This is the last part of our four-part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, Intermission) on the debates surrounding ancient Greek hoplites and the phalanx formation in which they fought. We’ve spent the last two entries in this series looking at warfare quite narrowly through the lens of tactics: hoplite spacing, depth, fighting style, and so on. I’ve argued for what I regard as a ‘blended’ model that sits somewhere between orthodoxy and heterodoxy: no ‘shoving’ othismos, but the hoplite phalanx is a shield wall, a formation with mostly regular spacing that is intended for shock and functions as a shock-focused shield wall formation likely from a relatively early date.

This week, we’re going to now ‘zoom out’ a bit and ask what implications the hoplite debate has for our broader understanding of Greek society, particularly polis Greek society. Hoplites, as warriors, were generally found in the Greek poleis but of course not all Greeks lived in poleis and areas of Greece without poleis largely lacked hoplites as well. In particular, our understanding of the place that hoplites have in polis society has a bunch of downstream implications in terms of social structure, the prevalence of slavery and even the question of how many Greeks there are in the first place.

I ended up having to split this into two parts for time, so this week we’re going to focus on the social status of hoplites, as well as some of the broader implications, particularly demographic ones, of a change in our understanding of how rich hoplites were. Then next week we’re going to close the series out by looking at hoplite ‘discipline,’ training and experience.

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Via Wikimedia Commons, an arming scene showing hoplites and a young man being armed as a hoplite (c. 530-510 BC).

Orthodox Yeoman Hoplites

The key question we are asking here is fundamentally “how broad is the hoplite class?” That is, of course, a very important question, but as we’ll see, also a fiendishly tricky one. It is also a question where it can be unclear sometimes where scholars actually are which can render the debates confusing: heterodox scholars write articles and chapters against something called the ‘myth of the middle-class hoplite‘¹ but it isn’t always clear exactly what the bounds of the model they’re arguing against is, in part because orthodox scholars are not generally proposing hard numbers for the size of the hoplite class.\

Post-Publication Edit: We’ve already had some confusion in the comments so I want to leave a clarifying edit here. We’re about to dive into a lot of questions about the percentage of people in the hoplite class. But all of the scholars involve calculate those figures on a different basis – in particular does the denominator include women? children? slaves? the elderly? I try to homogenize those estimates here as best I can, often aiming for a ‘percentage of free households‘ (so the enslaved excluded) or ‘percentage of adult males’ (so women and children excluded, but slaves included) in a given status type. But I am afraid you will have to keep track fairly closely of exactly what percentage of what we’re calculating (and of course it is entirely possible I have simply made a math error somewhere, although I have tried to be careful).

By way of example, I want to take Victor Davis Hansen out to the woodshed on this point – because his half of this specific disconnect was brought up in the comments early in this series – in terms of the difference between how he sometimes imagines in words the size and social composition of the hoplite class and then how it looks when he uses numbers. In The Other Greeks, VDH’s preference for describing the hoplite polis of the late Archaic is ‘broad-based’ a term he uses for it about three dozen times, including on when he talks about the “broad base of hoplite yeomanry” and how “when middling farmers were in control of a Greek polis government it was broad-based: it was representative of the economic interest of most of the citizenry” and when he references “the yeomanry […] who had built the polis and created broad-based agrarian governments.”² These references are, in my digital copy, all within 3 pages of each other. They certainly give the impression of a middling, yeoman-hoplite class that dominated the typical polis. And indeed, in his more pop-focused works, like the deeply flawed Carnage and Culture (2001) he posits Greece as the origin point for a western tradition that includes “equality among the middling classes” tied to the hoplite tradition, which certainly seems to suggest that Hanson thinks we should understand the hoplite class as broad, covering even relatively poor farmers, and with a great degree of internal equality.

But then flash forward three whole pages and we’re calculating the size of that ‘broad-based’ class and we get a line like, “the full-citizen hoplites […] composed about twenty percent of the total adult resident population of Boeotia.”³ And pulling out just that second quote, someone might express confusion when I say that the heterodox argue that the hoplite class is small and exclusive, a rejection of the ‘middle class’ yeoman-hoplite of the orthodox school, because look there is VDH himself saying they’re only 20%! But equally, one may question the fairness of describing such a rate of enfranchisement as ‘broad-based!’

Now on the one hand VDH’s argument in this passage is about the relative inclusivity of ‘moderate’ oligarchies (the ‘broad-based’ ones) as compared to radical Greek democracies and so the question of the relative breadth of the hoplite class itself is not particularly his concern. But I think he’s also hiding the ball here in key ways: Boeotia is a tricky test case – unusual and famous for both its significant cavalry (drawn from an unusually wealthy aristocracy) and light infantry manpower (drawn from an unusually impoverished peasantry). VDH notes the low property qualifications for citizenship in Boeotia but does not stop to consider if that might be connected not to the hoplites, but to the unusually large numbers of Boeotian light infantry.

Moreover, there is a lack of clarity when presenting these percentages as to exactly what is being included. VDH’s 20% figure is 20% of the total “adult resident population,” rather than – as we might expect – a percentage of the adult male population or frequently the free adult male population. So he is actually asserting something like almost 45% (really probably 43 or 44%) of free households serve as hoplites (once we adjust for women and the elderly), which, as we’ll see, I think is pretty doubtful.⁴ For the sake of keeping comparisons here ‘clean,’ I am going to try to be really clear on what is a percentage of what, because as we’ll see there is in fact, a real difference between the orthodox assumption of a hoplite class of 40-50% of free households and the heterodox assumption that is closer to 25% of free households.

So when I say that heterodox scholars generally argue for a smaller, economically elite hoplite class while orthodox scholars generally assume a larger ‘yeoman’ hoplite class, it can be tricky to pin down what that means, particularly on the orthodox side. We need apples-to-apples number comparisons to get a sense of where these folks differ.

And I think the place to actually start with this is Karl Julius Beloch (1854-1929); stick with me, I promise this will make sense in a second. Beloch’s Die Bevölkerung der griechisch-römischen Welt (1886, “The Population of the Greco-Roman World”) is the starting point for all of the debates of Greek and Roman demography, the first really significant, systematic effort to estimate the population of the entire classical world in a rigorous way. Now if you recall your historiography from our first part, you will quickly realize that as a German writing in the 1880s, Beloch was bound to have drawn his assumptions about Greek society and the social role of the hoplite class from those early Prussian and German scholars who serve as the foundation for the orthodox school. They were, after all, writing at the same time and in the same language as he was. Equally useful (for us) Beloch’s basic range of estimates for Greece remain more-or-less the accepted starting point for the problem, which is to say that a lot of current historians of ancient Greece when they think about the population of the Greek poleis are still ‘thinking with Beloch’ (typically mediated by Corvisier and Suder, La population de l’Antitiquité classique (2000)).

So analyzing Beloch’s approach – and because he is estimating population, he is forced to use numbers – can give us a sense of the society that the ‘orthodox’ vision of hoplites imagined at its inception and which it largely still imagines when it thinks in terms of raw population numbers. And that can help us lock down what we’re actually arguing about.

In very brief, Beloch had a problem to solve in estimating the population of Greece. Whereas in Roman Italy, he had census data to interpret, we have no equivalent in Greece (ancient reports of population in Greece are rare and almost invariably unreliable). So instead he adopts the method of estimating from maximum military deployments, the one number we reliably get from ancient sources. Doing so, of course, requires squaring away some key questions: what percentage of adult males might be called up for these armies? Our sources often give us only figures for hoplites, so this question really becomes, ‘what percentage of adult males served as hoplites?’ And then following on that, what percentage of people were female, children, elderly or non-free?

Beloch answers those questions as follows: he assumes that roughly half of all free households are in the hoplite class, so he can compute the free adult male population by multiplying hoplite deployments by two, that he can compute the free population by multiplying the adult male population by three, and that the non-free population is around 25% of the total (significantly concentrated in Sparta and Athens), including both slaves and serfs. You can see the logic in these assumptions but as I am going to argue all of these assumptions are wrong, some more wrong than others. We’ll come back to this, but I think Beloch’s key stumbling block (apart from just badly underestimating the number of children in a pre-modern population – he should be multiplying his adult males by four, not three) is that he largely assumes that the Greek poleis look more or less like the Roman Republic except that the Romans recruit a bit further down their socio-economic ladder. And that’s…not right, though you could see how someone working in the 1880s might jump to that expedient when the differences in Greek and Roman social structure were less clear.

Greeks are not Romans and the Greek polis is not the Roman Republic.⁵

Nevertheless those assumptions suggest a vision, a mental model of the social structure of the typical Greek polis: wealthy citizens of the hoplite class make up roughly half of the free households (he explicitly defends a 47/53% breakdown between hoplite and sub-hoplite), while the landless citizen poor make up the other half. Beloch assumes an enslaved population of c. 1m (against a free population of c. 3m), so a society that is roughly 25% enslaved, so we might properly say he imagines a society that is roughly 37.5% hoplite class (or richer), 37.5% poorer households and 25% enslaved households. And returning to a moment to VDH’s The Other Greeks (1995), that’s his model too: if 20% of adults (not just adult males) were citizen-hoplites in Boeotia, then something like 43% of (free) households were hoplite households (remember to adjust not just for women, but also for the elderly),⁶ which is roughly Beloch’s figure. It is a touch lower, but remember that VDH is computing for Boeotia, a part of Greece where we expect a modestly larger lower class.

What does it mean for a society if the hoplite class represents approximately 40% of households (including non-free households)?

Well, this suggests first that the hoplite class is perhaps the largest or second-largest demographic group, behind only free poor citizens. It also assumes that nearly all of the propertied households – that is, the farmers who own their own farms – both served as hoplites and were members of the hoplite class.⁷ In particular, this imagines the ‘typical’ member of the hoplite class (this distinction between hoplites and the hoplite class will matter in a moment) as a middling farmer whose farm was likely small enough that he had to work it himself (not having enough land to live off rents or enslaved labor), essentially a modest peasant. Moreover the assumption here is that this broad hoplite ‘middle class’ dominates the demography of the polis, with very few leisured elites above them and a similar number of free poor (rather than a much larger number) below them.

And I want to note here again there is an implicit – only rarely explicit (Beloch makes the comparison directly) – effort to reason from the social model we see in the Roman Republic, where the assidui (the class liable for taxes and military service) as a group basically did include nearly all farmers with any kind of property and ‘farmers with any kind of property’ really does seem to have included the overwhelming majority of the population. There’s an effort to see Greek ‘civic militarism’ through the same frame, with the polis a community made up of small freeholding farmers banding together.⁸ I think scholarship has not always grappled clearly enough with the ways in which Rome is not like an overgrown polis, but in fact quite different. One of those differences is that the assidui is a much larger class of people than anything in a polis, encompassing something like 70% of all adult males (free and non-free) and perhaps as much as 90% of all free households. That is an enormous difference jumping even from 37.5% to 70%. What that figure suggests is both that Roman military participation reached much more robustly into the lower classes but also that (and we’ll come back to this in a moment) land ownership was probably more widespread among the Roman peasantry than their Greek equivalents.

In short part of what makes the Roman Republic different is not just where they draw the census lines, but the underlying structure of the countryside is meaningfully different and that has very significant impacts on the structure of Roman society.⁹ Taken on its own evidence, it sure looks like the organization of land in the Greek countryside was meaningfully less equal¹⁰ and included meaningfully more slaves than the Italian countryside, with significant implications for how we understand the social position of hoplites. And that brings us to the heterodox objections and thus…

Divisions Among Hoplites

The response to the ‘yeoman hoplite’ model of hoplite orthodoxy has been Hans van Wees’ assault on the ‘myth of the middle-class hoplite.’¹¹

What van Wees does is look specifically at Athens, because unlike anywhere else in the Greek world, we have the complete ‘schedule’ of wealth classes in Athens, denominated in agricultural production. He’s able to reason from that to likely estate size for each of the classes and from there, given the size of Attica (the territory of Athens) and the supposed citizen population (estimates from 40,000 to 60,000) the total size of each wealth class in terms of households and land ownership, in order to very roughly sketch the outlines of what wealth and social class in Attica might have looked like. Our sources offer little sense that they thought Athenian class structure was ever unusual or remarkable beyond the fact that Athens was very big (in contrast to Sparta, which is treated as quite strange), so the idea here is that insights in Athenian class divisions help us understand class divisions in other poleis as well.

What he is working with are the wealth classes defined by the reforms of Solon, which we haven’t really discussed in depth but these are reported by Plutarch (Solon 16) and seem to have been the genuine property classifications for Athenian citizens, which I’ve laid out in the chart below. Wealth was defined by the amount of grain (measured in medimnoi, a dry measure unit of 51.84 liters), but for non-farmers (craftsmen and such) you qualified to the class equal to your income (so if you got paid the equivalent of 250 medimnoi of grain to be a blacksmith, you were of the zeugitai, though one imagines fairly few non-landowners qualify for reasons swiftly to become clear).

Name	Wealth Requirement	Notional Military role	Percentage of Population Following van Wees (2001)
Pentakosiomedimnoi (“500 Bushel Men”)	500 medimnoi or more	Leaders, Officers, Generals	1.7-2.5%
Hippeis (‘horsemen’)	400 medimnoi	Cavalry	1.7-2.5%
Zeugitai (‘yoked ones’)	200 medimnoi (possibly reduced later to 150 medimnoi)	Hoplites	5.6-25%
Thetes (‘serfs’)	Less than 200 medimnoi	Too poor to serve (later rowers in the navy)	90-70%

Now traditionally, the zeugitai were regarded as the ‘hoplite class’ and that is sometimes supposed to be the source of their name (they were ‘yoked together’ standing in position in the phalanx), but what van Wees is working out is that although the zeugitai are supposed to be the core of the citizen polity (the thetes have limited political participation) there simply cannot be that many of them because the minimum farm necessary to produce 200 medimnoi of grain is going to be around 7.5 ha¹² or roughly 18 acres which is – by peasant standards – an enormous farm, well into ‘rich peasant’ territory. It is, in fact, roughly enough farm for the owner to not do much or any farming but instead subsist entirely off of either rents or the labor of enslaved workers.¹³

In short, the zeugitai aren’t ‘working class’ ‘yeoman farmers’ at all, but leisure-class elites – mostly landlords, not farmers – albeit poorer than the hippeis and pentakosiomedimnoi even further above them. And that actually makes a great deal of sense: one of the ideas that pops up in Greek political philosophy – albeit in tension with another we’ll get to in a moment – is the idea that the ideal hoplite is a leisured elite and that the ideal polis would be governed exclusively by the leisured hoplites.¹⁴ Indeed, when a bunch of Greek-speakers (mostly Macedonians) find themselves suddenly in possession of vast kingdoms, this is exactly the model they try to build their military on (before getting utterly rolled by the Romans because this is actually a bad way to build a society). And of course Sparta’s citizen body, the spartiates, replicate this model as well. Often when we see elements in a Greek polis try to create an oligarchy, what they are intending to do is reduce political participation back to roughly this class – the few thousand richest households – which is not all the hoplites, but merely the richest ones.

Of course with such large farms there can’t be all that many zeugitai and indeed there don’t seem to have been. In van Wees’ model, the zeugitai-and-up classes never supply even half of the number of hoplites we see Athens deploy; they only barely crawl over half if we assume the property qualification was (as it probably was) reduced at some point to just 150 medimnoi. Instead, under most conditions the majority of hoplites are thetes, pulled from the wealthiest stratum of that class (van Wees figures these fellows probably have farms in the range of ~3 ha or so, so c. 7.5 acres). Those thetes make up the majority of hoplites on the field but do not enjoy the political privileges of the ‘hoplite class.’ And pushing against the ‘polis-of-rentier-elites’ model, we often also find Greek sources remarking that these fellows, “wiry and sunburnt” (Plato Republic 556cd, trans. van Wees), make the best soldiers because they’re more physically fit and more inured to hardship – because unlike the wealthy hoplites they actually have to work.

What the transition to the Athenian democracy meant was the full enfranchisement of this large class of thetes, both the fellows who could afford to fight as hoplites (but previously didn’t have the rights of them) and the poorer citizen thetes.

And of course this isn’t only Athens. The only other polis whose complete social system we can see with any clarity, of course, is Sparta and when we look there, what do we find? A system where political participation is limited to the rentier-elite class (the Spartiates), where there is another class of poorer hoplites – the perioikoi, who fight as hoplites – who are entirely blocked from political participation. It appears to be the same kind of dividing line, with the difference being that the spartiates had become so dominant as to deny the perioikoi even citizenship in the polity and to physically segregate themselves (the perioikoi lived in their own communities, mostly on the marginal land). It is suggestive that this sort of divide between the wealthy ‘hoplite class’ that enjoyed distinct political privileges and other ‘working-class’ hoplites who did not (and yet even far more poor farmers who could not afford to fight as hoplites) was common in the polis.

That leaves the notion of a truly ‘broad-based’ hoplite-class that runs a ‘broad-based’ agrarian polis government that consisted of ‘middle-class’ ‘yeoman’ hoplites largely in tatters. Instead, what you may normally have is a legally defined ‘hoplite class’ that is just the richest 10-20% of the free citizen population, a distinct ‘poor hoplite’ class that might be around 20% and then a free citizen underclass of 60-70% that cannot fight as hoplites and also have very limited political participation, even though many of them do own some small amount of land.

Once again, if you’ll forgive me, that looks nothing like the Middle Roman Republic, where the capite censi (aka the proletarii) – men too poor to serve – probably amounted to only around 10% of the population and the light infantry contingent of a Roman army (where the poorest men who could serve would go) was just 25%.¹⁵ So whereas the free ‘Roman’ underclass of landless or very poor is at most perhaps 35% of (free) households,¹⁶ the equivalent class at Athens at least (and perhaps in Greece more broadly) is 60% of (free) households. Accounting for the enslaved population makes this gap wider, because it certainly seems like the percentage of the enslaved population in Greece was somewhat higher than Roman Italy. It is suddenly less of a marvel that Rome could produce military mobilizations that staggered the Greek world. Greeks are not Romans.

This is a set of conclusions that naturally has significant implications for how we understand the polis, particularly non-democratic poleis. Older scholarship often assumes that a ‘broad’ Greek oligarchy meant rule by the landholding class, but if you look at the number of enfranchised citizens, it is clear that ‘broad’ oligarchies were much narrower than this: not ‘farmer’s republics’ (as VDH supposes) but rather ‘landlord‘s republics.’¹⁷ That is quite a different sort of state! And understanding broad oligarchies in this way suddenly restores the explanatory power of what demokratia was in Greek thought: it isn’t just about enfranchising the urban poor (a class that must have been vanishingly small in outside of very large cities like Athens) but about enfranchising the small farmer, a class that would have been quite large in any polis for reasons we’ve discussed with peasants.

Via Wikimedia Commons, a Greek funerary statute from Eleusis (c. 350-325) showing a hoplite being armed by his enslaved porter. One of the indicators that slavery may have been more prevalent in Greece and that the hoplite class was wealther than their Roman equivalents is that Greek writers often seem to assume that the typical hoplite has an enslaved servant with them on campaign to carry their equipment and handle their logistics, whereas famously in the Roman army, the individual infantrymen were responsible for this.

I think there’s also a less directly important but even more profound implication here:

Wait, How Many Greeks Are There?

The attentive reader may be thinking, “wait, but Beloch’s population estimates assume that the hoplite contingent of any Greek polis represent half of its military aged (20-60) free adult males, but you’re saying that number might be much lower, perhaps just 30 or 40%?”

I actually haven’t seen any scholars directly draw this connection, so I am going to do so here. Hell, I’ve already seen this blog cited quite a few times in peer-reviewed scholarship so why not.

If it isn’t already clear, I think when it comes to the size of the hoplite class, van Wees is correct and that thought interlocks with another thought that has slowly crept into my mind and at last become lodged as my working assumption: we have significantly under-counted the number of Greeks. Or, more correctly, everyone except Mogens Herman Hansen has significantly under-counted the number of Greeks. So good job to Mogens Herman Hansen, everyone else, see me after class.

Now these days the standard demographic reference for the population of Greece is not Beloch (1886), it is Corvisier and Suder, La population de l’Antitiquité classique (2000). Unlike Beloch, they do not reason from military deployments, instead they reason from estimated population density. Now I want to be clear, they are reasoning from estimated rural population density, which is not the same as reasoning from built-up urban area¹⁸ The thing is, we can’t independently confirm rural population density from archaeology (unlike urban area estimates) so this method is entirely hostage to its assumptions. So the fact that Corvisier and Suder’s estimates fall neatly almost exactly on Beloch’s estimate (a free population of c. 3m in mainland Greece) might suggest they tweaked their assumptions to get that result. And on some level, it is a circular process, because Beloch checks his own military-based estimates with population density calculations in order to try to show that he is producing reasonable numbers. So if you accept Beloch’s density estimates at the beginning, you are going to end up back-computing Beloch’s military estimates at the end, moving through the same process in reverse order.

But you can see how we have begun to trouble the foundations of Beloch’s numbers in a few ways. First off, we’ve already noted that his multiplier to get from military aged males to total population (multiply by three) is too low (it needs to be four). Beloch didn’t have the advantage of modern model life tables or the ability to see so clearly that mortality in his own day was changing rapidly and had been doing so for a while. Adjusting for that alone has to bring the free population up to support the military numbers, to around 4m instead of 3m (so we have effectively already broken Corvisier and Suder (2000)). Then there is the question of the prevalence of the enslaved; Beloch figures 25% (1m total), but estimates certainly run higher. Bresson, L’économie de la Grèce des cités (2007/8) figures perhaps 40-50% and 30% is also a common estimate, though we are here, in practice, largely guessing. Even keeping the 25% figure Beloch uses, which we now have to acknowledge may be on the low side, we have to raise the number of enslaved to reflect the larger free population: 1.33m instead of 1m, for a new total of 5.33m instead of Beloch’s original 4m.

But then if the number of men who fight as hoplites is not, as Beloch supposes, roughly half of polis society, but closer to 40% or even less, then we would need to expand the population even further. If it is, say, 40% instead of 50%, suddenly instead of Beloch’s computation (very roughly) of 500,000 hoplites giving us 1,000,000 free adult men giving us 3,000,000 free persons, resulting in a total population of 4,000,000 including the enslaved, we have 500,000 hoplites implying 1,250,000 free adult men implying 5,000,000 free persons, to which we have to add something like 1,500,000 enslaved persons¹⁹ implying a total human population not of 3 or 4m but of c. 6,500,000.

And there’s a reason to think that might be right. The one truly novel effort at estimating the population of Greece in the last few decades (and/or century or so) was by Mogens Herman Hansen. Having spent quite some time on a large, multi-scholar project to document every known polis (resulting in M.H. Hansen and T.H. Nielsen, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (2004)), M.H. Hansen decided to use that count as a basis to estimate population, assigning a rough estimate to the size of small, medium and large poleis – using the built-up urban area of poleis we knew relatively well – and then simply multiplying by all of the known poleis to exist at one point in time. The result, documented in M.H. Hansen, The shogtun method: the demography and ancient Greek city-state culture (2006), produced an estimate of 4-6m for mainland Greece and I think, to be frank, Hansen pulled his punch here. His method really produced the top figure in that range, a significantly higher figure that generally postulated for Greece.²⁰

My strong suspicion – which the evidence is insufficient to confirm definitively – is that van Wees is right about the relative size of the slice of men who fight as hoplites (distinct from the ‘hoplite class’) and that M.H. Hansen is correct about the population and that these two conclusions interlock with each other to imply a rather different Greece in terms of equality and social structure than we had thought.

Looping back around to what is my repeated complaint this week: we were often conditions to think about Greek agriculture, the Greek peasantry, the Greek countryside through the lens of the much better documented Roman Italian agriculture, peasantry and countryside. After all, it is for Italy, not Greece, that we have real census data, it is the Roman period, not the classical period, that gives us sustained production of agricultural treatises. We simply have a much better picture of Roman social structures and so it was natural for scholars trying to get to grips with a quite frankly alien economic system to work from the nearest system they knew. And that was fine when we were starting from nothing but I think it is a set of assumptions that have outlived their usefulness.

This isn’t the place for this argument in full (that’s in my book), but briefly, the structure of the Roman countryside – as we come to see it in the late third/early second century BC – did not form naturally. It was instead the product of policy, by that point, of a century’s worth of colonial settlements intentionally altering, terraforming, landholding patterns to maximize the amount of heavy infantry the land could support. It was also the product of a tax-and-soldier-pay regime (tributum and stipendium) that on the net channeled resources downward to enable poorer men to serve in that heavy infantry.²¹ Those mechanisms are not grinding away in mainland Greece (we can leave Greek colonial settlement aside for now, as it is happening outside of mainland Greece), so we have no reason to expect the structure of the countryside to look the same either.

In short the Romans are taking steps to ‘flatten out’ their infantry class (but not their aristocracy, of course), to a degree, which we do not see in Greece. Instead, where we get an ideology of economically equal citizenry, it is an ideology of equality within the leisured elite, an ‘equality of landlords’ not an equality of farmers. We should thus not expect wealth and land distribution to be as ‘flat’ in Greece as in Italy – and to be clear, wealth distribution in Italy was not very flat by any reasonable standard, there was enormous disparity between the prima classis (‘first class’) of infantry and the poorest Roman assidui. But it was probably flatter than in Greece within the infantry class (again, the Roman aristocracy is a separate question), something that seems confirmed given that the militarily active class in Roman Italy is so much larger and more heavily concentrated into the heavy infantry.²² Consequently, we ought not assume that we can casually estimate the total population of Greece from hoplite deployments, supposing that the Greeks like the Romans, expected nearly all free men to serve. Instead, the suggestion of our evidence was that in Greece, as in many pre-modern societies, military service (and thus political power) was often the preserve of an exclusive affluent class.

Implications

But returning to Greece, I would argue that accepting the heterodox position on the social status of hoplites has some substantial implications. First, it suggests that there was, in fact, a very real and substantial social division within the body of hoplites, between wealth hoplites who were of the ‘hoplite class’ as politically understood and poor hoplites who fought in the same way but only enjoyed a portion of the social status implied. That division suddenly makes sense of the emergence of demokratia in poleis that were more rural than Athens (which is all of them). The typical polis was thus not a ‘farmer’s republic’ but a landlord’s republic.

At the same time, this also substantially alters the assumptions about ‘yeoman hoplites’ who have to rush home to pull in their harvests and who are, in effect, ‘blue-collar warriors.’ Instead, the core of the hoplite army was a body – not a majority, but a significant minority – of leisured elites who had slaves or tenants doing most of their farming for them. What kept hoplite armies from campaigning year-round was as much poor logistics as yeoman economics (something clear in the fact that spartiates – by definition leisured elites – didn’t campaign year-round either).

Finally, if we extend this thinking into our demographic analysis, we have to accept a much larger population in Greece, with all of the expansion happening below the men who fought as hoplites (both the hoplite class and our poorer working-class hoplites). It suggests a remarkably less equal social structure in Greece – indeed, perhaps less equal than the structure in Roman Italy – which in turn significantly caveats the way we often understand the Greek polis as a citizen community relatively more egalitarian and free than the absolute monarchies which pervaded Egypt and the Near East.

And of course, for one last return to my pet complaint in this post, it should reinforce our sense that Greek are not Romans and that we cannot casually supply the habits, economics or social structures of one society to the other to fill in gaps in our evidence. In particular, the assumption that the Greeks and Romans essentially share a civic and military tradition is a thing that would need to be proved, not assumed.²³

Nearly every bit of the high-tech world, from the most cutting-edge AI systems at the biggest companies, to the casual scraps of code cobbled together by college students, is annotated and described by the same, simple plain text format. Whether you’re trying to give complex instructions to ChatGPT, or you want to be able to exchange a grocery list in Apple Notes or copy someone’s homework in Google Docs, that same format will do the trick. The wild part is, the format wasn’t created by a conglomerate of tech tycoons, it was created by a curmudgeonly guy with a kind heart who right this minute is probably rewatching a Kubrick film while cheering for an absolutely indefensible sports team.

But it’s worth understanding how these simple little text files were born, not just because I get to brag about how generous and clever my friends are, but also because it reminds us of how the Internet really works: smart people think of good things that are crazy enough that they just might work, and then they give them away, over and over, until they slowly take over the world and make things better for everyone.

Making Their Mark

Though it’s now a building block of the contemporary Internet, like so many great things, Markdown just started out trying to solve a personal problem. In 2002, John Gruber made the unconventional decision to bet his online career on two completely irrational foundations: Apple, and blogs.

It’s hard to remember now, but in 2002, Apple was just a few years past having been on death’s door. As difficult as it may be to picture in today’s world where Apple keynotes are treated like major events, back then, almost nobody was covering Apple regularly, let alone writing exclusively about the company. There was barely even an “tech news” scene online at all, and virtually no one was blogging. So John’s decision to go all-in on Apple for his pioneering blog Daring Fireball was, well, a daring one. At the time, Apple had only just launched its first iPod that worked with Windows computers, and the iPhone was still a full five years in the future. But that single-minded focus, not just on Apple, but on obsessive detail in everything he covered, eventually helped inspire much of the technology media landscape that we see today. John’s timing was also perfect — from the doldrums of that era, Apple’s stock price would rise by about 120,000% in the years after Daring Fireball started, and its cultural relevance probably increased by even more than that.

By 2004, it wasn’t just Apple that had begun to take off: blogs and social media themselves had moved from obscurity to the very center of culture, and a new era of web technology had begun. At the beginning of that year, few people in the world even knew what a “blog” was, but by the end of 2004, blogs had become not just ubiquitous, but downright cool. As unlikely as it seems now, that year’s largely uninspiring slate of U.S. presidential candidates like Wesley Clark, Gary Hart and, yes, Howard Dean helped propel blogs into mainstream awareness during the Democratic primaries, alongside online pundits who had begun weighing in on politics and the issues and cultural moments at a pace that newspapers and TV couldn’t keep up with. A lot has been written about the transformation of media during those years, but less has been written about how the media and tech of the time transformed each other.

A photo from 2004 of a TV screen showing CNN, with a ticker saying "Gary Hart Cyber Campaign Starts blog for possible 2004 presidential bid"

That era of early blogging was interesting in that nearly everyone who was writing the first popular sites was also busy helping create the tools for publishing them. Just like Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz had to pioneer combining studio-style flat lighting with 35mm filming in order to define the look of the modern sitcom, or Jimi Hendrix had to work with Roger Mayer to invent the signature guitar distortion pedals that defined the sound of rock and roll, the pioneers who defined the technical format and structures of blogging were often building the very tools of creation as they went along.

I got a front row seat to these acts of creation. At the time I was working on Movable Type, which was the most popular tool for publishing “serious” blogs, and helped popularize the medium. Two of my good friends had built the tool and quickly made it into the default choice for anybody who wanted to reach a big audience; it was kind of a combination of everything people do these days on WordPress and all the various email newsletter platforms and all of the “serious” podcasts (since podcasts wouldn’t be invented for another few months). But back in those early days, we’d watch people use our tools to set up Gawker or Huffington Post one day, and Daring Fireball or Waxy.org the next, and each of them would be the first of its kind, both in terms of its design and its voice. To this day, when I see something online that I love by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd or Ta-Nehisi Coates or Nilay Patel or Annalee Newitz or any one of dozens of other brilliant writers or creators, my first thought is often, “hey! They used to type in that app that I used to make!” Because sometimes those writers would inspire us to make a new feature in the publishing tools, and sometimes they would have hacked up a new feature all by themselves in between typing up their new blog posts.

A really clear, and very simple, early example of how we learned that lesson was when we changed the size of the box that people used to type in just to create the posts on their sites. We made the box a little bit taller, mostly for aesthetic reasons. Within a few weeks, we’d found that posts on sites like Gawker had gotten longer, mostly because the box was bigger. This seems obvious now, years after we saw tweets get longer when Twitter expanded from 140 characters to 280 characters, but at the time this was a terrifying glimpse at how much power a couple of young product managers in a conference room in California would have over the media consumption of the entire world every time they made a seemingly-insignificant decision.

The other dirty little secret was, typing in the box in that old blogging app could be… pretty wonky sometimes. People who wanted to do normal things like include an image or link in their blog post, or even just make some text bold, often had to learn somewhat-obscure HTML formatting, memorizing the actual language that’s used to make web pages. Not everybody knew all the details of how to make pages that way, and if they made even one small mistake, sometimes they could break the whole design of their site. It made things feel very fraught every time a writer went to publish something new online, and got in the way of the increasingly-fast pace of sharing ideas now that social media was taking over the public conversation.

Enter John and his magical text files.

Marking up and marking down

The purpose of Markdown is really simple: It lets you use the regular characters on your keyboard which you already use while typing out things like emails, to make fancy formatting of text for the web. That HTML format that’s used to make web pages stands for HyperText Markup Language. The word “markup” there means you’re “marking up” your text with all kinds of special characters. Only, the special characters can be kind of arcane. Want to put in a link to everybody’s favorite website? Well, you’re going to have to type in <a href="https://anildash.com/">Anil Dash’s blog</a> I could explain why, and what it all means, but honestly, you get the point — it’s a lot! Too much. What if you could just write out the text and then the link, sort of like you might within an email? Like: [Anil Dash’s blog](https://anildash.com)! And then the right thing would happen. Seems great, right?

The same thing works for things like putting a header on a page. For example, as I’m writing this right now, if I want to put a big headline on this page, I can just type #How Markdown Took Over the World and the right thing will happen.

If mark_up_ is complicated, then the opposite of that complexity must be… markd_own_. This kind of solution, where it’s so smart it seems obvious in hindsight, is key to Markdown’s success. John worked to make a format that was so simple that anybody could pick it up in a few minutes, and powerful enough that it could help people express pretty much anything that they wanted to include while writing on the internet. At a technical level, it was also easy enough to implement that John could write the code himself to make it work with Movable Type, his publishing tool of choice. (Within days, people had implemented the same feature for most of the other blogging tools of the era; these days, virtually every app that you can type text into ships with Markdown support as a feature on day one.)

Prior to launch, John had enlisted our mutual friend, the late, dearly missed Aaron Swartz, as a beta tester. In addition to being extremely fluent in every detail of the blogging technologies of the time, Aaron was, most notably, seventeen years old. And though Aaron’s activism and untimely passing have resulted in him having been turned into something of a mythological figure, one of the greatest things about Aaron was that he could be a total pain in the ass, which made him terrific at reporting bugs in your software. (One of the last email conversations I ever had with Aaron was him pointing out some obscure bugs in an open source app I was working on at the time.) No surprise, Aaron instantly understood both the potential and the power of Markdown, and was a top-tier beta tester for the technology as it was created. His astute feedback helped finely hone the final product so it was ready for the world, and when Markdown quietly debuted in March of 2004, it was clear that text files around the web were about to get a permanent upgrade.

The most surprising part of what happened next wasn’t that everybody immediately started using it to write their blogs; that was, after all, what the tool was designed to do. It’s that everybody started using Markdown to do everything else, too.

Hitting the Mark

It’s almost impossible to overstate the ubiquity of Markdown within the modern computer industry in the decades since its launch.

After being nagged about it by users for more than a decade, Google finally added support for Markdown to Google Docs, though it took them years of fiddly improvements to make it truly usable. Just last year, Microsoft added support for Markdown to its venerable Notepad app, perhaps in attempt to assuage the tempers of users who were still in disbelief that Notepad had been bloated with AI features. Nearly every powerful group messaging app, from Slack to WhatsApp to Discord, has support for Markdown in messages. And even the company that indirectly inspired all of this in the first place finally got on board: the most recent version of Apple Notes finally added support for Markdown. (It’s an especially striking launch by Apple due to its timing, shortly after John had used his platform as the most influential Apple writer in the world to blog about the utter failure of the “Apple Intelligence” AI launch.)

But it’s not just the apps that you use on your phone or your laptop. For developers, Markdown has long been the lingua franca of the tools we string together to accomplish our work. On GitHub, the platform that nearly every developer in the world uses to share their code, nearly every single repository of code on the site has at least one Markdown file that’s used to describe its contents. Many have dozens of files describing all the different aspects of their project. And some of the repositories on GitHub consist of nothing but massive collections of Markdown files. The small tools and automations we run to perform routine tasks, the one-off reports that we generate to make sure something worked correctly, the confirmations that we have a system email out when something goes wrong, the temporary files we use when trying to recover some old data — all of these default to being Markdown files.

As a result, there are now billions of Markdown files lying around on hard drives around the world. Billions more are stashed in the cloud. There are some on the phone in your pocket. Programmers leave them lying around wherever their code might someday be running. Your kid’s Nintendo Switch has Markdown files on it. If you’re listening to music, there’s probably a Markdown file on the memory chip of the tiny system that controls the headphones stuck in your ears. The Markdown is inside you right now!

Down For Whatever

So far, these were all things we could have foreseen when John first unleashed his little text tool on the world. I would have been surprised about how many people were using it, but not really the ways in which they were using it. If you’d have said “Twenty years in the future, all the different note-taking apps people use save their files using Markdown!”, I would have said, “Okay, that makes sense!”

What I wouldn’t have asked, though, was “Is John getting paid?” As hard as it may be to believe, back in 2004, the default was that people made new standards for open technologies like Markdown, and just shared them freely for the good of the internet, and the world, and then went on about their lives. If it happened to have unleashed billions of dollars of value for others, then so much the better. If they got some credit along the way, that was great, too. But mostly you just did it to solve a problem for yourself and for other like-minded people. And also, maybe, to help make sure that some jerk didn’t otherwise create some horrible proprietary alternative that would lock everybody into their terrible inferior version forever instead. (We didn’t have the word “enshittification” yet, but we did have Cory Doctorow and we did have plain text files, so we kind of knew where things were headed.)

To give a sense of the vibe of that era, the term “podcasting” had been coined just a month before Markdown was released, and went into wider use that fall, and was similarly a radically open system that wasn’t owned by any big company and that empowered people to do whatever they wanted to do to express themselves. (And podcasting was another technology that Aaron Swartz helped improve by being a brilliant pain in the ass. But I’ll save that story for another book-length essay.)

That attitude of being not-quite-_anti_commercial, but perhaps just not even really concerned with whether something was commercial or not seems downright quaint in an era when the tech tycoons are not just the wealthiest people in the world, but also some of the weirdest and most obnoxious as well. But the truth is, most people today who make technology are actually still exceedingly normal, and quite generous. It’s just that they’ve been overshadowed by their bosses who are out of their minds and building rocket ships and siring hundreds of children and embracing overt white supremacy instead of making fun tools for helping you type text, like regular people do.

The Markdown Model

The part about not doing this stuff solely for money matters, because even the most advanced LLM systems today, what the big AI companies call their “frontier” models, require complex orchestration that’s carefully scripted by people who’ve tuned their prompts for these systems through countless rounds of trial and error. They’ve iterated and tested and watched for the results as these systems hallucinated or failed or ran amok, chewing up countless resources along the way. And sometimes, they generated genuinely astonishing outputs, things that are truly amazing to consider that modern technology can achieve. The rate of progress and evolution, even factoring in the mind-boggling amounts of investment that are going into these systems, is rivaled only by the initial development of the personal computer or the Internet, or the early space race.

And all of it — all of it — is controlled through Markdown files. When you see the brilliant work shown off from somebody who’s bragging about what they made ChatGPT generate for them, or someone is understandably proud about the code that they got Claude to create, all of the most advanced work has been prompted in Markdown. Though where the logic of Markdown was originally a very simple version of "use human language to tell the machine what to do", the implications have gotten far more dire when they use a format designed to help expresss "make this **bold**" to tell the computer itself "make this imaginary girlfriend more compliant".

But we already know that the Big AI companies are run by people who don't reckon with the implications of their work. They could never understand that every single project that's even moderately ambitious on these new AI platforms is being written up in files formatted according to this system created by one guy who has never asked for a dime for this work. An entire generation of AI coders has been born since Markdown was created who probably can’t even imagine that this technology even has an "inventor". It’s just always been here, like the Moon, or Rihanna.

But it’s important for everyone to know that the Internet, and the tech industry, don’t run without the generosity and genius of regular people. It is not just billion-dollar checks and Silicon Valley boardrooms that enable creativity over years, decades, or generations — it’s often a guy with a day job who just gives a damn about doing something right, sweating the details and assuming that if he cares enough about what he makes then others will too. The majority of the technical infrastructure of the Internet was created in this way. For free, often by people in academia, or as part of their regular work, with no promise of some big payday or getting a ton of credit.

The people who make the real Internet and the real innovations also don’t look for ways to hurt the world around them, or the people around them. Sometimes, as in the case of Aaron, the world hurts them more than anyone should ever have to bear. I know not everybody cares that much about plain text files on the Internet; I will readily admit I am a huge nerd about this stuff in a way that maybe most normal people are not. But I do think everybody cares about some part of the wonderful stuff on the Internet in this way, and I want to fight to make sure that everybody can understand that it’s not just five terrible tycoons who built this shit. Real people did. Good people. I saw them do it.

The trillion-dollar AI industry's system for controlling their most advanced platforms is a plain text format one guy made up for his blog and then bounced off of a 17-year-old kid before sharing it with the world for free. You're welcome, Time Magazine's people of the year, The Architects of AI. Their achievement is every bit as impressive as yours.

The Ten Technical Reasons Markdown Won

Okay, with some of the narrative covered, what can we learn from Markdown’s success? How did this thing really take off? What could we do if we wanted to replicate something like this in the modern era? Let’s consider a few key points:

1. Had a great brand.

Okay, let’s be real: “Markdown” as a name is clever as hell. Get it it’s not markup, it’s mark down. You just can’t argue with that kind of logic. People who knew what the “M” in “HTML” stood for could understand the reference, and to everyone else, it was just a clearly-understandable name for a useful utility.

2. Solved a real problem.

This one is not obvious, but it’s really important that a new technology have a real problem that it’s trying to solve, instead of just being an abstract attempt to do something vague, like “make text files better”. Millions of people were encountering the idea that it was too difficult or inconvenient to write out full HTML by hand, and even if one had the necessary skills, it was nice to be able to do so in a format that was legible as plain text as well.

3. Built on behaviors that already existed.

This is one of the most quietly genius parts of Markdown: The format is based on the ways people had been adding emphasis and formatting to their text for years or even decades. Some of the formatting choices dated back to the early days of email, so they’d been ingrained in the culture of the internet for a full generation before Markdown existed. It was so familiar, people could be writing Markdown without even knowing it.

4. Mirrored RSS in its origin.

Around the same time that Markdown was taking off, RSS was maturing into its ubiquitous form as well. The format had existed for some years already, enabling various kinds of content syndication, but at this time, it was adding support for the technologies that would come to be known as podcasting as well. And just like RSS, Markdown was spearheaded by a smart technologist who was also more than a little stubborn about defining a format that would go on to change the way we share content on the internet. In RSS’ case, it was pioneered by Dave Winer, and with Markdown it was John Gruber, and both were tireless in extolling the virtues of the plain text formats they’d helped pioneer. They could both leverage blogs to get the word out, and to get feedback on how to build on their wins.

5. There was a community ready to help.

One great thing about a format like Markdown is that its success is never just the result of one person. Vitally, Markdown was part of a community that could build on it right from the start. Right from the beginning, Markdown was inspired by earlier works like Textile, a formatting system for plain text created by Dean Allen. Many of us appreciated and were inspired by Dean, who was a pioneer of blogging tools in the early days of social media, but if there’s a bigger fan of Dean Allen on the internet than John Gruber, I’ve never met them. Similarly, Aaron Swartz, the brilliant young technologist who’s known best known as an activist for digital rights and access, was at that time just a super brilliant teenager that a lot of us loved hacking with. He was the most valuable beta tester of Markdown prior to its release, helping to shape it into a durable and flexible format that’s stood the test of time.

6. Had the right flavor for every different context.

Because Markdown’s format was frozen in place (and had some super-technical details that people could debate about) and people wanted to add features over time, various communities that were implementing Markdown could add their own “flavors” of it as they needed. Popular ones came to be called Commonmark and Github-Flavored, led by various companies or teams that had divergent needs for the tool. While tech geeks tend to obsess over needing everything to be “correct”, in reality it often just doesn’t matter that much, and in the real world, the entire Internet is made up of content that barely follows the technical rules that it’s supposed to.

7. Released at a time of change in behaviors and habits.

This is a subtle point, but an important one: Markdown came along at the right time in the evolution of its medium. You can get people to change their behaviors when they’re using a new tool, or adopting a new technology. In this case, blogging (and all of social media!) were new, so saying “here’s a new way of typing a list of bullet points” wasn’t much an additional learning curve to add to the mix. If you can take advantage of catching people while they’re already in a learning mood, you can really tap into the moment when they’re most open-minded to new things.

8. Came right on the cusp of the “build tool era”.

This one’s a bit more technical, but also important to understand. In the first era of building for the web, people often built the web’s languages of HTML, Javascript and CSS by hand, by themselves, or stitched these formats together from subsets or templates. But in many cases, these were fairly simple compositions, made up of smaller pieces that were written in the same languages. As things matured, the roles for web developers specialized (there started to be backend developers vs. front-end, or people who focused on performance vs. those who focused on visual design), and as a result the tooling for developers matured. On the other side of this transition, developers began to use many different programming languages, frameworks and tools, and the standard step before trying to deploy a website was to have an automated build process that transformed the “raw materials” of the site into the finished product. Since Markdown is a raw material that has to be transformed into HTML, it perfectly fit this new workflow as it became the de facto standard method of creation and collaboration.

9. Worked with “View source”

Most of the technologies that work best on the web enable creators to “view source” just like HTML originally did when the first web browsers were created. In this philosophy, one can look at the source code that makes up a web page, and understand how it was constructed so that you can make your own. With Markdown, it only takes one glimpse of a source Markdown file for anyone to understand how they might make a similar file of their own, or to extrapolate how they might apply analogous formatting to their own documents. There’s no teaching required when people can just see it for themselves.

10. Not encumbered in IP

This one’s obvious if you think about it, but it can’t go unsaid: There are no legal restrictions around Markdown. You wouldn’t think that anybody would be foolish or greedy enough to try to patent something as simple as Markdown, but there are many far worse examples of patent abuse in the tech industry. Fortunately, John Gruber is not an awful person, and nobody else has (yet) been brazen enough to try to usurp the format for their own misadventures in intellectual property law. As a result, nobody’s been afraid, either to use the format, or to support creating or reading the format in their apps.