CHAPTER 5
J. DONALD HUGHES
AS historians present ancient warfare, it is a story of arms and armor, of tactics and strategy, of sieges of cities and the fortunes of empires. Seldom is consideration given to the effects of warfare and militarization on the environment and the reciprocal impacts of the environmental damage done by wars in the ancient societies that waged them. Nevertheless, a damaging aspect of ancient social organization as it affected the environment in the Mediterranean and Near East was its direction toward war. Ancient evidence is not silent on the subject. Sometimes environmental damage was an attendant result of military activities, but it was also used as an instrument of warfare.
Epics chronicle heroic exploits against nature. Mesopotamian tablets describe the journey of Gilgamesh, armed with his mighty ax, and his companion Enkidu to the mountains where they fought and killed Humbaba, the animal-god guardian of the cedar forest, and cut down the trees. This is myth, but many a historical truth is reflected in myth. The forest mentioned is probably the cedars of Lebanon (the epic places it near the Euphrates), a source of timber for the tree-poor Mesopotamian plain, and subject to ancient deforestation (Sandars 1960: 68–82). In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles, the greatest warrior of the Achaeans, fought a battle against the river Scamander (21.200–382). The river, angry because Achilles was polluting his waters with the bodies of dead Trojans, called on his brother, the river Simoeis, and attacked Achilles with a flood that would have killed him without the intervention of the gods. To help him, the god Hephaestus started a forest fire, and the conflict did not end without a fight among virtually all the gods. The battle, according to Homer, caused serious damage to the riverbank and the elms, the willows, tamarisks, clover, rushes, and galingale, and “all those plants that grew in abundance by the lovely stream of the river” (21.242–6, 349–55), as well as the eels and other fish.
Hunting was often regarded as a form of warfare, and art often portrayed humans in battle with animals. The idea that hunting and warfare are similar, and can use the same weapons, is much older than the classical period; a dagger from Bronze Age Mycenae shows shield-bearing warriors attacking lions with their spears, and a ring of the same period bears the design of an archer shooting a stag from a chariot (Anderson 1985: 14). Assyrian kings are portrayed wearing war gear, facing lions and stabbing them with swords that pass clear through the bodies of the beasts. Spears and javelins are often mentioned in the literature of hunting, and were redesigned for use against specific prey such as boars. Xenophon said, “Hunting…is…excellent training in the art of war” (Cyn. 12.1). His Spartan friends deliberately used it in this way. Perhaps this explains the oft-told Spartan story of the boy who was carrying a stolen fox under his cloak. It was said he met his military trainer and stood talking to him; the fox got loose under the cloak and gnawed at the boy’s abdomen, and in spite of that the boy continued to stand without showing a sign of pain until he fell over dead (Xen. Lac. 2.7–8; Plut. Lyc. 12.1–2, 17–18; Ath. 141C). The story was intended to illustrate the ability of a young Spartan to bear pain, and his willingness to die rather than admit he had stolen, but why he should have taken a fox can perhaps best be explained in the context of hunting as preparation for war. The Roman Army employed military methods in hunting to provision troops with meat; soldiers or paid professional hunters scoured the countryside in hostile or uninhabited regions. Hunting for large animals such as lions and boars involved organization and tactics like those of war, and many species were reduced in number and extirpated from sections of the Mediterranean basin (Hughes 2007b: 47–70).
Ancient cities and empires were warrior-dominated societies. Our impression that they were never at peace for long is partly due to the fact that ancient historians mostly took wars as their subject, but the impression is nonetheless accurate. The ancients may never have regarded war as the normal state of life, since in the words placed by Herodotus in the mouth of Croesus, “no one is stupid enough to prefer war to peace; in peace sons bury their fathers and in war fathers bury their sons” (1.87). In spite of that, war was a prevalent tribulation for ancient societies and for the natural environment. Athens in its Golden Age had many more years of war than of peace, and in Rome the gates of the temple of Janus, which were closed when there was peace, were usually open. Even the Pax Romana that began with Augustus and lasted, with few breaks, for two hundred years, did not end warfare along the frontiers, including for example the conquest of Britain, and the size of the army and its consumption of finances and natural resources increased sharply.
Fifty years of war in the third century A.D. left no major province untouched by battle, during which commanders in the provinces sought to seize power, plunging the Empire into sporadic warfare. The battlefields were predominantly in the settled regions of the central Empire, and destruction was visited upon houses, barns, orchards, and the rural population. The average period of rule of the emperors between A.D. 235 and 284 was two years, hardly enough time to establish policy, and all of the emperors were military men, few of whom had any understanding of principles of economy. Prices rose astronomically; the price of wheat in Egypt, for example, was eight drachmas per artaba in the second century, twenty-four drachmas in the mid-third century, and 220 to 300 drachmas in the late third century (Duncan-Jones 1990: 147). Emperors facing financial emergency increased the minting of coinage, thus exposing it to debasement. Due to the inflation of the value of precious metals, the cost of the metal in coins rose above their face value, forcing the issuing of coins in less valuable materials such as bronze or lead (perhaps with an easily eroded wash of silver). Silver could be used for coins of higher denominations, in a never-ending inflationary process. The tax base of the Empire, which depended on agricultural productivity, was shrinking. There were onslaughts of plague in 251 to 266 and afterward, and emperors made up a deficit of manpower by allowing groups of barbarians to settle within the Empire.
Armies typically targeted cities, but war also exacted toll from agriculture, since campaigns devastated the countryside, slaughtered farmers and their families, and requisitioned or destroyed crops and buildings. Armed conflict had its direct effects on the environment. Theophrastus remarked that when an army had marched over a field of growing plants, hardly anything remained visible, and due to the compaction of the earth, crops growing there the next year might be stunted. The land in the actual place of a battlefield, however, was another story. The blood of the slain and wounded, and the corpses if they were buried in situ, could fertilize the fields. After the battle of Aquae Sextiae (102 B.C.), in which the Roman general Marius defeated the Teutones, Plutarch reports (Mar. 21.3),
It is said that the people of Massalia built fences around their vineyards with the bones of the fallen, and that the soil, after the bodies had wasted away in it and the rains had fallen all winter upon it, grew so rich and became so full to its depths of the putrefied matter that sank into it, that it produced an exceedingly great harvest in later years, and confirmed the saying of Archilochus that “fields are fattened” by such a process.
Such damage, or enrichment, was incidental to military operations, but deliberate destruction of the ecological base of the enemy was a customary part of ancient warfare.
Armies lived off the land, of course; the conditions of transport did not always permit supply from home, and plunder of the stored grain and growing crops and animals in invaded countries was unavoidable. As Neil J. Goldberg and Frank J. Findlow note, “Because of the restricted method of land transport available to the Romans, or any military force before World War II, an army was forced literally to live off the land on which it stood” (1984: 376). But calculated “environmental warfare,” in which an enemy’s natural resources and food supplies were demolished, was also not a rare event. Indeed, as the agricultural historian knows, a biblical commandment forbids Jewish soldiers to cut down fruit trees while besieging a city (Deuteronomy 20.19–20). This exceptional regulation indicates that such destruction otherwise was a common practice of armies. Victor Davis Hanson notes, “Ravaging of cropland was central to warfare of most societies of the past” (1998: 4). Hanson further notes that Egyptian pharaohs and Mesopotamian kings boasted that they cut down the fruit trees of their enemies, and quotes a comment attributed to Socrates: “Men cut the grain that others have planted, and chop down their trees, and in all ways harass the weaker if they refuse to submit, until they are forced to choose slavery rather than war with the stronger” (Xen. Mem. 2.1.13). Tacitus has the Caledonian chief Calgacus tell his men that the Romans “make a desert and call it peace” (Agr. 30.5). In spite of the abundant references to this type of environmental warfare in ancient sources, however, most modern military historians of the ancient world have paid scant attention to it.
The case where we have the most information is one actually witnessed by Socrates—the invasion of the lands of Athens by the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War, in which they devastated farms and fields and chopped down olive orchards and vineyards, hoping to cause shortages in the besieged city. This took place in two phases. In the first, King Archidamus of Sparta waged annual campaigns to wreak havoc on Attica in an unsuccessful attempt to goad the Athenians to venture outside their impregnable city walls and fight an infantry battle that he was sure he would have won. Indeed, the tactic of devastating the landscape may have been forced on the Spartans in part because at that time siege warfare had not developed to the point where an assault on the walls could promise success, and the Athenians were well supplied by sea. In the second phase, the Spartans built a fort at Decelea in Athenian territory, from which they could ravage and plunder the countryside continuously.
Many historians believe that the damage done to Athenian agriculture by these invasions was major, although not the main cause of the defeat of Athens because the Athenian navy controlled the sea, and provisions came in through the port of Piraeus, which was protected and connected to the city by the Long Walls. Donald Kagan, for example, sees the destruction of vines, olive trees, and houses as a serious blow to Athens’s major export crops (olive oil and wine) and therefore the balance of trade, and incidentally says that the second phase deprived the Athenians of the revenues of the silver mines at Laurium (2003: 75, 106, 299). Hanson, however, emphasizes the difficulty of destroying the major Mediterranean crop plants (2005: 35–62). Olive trees are big, with trunks that reach six meters (twenty feet) in diameter, and deeply rooted, have hard wood that resists the ax and survives fire, and readily re-sprout from a stump, and moreover were very numerous; Sophocles describes the olive as a tree no man could “destroy or bring to nothing” (Oed. Col. 694ff.). Grapevines are also deep-rooted, regrow from the roots, and were even more numerous, and growing grain is impossible to set on fire until it matures and dries out, after which it is immediately harvested. He concludes that serious damage to Athenian crops would have required the labor of more troops than Sparta could have made available, and that agriculture would have recovered quickly after the war. “The damage that did occur to farmland during war was more often a result of dislocation—the evacuation of farmers, the driving off of slaves and livestock, the death in battle of farmer-hoplites themselves—than of the physical destruction of trees, vines, and cereals” (1998: 14–15).
Hanson’s opinion must be respected because he has had a lifetime of experience as a farmer of Mediterranean crops in California. But he has to explain references such as that of Lysias to devastation in Attica: “Many plots at that time were thick with private and sacred olive trees, which now have for the most part been cut down, so that the land has now become bare” (7.7). And if ravaging crops did little damage, it is hard to explain why Athenian seaborne troops faced obvious dangers to raid Spartan agriculture, and to ravage the lands of Megara, a nearby ally of Sparta. Along with this there are many other examples of what is often called “laying waste to the land” in ancient history, such as happened to Corcyra, Acanthus, Mende, and Melos. Hannibal devastated the land during his invasion of Italy, although not completely, since he wanted the aid of other Italian cities against the Romans. Studies have shown that during periods of military incursion, farmers may escape from dangerous low-lying lands that are subject to ravaging and looting, and find refuge in more isolated forested, mountainous regions where they can clear the trees and plant crops. The effects on the two environments are major: the lowlands become a landscape of abandoned fields, while the mountains suffer deforestation. Probably both conditions are conducive to deforestation (Athanasiadis 1975).
Roman farmers experienced economic and other disasters due to the organization of Roman imperial society for war and the military (Hughes 2007a: 27–40). They knew agricultural remedies for problems like siltation, salinization, and soil exhaustion through the leaching of essential minerals, but could not always apply them due to political and military pressures. The tax system bore most heavily on the agricultural sector of the economy, whether the levies were collected in coin or in kind. Taxes such as the Romanannona militaris (an annual tax to support the army) was assessed upon the farmers, depriving them of resources they could otherwise have used to improve the land. Citizen farmers were conscripted for military service, so that they were forced to be absent from their land, and too often were killed in battle, so that manpower left available to care for the land declined. Then the theater of war was often the countryside; farm families were killed, their property requisitioned by the troops, their crops, buildings, and terraces destroyed. The reliefs on Trajan’s Column show soldiers setting fire to villages and rounding up peasants as prisoners and slaves. Sometimes damage could be repaired, but more often agricultural ecosystems were not given the time to recover, making them vulnerable to insects and diseases. It is no wonder that ancient writers complained of abandoned fields (agri deserti in Latin). Furthermore, when terraced hillsides were abandoned the terrace walls were no longer maintained, and when they collapsed the amount of erosive material that was washed down into lowlands and coasts greatly increased. This is one of the reasons why harbors silted up in the war-ravaged decades of the later Roman Empire. Indeed, more general studies of deposited material along the Mediterranean coasts have shown that erosion significantly increased in watersheds during and after periods when they were theaters of warfare (Vita-Finzi 1969; Kraft 1978).
Along with damage to settled agriculture, the question arises of the effects of warfare on other lands such as pastures, brushlands, and forests. Wars were fought for the possession of such land, especially when located near territorial boundaries, as Timothy Howe explained in a study for the Association of Ancient Historians (2008). The Mediterranean climate has a long dry summer season, during which the vegetation is easily ignited, often by lightning but also by shepherds and soldiers. The resulting fires can engulf thousands of hectares. It is worth noting that setting such fires is used in contemporary times as a means of political expression. For example, records of wildfires in Greece during the twentieth century show unmistakable upswings in election years. It should be noted that Mediterranean vegetation, especially the prevalent brushland called maquis, is adapted to fire and will almost always regenerate in the course of a few years.
Setting fire in pastures, forests, and wildlands, unlike ravaging of farmlands, seldom seems to have been done in order to damage enemy territory, but it was often done to gain a military advantage or to kill enemy troops. For instance, during the Battle of Pylos, Spartan warriors were isolated on a brush-covered island in the bay, and Athenian soldiers landed without knowing the exact location or number of the Spartans. A fire started in the Athenian camp and burned off the vegetative cover (Thuc. 4.29–30, 38), enabling the Athenians to find and capture 120 of the Spartiates, the first time Spartans had been known to surrender. Thucydides says that the fire was an accident, although if he was right it was a lucky one, and there is the possibility that the Athenians started it deliberately. Commanders even ordered sacred groves to be burned if foes had taken refuge in them; in 494 B.C., the Spartan king Cleomenes I set fire to the grove of Argus and thousands of Argive soldiers were incinerated (Hdt. 6.78–80).
Damage to forests resulted from the constant need of military forces for wood to build fortifications and war machines and shelters, to burn as torches and signal fires and simply to cook food and stay warm. Shipbuilding was a major use of wood in war and peace, one often mentioned by ancient writers. Shipbuilding required great amounts of wood, including tall, straight tree trunks for masts. Strategies of warfare and diplomacy were often aimed at obtaining supplies of timber and other forest products such as pitch, and guarding the sea-lanes and roads over which they were transported (Meiggs 1982: 116–53, 423–57). Historians in Greece and Rome saw timber supply as a major factor determining naval strategy in particular. In the Punic Wars, Rome rushed ships to completion, from tree to sea, in as little as forty to sixty days (Plin. HN 16.74; Livy 28.45.15–21). Supplies dwindled; Dionysius of Syracuse, for instance, found all the shipbuilding material he needed in the rich forests he controlled in Magna Graecia (southern Italy) around 400 B.C., but Hiero, another tyrant of the same city a century and a half later, had to search far and wide for a suitable mast for a large warship (Diod. 14.42.4; Ath. 5.206f, 208e–f). Theophrastus notes that good timber was found mostly far away from major cities, implying that nearer forest resources had been exhausted. International diplomacy often hinged on obtaining shipbuilding supplies. A treaty between Amyntas, king of Macedonia, and the Chalcidians required the latter to obtain the king’s permission and pay duties to export fir timber for ships’ masts, while allowing them to trade less strategic lumber freely. Pharnabazus, the Persian satrap of Phrygia (in Asia Minor), helped sway the course of the Peloponnesian War by giving the Spartans access to the forests of Mount Ida and counseling them “not to be discouraged over a lack of ship’s timber, for there is plenty of that in the king’s land” (Xen. Hell. 1.24–5). Athens made treaties with kingdoms in northern Greece to obtain wood for shipbuilding; for instance, a fourth-century treaty between Athens and Perdiccas pledged the Macedonian regent to export wood suitable for oars only to Athens. But another way to get forests was to conquer them; Alcibiades told the Spartans that this was one of the Athenians’ major purposes in launching the Sicilian Campaign in 415 B.C. (Thuc. 6.90). Areas both strategically located and rich in forests, like Cilicia and Cyprus, were often objects of conquest by powers needing to build up their navies. Colonies were established as timber ports; the Athenians founded Amphipolis on the River Strymon below heavily forested mountains in Thrace, so their consternation when the Spartans took that city is understandable (Thuc. 4.108). Indeed, the Spartan general Brasidas had launched his northern campaign with the object of cutting off Athens’s timber supply from that region and redirecting it to Sparta and her allies, including Corinth. In the second century A.D., the Roman Empire was faced with a declining supply of large timber for purposes such as shipbuilding, so that the prudent Emperor Hadrian established a forest reserve on the mountains of Lebanon where trees of the most important species were declared to be the property of the Emperor, and could not be cut without his permission. More than a hundred stone boundary markers remained in place until the twentieth century, inscribed with warnings against timber thieves:
Boundary of the forests of the emperor Hadrian Augustus: Four species of trees reserved under the imperial privilege. (Meiggs 1982: 85–6)
It is not known just which species were included in the four that the Emperor protected, but it seems certain that the famous cedar of Lebanon (cedrus libani) was one of them.
The damage done to forests during Roman warfare is prominently portrayed in the great spiral relief of Trajan’s Column. That monument in Rome celebrates Trajan’s conquest of Dacia, a territory in modern Romania, and is regarded by experts as a principal source of information about Roman military equipment and operations (Rossi 1971). More than two hundred trees are represented in the relief. Many are shown being chopped down vigorously by ax-wielding Romans or Dacians. Sometimes the military axmen are clearing roads through thick woodland to allow passage for the legions. More often they can be seen carrying away logs and using them to make siege terraces, catapults, battering rams, and beacon fires. One such beacon, not yet ablaze, is made of 144 logs (Lepper and Frere 1988: Plate IV). There are many structures that demanded timber in their construction: camps, forts, palisades and other defense works, warships, boats, and barges loaded with barrels. Then there are the bridges of boats, huge assemblages of wood. Two of them, shown near the beginning of the relief, cross the Danube: “Each boat carries, amidships, a stout pier of logs firmly held together by horizontal slats. In between every pair of boats there is a pontoon of closely fitted planks; and the piers and pontoons carry the timber roadway structure of the bridge, with railings at the sides” (Rossi 1971: 132–3). Each of the soldiers crossing the river carries a wooden stake. The Emperor offers sacrifice on a fire altar. The work to supply the huge amounts of wood necessary for military operations was done by classiarii, technical support units for the army, directed by “ax masters.” If necessary, these men could fight with their axes, as the column relief shows. The transformation of the landscape by these operations was massive. Toward the end of the relief, a scene in northern Dacia where a forest god contemplates a little lake among the woods, rich in game such as deer and boars, is followed by a landscape where a single tree bears only two meager tufts of leaves above a trunk almost all of whose branches have been lopped (Lepper and Frere 1988: Plates CIX, CXIII).
Interference with the water supply of enemies is a method of environmental warfare often mentioned in ancient sources. Rivers were dammed or redirected to deprive cities of water, or deliberately contaminated. Xenophon described a plan used by King Cyrus of Persia, who gained entrance to the city of Babylon by diverting the Euphrates and sending his army through the walls on the riverbed (Cyr. 7.5.10–20). Frontinus included examples of these schemes in his Stratagems (Mayor 2003: 108–9): Lucius Metellus flooded out his Spanish enemies, and Julius Caesar cut the water supply of the town of the Cadurci to force its surrender. Cases of surreptitiously polluting rivers and wells are numerous.
Ancient armies used animals, both wild and domestic, in warfare. Xenophon wrote a book around 400 B.C. entitled The Art of Horsemanship. Horses were used in warfare as the basis of cavalry and to pull chariots, and performed an important function in military communication (see further Hyland 493–526). They were also used as pack animals and to pull supply wagons; donkeys and mules performed a similar function. Ancient Sumerian art shows donkeys pulling carts containing warriors into battle. By 1700 B.C., invaders from Asia had introduced horses and chariots to Egypt; the Scythians and other peoples of the Eurasian grasslands north of the Black Sea, an environment particularly suited to horses, were among the earliest to develop cavalry. The earliest horses used in cavalry were relatively small, but increasingly large horses were preferred as cavalry soldiers adopted armor. Ferghana (now in Uzbekistan) was a noted source of fine large cavalry horses for China, and also Persia and the Mediterranean. According to J. Edward Chamberlin, Alexander the Great’s legendary horse Bucephalus was possibly of the Ferghana breed (2006: 155–6). The Persian Emperor required several of the provinces to send an annual tribute of horses. The Persians, and Romans in the period of the late Empire, developed cataphracti or clibanarii, fully armored cavalry, and the horses themselves might be armored, so that these animals had to be heavier. Provision of horses with grain, grazing, and water had important environmental effects. Increasingly larger horses would have made greater demands on resources, as well as impact on the land. Alexander, for example, allocated each of his cavalry horses (he had as many as seven thousand) ten pounds each of grain and hay daily, as well as eighty pounds of water, and tried to give them a day a week for grazing. He preferred to time his expeditions into specific regions when harvests were available to feed his horses (Chamberlin 2006: 160).
Camels were used in battle and as pack animals, due to their advantage as animals adapted to an arid environment. The Arabs were apparently first to create a camel cavalry, and used them in battle against the Assyrians in the seventh century B.C. Herodotus says that Cyrus of Persia used camels to frighten the horses in the army of Croesus of Lydia (547 B.C.), and that when Xerxes brought camels into Greece, lions came down from the mountains to attack them (Hdt 1.80, 7.125–6). The city of Palmyra in Syria had a camel corps in the third century A.D., and when the Romans defeated them in 272, Queen Zenobia attempted to flee on a camel (Bulliet 1990: 87, 102–3). The camel was inferior to the horse in warfare, but Diocletian’s edict on prices indicates that transport by camel was less expensive than transport by wagon.
Elephants were captured, trained, and used on the battlefield, resulting in a constant drain on the wild population. This happened first in India around 1100 B.C., judging from Vedic hymns in which war elephants are mentioned. Indian battles sometimes involved thousands of elephants. The Persian Empire used Indian war elephants, which Alexander the Great initially met in battle in 331 B.C., and later famously in the encounter with the Indian king Porus on the Hydaspes (modern Jhelum) River. His successors used both Indian and African elephants. Both Pyrrhus and Hannibal took the great beasts into Italy to use against the Romans, both ultimately unsuccessfully. At the battle of Raphia in 217 B.C., 102 Indian elephants under Antiochus III of Syria defeated 73 African elephants of Ptolemy IV, collapsing the left wing of Ptolemy’s battle formation, although Ptolemy managed to win the battle. Strange to say, although in modern times African elephants are known to be considerably larger than Indian elephants, the reverse was stated by every ancient author who commented on the question (Polyb. 5.84; Plin. HN 8.9). Perhaps this was because the African elephant then known was a smaller North African species that is now extinct. The Carthaginian elephants that invaded Italy with Hannibal in the third century B.C. came from the north slope of the Atlas Mountains, but there are none there now (Scullard 1974: 24). Romans used elephants, too, if briefly: the senatorial army under Scipio and Cato that faced Julius Caesar in North Africa sent elephants into the Battle of Thapsus, which they nonetheless lost.
War dogs had an advantage over elephants. Elephants often trampled soldiers on their own side, but dogs could tell friends from enemies. Almost every ancient Mediterranean civilization used dogs in battle. Mastiffs are shown in reliefs with Assyrian soldiers. Molossian hounds from Epirus, the homeland of Olympias, mother of Alexander the Great, were the preferred breed of Greeks and Romans until the discovery of British fighting dogs, which were integrated into the Roman army (figure 5.1). Dogs were trained to attack, and often fitted with spiked collars and armor. They were also used to guard camps and warn against the approach of enemies.
Figure 5.1 Dogs have long played a part in war, as seen here, a detail from the “Alexander Sarcophagus” depicting Alexander with one of his favorite dogs (“Peritus”?; see Plut. Alex. 61.3). Painted pentelic marble. Hellenistic, ca. 325 B.C., probably by Cephisodotus the Younger, one of the sons of Praxiteles. From the royal necropolis of Sidon. Archaeological Museum, Istanbul. Photo Credit: Vanni/Art Resource, New York.
Adrienne Mayor has assembled evidence for use of weaponized animals of many species in ancient warfare, including birds, pigs, bears, rodents, snakes, bees, wasps, scorpions, beetles, assassin bugs, and jellyfish (2003: 171–206). Beehives or ceramic pots filled with various noxious creatures were catapulted at the enemy. Hannibal lobbed jars full of serpents onto the ships of Eumenes of Pergamum. The defenders of Hatra, a site now in Iraq, facing a Roman invasion led by Septimius Severus, filled clay pots with “poisonous flying insects” and hurled them at the legionaries (Hdn. 3.9.3–8; Mayor 2003: 181–6). During sieges, the defenders were known to release stinging insects into tunnels being excavated by the attackers, as Aeneas Tacticus advised in his book, How to Survive under Siege (see further Millett, 65–6). The Israelite hero Samson tied torches to the tails of foxes and released them in the grain fields of the Philistines (Judges 15.4). Alexander the Great did a similar thing with sheep to deceive the Persians into thinking that his army was more numerous than it actually was. The source of the latter incident, the Alexander Romance, is unreliable, but there are many similar stories.
Even microorganisms spread in armies as soldiers were weakened by the conditions of march, encampment in hostile territory, and exposure to foreign populations and organisms. Sometimes plagues were spread deliberately among the enemy, although the danger of unintended results including reinfection of one’s own personnel is obvious. The Hittites, for example, drove infected animals into Arzawan territory during the Anatolian War of 1320–1318 B.C. (Mayor 2003: 5, 122–3). Famine and disease were companions of war among the four horsemen, and not uncommonly deaths from disease exceeded those in battle. Athens suffered from plague near the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, when Pericles as a war measure ordered the rural population to take shelter in the limited space inside the city walls. Stunning evidence of the plague in Athens has come to light in recent excavations for the Athens Metro—mass graves with scores of remains indiscriminately thrown together contrary to every ritual of death (Parlama and Stampolidis 2000: 271–3, Littman 2006). So devastating was the plague that the Spartans postponed their annual invasion of Attica in order to avoid the danger that their soldiers might too become sick. The Carthaginian siege of Syracuse in 396B.C. ended when a plague decimated the attacking army. Had they succeeded, Rome might have come closer to losing the First Punic War. Pandemics seem to have increased in frequency when Alexander’s expedition, followed by Roman trade, made contact with South Asian populations, bringing microbes home to add to pathogens already present in the Mediterranean basin. After Augustus, Rome experienced plagues of increasing severity. Especially disastrous was the plague in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the symptoms of which were described by the medical writer Galen. It was brought to Rome in A.D. 164 by soldiers returning from Mesopotamia, and killed as much as one-third of the population; two thousand deaths a day in the city of Rome were reported at its height. Even more destructive was the plague that engulfed the eastern Mediterranean world in the reign of Justinian (A.D. 527–565) and which continued as far west as Britain, suggesting to some scholars that it contributed significantly to the end of the ancient world (Little 2007; Rosen 2007). But plagues were disasters for Rome’s enemies, too; incursions of Huns and Vandals were blunted by them. The effects of epidemics on the Mediterranean peoples were significant. Human populations usually rebound after attacks of pathogens because survivors tend to be resistant and birthrates rise as if to replace lost numbers. But if wars interfere, losses may be repaired more slowly. Plague is associated with famine and declining agricultural production, since farmers may die from the disease or flee from the districts it attacks.
Demonstrably, ancient warfare in the Mediterranean area and Near East had important environmental dimensions, many of which were understood and intended by the participants, but others which were the unfortunate side effects of conflict. In particular, a balance with nature is a condition of peace and is upset by war as a matter of course. The direct impacts of battle were noted by ancient historians, but just as important were the effects of the military-oriented organization of societies on the natural environment and resources.
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