Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/476

 460 HISTORY OF GREECE. transmitted from the king, as commander-in-chief, through the polemarchs to the lochages, from the lochages to the pente- konters, and then from the latter to the cnomotarchs, each of whom caused them to be executed by his enumoty. As all these men had been previously trained to the duties of their respective stations, the Spartan infantry possessed the arrangements and aptitudes of a standing army. Originally, they seem to have had no cavalry at all, 1 and when cavalry was at length introduced into their system, it was of a very inferior character, no provi- sion having been made for it in the Lykurgean training. But the military force of the other cities of Greece, even down to the close of the Peloponnesian war, enjoyed little or no special train- ing, having neither any small company like the enomoty, consist- ing of particular men drilled to act together, no fixed and disciplined officers, nor triple scale of subordination and sub- division. Gymnastics, and the use of arms, made a part of education everywhere, and it is to be presumed that no Grecian hoplite was entirely without some practice of marching in line and military evolutions, inasmuch as the obligation to serve was universal and often enforced. But such practice was casual and unequal, nor had any individual of Argos or Athens a fixed mili- tary place and duty. The citizen took arms among his tribe, under a taxiarch, chosen from it for the occasion, and was placed in a rank or line wherein neither his place nor his immediate neighbors were predetermined. The tribe appears to have been the only military classification known to Athens, 2 and the taxi- 1 Xenoph. Hellcn. vi. 4, 12. 2 Herodot. vi. Ill ; Thucyd. vi. 98 ; Xenoph. Hcllen. iv. 2, 19. The same marshalling of hoplites, according to the civil tribes to which they belonged, is seen in the inhabitants of Messenc in Sicily as well as of Syrakuse (Thucyd. iii. 90; vi. 100). At Argos, there was a body of one thousand hoplites, who, during the Peloponnesian war, received training in military manoeuvres at the cost of the city (Thucyd. v. 67), but there is reason to believe that this arrangement was not introduced until about the period of the peace of Nikias in the tenth or eleventh year of the Peloponnesian war, when the truce between Argos and Sparta was just expiring, and when the former began to entertain schemes of ambition. The Epariti in Arcadia began at a much later time, after the battle of Lcuktra (Xenoph. Hellen. vii. 4, 33). About the Athenian taxiarcbs, one to each tribe, sec JEschincs de FR!