In Classical Greece, as I've explained before, being an archer was an inferior status. Archers were widely despised, received less pay than heavy infantry and cavalry, and were treated as the opposite of the civic and masculine ideal. Real men, the Greeks would argue, stood their ground and fought hand-to-hand. Only cowards, barbarians and women used the bow.

You may recognise a bit of spite in that judgment, and even frustration at the ability of light-armed troops to harm heavier-armed fighters with impunity. This was very much recognised by the Greeks themselves. The playwright Euripides once has a hoplite and an archer compare the benefits of their respective fighting styles. The hoplite, of course, insists that the archer is a coward, but the archer notes that it is better to be safe than sorry, and better to hit your mark and get away with it than to rely on the chaotic violence of close combat. In other words, prejudice certainly did not blind the Greeks to the advantages of missile weapons. Archers were valued from a tactical perspective, since they carried out many important roles on campaign and in the defence of fleets and cities.

On the other hand, there were a few structural reasons why the inferior status of archers was firmly enshrined in Greek societies and armies. First, of course, a bow was cheaper than a hoplite panoply or a horse and horseman's armour. By definition, any Greek citizen would be expected to buy the most expensive battle equipment he could afford. Even if archery was a specialist skill that required considerable practice, the sorting method of Greek militias still meant that archers would be drawn from the poorer classes (whether citizen, freeborn migrant, or enslaved), and that wealthier citizens would look down on them for their limited means.

Second, Greek cities maintained an ideology in which the citizen fought alongside his fellow citizens as a hoplite. This was not a reality, but it was an ideal; by far the most common representation of the citizen in arms was a hoplite, even if cavalry was arguably more militarily important and the majority of the population would have fought as light infantry. As such, anyone who did not stand their ground in the phalanx was subject to the accusation of not living up to the civic ideal, and falling short of his civic duty. This could even affect men who were rich enough to fight as cavalry, despite their importance to the defence of the city.

In these circumstances, it is unlikely that anyone really coveted the position of archer. Increasingly, archers were hired (especially from Crete) as mercenaries, while citizens did their best to scrape together the funds to fight in the phalanx.