically the Fed poured in liquidity—would a weak political pawn, ignoramus Fed Chair, have been able to do that? I worry about that.

Sahm: Last year, to see disagreement among Fed officials about what’s the right thing to do, I found that reassuring. The economy was complicated, like we were talking about, it’s really hard to read the labor market: “what is the right thing? What is happening with inflation?” So there are moments where disagreement is reassuring and we can handle that; in the moment of a financial crisis, to have disagreement blow up inside of the Fed, that’s a moment where we need forceful action, competent action, and we need the Fed to be helping bring down uncertainty, that is not a moment where you want a Fed in disarray. That’s what we might end up with.

Krugman: I was interested to hear you say something about who wants to work at the Fed. I’ll get there in a minute, but what was really striking with the criminal investigations, it’s really bad if the president fires officials because he doesn’t like them, which is what happened—we’ve almost forgotten now, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Trump didn’t like a jobs number, and he fired her, and which didn’t actually appear to have changed there, but the agency hasn’t been politicized, at least not yet. But, this is more than that. This is saying “we will destroy your life. You don’t go along with my policy stuff, I will ruin you.” That has to have a chilling effect throughout the government in general, but certainly the Fed. I’m hearing some rumbles that the personnel situation at the Fed is not great. But I don’t know if you’re hearing the same stuff.

Sahm: Well, it goes way beyond the Fed. I said some of the situation stabilizing this week really rested on Jay Powell. He talked about how he had decades of bipartisan support. He also is worth tens of millions of dollars, he worked in the financial industry for many years. The criminal investigation in the Department of Justice is opening, the Fed legal staff cannot represent Jay Powell. He has to hire private counsel and, according to reports, had retained private counsel even before this investigation. This is not a total surprise that we were headed in this direction, but for him, he has the money to do this. He said in his statement, “as a public servant, there are times where you need to take a stand.” This is true and I am heartened that he took the stand and he is standing firm, but he has the ability to take that stand that most public officials don’t. They talk about, “watch the resignations out of different agencies.” We should be incredibly concerned about resignations out of the Department of Justice. That’s one of many ways that threats of lawsuits—people who don’t have the ability to represent themselves, don’t want to take their family through that. They might resign or they may not even be willing to sign up, because they’re not going to be protected.

This is a really bad path that we’re on, and it goes well beyond the Fed. So I’m glad that Powell was able to take the stand. But not everyone has the ability to do that. The Fed has more removal protections than practically any other public servants. It is an independent agency. Congress foresaw that the Fed would be vulnerable to political influence, and over time, there’s been attempts to politically influence it. You mentioned the commissioner, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is often considered independent, run by experts, not a place that the politicians hang out, but the Department of Labor, that’s in the administration, it’s been on tradition and norms that protected that individual from removal. The president has not respected those at all. He’s going after people who actually have some legal protections on their jobs, like Powell. So it’s a situation that, again, goes well beyond the Fed. You really do need people who are skilled and competent and trusted in these roles, and they’re not going to be welcomed.

Krugman: The Fed has a lot of career staff, people who have basically spent their whole lives there and have been dedicated public servants and are not personally wealthy. So Powell, because of a more complex background and private sector and all of that does have some personal resources, but I would assume most of the people that you really need to make sense of these peculiar goings on in the labor market, for example, don’t have a backstop. So if we get into the level of: “the Justice Department will be weaponized against anyone who isn’t going along with the president’s agenda,” my God, the Fed pays a little bit better than the civil service, but still, who wants to be in that position?

This is from left field, but the Fed does more than set interest rates. It also does regulatory supervisory work. Do you have any sense of what’s going on with that side?

Sahm: This case of keeping politics out of monetary policy, the tradition of politicians deciding what interest rates are, has a support in history, both in the United States and globally. The Fed is taking something of a position that really protects itself from political influence on monetary policy, but that case—and I kind of disagree with this—but they’ve said, the Federal Reserve has a lot of bank supervision and some financial regulations where the Fed isn’t standing alone like on monetary policy. The Fed stands alone, it is the institution within the US government that is making decisions on monetary policy. But when it comes to bank regulation, it is one of a set of Federal institutions. So the Fed works with the FDIC, an office to control the currency. They kind of split up the banks, and on regulations they’ll work together. So it’s less clear, because it is all part of the administration.

As an example of this, Michael Barr had been the vice chair in charge of supervision at the Fed. He was put into that position under President Biden. He stepped down from that position early this year. He’s continued in his role, he stayed on as a Fed governor. He’s continued to give speeches about bank supervision, about financial regulation. But it is clear that his view of where the Fed should be headed, where those areas should be, is different from the president’s. But the Fed didn’t take a big stand on “Barr is going to stay in place,” and instead Barr resigned from the vice chair of supervision. Michelle Bowman, who had been nominated by President Trump in his first term, stepped into that role. She was confirmed by the Senate in that role. So this is a case where the direction that the Fed has gone in terms of supervision and its financial regulation is much more consonant with the Trump administration and their views. Which isn’t to say that it’s politicized, but you can see the Fed is drawing a line with monetary policy. There’s justification of why monetary policy should not be the purview of politicians, but they haven’t brought the regulation into that. We’ll see how that plays out.

I think that’s the other thing that’s so notable about this week: Powell coming out with this public statement and really calling out the political interference. There are many steps in the first year of the Trump administration where the Fed could have come out and taken a stand, and they didn’t. Michael Barr had pressure on him and he stepped down, Lisa Cook, the president tried to remove; the Fed didn’t take the stand until we got to this place and one can second guess those decisions and have different opinions about it, but the Fed has treated the supervision as different. But they’re still taking the job seriously. I don’t want to act like they’ve just handed over the keys. But you can definitely see different approaches and a much lower tolerance for the politics to seep into monetary policy.

Krugman: It’s interesting because supervision is always a funny thing, on the one hand it is highly technical; you really can’t expect a random member of Congress to be able to second guess those kinds of decisions, you really do want professionals. On the other hand, at some level, it is clearly in the political arena.

Sahm: The supervision of banks is so central and frankly, the reason that the central bank exists is lender-of-last-resort, stabilizing financial markets. Well, if you have that power, you want to make sure you don’t have to use it, which means you oversee the financial system and make sure it doesn’t get to that point. So the banking system, the financial system, that’s so core to having a central bank, not monetary policy. The financial stability really is important. But then, one could make a case that as you said, the bank supervision, maybe that really should just be a full time expert, maybe it should all be under the FDIC. Maybe it shouldn’t be across agencies. One of my worries is after the financial crisis in 2008, part of Dodd-Frank, it took a lot of the consumer protection responsibilities away from the Fed, because I think, very credibly, there were arguments made that the Fed hadn’t lived up to their duties in terms of protecting consumers that they really focused on the mortgage fraud, it just didn’t rise to the attention because the Fed had other things they were focused on. So you think, “oh, let’s take this and put it in an agency that’s all dedicated: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” which I think is a great idea, until it gets shut down.

Krugman: Just a word for listeners. Dodd-Frank was the reform that was put in after the financial crisis. It became clear that the existing regulatory structure, which was designed for banks, wasn’t adequate for this whole world of shadow banking. So Dodd-Frank took a lot of stuff out of the house, the Fed and the consumer financial protection Bureau. But CFPB had a lot of legal protection, it was designed to be invulnerable to what has actually happened to it.

Sahm: It hasn’t proved invulnerable. So it might make a lot of good economic sense or good procedural sense to have bank supervision outside of the Fed. But the Fed truly has extraordinary protections from interference. It has its own budget. It has removable protections that other agencies don’t have. It’s really tied into financial markets in a way that kind of gives it—I don’t think it’s the best backstop, but it does give it more protection than other Federal agencies. That kind of institutional framework is really important.

Krugman: A quick anecdote. The group of 30 — Paul Volcker used to be the chairman of that group. He looked at me during some meeting and said “Krugman, you’re looking pretty down. What’s wrong?” And I said, “oh, I just spent two hours listening to a bunch of men in suits talk about bank supervision,” which I thought was the most boring, impossible subject. I think it was 2007. A year later, inadequate bank supervision blew up the world. So I was wrong to be so bored, although it is inherently a deeply boring subject. But you’re right, there’s always a question here about how the Fed has a lot of institutional protection and professionalism, and so it’s good to have important stuff under that roof; but too much stuff under that roof, then it’s not the Fed anymore. And it’s no longer going to be treated specially. So this is a bit hard. But I do worry that in looking at the interest rate decision, we may be looking too narrowly at what’s under threat now.

Sahm: Another problem that I’ve seen, there’s been a lot of talk about reform of the Fed. Treasury Secretary Bessent has a long list of things that he thinks the Fed has done wrong or could do better. You’ve seen other Fed chair candidates mention similar things. I want to be clear, like the Fed is not perfect. I think there are big questions about how you have an independent agency where technocrats are making decisions that affect millions of Americans. They’re not elected, so then how do you have independence? But then also accountability: how do they report to Congress? Like where should the lines be? Because some decisions should be determined by politicians. It’s not that you just want the economists or the lawyers running the world, right? You have a political process. So there’s these big questions that have been since the very beginning of the Fed and will continue about how you could do it better as an institution.

Unfortunately, I have a hard time really joining in these “let’s make the Fed better” conversations because they also don’t feel like they’re motivated in terms of making the Fed better. It’s like trying to weaken the Fed, discredit the Fed. I am not convinced that the president is going to be able to move interest rates down. When we talked about a lot of reasons why the Fed just doesn’t pull rates down. I think the president is going to be very effective at weakening the institution, and probably already has. This is going to be a really big mess to clean up, even if it doesn’t blow up in some dramatic market movement. So that’s where some of these reform discussions aren’t about making the Fed better. They’re about making the Fed weaker, and that makes it more vulnerable to political intimidation.

Krugman: If you want to make a case for why politicians shouldn’t have their direct hand on the dial. It’s hard to do better than looking at Trump’s recent statements. I think just the other day he said “if the market is up, then we should cut interest rates,” because they seem to think of interest rate cuts as a gold star that you get for doing well on a class quiz, instead of as a management tool for managing trade-offs.

You probably can’t answer this, but maybe it’s a jumping off point: How bad can it get? Not in terms of how bad it is at the Fed, which I worry about to be a thing, because I have friends there, but how bad does it get in terms of the macro economy?

Sahm: We can go back and look at the last time the Fed was under incredible amounts of political pressure. There are some parallels in terms of where we are in the political calendar as well.

In his reelection campaign, President Nixon put a lot of pressure on the then Fed Chair, Arthur Burns. This was someone who he had worked with, had close ties to, and the Fed kept interest rates low in the election year. That was part of gooseing the economy, keeping it going, it’s good for an election—that history has been told, but if you go back and look at that moment, it wasn’t just about the Fed keeping interest rates down, there was a big push to get the housing market going. Lots of different measures. The levers that were pulled in the Nixon administration are different than today. But it has this spirit, you see, price controls trying to loosen up credit and the housing market, this big effort to really run the economy in a way that in the short term, was beneficial to people. Growth is good, housing market is up, stock market is up. Nixon was reelected. We know that Nixon was pulling levers outside of the economy too, with the reelection. The Fed was one piece in a much bigger puzzle.

We’ve looked, in the last week, the edicts, the proposals coming out of the president, they go broader than the Fed. “Cut credit card rates to 10% by next week. Do purchases of mortgage-backed securities,” you’re pulling a lot of different levers to get interest rates down, and the efforts to intimidate the Fed haven’t been successful up to this point, but they fit within a broader thing—but back to: why should anyone care about this? They’re going to push interest rates down, and try to run the economy hot. It politically worked well in terms of the reelection with Nixon. But the economy was a mess on the other side of that, as the price controls came off, as the interest rates and the inflation took off. That required us to get the inflation under control, which had been building over time, that took some really dramatic efforts from the Volcker Fed in terms of raising interest rates, a deep recession. So it did a lot of damage. We’ve seen this news, the other cases around the world, eventually you end up with higher inflation and you end up with financial instability.

Krugman: That’s something we aren’t talking about much, the financial side. The inflation side is sort of easy: single focus, that’s kind of one number, there’s one inflation rate. But the broader issue of financial stability, also an irresponsible politicized Fed which would contribute to that.

Sahm: Yes. For that it’s really event driven. It’s not like interfering with the Fed isn’t a guarantee that you get bad outcomes, you might not get bad outcomes right away. You might not get it later. We could get lucky in that: productivity has risen. It could really set in. We could be disinflationary. Having ultra low interest rates might be the right thing to do by the end of this year, next year. This is not my base case at all. But you could have events come together in a way that pushing interest rates lower doesn’t create excess inflation, doesn’t create instabilities. We might not have another kind of Silicon-Valley-bank-run-type issue. We might not have credit market problems or whatever. Then it’s like, “oh, this wasn’t such a big deal.” I think for markets, they haven’t reacted much to all this because we’re not really in a crisis moment. We’re not really depending right now on the Fed only getting it right. But bad events happen. It just dials up the risk because you don’t have a Fed, or just more broadly thinking about interest rates, thinking hard about: is this the best thing to do in terms of the evidence and the economic conditions?

Then you could make a really bad decision in terms of interest rates, and if that moment of financial disruption comes, you could just really botch it. Financial markets move fast. With the Fed, there have been multiple times where they kind of got things under control quickly, like over the weekend and it didn’t spiral out. Well, If you have a Fed that comes in and really botches the response, things could start spiraling out. So it’s not a guarantee that bad things happen and we don’t want to overdramatize it. But it’s like: what purpose does this serve in terms of the American people and the economy functioning to be putting this much pressure on the Fed? Really trying to push through a political agenda on interest rates that historically has not ended well.

Krugman: The Fed’s track record is not perfect. They called inflation wrong in 2021. But we didn’t get stagflation back. This is an institution we ought to be cherishing for being open-minded and having done stuff mostly right. And now instead, you have potential criminal charges.

Sahm: Another piece of the Fed that really is trying to engage with the data, the evidence, and the Fed gets a lot of criticism for not raising rates soon enough in 2021 as inflation is taking off. They did pivot in 2022. The Fed raised interest rates very aggressively to try and get that under control. So they were willing to shift gears, Powell has even said we could have moved sooner. You have individuals that have been willing to admit a mistake and change course because the date, like the economy says, we need to change course for as much as Powell-Fed is criticized for the inflation we saw in ‘21 and ’22, the Powell-Fed also oversaw a very rare occurrence of a soft landing. Inflation has come down—not all the way down—but it has come down a lot. The unemployment rate has risen some, but we avoided recession, this is not typical. I think part of that is—it’s not all about the Fed, The Fed does not run the economy—but it is really important to have an institution and people at the Fed who are willing to pivot and do what is right for the economy, not kind of stick to their guns of like, “well, I just know that we need to be doing x, y, z with interest rates.”

So they pivoted and when they pivoted, they moved really forcefully. They’re responding because the economy was giving them signals like, “hey, you got to course correct here.” That kind of response contributed to what has been—despite all that’s been thrown at the US economy since the pandemic—we’ve done pretty well here. That ability to change course and pivot is really important. That’s something that I think would be very hard if it’s all the political calculus behind it.

Krugman: Gosh. Actually having people in positions of responsibility who are willing to admit mistakes and change course, that’s a kind of an un-American idea at this point in our nation’s history. But an amazing thing.

Well, thanks so much. Quite an amazing moment. The Fed is not unique in this, kind of, fraught moment, but this is not some place I expected to see this kind of thing. Thanks again so much for talking to me.

Sahm: Thank you.

This is, at long last, the last part of our four-part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, Intermission, IVa). last time we looked at the social status of hoplites and the implications that had for the political and social structure of the polis and even the very basic question of how many people there were in ancient Greece.

I had originally planned for this week’s topic – the amount of training and combat experience hoplites had – to be an addendum to that discussion as it related to how we understand who hoplites are (yeoman soldiers or leisured elites? warrior elites or amateurs?) but there wasn’t the time to work it in. So it sits here almost as a coda to the entire series.

So that is what we are going to look at today: how were hoplites prepared for battle? This topic is going to be a bit more complicated than most of our neat binary orthodox-heterodox divides because they are divisions within the orthodox school here, although oddly those divisions don’t seem to me to be readily acknowledged. In particular, we might identify an old-orthodox position (hoplites drilled and trained), a new-orthodox VDH-position (hoplites fought a lot, but trained little), a non-scholarly and remarkably a-historical pop-orthodox Pressfield-position (hoplites did US Marines boot camp) and finally the heterodox position (hoplites were largely untrained amateurs).

So to tackle this question, we want to ask how often hoplites fought, what kind of training was available to them, when it was available and the degree to which it was compulsory. As we’re going to see, I think the evidence here leans in the heterodox position, though I would argue it doesn’t lean quite as far as Roel Konijnendijk, the heterodox scholar who I think has focused on this issue the most, might have it.

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From the British Museum (1848,1020.35) part of the frieze from the “Nereid Monument’ depicting two hoplites fighting (c. 380 BC). The hoplite turned towards us wears a tube-and-yoke cuirass (a later type of armor, generally made of textile), partially covered by a cloak. Interestingly, he has his helmet pushed up even while fighting. Pushing a Corinthian helmet up like this was common before battle and one wonders if this is merely the artist taking some liberties so that we can see this figure’s face more clearly.

Understanding the (Very Much Not Boot) Camps

But we should start by trying to get a handle on what everyone’s positions actually are and here I think we do need to be careful to make a distinction between three kinds of ‘training’ involved in warfare. When we say drill, we mean training in groups, focused on practicing moving and fighting as a formation. By contrast, when we say training at arms (or ‘training in arms’) we mean individual combat training on how to use weapons. A good way to think about this is the contrast between how a marching band collectively trains to move together during their shows (drill) and how the individual musicians train independently to play their instruments well (training at arms, except the arms are trombones). Finally there is fitness training, which is focused neither on the specific motions of collective action (that’s drill) or the specific motions of individual fighting (that’s training at arms) but rather on strength, stamina and agility.

You will want to keep those terms separate because of course it is perfectly possible for armies to do one kind of training and not the others. Many types of ‘warriors’ for instance, might train for individual combat (training at arms) and even for personal fitness, but because they do not expect to fight in formation in large groups, they have little use for drill. On the other hand, in some societies where the expectation is that soldiers are recruited broadly from a farming class that is already very physically active, there might be less emphasis on fitness training, but if they expect them to fight in formation, a lot of emphasis on drill. And of course different weapons demand different degrees of training at arms: spears are generally easier to use with less training than swords or muskets and so on.

So we’re interested here in both how much training but also what kind of training and we cannot assume just because we see one kind of training that the others are present.

So with our terms in place, to outline the debate briefly, the early German scholars of our ‘Prussian Foundations,’ when they thought about hoplites largely assumed drill, because it was the ubiquitous understood principle of their day that drill was the way that soldiers could be made to fight in formation together.¹ Consequently early hoplite orthodoxy assumed that hoplite formations must have drilled in order to function. Likewise, extrapolating from their own (gunpowder) warfare, they assumed rigid formations with standard spacing, assigned places in line which maneuvered like early modern musket or pike formations, marching in time and with standard evolutions to move from column into line and such.² It seems to have legitimately not occured to these early scholars that there was any way to do close-order infantry that didn’t involve drill and so even though – as we’re going to see – there’s very little evidence to suggest that hoplites regularly drilled, they just assumed they did. So that is the ‘old’ orthodox position: it assumes hoplites drilled and practiced at arms, without a lot of evidence to support the notion, because that’s simply what – to them – soldiers did.

(This is also, I think, another example of ‘Rome acting as the frog DNA for studying Greece.’ The Romans did drill and practice at arms and we know that because the sources tell us repeatedly. But part of the reason the sources tell us is that the Roman practice was strange to them, which of course in turn suggests you cannot use it to fill in the gaps for Greece or anywhere else!)

That said, the ‘Restatement of the Orthodoxy’ phase – inaugurated by VDH’s The Western Way of War (1989) took an odd turn from this point an in some ways. While WWoW is, for the most part, simply a full-throated restatement of the old orthodoxy on hoplites, one of VDH’s obsessions was the idea (substantially critiqued in last week’s post) of the hoplites as ‘yeoman’ citizen-warriors, which leads him to stress the importance of civilian social bonds (sub-units of the polis, called tribes (φυλαί, ‘phulai’)) and thus not to assume the sort of drill that the older Prussian scholars (on whom he otherwise often relies) do. I haven’t found any specific point where VDH openly disputes the notion that hoplites had drill or training at arms, but he pretty clearly assumes they don’t.³

On the other hand, WWoW assumes that in the ideal, archaic form of hoplite warfare, hoplite battles were really frequent, assuming “battle of some type on an average of two out of every three years.”⁴ So VDH seems to assume that hoplites are untrained but that hoplite army fight so frequently that most hoplites would have a lot of experience, which would make up for being untrained. VDH’s assumptions about the frequency of hoplite battles are, uh, quite flawed, as we’re going to see.

At around the same time (the late 1990s), hoplites, particularly Spartans surged back into the popular consciousness through the action of Frank Miller’s comic 300 (1998) – it gets a film of the same name in (2006) and Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire (1998). These form the bedrock of the modern popular misunderstanding of Sparta and are all terrible guides to the ancient world (despite Gates of Fire, to my eternal annoyance, frequently making military academy reading lists). Both pieces of popular culture are at best only tenuously connected to any actual historical scholarship or the actual historical sources and both, for reasons of their fiction, want to understand the Spartan agoge as super-badass warrior training. Both imagine both drill and training at arms in the context of Spartan training, with Pressfield especially imagining the agoge as an almost direct analogy to modern military training (particularly his own US Marine Corps boot camp). This is essentially a modern version of the same error our 19th century Prussians were making: assuming that armies have always worked the way they work now.

But this notion of hoplites generally and Spartans particularly as highly trained ‘super elite’ warriors persists in popular culture and leads to the sort of shocked incredulity one gets when noting that there is in fact relatively little evidence for extensive drill or any training at arms at Sparta, much less anywhere else.

Finally, there is the heterodox position, which has been most recently compiled and defended by Roel Konijnendijk in Classical Greek Tactics (2018), 39-71. Konijnendijk describes the question of training as a “hidden controversy” and I think that is right: there is in fact a lot of disagreement here, but because it is embedded in the assumptions beneath the arguments rather than the arguments themselves, it is rarely expressed as disagreement. Konijnendijk surveys the evidence and concludes, to quote him, “the typical Greek citizen hoplite knew no weapons drill, no formation drill, and understood only the simplest of signals“⁵ Konijnendijk allows for “modest advances” by smaller, more elite units in the late Classical but largely rejects a developmental model where the amount of training and drill increased over time.⁶ In short, hoplites were consummate amateurs – with the exceptions (Spartans, the Sacred Band, etc.) having still only very limited real training – and remained that way through the Classical period. Real military drill and effective mass-training would have to wait for the Macedonians.⁷

So let’s take a brief look through the evidence and see which of these viewpoints holds up.

How Often Did They Fight?

It may actually be easier to move out of order a bit and deal with the easiest to dispense with position first, which is actually Victor Davis Hanson’s notion that a polis and thus most of its hoplites fought a “battle of some type on an average of two out of every three years.”⁸ VDH provides no supporting evidence for this argument and it does not hold up either as a direct, evidentiary matter or as a matter of its logical implications.

Post-Publication Note! A bit of a goof here! VDH writes in WWoW, as quoted above, “For the citizen of the fifth-century Greek city-state who saw battle of some type on an average of two out of every three years” (WWoW, 89). Which is to say a battle every eighteen months on average. That is such an insane claim that I seem to have edited it in my brain to the also-wrong but at least less facially insane idea of a battle every 2 or 3 years. But, as folks in the comments pointed out, that’s not what VDH said, he said two out of every three. You can tell how VDH has just not considered the implications because on the very same page he comments that, “this long tour of duty meant that in the phalanx as a whole a great number of hoplites were always men over thirty” but at an 18-month (rather than 24- to 36-month) battle tempo, there actually wouldn’t be very many hoplites over 30 (for reasons discussed below)! I am not going to re-run my demographic math below to also figure for a 18-month tempo because there’s not much point to the effort: having demonstrated that a 36-month tempo is unworkable, a tempo twice as fast is already ruled out. However, I have made some light edits to reflect the fact that I am actually testing a much more reasonable case than what VDH has supposed.

The idea here is that, if the polis has a hoplite battle – or even a smaller action – every eighteen months or so, the typical hoplite who survived the roughly forty years of military eligibility – citizens served as hoplites from their late teens to 60 years of age – would see dozens of battles (around 25 of them). The problem with that argument is the obvious one: actual major hoplite engagements (and even minor ones!) don’t seem to have ever been that common. You may recall we listed every major Spartan battle (and a fair number of minor ones) between 500 and 323 B.C. and found 38 of them or one battle every 5 years or so, less than a third of the frequency VDH supposes (Sparta is useful for this exercise because unlike other poleis (other than Athens) we can be pretty confident that basically every major Spartan battle is attested). And that’s a list that includes battles in which there were basically no spartiates present (e.g. Amphipolis (422)) or which were very small actions involving just a few hundred hoplites (e.g. Pylos (425)) or fourteen naval battles. Filtering for all of that, we end up with Sparta fighting a major pitched hoplite battle something like once roughly each decade.

Making that figure even worse, it’s not clear that we can be sure any of those battles involved something like the entire Spartan citizen force. There ought to be something like 8,000 spartiates in 479, but only 5,000 show up for Plataea (479 B.C.; the remainder of the Spartan force are helots and perioikoi). The Spartan force at Mantinea (418), a major battle in Sparta’s backyard, we’re told had five-sixths (Thuc. 5.64.3) of the spartiates present, which comes close to an all-call. But most of these battles are much smaller and involve only a minority of the citizen body.

In short then, when we actually try to run the numbers, the suggestion we get is not that hoplites are rolling out for a major battle every two out of three years – or even once every three years – but rather than a polis probably only fights a major pitched battle around once a decade, with a few minor engagements between and that not every hoplite is at every battle, suggesting the typical hoplite, rather than seeing 25 (or 20 or 15 or 10) actions in his life, might instead see perhaps 3-4. An interesting data-point: we know that Socrates was of military age and fought as a hoplite for Athens during the difficult days of the Peloponnesian War and that he served in three campaigns and saw three battles: Potidaea (432), Delium (424) and Amphipolis (422); given the context – Plato is giving us a full accounting of Socrates’ service to the city in his defense in a period of very high military activity – we can probably assume this is an exhaustive list and perhaps on the high end.⁹ So the idea that a typical hoplite might serve on three or four campaigns and see perhaps that many significant engagements seems to fit with the evidence we have. Some doubtless saw more, some saw less and there are probably a bunch of minor skirmishes scattered in that we can’t see.

Which, as an aside, VDH has to be wrong demographically as well. As Peter Krentz notes,¹⁰ a typical pitched battle between hoplites seemed to produce roughly 10% losses (that is, KIA; ancient sources almost never count WIA), split between about 5% of the victor and 15% of the loser. Needless to say, a society losing 10% of its adult male citizen population every eighteen months on a permanent basis is not going to remain a society for very long.

We can actually quickly run the math on this. As noted above, I ran the math on this question for a significantly slower 30-month battle tempo rather than for the insanely rapid 18-month battle tempo VDH proposes, but the exercise will serve. A polis fighting a hoplite battle at c. 10% deaths would have lost half its population by the sixth battle and by the twelfth only a quarter would be left alive, purely from combat related deaths. Accounting for normal civilian mortality on top of this, a society fighting four hoplite battles (each at 10% casualties) a decade (so a 30-month tempo, rather than 18) would lose half of its generational cohort reaching adulthood by thirty and lose ninety percent of it by age 45. Accounting for male child mortality on top of that, you’d have a society birthing one thousand male babies (so just under two thousand total births) each year to have twenty eight men in that surviving cohort make it to 45 and around fifty or sixty men total living over the age of 45.¹¹ That is simply not the sort of age structure suggested by ancient Greek literature.

In short then it seems like the typical citizen-hoplite saw battle infrequently. It was hardly a wholly foreign experience – the typical citizen hoplite expected to participate in a few engagements and perhaps one or two major battles in their life time – but they were hardly doing this often enough or consistently enough to get a lot of fighting experience. The contrast with the Romans – the average Roman male during the Middle Republic will have had to serve around 7 years to make up the numbers for the Roman armies we see – is marked.¹²

Hoplites simply didn’t campaign that often.

Training and Drill?

So let’s start with training at arms. Was there much training at arms among Greek hoplites?

Broadly, I think the evidence suggests ‘no,’ but I think Konijnendijk is maybe a little too quick to dismiss a developmental model, where the edges of that ‘no’ fuzz over time.

The general sense one gets is that broadly the Greeks did not think that contact fighting requires specific, focused training in the motions and patterns of fighting – that is, training at arms. Note how that doesn’t mean they didn’t think fitness was important – remember, that is separate. This appears to be Xenophon’s view, for instance: in the Cyropaedia (Xen. Cyrop 2.3.9-10, trans W. Miller), Xenophon has his ideal ruler, the Persian Cyrus, arm many of light-armed poor as heavy contact infantry (though with swords, not spears), on the grounds that fighting this way would eliminate the skill distinction (removing the advantage of enemy rich Persians, who trained extensively in archery) because:¹³

“And now,” he continued, “we have been initiated into a method of fighting [that is, hoplite-style fighting], which, I observe, all men naturally understand, just as in the case of other creatures each understands some method of fighting which it has not learned from any other source than from instinct: for instance, the bull knows how to fight with his horns, the horse with his hoofs, the dog with his teeth, the boar with his tusks. And all know how to protect themselves, too, against that from which they most need protection, and that, too, though they have never gone to school to any teacher.
As for myself, I have understood from my very childhood how to protect the spot where I thought I was likely to receive a blow; and if I had nothing else I put out my hands to hinder as well as I could the one who was trying to hit me. And this I did not from having been taught to do so, but even though I was beaten for that very act of putting out my hands. Furthermore, even when I was a little fellow I used to seize a sword wherever I saw one, although, I declare, I had never learned, except from instinct, even how to take hold of a sword. At any rate, I used to do this, even though they tried to keep me from it—and certainly they did not teach me so to do—just as I was impelled by nature to do certain other things which my father and mother tried to keep me away from. And, by Zeus, I used to hack with a sword everything that I could without being caught at it. For this was not only instinctive, like walking and running, but I thought it was fun in addition to its being natural.

Now this is essentially a made-up story that Xenophon is putting in the history of Cyrus II (the Great) who he is presenting as an ideal ruler, so this didn’t happen, but what it suggests very strongly is that Xenophon – an experienced military man, a mercenary general who wrote manuals on tactics – does not think that training at arms is necessary. Instead he stresses that the style of warfare is instinctive – that humans fight in contact warfare, in his view, the same way a bull fights with its horns, entirely untrained.

And that impression extends to much of the rest of our sources. Xenophon’s description of the agoge and broader Spartan rearing program features fitness and obedience training, but not practice with weapons (Xen. Lac. Con. 11, 12.5-6).¹⁴ Tyrtaeus, in a classic passage (West fr. 12) declares that he “would not rate a man worth mention or account either for speed of foot or wrestling skill, not even if he had a Cyclops’ size and strength or could outrun the fierce north wind of Thrace […] no, no man is of high regard in time of war unless he can endure the sight of blood and death and stand close to the enemy and fight,” essentially declaring that all forms of excellence that might result from practice or training were less important than simple personal courage. When Agesilaus was “wishing to practice his army” he offers the cavalry prizes for the best horsemanship, the skirmishers prizes for the best shooting and throwing and the hoplites just a prize for physical fitness, leading to the hoplites to call exercise in the gymnasia (Xen. Hell. 3.4.16). Over and over again we see that when hoplite armies do train, training at arms is unmentioned and instead physical fitness is stressed.¹⁵

On the other hand, we have some interesting references in Plato. In Plato’s Republic, we get a discussion of the military of the ideal city: Plato has Socrates in the dialogue suggest that their ideal, utopian society ought to have a professional army, precisely to allow for this kind of training, but notably he suggests this precisely because Glaucon – his interlocutor at this point – assumes that this ideal politeia will be defended by its untrained citizenry (Plato, Rep. 2.373-4). The implication is that at least some Greeks recognized that skill at arms might be useful, but that the typical hoplite generally didn’t train at it. Likewise, Aristotle (writing decades later and living for some time in the Macedonian court of Philip II) argues directly that mercenary troops were superior to citizen militias precisely because mercenaries actually trained on their weapons (Arist. Eth. Nic. 1116b.7-8). Again, the implication training at arms was understood to be potentially useful, but something everyone assumed citizen hoplite armies did not do.

Alongside this was the emergence of hoplomachoi – trainers at arms for hoplites – and their attendant hoplomachia. Our first references to these fellows are in Plato (Plat. Lach. 181e-183a) and honestly the vibe one gets from our sources is sometimes derisive: Plato has Nicias present this sort of training in arms as good and very helpful for young men, only to be immediately dismissed by Laches who notes quite bluntly that the Spartans – more interested in preparing for war than other Greeks – don’t make use of it, so it must be useless. Xenophon too is mocking (Xen. Anab. 2.1.7; Mem. 3.1). Konijnendijk, I think, maybe reads some of this mockery a little too straight – Xenophon wouldn’t feel the need if many folks did not take these guys seriously – but is fundamentally right to note that individual traveling weapon instructors were hardly going to train entire hoplite armies.¹⁶

The conclusion I think we have to draw here is that the lack of training at arms became a known problem in Greece but that at least in the Classical period, that problem was never ‘solved.’ Notably, it certainly was not solved in Sparta, which seems to have neglected this training entirely; so much for the idea of the agoge as being like a modern boot camp in terms of having practice on specific weapons. On the other hand arranging these reports chronologically, one senses something of a growing awareness – Plato and Xenophon are writing after the Peloponnesian War and Aristotle is a generation younger than them – that this is in fact a problem. Athens is going to make the ephebia, a military training program for young men mandatory in 336/5 (it existed before, but was non-mandatory and unpaid, so probably only for the very wealthy), right at the tail end of the Classical period, which may also be suggestive of something a little more like the ‘developmental’ model. It seems consistent with our limited evidence to suppose that other poleis – for which our evidence is far less complete than Athens – might have been trending in the same way in the late Classical, a trend which might have culminated in the Macedonian army of Philip II and Alexander, which is generally assumed to have been trained at arms and in drill.¹⁷

After training at arms, we can consider drilling, that is training to fight in groups. And here Konijnendijk summarizes the evidence neatly that prior to the 330s (when the Athenian ephebia is made mandatory, as noted above), “there is no evidence for formation drill anywhere outside of Sparta.“¹⁸ As Konijnendijk also notes, this isn’t just a question of pure silence – every so often sources note the absence of such training (.e.g Plato, Laws 831b). The most dramatic is the passage that tells us the Spartans could do formation drills: Xenophon presents as astounding the fact that the Spartans can perform even basic maneuvers “which hoplomachoi [instructors in fighting] think very difficult,” like forming from column into line (Xen. Lac. Con. 11) and elsewhere (Xen. Mem. 3.12.5) explicitly notes there was no public military training at Athens in his day.

Which is to say that the Spartans, the only poleis we have evidence did any sort of formation drill, amazed everyone by being able to do something that, in a broader world-historical sense is an extremely basic formation drill. If you will permit the contrast, in a century Macedonian sarisa-phalanxes are going to be advancing in separate units, charging, giving ground, wheeling under pressure, opening ranks to admit light infantry and even once forming square in combat but the very best that the Classical Greek hoplite can manage – and only in Sparta! – is forming from column into line as a group and a few other quite basic maneuvers that show up elsewhere in Xenophon (largely in the Hellenica). Once again, our ancient authors seem aware that this is a weakness and we might imagine there were some efforts here and there to remedy it, but the overall impression is that outside of Sparta, hoplites generally did not drill at all such that even the relatively modest Spartan achievements in this respect were considered remarkable.

Now I do think, when it comes to training at arms and drill, we probably ought to be alive to the idea that young men of the appropriate social status were probably prepared for the battles they were going to fight informally, at home. We’ve stressed the lack of formal training, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t informal training. Now, it has to be immediately conceded: our sources breathe not a word of this to us. No real sense that young men learned to wield a spear or stand a position from their fathers. But there’s a lot about the raising of children in antiquity we don’t really know – this omission isn’t surprising. That said, given the frequent notes on our sources of how limited the capabilities of citizen hoplites were, just how amateurish they were compared to mercenaries or the still-fairly-unimpressive Spartans, this informal training could never have been very thorough, if it happened.

All of which leaves physical fitness training.

The Greeks thought physical fitness training was important and put a fair bit of emphasis on it, although the fact that our sources also assert that poor wiry farmers made the best soldiers (e.g. that Plato, Republic 556cd) – the poor farmers who could not afford to spend a bunch of time training at the gymnasion is rather suggestive about how limited the role of formal fitness training was in most poleis. We do often see ‘picked’ bodies of men in hoplite armies, but these are generally the youngest and fittest fellows picked out, rather than a special unit that trains together (though special units do emerge – things like the Sacred Band – in the late Classical). Indeed, often Greek military fitness programs make the most sense if understood as an effort by the leisured wealthy elite to keep themselves and their sons from falling catastrophically behind the poor farmers in fitness. That certainly seems to be how we should understand the agoge, which included a ton of fitness training, but no training in arms that we are told of (nor any real ‘schooling’ as such, but it did include a lot of child abuse).

That said, alongside an emphasis on fitness training, we also hear complaints that, outside of Sparta (which did emphasize physical fitness), citizen hoplites were often in parlous condition. Xenophon complains of armies “from poleis” including too many old men, some soldiers who are too young and only a few men somaskein (σωμασκεῖν), “train their bodies” (Xen. Hell. 6.1.5).¹⁹ Still, this was something that poleis focused some pretty clear intentional collective action on, instituting physical spaces (gymnasia) and institutions for fitness training among the citizenry or at least among the wealthy citizenry.

Putting this all together, I fall closest to the heterodox position here. I am a bit slower than Konijnendijk to reject a ‘developmental’ model where training at arms and drill become (modestly!) more common over time, but hoplites do not appear to have regularly drilled (outside of Sparta, which did some drill but hardly excelled at it compared to the later practice of the Romans or Macedonians) and they did not regularly train at arms, although some training arms seems to have begun to seep in – not very much, just a bit – by the fourth century. Physical fitness was percieved as more important and central than either, although it is not clear how successful most poleis were at achieving a high fitness standard.

Overall then, the old-orthodox tacit assumption of drill is not based on the evidence. The modern pop-historical vision of hoplites (especially Spartans) as ‘elite warriors’ with rigorous boot-camp like training is functionally entirely a fabrication of modern fiction writers falling into precisely the same trap as some of the Old Prussians did: unable to imagine that a culture often presented to them as ‘familiar’ could in fact do something so alien as fail to have a modern-style drill-and-training tradition. It seems notable to me that while there is intense incredulity that the evidence for hoplite training is what it is, that disbelief does not follow if I say that other ‘non-Western’ cultures didn’t appear to engage in drill or training at arms. I think the underlying problem here is the assumption that the ancient Greeks were ‘like us’ and indeed even more ‘like us’ than modern or early modern people who were ‘non-Western.’ Whereas the truth is, Ancient Greece was a deeply alien place from our modern perspective.

Ancient Greeks were not Romans, but they were also not moderns and there is a specific kind of error (which, let’s be honest, often comes paired with a thick dose of orientalist xenophobia) which wants to imagine they were ‘like us.’ They were not.

Conclusions

So after all of that, where do we find ourselves?

We’ve laid out the two opposing ‘camps’ on hoplites so I suppose it is worth, at this point, doing something of an inventory of the key questions and where I fall.

On the emergence of the phalanx, I think the orthodox model of rapid and early development is simply clearly wrong, disproved by the archaeology for some time and largely abandoned. However, I also think the heterodox model has a problem: it takes an excessively narrow view of what a ‘phalanx’ is, to push back the ‘date of the phalanx’ in a definitional sense further than I think it should go. Instead, it is clear to me that hoplite equipment emerged gradually over the course of the eight and seventh centuries, but that it was likely being used for some kind of ‘shield wall’ from the beginning. I am willing to call that shield wall a ‘proto-phalanx’ early on, as it hasn’t fully excluded the light infantry, but I think it is clearly a kind of phalanx from at least 650 BCE.

That position is in turn supported by my view on hoplite arms and armor, where I effectively reject the ‘strong’ form of both camps. On the one hand, the ‘strong’ orthodox position, that hoplite equipment was so heavy as to be unusuable in anything other than a tight, shoving phalanx is absurd; as heavy infantrymen, hoplites were not particularly heavily equipped. On the other hand, the notion of a ‘skirmishing’ hoplite, as suggested by some ‘strong’ heterodox scholars is also, to me, quite silly: these are heavy infantrymen, not skirmishers and they are using an equipment set that seems tailored to operating in a close-order shield-wall formation. You could do other kinds of warfare in it, and Greek hoplites sometimes did, but the panoply is most clearly suited – from its very emergence – for a shield wall. It is ‘shield wall native,’ as it were.

That in turn informs my view on hoplite tactics. The orthodox ‘shoving othismos‘ rugby scrum has to be rejected – it is not required by the sources and is exceedingly implausible. However, I think the ‘strong’ heterodox position, which imagines ‘skirmishing’ hoplites moving fluidly in masses of men with no fixed formation or firm place, is also wrong – far too much of a correction from the overly rigid orthodox model. Instead, I favor something of a midpoint, a modestly tight (60-90cm file width) formation, with assigned places and an expected if not standard depth and width, which operated principally (eventually exclusively) in shock. That shock engagement in turn took the form of a sequence of ‘micro-pulses’ and ‘micro-lulls,’ not a ‘series of duels’ but in fact a rolling sequence of several-on-severals as the formations ‘acordianned’ forward and backwards. It would be rare for either side to fully disengage after contact, but men would spend a lot of time pulled just out of measure, looking for an opening to surge forward (or fearing their opponents might do the same).

When it comes to the rules of war for hoplites, I think that the heterodox habit of treating battles, raids, sieges and ambushes without distinction and thus insisting that essentially there were no rules is unhelpful and leads to confusion. The orthodox model, which imagines some sort of (unattested) Archaic golden age where the rules were always followed is absurd, but the idea of, if not rules, expectations that governed war between Greek states under certain circumstances (and which might not apply to non-Greeks, or in certain kinds of war) clearly seems true and is the way these things work in basically all cultures. In no culture does the ‘discourse’ of war fully match its ‘reality’ but the degree of disconnect is variable and the discourse does influence the reality. Within that frame, the orthodox scholars are correct to point to the Peloponnesian War as a conflict which ruptured the discourse that existed at the time it was fought, even if they are wrong to suppose that entire discourse had existed unaltered since 650.

In terms of the status of hoplites, I think the heterodox camp is essentially correct: the legally defined ‘hoplite class’ (like the Athenian zeugitai) were significantly smaller and wealthier than the ‘yeoman hoplite’ model advanced in The Western Way of War. Even if we include the ‘working-class’ hoplites who often didn’t enjoy the political privleges of the ‘hoplite class,’ we are still talking about a smaller slice of society than either Beloch or VDH suppose. That has implications for the relative breadth of political participation for the polis (narrower in oligarchies than sometimes supposed),²⁰ the structure of class and wealth in the Greek countryside (meaningfully less equal than supposed) and finally the absolute population of the Greek world (higher than generally supposed). The field of ancient Greek history is beginning to really grapple with some of these implications (albeit not fully with the demographic one, yet).

Finally, in terms of training, while I give the ‘developmental model’ (a very little bit of increasing drill and training in arms over time) a bit more credit, I think the current heterodox position – functionally no drill outside of Sparta, extremely little formal training at arms, but an emphasis on physical fitness (with uneven results) – is the direction in which our evidence, such as it is, points. Hoplites were not drilled early modern soldiers, nor battle-hardened ultra-veterans, nor the products of elite boot camp style training – they were, for the most part, citizen amateurs with relatively little (if any) formal training. One strongly suspects that they were prepared for their military role by parents and other older male relatives, but not in any formal way.

The result is a mental model that is, I suppose, somewhat more heterodox than orthodox, but which does not fit neatly into either ‘camp’ and is instead something of a synthesis of their arguments and ideas. It is ironic that in a running debate about how rigid the phalanx is, both ‘sides’ suffer, I think, from a degree of doctrinaire rigidity. In my view, the next place that the debate needs to go is a synthesis of the two positions, although obviously it will not be me doing that work, as I am not a Greek warfare specialist.

Next week: something different!