Part Two
The rulers must be those who are best suited both for philosophy and war.
—Plato, Republic
Chapter Three
Early Greek Practices of War
The unique decentralized culture of the Greeks, which lay on the western flanks of the great Iron Age empires, had developed an oddly archaic kind of warfare. The Persians do not seem to have realized how odd these neighbors were until the beginning of the fifth century B.C., when, in order to avenge insults to their Great King, or perhaps to round off their European frontier (I have mentioned the difficulty of distinguishing strategic motives in ancient empires), they attempted to absorb all the little Greek city-states clustered around the Aegean Sea. Their commander, Mardonius, is said to have given his king the following advice:
It were indeed a monstrous thing if, after conquering and enslaving the Sacae, the Indians, the Ethiopians, the Assyrians, and many other mighty nations, not for any wrong that they had done us, but only to increase our empire, we should then allow the Greeks, who have done us such wanton injury, to escape our vengeance. What is it that we fear in them?—not surely their numbers?— not the greatness of their wealth? We know the manner of their battle—we know how weak their power is … And yet, I am told, these very Greeks are wont to wage war against one another in the most foolish way, through sheer perversity and doltishness. For no sooner is war proclaimed than they search out the smoothest and fairest plain that is to be found in all the land, and there they assemble and fight; whence it comes to pass that even the conquerors depart with great loss: I say nothing of the conquered, for they are destroyed altogether. Now surely, as they are all of one speech, they ought to interchange heralds and messengers, and make up their differences by any means other than battle; or, at the worst, if they must needs fight against one another, they ought to post themselves as strongly as possible, and so try their quarrels. (Herodotus 7.9 [trans. George Rawlinson])1
What the Persian finds absurd is the Lilliputian pugnacity of the Greeks: their readiness to go to war and, in war, their readiness to offer battle without attention to elementary strategic or tactical considerations. He exaggerates . As we will see, Greek warfare before the Persian Wars could not have been nearly so common as Mardonius thinks, nor its casualties so heavy. But the historian Herodotus and his audience must have thought this, too, for Herodotus never corrects these impressions. Therefore, this is what Greeks of the late fifth century B.C. imagined the wars of their grandfathers were like. The picture is at once too critical and too idealized, but if we allow for the exaggerations, we can agree with Mardonius and Herodotus that early Greek warfare was distinguished by an unusual taste for violent battle, and we can accept the above as a fairly accurate description of what happened when two Greek cities went to war before 480 B.C. On a level plain, two deep formations of armored spearmen drew up facing one another, packed closely together with big shields overlapping. They collided in a cloud of dust, and there followed some minutes of deafening butchery, the spears of the front rank clashing against shield and helmet, while the files behind them yelled and pushed; then on one side or the other, suddenly the shield wall was broken, the little army scattered, the battle lost.
It requires some effort of the imagination for us to understand why this should seem so odd to a Persian commander. No one now alive has witnessed combat between organized forces using hand-to-hand weapons, for the last vestige of it disappeared one hundred fifty years ago when the bayonet charge became obsolete. We tend to think (assisted by the movies) that direct shock combat of the sort described above was much more common in premodern warfare than it was. In reality, it was always difficult to make foot soldiers seriously engage one another with edged weapons because of their natural tendency to keep out of one another’s way. We have already seen that the Persian and other Eastern armies put no faith in heavy infantry assault. The main function of their spearmen was to provide cover for their archers, and battles were won by cavalry and archers with a minimum of physical contact. Only the Greeks had developed a style of warfare that made shock combat inevitable, because their infantry formation was no loose huddle but a tight rectangle (phalanx) often eight ranks deep or more, its heavy shields a collective locking device, its sheer depth and weight propelling the men in the front ranks onto the spears of the enemy.2
This type of heavy infantryman, called a “hoplite,” was recognizable because he was burdened with armor and shield probably heavier than any infantry had ever carried. The style of fighting for which his equipment was designed had been perfected in the seventh century B.C., perhaps at Sparta, so by the time the Persians encountered hoplites in their homeland, Greeks had been warring in this way for some two hundred years. In the course of the Persian Wars, the archaic style of warfare began to change, and by the time Herodotus wrote the first useful descriptions of Greek warfare, the system was almost obsolete. But some of its practices and many of its values lived on to influence the whole classical tradition.
Mardonius and Herodotus were right to emphasize the backwardness of hoplite warfare. It was in some ways a throwback, closer to the practices of primitive tribes than to the great standing armies of contemporary Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia. As in many primitive cultures, warfare among the small agricultural communities of archaic Greece was fairly frequent in occurrence but low in intensity. The frequency of it is certainly exaggerated in Mardonius’s speech. Apparently, the later Greeks liked to imagine their ancestors as almost constantly at war, but it is possible that for the average Greek city-state (we should remember that there were more than one thousand of these, with very different histories, mostly lost to us), war was a rare event. We have very little information about Greek wars before the Persian invasions, but we do know much about the traditions of Athens, and it is surprising how little warfare was waged there in the archaic age.3 When wars did occur, they were always border wars between neighboring cities. Campaigns did not require much planning or preparation because the participants did not aim at occupation but only hoped to damage the enemy by raiding. Tactics were equally simple, hardly distinguishable from strategy, for all fighters were armed alike and battles tended to be conducted according to rigid conventions that gave them the ritualistic character of a duel— one of the things that perplexed Mardonius.
All this reminds us of primitive warfare, and we might be tempted to call archaic Greek warfare a specialized variant of this, surviving in that corner of the world because the decentralized Greek political structure had resisted the formation of large bureaucratic states. But if Greek armies had been no more effective than primitive warriors, Greece would have been part of the Persian empire by the time Herodotus wrote, and Herodotus would probably never have written. What was unexpected and formidable about Greek warfare was its reduction of the process to a single offensive shock tactic.
Causes of Early Greek Warfare
It seemed obvious to Greeks why they had to play by these rules. Their art of war was intensely territorial. As soon as a war started, their land became the military objective. An invading force had to be met and fought at once before it could ravage the cultivated fields surrounding the city walls. The strategy of the campaign, or rather, raid, was to force the defender to immediate combat, which could be accomplished simply by marching onto his fields. The necessity of driving the enemy away at once reduced the defender to the use of a single arm, the hoplite phalanx, and to a single tactic, the hoplite charge, which nearly excluded other methods of fighting. As Herodotus’s bemused Persian pointed out, they did not even try to find an advantageous position; nor would there have been much point to that attempt, for the phalanx could charge only on level ground, normally so scarce in Greece as to leave little room for maneuver, and since the hoplites did not bother with supply trains, it was rarely feasible to hold mountain passes against them.4 Thus, armies met on a level field, as if by appointment. A successful charge was not followed up, for the phalanx was too unwieldy to conduct a pursuit, and siege tactics, though well advanced in the Middle East at this period, were rudimentary in Greece.
Nevertheless the hoplite charge was a terrifying ordeal, and the economic explanation the Greeks commonly gave for it—the need to defend their crops—is not entirely satisfactory. If military tactics are really that controlled by agriculture, then we might expect something like the hoplite style of battle to evolve not long after the first agricultural settlements; yet no other society of primitive or peasant agriculturalists, as far as we know, ever saw the need to submit to any such thing. Their fields were subject to raids, but they do not appear to have thought it imperative to drive the enemy away immediately, and it is hard to find pressing economic reasons for the Greeks to have thought so. The normal season of war in the ancient Mediterranean was the summer. An invader might do heavy damage if he arrived just before the grain harvest in early summer, but such timing must have been difficult, and often the precious fields on and for which the hoplites died were dry stubble. An invader could always try to destroy vineyards and olive groves, but the amount of permanent damage that could be inflicted in such a raid does not seem sufficient to force battle upon the defenders. To remain safely within the city walls and harass the invaders until they left must have been at times a reasonable option. Nor is it true that the seizure of land was an ultimate war aim: As will be discussed later, the central agricultural land of a city was hardly ever at risk in war, either tactically or strategically.
Therefore, there must have been some powerful emotive, symbolic, ideological reason for this choice of tactic and strategy.5 The key to the Greek system of warfare is that hoplites, who had to furnish their own equipment, constituted a privileged minority in the city-state, composing perhaps one-third of the free population, and they were often the only full citizens. Their political and social predominance was based squarely on their right and duty to carry a shield in the phalanx. There was an obvious connection between the role of hoplite and the role of citizen: Hoplites were the citizens in battle; citizens were the hoplites in assembly. It was this style of battle that had endowed small farmers, or the more prosperous of them, with a prestige unknown in other ancient societies, and it had transformed peasants into citizens. No other ancient society had a decentralized political structure based on private property, with landownership distributed among such a large percentage of the population. Hoplites were a landowning class that adopted this offensive style of war, despite its cost to themselves, because their status depended upon their demonstrated ability to defend the soil. Only citizen soldiers of high morale could have submitted to the discipline of the phalanx. They were jealous of their role as defenders of the soil and were reluctant to make much use of slingers and archers, though these fighters were much better suited to the terrain, because they were not eager to enhance the military value of their poorer neighbors. In sum, they accepted all the consequent tactical and strategic limitations for the sake of preserving their leadership. The intense territorialism of early Greek warfare was more symbolic than material.
Given these premises, the hoplite battle made sense. For both sides, it was the cheapest and quickest way to settle the business. Like no other method of fighting known to antiquity, it ensured that the battle, and normally the war—almost synonymous with “battle”—would be ended by a single, short, savage clash, after which the farmer-soldiers could return to their fields. And this procedure spared lives as well as time. Herodotus greatly exaggerated the casualty rates in early hoplite battles, apparently because Greeks of his generation commonly believed that old-style battles had meant near annihilation for the losers and appalling losses even for the victors. This heroic legend led them to miss altogether the clue to the archaic military tradition: Battles were so short that casualties must have been relatively light.6 Hoplite battles were supposed to create awe and terror, and their reputation deceived even Greeks into thinking the system more vicious than it really was. In reality, it was vicious mostly to the men in the front rank, and then not for long, for their heavy panoply, worn in the heat of a Greek summer and in the press of battle, kept the fighting short while it increased their chances of surviving it.
The hoplite ideology may be correctly described as militaristic—the original form of what I have dubbed “civic militarism.” But it was a defensive and protective militarism, the sole purpose of which was to promote communal esprit de corps. It could not easily be used to justify expansion, like the theocratic militarism of eastern kings or the Roman version of civic militarism to be examined later. The hoplites were tied to their own soil, and their notions of the purposes of war were as limited as their practices of war were offensive. Recently the sociologist W. G. Runciman asked,
What, then, was it about the Greek poleis [city-states] which prevented any of them from breaking out of the evolutionary dead-end up against which they found themselves? If there is any single inference to be drawn from the comparison with Rome and Venice, it is simply that the poleis were all, without exception, far too democratic. Some, of course, were more oligarchic than others. But this meant only that their government was in the hands of a relatively smaller number of relatively richer citizens rather than a relatively larger number of relatively poorer ones. In terms of a close concentration of economic, ideological, and coercive power in the hands of a compact, self-reproducing élite, no Greek polis ever came anywhere near the degree of oligarchy which characterized the institutions of both Rome and Venice during the period of their achievement of world-power status … the ideology of the Greek poleis was … strongly populist; it was, that is to say, hostile to the concentration of power in the hands of any single person, family, or group except for limited periods and for limited purposes as endorsed by the citizen body as a whole.7
As to the formal causes that Greeks gave for going to war, we find much the same complex of motives as in the better organized primitive tribes. Some historians have assumed that early Greek wars were normally over land,8 but that seems an illusion left by the hoplite ethos and its tendency to speak of territory as a symbol for all civic values. Their ritual territorialism actually worked to limit conquest: The wars of the poleis were less territorial in the economic sense than those of the Homeric kings. It is true that they fought many wars over disputed border territories. The long enmity between Sparta and Argos, at war repeatedly for two hundred years, centered on the disputed possession of a border territory called Thyreae (Herodotus 1.82); but this Peloponnesian Alsace-Lorraine was worth so little as to suggest the fighting was more about honor than land. Other wars arose over thefts that seem more like insults than injuries, as when Sparta in the late sixth century B.C. went to war with Samos because Samian pirates had hijacked both a bronze bowl that the Spartans had sent as a gift to the king of Lydia and a corselet sent by the Egyptian pharaoh to Sparta (Herodotus 3.47). Others began over ritual matters, like the enmity between Athens and Aegina, which originated in an ancient quarrel over certain cult statues (Herodotus 5.82). Whatever the original cause, disputes could easily turn into hereditary hostilities lasting for generations and imparting to warfare the legitimacy of tradition. The world of Herodotus knew that such an enmity was self-perpetuating and that the grievances behind specific wars might matter little. Herodotus spent some time explaining the disputes between Corinth and Corcyra in the late sixth century, which had to do with charges of homicide and slave stealing; but he remarked that the real reason for all the trouble was simply that Corinth and its colony Corcyra had suffered bad relations ever since Corcyra was founded (Herodotus 3.49).
All wars were ostensibly fought for honor, and in all, some material interest was involved. It is likely that people were aware the Spartans had some financial interest in putting down Samian piracy, in addition to the defense of Spartan honor. The causes of war in early Greece, like many of the Greek practices of war, retained a primitive simplicity. The need of a city to protect its honor and its land was obvious, and honor and land were essentially the same.
Warfare in Early Greek Religion and Poetry9
The early Greek assumptions about warfare are those found among primitive peoples the world over: Warfare is a natural and inevitable part of the order of things, and when fought to avenge wrongs (but for no other purpose), it is fully justifiable, indeed, it is then a moral imperative and the source of male identity. The poems of Homer and Hesiod, written perhaps in the eighth century B.C., gave these ancient notions permanent literary expression.
As has already been discussed, some primitive cultures had antimilitaristic traditions about a peaceful golden age in the remote past, but this was a passive and fatalistic antimilitarism that accepted war as an inevitable evil. Among the Greeks, this attitude was represented by The Works and Days of Hesiod, which describes a primitive state called the Time of Cronus (later called the “golden age” by Latin poets), during which there was neither warfare nor any other misfortune. The “ghastly action of Ares” (1.146, trans. Richard Lattimore), god of war, is one of the more dramatic misfortunes of the increasingly degenerate times that followed, especially our own time. In later centuries, this Hesiodic myth inspired much antiwar rhetoric, but at least until the time of Erasmus, these expressions never went beyond sentimental nostalgia, because the pessimism of the myth was too plain to permit anything else. In the world we live in, war is as inescapable as sickness and old age.
Hesiod represents the antimilitaristic side of the ambiguous Greek attitude toward war. But much more important as an influence on later war literature is Homer’s Iliad, the greatest of all literary glorifications of warfare. The epic poem is filled with a tragic sense of the costs of war, expressed in its opening lines:
Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished …
(Lattimore trans.)
But the main theme of the epic poet is “the fighting where men win glory” (Iliad 4.225). The Homeric heroes live with an absolute imperative, encouraged by the gods, to defend their honor and gain glory. Homer must be held largely responsible for the view that warfare is the noblest subject of literary art and that the highest aim of the artist is to celebrate the martial values.
The Homeric code was, of course, highly individualistic, and it required considerable socialization to fit the later hoplite ethic.10 Homer portrays a society resembling the more advanced primitive chiefdoms. Every war leader is concerned exclusively with his personal honor and glory, not that of the army, but this society is sufficiently complex and articulated to make it easy for conflicts to arise between these goals, and precisely such a conflict forms the plot of the Iliad. The anger of Achilles is a problem endemic in societies at the edge of state formation, when for the first time a gap opens between the motives of the chief and those of his warriors. Likewise, the battle descriptions in Homer, whose gory realism was never matched in classical literature, almost exclusively feature duels between individual heroes, though we catch confused glimpses of masses of troops milling in the background.
But the greatest and most original contribution of Homer to the literature of war was his invention of a narrative form that inspired the precocious Greek historical spirit. Many ancient societies had some kind of narrative battle poetry, but none other produced a poetic medium capable of describing action with the empathy, psychological subtlety, mimetic vividness, and compositional technique of the Iliad. The simple fact that Homer portrays Greeks and Trojans with equal sympathy was sufficient to raise Greek narrative forever above the vainglorious boasting and flattery of divine patrons that fill most ancient war literature (compare the annals of Ashurnasirpal quoted in the previous chapter). In some ways Homer bequeathed a strait-jacket to later Greek historians, few of whom could break away from his fascination with individual heroics. But without him it is difficult to believe that the analytical attitude toward the past peculiar to the later Greeks could have developed at all.
It turned out to be surprisingly easy to adapt the language and values of Homer to hoplite warfare. This was being done as early as the seventh century B.C., or almost as soon as hoplite warfare appeared. We know it had not yet fully developed at the time Tyrtaeus of Sparta composed his war songs in the mid-seventh century, because these describe a kind of battle in which there is still some room for individual initiative, though what Tyrtaeus describes is not Homeric warfare, either. He praises the valor of the Spartan warriors in the language of Homer, but the Homeric duel between individual heroes has become the mass duel of hoplites:
Ye are of the lineage of the invincible Heracles; so
be ye of good cheer; not yet is the head of Zeus turned
away. Fear ye not a multitude of men, nor flinch, but let
every man hold his spear straight toward the van, making Life
his enemy and the black Spirits of Death dear as the rays of
the sun. For ye know the destroying deeds of lamentable Ares,
and well have learnt the disposition of woeful War; ye have tasted
both of the fleeing and the pursuing, lads, and had more
than your fill of either. Those who abiding shoulder to
shoulder go with a will into the mellay and the van, of these
are fewer slain, these save the people afterward. (Frag. 11 [trans. J. M. Edmonds])
In poetry, too, the phalanx meant something of a throwback, as poets left behind the kingly ideals of Homer and reverted to the celebration tribal solidarity. In later classical literature, the kingly militarism of Hom
All military traditions and values were thus adapted to the needs of the city-state. In Homer’s world, wars were begun to avenge wrongs against the kings: The grievance behind the Trojan War was the typical primitive cause of war, the abduction of a female. But after the rise of the city-state and the hoplite phalanx, wars were fought to uphold the honor of the citizens, meaning especially the hoplite class, and took the form of a duel for the literal and symbolic protection of their land. Individual trophy hunting was replaced by group trophy hunting: In the Iliad, a victor would strip his dead enemy of arms and armor and keep those spoils of war, but in later Greece, it was customary for a victorious city to make a collective dedication to the gods of all captured arms.
Every effort was made to secure the favor of the gods with sacrifices, vows, consultation of oracles, and examination of omens. An army made a sacrifice just before the charge and, if the signs were unfavorable, made repeated sacrifices until the desired results were achieved—a custom resembling the most primitive magic in its manipulativeness, requiring an army to drive with it a small flock of goats or sheep on every campaign. An army might hope that the gods would demonstrate their support by appearing on the battlefield, which they seem to have done at least as often as modern generals do, the apparition of the hero Theseus to the Athenian hoplites at Marathon being only the most famous such. And if the ancestral gods failed to bring victory, diplomatic overtures might be made to foreign gods.
But Greek religion was not totally manipulative, and sacrifices and vows were not sufficient to win the favor of the gods. If one hoped for the favor of either gods or men in wartime, one’s war had to be just. It had to conform to the unwritten code of usages called “the laws of the Greeks” or “the laws of mankind.” In the fourth-century dialogue Alcibiades I by Plato or by one of his disciples, Socrates asks the young Alcibiades, who is ambitious to enter public life, how he would advise the citizens on matters of war and peace. What reasons, Socrates asks, do we give for going to war? Alcibiades replies immediately that “we say we are victims of deceit or violence or spoliation.” Socrates then asks him if there are any circumstances in which he would advise the citizens to make war on people who are not practicing injustice. Alcibiades replies, “That is a hard question: For even if someone decides he must go to war with those who are doing what is just, he would not admit that they were doing so” (109; trans. W.R.M. Lamb). They agree that wars against those who are guilty of no wrong are neither lawful (nomimos) nor seemly (kalos).
They are aware that, in practice, a different kind of reasoning is possible in warfare and that the routine protestation of seemliness and legality may be a facade. The historical Alcibiades had been one of the most notorious practitioners of such realpolitik. But all think it wise to observe the proprieties. When Herodotus makes his Persians brag about how they have conquered peoples who have never even offended them, that is meant to show the depths of their barbarous impiety. Thucydides, as we will see, has his Athenian politicians speak of war and empire with astonishingly candid raison d’état—perhaps in part the historian’s artifice, in part a reflection of a real bluntness in Athenian political oratory in Alcibiades’s generation. But in any case, even Thucydides’s Athenians do not in public altogether forget the need for a just cause. To have a just cause, one must be fighting to resist aggression or to avenge a broken treaty or any other insult or injury against the citizens as a whole. Every war opens with the proclamation of such a grievance, made first to the citizens to persuade them to declare war, then to neighboring cities to ensure their assistance or neutrality, then by official herald to the enemy, and finally to the gods.
The treatise The General by the Greek philosopher Onasander was written in the first century A.D., but his advice on public relations would have been intelligible to his countrymen at any time: “It should be evident to all that one fights on the side of justice. For then the gods also, kindly disposed, become comrades in arms to the soldiers, and men are more eager to take their stand against the foe … [The general] should call heaven to witness that he is entering upon war without offense” (4.1-3 [trans. Loeb Classical Library]). It was, of course, normally possible to get favorable signs from the gods one way or another, and cases of engagements postponed for ritual considerations are hard to find except among the notoriously superstitious Spartans.
It was not only necessary to have a just cause (corresponding to the jus ad bellum, or the right to make war, in the later Christian just war doctrine) but also to observe a rudimentary code of conduct during war (corresponding to the Christian jus in hello, or rights in war). Everything connected with the worship of the gods was inviolable during wartime, including temples, sanctuaries, priests, and the great Panhellenic games; the persons of heralds were sacrosanct, and so were defeated enemies, once they threw down their arms and became suppliants; the gods were called upon to enforce truces and treaties; and it was the height of impiety not to allow a defeated enemy to bury his war dead, as shown in the importance of this taboo in heroic legend. Later Greek writers certainly idealized archaic military practice, and the reality could not always have been so chivalrous. But these were rules sanctioned by the gods and universally respected by men, and the need to strengthen the soldiers5 faith in divine support put teeth into them.11
Rarely are we told which gods they called upon. Usually we hear only that an army sacrificed to “the gods.” Ares, the ancient Greek war god, was a cruel and barbarous lout to whom the Greeks, even in archaic times, paid relatively little attention. In Homer, he is already a despicable figure. When shamefully worsted in battle by Athena, the goddess of wisdom, he goes complaining to Zeus, king of the gods, who receives him with small sympathy:
Do not sit beside me and whine, you double-faced liar.
To me you are most hateful of all gods who hold Olympos.
Forever quarreling is dear to your heart, wars and battles.
(Iliad 5.889ff. [trans. Lattimore])
Armies sometimes sacrificed to Ares before battle, and the Thebans considered him their ancestor. But most Greeks were far more likely to call upon the civilized gods who protected the city both in peace and war. In Tyrtaeus’s poem it is Zeus and Hercules who bring victory, while “lamentable Ares” seems to personify everything horrid about warfare. Does the presence of such an unheroic war god in so militaristic a culture testify to some deep ambivalence in the Greek attitude toward war?
As with most things military, we are better informed about the war gods of Sparta than anyplace else. We know from contemporary sources that in the classical age, Spartans performed prebattle sacrifice to Artemis the Huntress (Xenophon, Hellenica 4.2.20), and later writers attributed to them some surprising military cults, complete with philosophical rationales. We are told that the Spartans, the Cretans, and the Sacred Band of Thebes sacrificed before battle to Eros, god of love, because of their well-known practices of military homosexuality (Athenaeus 13.561); that Spartans sacrificed to the Muses to remind them of the war songs and dances that played an important role in Spartan military training (Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus 21); that if Spartans won a victory by open battle they sacrificed a cock to Ares, but if the victory was the result of stratagem they sacrificed a bull, the latter method being a mark of superior generalship (Plutarch, Ancient Customs of the Spartans 25). These stories may reflect authentic traditions, but they also reflect the later philosophical tradition of Sparta as military utopia. The last item sounds particularly un-Spartan. As we will see, the Greeks in practice were no more averse to the use of stratagems in war than we would expect the people of Odysseus to be. But when they were painting idealized pictures of the hoplite ethic, they liked to pretend that they, or at least their ancestors, were above such trickery. (In fact, surprise attacks are rarely heard of in early Greek warfare, but this is surely because there could not have been much opportunity for them in hoplite tactics.)
Sea Power and Strategy, 480-431 B.C.12
The Greek tradition of limited land warfare just described continued into the early fifth century B.C. For generations, the Greek cities pursued their endemic little wars. We can dimly perceive a slow shift in the balance of power. At an early date, the contest threw up a clear winner. Sparta, whose unique military and social institutions gave that city-state a clear advantage in hoplite warfare, had become the dominant power in Greece by the sixth century. Spartan territory stretched across the southern Peloponnesus—a monstrous territory for a Greek city-state, as big as Rhode Island—and in addition, Sparta had built up a network of alliances, known as the Peloponnesian League, that covered most of central and southern Greece. But expansion had been slow and gradual, had made no obvious break with the traditional patterns of Greek border warfare, and had reached its limits early. Not until much later did other Greeks inquire into the reasons for Sparta’s success or show any interest in the strange Spartan communistic institutions. The recalcitrant autonomy of Greek political and military values had prevented the struggle for power from resulting in unification. However, it had produced a stable hegemony, which left to itself might have remained stable.
But it did not remain so because the coming of the Persians rudely introduced the Greeks to a world of radically different war practices and vastly larger strategic concerns. In 480 B.C., an enormous combined fleet and army, possibly the largest military operation that had ever been organized, moved inexorably on Greece, impressing upon the Greek mind that a large fleet of warships could make war possible on a scale they had associated with gods rather than men.
The Greeks were awakened to the possibilities of strategy, especially the maritime variant. For a century to come, they would often assume that truly grand strategies aiming at conquest and empire had to be based on sea power. They tended to take for granted everything about land power and land warfare, even on a scale as stupendous as the Persian empire. But it was immediately obvious that there was something about sea power that was not in the natural order of things. It suggested new possibilities for human ingenuity and technology, for long-range planning, for sudden and dramatic accretions of power over immense distances.
However, the Greeks tended to overestimate the capacities of sea power. Genuine naval warfare in antiquity required fast rowing ships and was confined to the Mediterranean, an almost tideless inland sea ideally suited to such ships. Ancient Mediterranean navies did not “command the sea” in the sense that navies have aspired to since the sixteenth century A.D. When Greeks spoke of “command of the sea” (for which they had a word, thalas– socratia), they meant “command of selected sea lanes,” mostly coastal, and above all, the narrow passages. The opportunity for such control presents itself often in the maze of islands, straits, and inlets on the north Mediterranean coast, and that opportunity arose more often in antiquity because of the ancient mariners5 aversion to losing sight of land.
The oared galleys, which have been aptly described as large racing sculls, were incapable of much else. They were too slow to catch sailing ships with a good wind in their favor. They could not carry much of anything except rowers. They carried too few marines to secure a landing on a hostile coast and too few provisions to stay at sea for long periods, so normally they were beached every night. They could not prevent a fleet from crossing the open sea, nor could they blockade any long stretch of coast or operate at all without a friendly shore that could be reached in a few hours5 rowing.
But they were independent of the wind and, over a short distance, were faster and more maneuverable than any sailing ship. They could attack or defend the supply lines of a large army. The Persians used them for this when they invaded Greece in 480 B.C., for so huge an army had to be supplied by sea. In the year 415 the Athenians launched another huge amphibious force against Sicily, and again the real function of the galleys was to protect the supply lines of the army Both invasions failed as soon as the fleet was lost. Likewise, galleys could attack or defend the supply routes of a large city. In the fifth century, a major function of the Athenian fleet was to guard the grain route from the Black Sea, which ran through the bottleneck of the Hellespont, a passage highly vulnerable to the galleys. The galleys were most effective against small islands or other exposed points easily cut off by sea; their ideal theater was the island-studded Aegean, the inmost arm of the inland sea.
Even in the Aegean, the galleys could command the sea only to a limited extent. During the Peloponnesian War, when the Athenians moved to take over the little island of Melos, they warned the Melians that they could expect no help from Sparta, as Athenian ships controlled the sea. The Melians replied that on the west they were separated from the mainland by a seventy-mile stretch of open water, where the Athenians could never be sure of intercepting ships (Thucydides 5.110). The Melians were grasping at straws: Spartan help never came, and if it had, the Athenians would have done their intercepting not on the open sea but at Melos harbor. Nevertheless, this exchange shows the common assumptions about the reach of the galleys. Their real function was not interception on the open sea but ambush in a narrows. In 480, Greek strategy consistently relied upon positioning their fleet in a narrow strait, first by Thermopylae and then by Salamis, knowing that the Persian fleet could not afford to ignore them and move on (as the fleet of Drake or Nelson could have done easily), because of the threat the Greek ships posed to the vulnerable Persian supply lines. The galleys might score occasional successes in bolder strategies. In 396 B.C., the Carthaginians launched a great fleet (said to contain 600 transports carrying 300,000 infantry) against Sicily, keeping its route a strict secret so as to prevent interception; but somehow the fleet of Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, managed to intercept the Carthaginians off the Sicilian coast and sent to the bottom 50 transports carrying 5,000 men and 200 chariots (Diodorus of Sicily 14.54-55). This sounds like a stroke of luck, and even then, most of the Carthaginian fleet was able to escape as soon as a favorable wind rose.
Galleys certainly had their uses. Still, in the fifth century B.C., there were few urban centers in the Mediterranean, and fewer armies, large enough to be dependent on sea transport; and the geopolitics of the Aegean were unique. To us today, the most striking fact about the ancient navy is its extremely limited utility. We wonder why the Greeks were so impressed.
Of course, we have that impression largely because the place most affected by sea power was Athens, the source of most of the extant classical Greek literature. But perhaps the sheer novelty of naval power also had something to do with it. The navy was the most important innovation of a purely technological nature that had ever appeared in the history of warfare. And it appeared very late in that history. In the seventh century B.C., some experiments were made to increase the rowing power of galleys and fit their prows with metal beaks for ramming. The innovators must have been either insular Greeks or their trade rivals, the Phoenicians. Sometime in the seventh or sixth century, some Greek or Phoenician invented the classical war galley, the trireme, a ship propelled by three superimposed banks of oars. It was a highly specialized craft useful only for war, with all the capabilities and limitations previously mentioned, and it made genuine naval tactics possible. Just what it was invented for is a mystery. In any case, the possibilities of thalassocracy, in the ancient sense, were soon realized.
In the sixth century, the first naval powers arose. The Phoenician colony of Carthage united all the other Phoenician cities around the coasts and islands of the western Mediterranean into the first maritime commercial empire. Their fleet dominated the western waters for the next three centuries, but their empire reached the limits of its expansion quickly and thereafter the Phoenicians pursued a defensive policy aimed at guarding the trade routes and keeping the Greeks out of the west.
Later in the sixth century B.C., the Persian empire reached the Mediterranean, absorbed the old Phoenician cities and their fleets, and became the first great naval power to the east—a far more dynamic and dangerous power than Carthage, for the Persians were interested from the start in using their navy as an ancillary to their land forces and in further Mediterranean conquests. The Great King Cambyses, who added Egypt to the empire in 525, sought allies among the Greek cities of the Aegean islands, and it was said he planned to send a joint army and fleet against Carthage (Herodotus 3.19), which might have created a trans-Mediterranean thalassocracy on the scale eventually realized by Rome. The Greeks thought Cambyses quite mad, but something about sea power encouraged such delusions of grandeur. The barriers of communication and transport that nature had placed to stunt the growth of empires seemed suddenly to fall away.
As it happened, the first major experiment in the use of sea power for conquest—the Persian invasion of the Aegean Basin in 480—was on a somewhat less ambitious but still unprecedented scale. The Persian forces certainly did not number in the millions, as was firmly believed by later Greeks, including Herodotus, but some modern scholars have thought they could have approached one hundred thousand, which may have been the largest army that had so far marched in human history. Why they bothered to assemble so huge an army, probably too cumbersome for any military advantage, is not clear—perhaps it was done for publicity, to advertise to the world the unity of the empire and the power of the Achaemenid. In any case, such an experiment would not have been possible without the new logistical capabilities of sea power.
The experiment ended, of course, in total disaster on both land and sea. On land, the hoplite forces of the allied Greek cities, led by Sparta, repeatedly smashed the lightly armed Orientals. The Greek phalanx was invulnerable in shock combat, but it should have been vulnerable to an army of cavairy and archers willing to avoid such combat. Thus, it would appear that the Persians repeatedly made the mistake of meeting the Greek on Greek terms and not their own, being handicapped by the terrain, the size of their army, and the constraints of time. As Herodotus said, the land and the sea fought against them. It was more surprising to find the sea on the side of the Greeks, yet the jerry-built fleet of Athens managed to defeat the lords of the Mediterranean on their own element.
Still, the Greeks were rightly impressed. The Great King had come one thousand miles, with what looked like half of Asia at his back, and he might come against them again. The problems of war, on land and sea, would never seem simple again; the habits of concerted long-range planning could not be given up. It was now clear that the Aegean Sea was the gate to Greece. To guard it against the Persians, some 150 maritime cities on the coasts and islands formed an alliance under the hegemony of Athens. Athenian control gradually tightened: The alliance grew into a confederation, the confederation into an empire. By mid-century, the Greek world was divided between a land power and a sea power: The old Peloponnesian League led by Sparta, a loose hegemony of hoplite cities, confronted the new centralized maritime empire of Athens. From 461 B.C. on, hostilities between the two alliances were endemic, and in 431, the general conflict known as the Peloponnesian War broke out, which changed the nature of Greek warfare forever.
Never again would wars be settled quickly by hoplite battles. Hoplites were to remain formidable, when properly used, for centuries to come, but the hoplite system was doomed. Now, even hoplites had to make more use of tactical maneuver, and they had to be supplemented by naval operations, sieges, raids, ambushes, the defense of passes, the hit-and-run warfare of light infantry, and the secret warfare of treason, assassination, and the fifth column. By the late fifth century, the Greek art of war was more complex than any kind of warfare ever known, and the dynamic political culture of the Greek Enlightenment, now entering its maturity, raised it to a new level of reflection. The rise of sea power brought a social and cultural as well as a military crisis: It put an end to landed timocracy and made it possible for any citizen to take on the defense of the city. For centuries, Greek warfare had remained almost immune to the slow but steady material progress of the polis, but that long insulation was now over, and the Greek genius was free to apply itself to problems of war without ethical or religious restraint. By around 431 B.C., the old Greek way of war was practically dead, and the serious history of military thought was beginning.
The Military Revolution
The great intellectual breakthrough in Greek warfare came toward the end of the fifth century B.C., but the Greek practice of warfare attained maturity during the century that followed. These later developments I will sketch briefly here; for the history of ideas, they were less decisive than the achievements of the fifth century, and the purpose of this chapter is not to provide a history of Greek warfare but rather to outline the political and social context of the Greek ideologies of war.
In the major set battles of the fourth century, it was still the hoplites who won or lost the day, but the experiments begun during the Peloponnesian War continued. There was more and more use of other arms and weapons, more need for complicated maneuver, combined-arms tactics, long-range planning, employment of professional mercenaries, specialized military training, and a specialized military literature. All this climaxed around the middle of the fourth century with the perfection of the Macedonian military machine. The armies of Philip and Alexander combined an improved and heavier phalanx with light infantry, light and heavy cavalry, and an elaborate siege train. Alexander added to all this the logistical and organizational capabilities of the Persian empire, and his fantastic expedition into the heart of Asia raised strategy and tactics to new levels. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of these changes. The Greek city-states had practically no regular taxation and had neither the ability nor the desire to carry out sophisticated war making on the Macedonian scale. The perfection of siegecraft by the Macedonian army, especially the invention of the torsion catapult around 350 B.C., rendered obsolete the ideal of city-state autonomy. It seems correct to speak of a genuine military revolution in the Greek world between the time of Pericles and the time of Alexander, climaxing around the year 350 B.C.—a change comparable in many ways to the “military revolution” that historians often see in European history during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries A.D.13
It is ironic that the major phase of this revolution took place in the middle and later fourth century B.C., yet the extant Greek literature on warfare (and much else) is far richer for the late fifth and early fourth centuries B.C. We may have lost much valuable literature from the fourth century and from Hellenistic times through accidents of textual transmission, but I will argue later that in ancient Greece, as in ancient China, military thought peaked early and probably never surpassed the level of sophistication achieved by the historians, orators, and philosophers who wrote during the Peloponnesian War and the decades immediately following. The next three chapters are devoted to an examination of this literature.
Notes
1. Herodotus probably wrote this circa 430 B.C. and Mardonius’s critique of traditional hoplite warfare, which by that year was rapidly becoming obsolete, probably echoes criticisms made by contemporary Greek Sophists, who taught a “scientific” approach to the art of war. Criticism of the hoplite tradition would have been especially welcome to a democratic audience. See F. W. Walbank, A Historical Commentary on Polybius, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1967), on Polybius 13.3.4. But did Herodotus agree with this critique? Herodotus’s audience knew perfectly well, and Herodotus would shortly remind them, that in fact the simple assault tactics of the Greeks proved superior to the sophisticated Persian strategies. Herodotus seems to use the “Persian” speech to parody the advanced military thought of his own day and to suggest that the old-fashioned military virtues were better.
2. There has been much controversy over the extent to which early Greek warfare relied on shock combat of the sort described here, but there is a general consensus that in comparison with other ancient societies, it did so very heavily. See the reconstruction of hoplite warfare in V. D. Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (New York, 1989), and his references to the earlier literature. G. L. Cawkwell, “Orthodoxy and Hoplites,” Classical Quarterly n.s. 39 (1989), 375-389, argues that hoplites sometimes fought in open order, rather than using the concerted push (othismos) of the “orthodox” view. The issue is difficult, first, because our earliest detailed account of a hoplite battle is Thucydides’s description of Delium in 424 B.C. (Thucydides 4.93-96) (Herodotus’s battles are Greek against Persian), and therefore all our useful narratives come from a period when hoplites were capable of far more flexible tactics than in the age of pure hoplite battle, and, second, because Greek historians tend to fall into a disjunctive narrative mode that can make it hard to tell the exact sequence of events. A passage in Plato’s Laches is highly relevant to this debate: Two Athenian generals are discussing the novel technique of hoplomachia, or fencing with hoplite weapons, a skill useful only for individual open-order fighting; they agree there might be some use for it in any battle, but it would be chiefly useful after the real battle, in the fluid retreat and pursuit after a phalanx broke and turned (.laches 181-182). This passage has been quoted in support of both sides, but surely it supports mainly the “orthodox” thesis: The generals know that many accidents can happen in battle and individual duels might occur, but these are not a typical or expected feature of regular hoplite battle. See J. K. Anderson, “H oplites and Heresies: A Note,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 104 (1984), 152. In any case, even “heretics” like Calkwell do not deny the existence and centrality of the othismos.
3. W. R. Connor, “Early Greek Land Warfare as Symbolic Expression,” Past and Present 119 (1988), 3-29.
4. See Xenophon’s Anabasis for testimony to the ability of hoplites to fight their way through mountain passes held only by light troops.
5. The theory that the Greek way of war was determined by economic constraints was developed by G. B. Grundy, Thucydides and the History of His Age, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Oxford, 1948), and was generally followed until the 1980s. For example, Yvon Garlan, Guerre et économie en Grèce ancienne [Warfare and the Economy in Ancient Greece] (Paris, 1989). The “symbolic” interpretation I have adopted here I owe to Hanson, Western Way of War; Connor, “Early Greek Land Warfare”; Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York, 1993).
6. Peter Krentz, “Casualties in Hoplite Battles,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 26 (1985), 13-20, estimates losses in an average hoplite battle at 5 percent for the victors and 14 percent for the defeated. These estimates are based on battles in the classical period, and it seems possible that smaller battles were less bloody.
7. W. G. Runciman, “Doomed to Extinction: The Polis as an Evolutionary Dead-End,” in The Greek City from Homer to Alexander; ed. Oswyn Murray and Simon Price (Oxford, 1990), 364-366.
8. G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, Origins of the Peloponnesian War (London, 1972), 218-220, argues that disputed border territories were the “characteristic” cause of Greek wars. The sources he cites do not seem to me to support this view. Border disputes are mentioned as one cause of war in Thucydides 1.122, 4.92, 5.79; Diodorus 3.33.
9. On religious practices in Greek warfare, see essays in W. K. Pritchett, The Greek State at War; 5 vols. (Berkeley, 1971-1991), and Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience, ed. V. D. Hanson (New York, 1991); K. J. Dover, Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle (Berkeley, 1974); Yvon Garlan, War in the Ancient World: A Social History, trans. Janet Lloyd (Ithaca, 1975); A. J. Holladay and M. D. Goodman, “Religious Scruples in Ancient Warfare,” Classical Quarterly n.s. 36 (1986), 151-171. Readers familiar with Italian may consult V. Ilari, Guerra e diritto nel mondo antico, I: Guerra e diritto nel mondo greco-ellenistico fino al III secolo [The laws of War in the Ancient World, vol. 1: The laws of War in the Greek and Hellenistic World to the Third Century] (Milan, 1980).
10. When I speak of the world of Homer, I should make it clear that I refer to his literary world, not his real world, the reconstruction of which is immensely controversial. Homer probably lived late enough to know something about phalanx warfare, and many scholars, including Pritchett, have discerned phalanxlike formations in the Iliad. But the foreground is occupied by a much more antique kind of fighting—individual duels between heroes using chariots, bronze weapons, and throwing spears—in part perhaps a deliberate anachronism to satisfy Homer’s aristocratic audience.
11. For this idealizing tendency (a touch of which I have noted in Herodotus), see E. L. Wheeler, “Ephorus and the Prohibition of Missiles,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 117 (1987), 157-182.
12. For an introduction, see C. G. Starr, The Influence of Sea Power on Ancient History (New York, 1989). F. E. Adcock, in his widely read The Greek and Macedonian Art of War (Berkeley, 1957), may underestimate the effectiveness of ancient navies when he expresses doubt that triremes could have rammed sturdy sailing ships (38). But if not, they would have been useful only for fighting other triremes, which is to say, for nothing. Triremes were expected to ram and board freighters (see Plato, laches 183), and they had no difficulty in turning to piracy with profit (see Herodotus 6.17).
13. The concept was popularized by Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1988), who pointed out the parallel between the military revolution of early modern Europe and that of ancient China, but rather surprisingly did not mention the ancient Greeks, though the phrase “military revolution” had already been applied to fourth-century Greece in Arther Ferrill’s The Origins of War (London, 1985).
The effects of the new developments in siegecraft on the autonomy of the polis are emphasized by Josiah Ober, Fortress Attica: Defense of the Athenian land Frontier; 404-322 B. C. (Leiden, 1985).