PART III
CHAPTER 13
LAWRENCE A. TRITLE
AS the fighting raged between Athenians and Persians on the plain of Marathon, a Persian of great height—so big that his beard covered his shield—confronted the Athenian Epizelus. As he would recount to the end of his days, this giant passed him by and killed the man next to him. With that Epizelus was struck blind and remained so the rest of his life (Hdt. 6.117).
This story, reported to Herodotus as he reconstructed the Persian Wars generations later, reveals as few do the horror and trauma of battle in the ancient world. Until recently students of Herodotus did not recognize that what struck Epizelus was hysterical blindness, a physiological response to terror and trauma that transcends place and time (Tritle 2000: 63–5). Similar responses to battlefield trauma may be found elsewhere, including Xenophon’s description of the Spartan soldier Clearchus (Xen. An. 2.6.1–15; Tritle 2004) and testimonies recorded on the Epidaurian miracle inscriptions (Edelstein and Edelstein 1945/1998; LiDonnici 1995). Similar horrors were experienced by Roman soldiers too as seen in Livy’s account of the Punic Wars (Livy 22.7, 51) and Virgil’sAeneid. Examination of this evidence substantiates not simply the cliché “war is hell,” but that its physical and psychological manifestations are unchanged over the millennia. The killing fields of two world wars, those of Korea and Vietnam, as well as contemporary Afghanistan and Iraq, have made the modern diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder a commonplace, but there can be little doubt that such human response to war and violence occurred in the ancient world too.
Until the 1976 publication of John Keegan’s innovative work, The Face of Battle, the study of war and battle had largely focused on grand strategy and tactics. Ranging from the strategy-laden Germanic handbooks of Delbrück (1920), Kromayer and Veith (1928), the academic studies of Anderson (1970) and Pritchett (1971–91), to such popularized works as Sun-Tzu (e.g., Sawyer 1994) and Roots of Strategy (Phillips 1940), the study of war seldom considered what happened to those who fought, how they died, and certainly not how they survived and coped with the horrific aftermath of battle. Such topics were left to novelists and memoirists, but not to scholars. Keegan’s example has inspired scholars to look afresh at the Greek “face of battle” (Hanson 1989/2009; Lazenby 2004; Rawlings 2007; van Wees 2004; Wheeler 2007) and the Roman experience also has not been neglected (Campbell 1994; Goldsworthy 2000; Lazenby 1978; Sabin 2000).
Writers of war today then are not like those of earlier times who wrote what was often dismissed as “drum-and-bugle” history. These writers of the “new” military history (a term now rather dated since its mid-1970s minting) inform readers and students alike of the intersection of society and culture amid the experience of war, who now learn not only how armies were organized, how they marched, and how they were fed, but also what they experienced at the sharp end of the spear (Raaflaub and Rosenstein 1999; Tritle 2010). Teasing out from the sources available to the ancient historian accounts that might tell what the experience of war was like is neither simple nor uncontroversial. Looming in the background, for example, is the shadow of Homer, whose great poems of men, women, and war certainly influenced the Greek authors who followed him no less than the Roman, if we are to include, as we should, Virgil. Literary accounts of battles then are sometimes construed merely as topoi, commonplace themes that reveal more about literature and style than anything else. One example of this perhaps is the “Battle of the Champions” that Herodotus reports between the Argives and Spartans, a battle that lasted until nightfall, the duration expected by readers of Homer (Hdt. 1.82).
Yet Homer also provides insights into the experience of war that until recently have remained unappreciated. In 1994 Cambridge, Massachusetts psychiatrist Jonathan Shay published Achilles in Vietnam, a book that illuminated the nature of battle trauma through careful analysis of Homer’s Iliad and the personal accounts of Vietnam War veterans (followed up by Shay 2002 on which see below). Different from anything before, Shay’s work provides psychological and medical explanations not only to passages in theIliad, for example, Achilles’s reaction to Patroclus’s death—his inability to sleep or eat, his preoccupation with revenge—but to the blindness of Epizelus and Xenophon’s war-loving Spartan companion and friend, Clearchus. Critics may dismiss such comparative approaches, but to do so seems overly conservative if not reactionary. The historical discipline has long made use of ancillary studies (e.g., archaeology, economics, linguistics) to aid in understanding the evidence of the past, and now, in the early twenty-first century, human physiology and psychology are opening new windows as researchers learn more. Lastly, the idea that a text can mean only what it says seems a trifle naïve.
GREEKS AT WAR
Striking contemporary confirmation of battlefield trauma in the fifth-century Greek world comes from an unexpected source, the Sophist Gorgias from the Sicilian town of Leontini. Gorgias arrived in Athens early in the Peloponnesian War (ca. 427) on a diplomatic mission, requesting Athenian aid for his town against Syracusan aggression. After an initial visit to Athens, Gorgias traveled extensively, giving speeches and lessons throughout Greece. One of his offerings was the Encomium of Helen, a rhetorical showpiece that absolved Helen of any blame in abandoning Menelaus for Paris (MacDowell 1982; see also Guthrie 1971: 192). The moment of composition is uncertain, but the wartime conditions of the ongoing Peloponnesian War seem certain. In the course of his defense, Gorgias notes (17) that simply seeing frightening things causes people to stop thinking. He then elaborates this argument, placing it in the context of battle, and how many of those who have experienced combat and survived have fallen “victim to useless labor and dread diseases and hardly curable madnesses.” An oblique reference to the trauma of war in the middle of a rhetorical exercise (and its subordinate, unconscious reference validates its primacy as evidence), Gorgias’s reference complements the stories of the Athenian Epizelus at Marathon and those preserved in the Epidaurian miracle inscriptions. One of the latter records how a Greek warrior named Anticrates left the sacred precinct cured of his blindness, the result of a battlefield wound to the face by a spear. The text makes clear that Anticrates had been left blind, suffering a psychic wound: “inside his face” he carried the image of the wounding spear, as clear an example as we can find of hysterical blindness resulting from battle in the ancient world (LiDonnici 1995: 109; Tritle 2003: 132–3).
Written amid the trauma of war, Gorgias unconsciously reflects the sights and conditions of wartime Greece. Survivors’ tales of battle would have been commonplace (Greek houses, as in the village of Megalochori in Thira today, were tightly packed and voices would have carried easily) and these stories would have been repeated on the streets, sometimes openly, sometimes in whispers. One such story was that told by Plato in his Symposium of Socrates calmly walking off the battlefield of Delium as so many other Athenian soldiers ran for their lives (Pl. Symp. 221B). Some humorous examples of war stories include those that appeared in Attic comedy, as in the gibes Aristophanes throws at such well-known commanders as Demosthenes and Nicias in his play Knights. But even tragedy reveals the trauma of war, as in Euripides’s Heracles, where the greatest of Greek heroes returns home from war only to go berserk and kill his wife and children (HF 821–1162; Tritle 2010: 127–8). Were it not for the Fort Bragg murders of June and July 2002, we might think that such happenings were literary and imaginary, not tragically real.
Gorgias’s testimony is clearly valuable as it puts a human face on the terror of the Peloponnesian War, complementing the more rational accounts given by Thucydides, as in his description of the Athenian retreat from Syracuse, or his account of the terrible stasis in Corcyra. But Gorgias’s reference is actually richer in that it reveals a connection between going into battle, seeing horrific things, and how this affects the soul and changes the man—something that today is defined as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD (Shay 1994: xx).
While Gorgias and other ancient authors may not have understood why men sometimes acted strangely or were, conversely, unable to do anything at all, they did see these things and meet these men. Examples may be found in Xenophon’s mini-biography of the Spartan commander Clearchus, a man who loved war, who lived for war, and thought of nothing else (Tritle 2003). Such seems also the case with Alexander the Great who after a long evening of drink, killed one of his oldest friends, Cleitus the Black, a man who had saved his life in battle years before (Tritle 2003). In these two examples may be found such symptoms of PTSD as the persistence of combat survival skills, the potential for explosive violence (e.g., Clearchus), excessive alcohol use, the persistent expectation of betrayal, and the inability to trust (e.g., Alexander).
ROMANS AT WAR
Hannibal’s defeat of C. Flaminius’s army at Lake Trasimene (217) continued to claim victims for weeks after the battle. The historian Livy reports accounts of Roman mothers, thinking their sons dead, dropping dead themselves from shock on seeing them return home alive (Livy 22.7.13). Such accounts might seem to be dramatic inventions, but are in fact real, the result of stress-induced sudden cardiac death. Such testimonies make clear that the trauma of war touched noncombatants no less than combatants, a reality brought to life by the Roman response to Homer’s saga of the Trojan Wars, Virgil’s Aeneid.
Virgil’s contemporaneity to the savageness of Rome’s civil war era enabled him to acquire full knowledge of the horrors of war committed against soldiers and civilians alike. An intimate in the circle of Maecenas, confidant of the Emperor Augustus, Virgil surely knew others in this group, including Marcus Agrippa, Augustus’s field commander, son-in-law, and, for a time, presumptive heir. Gatherings with these men, and others such as the soldier-poet Horace, would have provided Virgil with the raw materials of war’s violence. While R. J. Tarrant (1997: 179) acknowledges that “the compassion with which Virgil depicts war’s human cost has long been recognized by critics,” the reality of his war reporting seems unappreciated. In many ways what Virgil reveals of war may be seen as a creative complement not only to Homer but to Gorgias’s revealing comments on the impact of war in fifth-century Greece.
Virgil’s sensitivities to the realities and traumas of war abound throughout the Aeneid. At the poem’s beginning, Aeneas refers to the Trojan dead at Ilium, how he wishes he too could have died (Aen. 1.131–144), a commonplace among survivors of violence. On reaching Carthage Aeneas tells of the fall of Troy (Aen. 1.632–664) and as he does, tears fill his eyes. Are his tears authentic or is Virgil simply imitating Homer’s Odysseus in the land of the Phaecians (Hom. Od. 8.521–34)? The reality of such emotions among the Romans finds confirmation in Livy’s account of Rome after the defeat at Lake Trasimene (22.7.11), as well as additional evidence drawn from modern times. When the film Saving Private Ryan played in both the United States and Germany in 1998, newspaper accounts in both countries appeared with stories of veterans emerging from theaters with tears in their eyes.
On reaching Italy the goddess Allecto stirs up the Latin prince Turnus to fight Aeneas and the Trojans (Aen. 7.623–653). Later Virgil relates how two armies facing one another and not anxious to fight, suddenly do so as the goddess Juturna assumes human form and incites the Latins to war (Aen. 12.297–383). In each case Virgil invokes an external device, a god, whom he uses to explain one of the oldest problems in the study of war, why men fight. Such divine explanations for unexplainable human acts find a counterpart in Euripides’s attribution of Heracles’s madness to Iris and Lyssa, again an explanation for the unknown and unknowable (see HF 822–874).
No less a mystery is how men face the prospect of war and the realities of death in battle. Many who go to war are only able to function, as the Etruscan king Mezentius admits to a vengeful Aeneas, by admitting they are dead men already (Aen. 10.900–902). Yet this truism of war finds a counterpart in the excitement, the adrenaline rush of battle, as with Evander, Pallas’s father (Aen. 11.212–215). Similar statements by Achilles in Homer (Il. 18.110) and Xenophon’s description of his war-loving friend Clearchus (Xen.An. 2.6.1–15), attest an emotion so familiar to many veterans.
Acts of courage are no less mysterious, and writers from Plato (in his dialogue Laches) to William Miller (2000) and Vietnam veteran and author Tim O’Brien (1975) have also attempted to unravel its depths. Virgil reflects on this also in the characters of two Trojan soldiers, Nisus and Euryalus, who incite each other to acts of courage (Aen. 9. 252–304). But their plan to attack the Latins heroically and unaided miscarries and both are killed (Aen. 9.660–669). The Latins place their heads on stakes for the Trojans, including Euryalus’s mother, to see, just as happened at Munda in Spain during the Roman civil wars (see below).
At the funeral of Pallas (Aen. 11.108–111) Virgil relates similar brutalities, in this instance human sacrifice, as bound prisoners are slaughtered as offerings to the dead hero below. Such scenes might appear as literary tropes (cf. Achilles’s sacrifice of prisoners at the funeral of Patroclus, Hom. Il. 23.19–23) or anachronisms. But the traditional punishment of unchaste Vestal virgins, the live burial of a Gallic and Greek couple in the Forum Boarium after Cannae (Livy 22.57.6), not to mention Octavian’s brutal murders at Perugia, would have given a true sense of reality to what Virgil tells (App. BCiv. 5.32–49).
Such savagery occurs in the midst of battle too. Aeneas is about to let Turnus live when he sees that he wears Pallas’s sword belt, having stripped it from the body of his friend (Aen. 12.1276–1298). On seeing this, an enraged Aeneas shows no mercy, sinking his sword into Turnus’s chest. Virgil here reflects a truism among combat soldiers that items belonging to the enemy are not carried into battle for fear of suffering Turnus’s fate. Author and veteran Paul Fussell (1975: 120) reports the letter of a First World War British soldier who threw away German trophies out of fear that some German might act like Aeneas.
TRAINING FOR BATTLE
Preparation for battle in the ancient world was, relatively speaking, approached as carefully as in the modern world. In earliest times, hunting was a dimension of war, teaching, among other things, endurance, stealth, and patience. In the fourth century B.C., the Athenian Xenophon, a veteran soldier and commander, would write On Hunting and On Horsemanship, texts with a clear military orientation. Preparation for battle may also be seen in events of the Olympic Games, particularly the race in heavy armor known from the fifth century, a contest with unequivocal military application. Through the classical and Hellenistic periods, communities trained their youth in the ways of war (at Athens the ephebeia, at Sparta the agoge); individual preparation became increasingly sophisticated, with instructors and instruction becoming available to individuals with money to pay for lessons in weaponry and drilling (see Pritchett 2: 208–31; Rawlings 2007: 209–11; and Xen. Mem. 3.12.5; Pl. Lach. 182a-b). Communities also sought out such instruction, particularly for the training of elite or picked troops and as new weapons such as catapults came along in the course of the fourth century B.C. and later.
In classical Sparta the instruction and training for war achieved a near mythical level in the agoge, and many modern scholars perpetuate the idea that the Spartans were the “professional” soldiers of the day; all other Greeks mere “amateurs.” Such argument is anachronistic and incomplete: anachronistic in that the professional-amateur concept is modern in its origins, incomplete in that the abilities of other Greek soldiers were hardly less than the fabled Spartans (cf. Hanson 2009, Hornblower 1991: 303–4). A few examples of the later will illustrate: at First Mantinea (418 B.C.) the victorious Spartan army included not only Arcadians, but also freed Spartan helots and perioikoi; at Marathon (490) the Athenians executed a brilliant tactical success against the Persians, deliberately weakening their center, strengthening their wings, and then trapping the Persians in an enveloping maneuver, tactics similar to what Hannibal would do to the Romans at Cannae.
The training required for such maneuvering is evident too in the technique of advance taken by many Greek armies against their enemies: the run. Hoplites advancing at the run are often recorded (e.g., Xen. Hell. 4.3.17 [Coronea]; An. 1.8.18 [Cunaxa]) and have also been depicted in art (the Athenian Megacles [renamed Glaucytes, after the former’s ostracism?] after 490 B.C. [?]; see Robertson 1959: 94). What has gone unnoticed is that the length of the spear—some eight or nine feet—dictates that advancing ranks must be separated minimally four to five feet otherwise men will impale themselves on each other’s spears (cf. Pritchett 1: 134–43 who discusses phalanx depth but seemingly overlooks the spears of running hoplites). As experienced soldiers know, maintaining distance and interval between ranks while marching is difficult; doing so while running demands a level of training that makes certain significant, if not extensive, preparation for battle. Finally, the battlefield success of amateurs seems unappreciated—not only at Marathon, but those of the U.S. Civil War, and the Western Front in World War I.
Military training in Rome was no less severe and regimented than in early Sparta. A witness to the Roman way of war was the Greek political leader, then prisoner of war, Polybius, whose exile in Rome and later friendships with Roman elites enabled him to observe firsthand and then record Roman military and political practices. Not only did Polybius describe the tactical structure of the Republican army, its legionary structure (including tactical units and command structure), but also its weaponry, the pilum and “Spanish sword” (Polyb. 6.23, 18.29–32; Campbell 2004: 24–5, 28–31).
But it was perhaps the carrot-and-stick approach to discipline that distinguished Roman preparation for battle from Greek. Officers awarded their men for conspicuous gallantry, particularly killing and stripping the enemy, for being the first to scale a wall, for saving the life of a fellow citizen (Polyb. 6.39.1–3, 5–11; Campbell 2004: 27). Winning such distinctions sometimes began political careers as in the case of Republican general and consul Gaius Marius (Plut. Mar. 3.3–4). But no less distinctive was the brutality of Roman discipline. What is known as decimation was in reality the practice of the fustuarium: here soldiers accused of cowardice were assembled, lots were drawn by their officers who then ordered them beaten to death by their comrades (Polyb. 6.38; Campbell 2004: 26).
Such harsh discipline continued into the Roman Imperial period where its practice extended into the drills that prepared Roman soldiers for battle. A first-century A.D. witness to this was the Jewish soldier-historian Josephus, who famously described the Roman way of war: “their drills are bloodless battles, their battles bloody drills” (Joseph. BJ 3.75; Campbell 2004: 35–7). Such discipline perhaps survived into the late Empire as seen in the crushing defeat inflicted by the Goths on the Emperor Valens at Adrianople, as recorded by another soldier-historian, Ammianus Marcellinus (31.13). A defeat no less in scale or loss of life than Cannae, Ammianus’s description of Adrianople, while surely influenced by Livy’s account of another great disaster, depicts Roman soldiers standing, fighting, and dying in place. While desperation and circumstance explain such resistance in part, the demands of discipline played no less a role.
IN THE KILLING ZONE
Ferocity and brutality in the killing zone of battle have no limits. As early as Homer the reality of fighting meant traumatic amputations and destructive wounds which have been studied and confirmed by scholars (Robertson 2002; see further Salazar, 294–311). Real-life examples of these begin with Marathon. On pushing the Persians from the battlefield, the victorious Athenians pursued them to their ships and here the fighting was no less vicious. Cynegirus, brother of the playwright Aeschylus, struggled for possession of one of the Persian ships and in the fighting was mortally wounded, his hand chopped off by a Persian ax (Hdt. 6.113). At Plataea, the final battle of the Persian Wars, Mardonius, the Persian commander, inspired a stout resistance among his men who bravely charged into the Spartan ranks, grabbing spears and wrestling them away. This ended when Arimnestus killed him with a rock (Plut. Arist. 19.1). A little-noticed detail, this only makes sense if in the heat of battle the spear and sword that Arimnestus carried had already broken, and, in a frenzy, he grabbed whatever object he could for lethal effect (cf. Eur. HF 193 and shivered spears). That spears and swords did break also finds confirmation in the 1939 excavations at Thermopylae where archaeologists found among the Persian arrowheads a spear butt, clearly the last weapon wielded by one of Leonidas’s three hundred (Burn 1984: 420). Stunning evidence has recently resurfaced in the remains of the Theban dead of Chaeronea, most notably in Theban soldier Gamma 16 whose face was nearly cut away by the downward stroke of a cavalryman’s sword (figure 13.1; Ma 2008: 75–6). The skulls of others, punched through by spear butts, tell that these dead and dying men each received a coup de grace. Similar scenes were brought to light in the 1934–1939 excavations of Maiden Castle in Dorset, England, where archaeologists not only found dead Celts finished off by attacking Roman legionaries of Vespasian’s legio II Augusta, but also defenders of that hilltop fortress killed by catapult arrows fired into the fort to soften it up before attack (figure 13.2; Wheeler 1943: 61–3, with plates).
Figure 13.1 Gamma 16, Theban soldier killed at Chaeronea (338/7), possibly by the downward stroke of a cavalryman’s sword. National Archaeological Museum, Athens (Photo Archive). Photo Credit: J. Ma.
Figure 13.2 Death from above: wound inflicted by Roman artillery (a catapult), excavated from Maiden Castle, Dorset in 1939. By permission of the Society of Antiquaries.
Death in battle is a reality all soldiers past and present contemplate, but no less an anxiety is the prospect of being wounded. The wound histories of the Macedonian kings Philip and Alexander exemplify what soldiers in antiquity could expect to suffer and see in battle. Both kings were wounded on multiple occasions: Philip four times (eye, collarbone, hand, leg), Alexander at least four times (leg, shoulder, chest), and there is no denying that the women who married or bedded them would have seen some nasty scars (so Harding 2006: 242; also Tritle 2003: 134). These purple-heart stories have numerous Roman parallels, from such Caesarian centurions as P. Sextius Baculus (Caes. B Gall. 2.25, 3.5, 6.38); Scaeva (Caes. B Civ. 3.53); Cratinus (Caes. B Civ. 3.91), to the scenes of wounded Romans and Dacians on Trajan’s Column (Lepper and Frere 1988: plates 30–2). As in today’s wars, the type and nature of wounds is nearly unlimited.
All battle is fierce, sharp, and cruel, but in all of antiquity there is possibly no more brutal example of this than Cannae, Hannibal’s great victory over the Romans that left some sixty thousand Romans dead in a day. In a poignant description of the battlefield, Livy notes piles of dead, infantry and cavalry (and horses) mixed together, mortally wounded men unable to walk, pleading for a quick death (22.51.5–9). Adrian Goldsworthy adds perspective to this, noting that while the sixty thousand British casualties of July 1, 1916 fell along a sixteen-mile front of the Somme, over fifty thousand Roman dead and dying lay heaped over a few square miles of open plain (Goldsworthy 2000: 213). Livy provides authentic descriptions of these Romans, many crippled with severed thigh muscles and tendons (22.51.7). Such wounds would have been the result of the Spanish espada falcate, a Western version of what the Greeks called the kopis, or cleaver, the weapon of choice of Hannibal’s Spanish infantry. This sword type has a curved or arched blade that enables the warrior wielding it literally to reach over or around a man, for example, slice the backs of his legs, severing the muscles, just as Livy relates. Livy’s account of the battle of Cannae might strike some as rhetorical, but its account of the aftermath of battle in fact preserves realistic details of the horrors of war.
MUTILATION
Battle often brings out the worst in man and the accounts of Greek writers and historians, as also those of their modern-day counterparts, surely underplay the frequency with which such incidents occur. Examples of atrocity and mutilation are at the beginning of Greek literature. Homer tells such stories ranging from Achilles’s humiliation and mutilation of Hector’s body (Il. 22.367–404), to the lesser Ajax beheading a Trojan then throwing the head, “spinning like a ball,” to Hector (13. 201–205). These acts of brutality find a parallel in a line of the Spartan soldier-poet Tyrtaeus, who refers to an old and grizzled veteran lying on the ground holding his bloodied genitals in his hands (10.21–5). The picture is a macabre joke and not one of a wounded man: combat veterans will recognize that Tyrtaeus clearly describes a dead man, as a wounded man will instinctively hug the ground with his belly (cf. Hackworth 1989: 685; Tritle 2000: 40; cf. van Wees 2004: 136, 288 n. 23).
It might be objected that these instances of violence in Homer and Tyrtaeus are poetical and so metaphorical references. But after Xerxes forced the pass at Thermopylae he gave orders that the body of Leonidas be beheaded, his head placed on a stake for all to see (Hdt. 7.238.1). After Plataea the Spartan commander Pausanias refused to treat the body of Mardonius in similar fashion, arguing that it was un-Greek (Hdt. 9.78–79). But such restraint was not always exercised. The Athenian Xanthippus, father of Pericles, ordered the crucifixion of Artaÿctes, the Persian governor of Thrace and Macedonia, who, as he slowly died, watched his son stoned to death (Hdt. 9. 120). In the fighting after Cunaxa (399 B.C.), Greek soldiers mutilated Persian dead without provocation, simply to intimidate their enemies (Xen. An. 3.4.5).
Mutilation of the dead is an example of what the modern world knows as payback or revenge, and a ritualistic form of this comes in stripping the dead of their armor (and weapons) after battle. Left dead, mutilated, and naked on the battlefield is an act of humiliation (cf. Hector’s stripping and [proposed] mutilation of Patroclus, Achilles of Hector, Hom. Il. 125–26, 22,367–71; Eur. Andr. 1152–55, mutilation [and stripping?] of Neoptolemus). Yet it was not always done. In his account of the Athenian civil war of 403, Xenophon reports that after the battle in the Piraeus, Athenian democrats did not strip naked the bodies of the fallen oligarchs (Hell. 2.4.19).
Similar acts of mutilation may be found in Julius Caesar’s account of the Spanish War of 46/5 B.C. (in his corpus but likely compiled by a soldier at the request of Aulus Hirtius). In this struggle the fight for Munda was particularly fierce. On the defeat of Pompeian forces, the Caesarians built a rampart of bodies of the enemy dead around the town and then took shields and javelins from among the enemy’s weapons to serve as a palisade; on top, impaled on sword points, severed human heads were ranged in a row, all facing the town. The intent of the Caesarians is plain to see. Not only did they surround their enemy with a palisade, but it was clearly one designed to intimidate their rivals while creating an awe-inspiring, if horrific, spectacle of their own valor. Such barbarity is not unknown to the twentieth century. Horrific treatment of the enemy was a commonplace in both the World War II Pacific theater as well as in Vietnam, as seen in both historical accounts Lindeman (1997) and fiction (O’Brien 1975). Such actions are timeless and go far in explaining the outrageous conduct of Homer’s Achilles and the Caesarians at Munda.
PRISONERS
Other passages from the account of the Spanish War include killing and mutilation of envoys and the summary execution of the enemy (B Hisp. 12, 26). Similar accounts come from the African War where, for example, after the battle of Thapsus, Caesar’s officers were unable to stop their own men from slaughtering thousands of fellow Romans who had surrendered (B Afr. 85–86).
Those taken prisoner in battle are always at risk, be it from vengeful enemies, or commanders eager to exploit a victory. Simply put, prisoners are a nuisance: they have to be guarded, fed, and otherwise looked after while also complicating whatever plans a victorious commander has in mind. Lysander, after his crushing defeat of the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami, is but one example. Lysander solved his prisoner problem by simply conferring with his allies—Boeotians, Corinthians, and others who hated the Athenians and had many scores to settle. Their response to his consultation was simple—kill them—and shortly afterward some three thousand Athenians paid the price for their city’s acts of imperial aggression (Tritle 2010). Sources seldom tell how such killings were managed. A few illustrations on pottery reveal bound prisoners seemingly led to execution, while other scenes suggest a simpler method: bound men being thrown into the sea to drown. For a large and ready Spartan-Peloponnesian fleet, such a technique would seem the likeliest choice.
Sometimes prisoners serve as sacrificial victims for the victorious. In the aftermath of the Teutoburg Forest disaster in A.D. 9, hundreds of Roman captives were sacrificed by the Germans in various and creative fashion. The throats of some were slashed, their heads nailed to trees; others were hanged, and still more were drowned in bogs: all this done to appease and honor the wrathful and hungry gods and spirits the Germans worshiped (Wells 2003: 190–2). Such rituals are known from other places and times. North American Indians regularly mutilated their dead enemies in order to disable them in future combat in the afterlife; when the relief force reached the camp at Isandlwana after the sensational though costly Zulu victory of 1879, the dead of the British army’s 24th Regiment were found to be similarly mutilated and for similar reasons (Keeley 1996: 102–3; Snook 2005: 301–2). While such practices may have religious explanation, to outsiders and those who must collect and cover the bodies of friends or countrymen, they will appear as simple acts of barbarism demanding retribution, what we know today as “payback.”
POLICING THE BATTLEFIELD
Wellington remarked after Waterloo that only a battle lost was a sorrier sight than a battle won. Carl Sandburg’s Grass (1918) and Robert Southey’s The Battle of Blenheim (1796) and their graphic battlefield vistas find reality in the battlefield at Busta Gallorum and the whitening soil-enriching bones of the Cimbri and Teutones (see further Hughes, 130–1), or that at Plataea where for years after the battle Herodotus (9.83) tells that local people found valuables and remains (just as today World War I and II battlefields continue to give up their dead and relics too). The battlefield also produced amazing sights—accounts of Persians at Marathon dropping to their knees in poses of surrender that baffled their Athenian enemies (Plut. Arist. 5.7); Spartans at Marathon marveling at the battlefield, complimenting the Athenians on their handiwork (Hdt. 6.120). But these stories mask much uglier scenes of carnage that lie behind Wellington’s stoic comment.
In early winter of 424, two armies, one Athenian and one Boeotian, tangled in a fight now known as Delium. It was a crushing defeat for Athens as nearly one thousand men were killed, but worse was to follow. Thebes, which had led its Boeotian neighbors to victory, claimed that the Athenians had violated a sacred precinct and on that account refused—in violation of tradition—to surrender the field and allow the bodies of the fallen Athenians to be collected. For some seventeen days the dead lay as they fell and the wrangling continued. Finally the Thebans relented and the dead were brought home. A few lines from the third century playwright Menander (Aspis 69–79) make clear that what the Athenians found would not have been pretty: bloated, blackened bodies, difficult to identify if at all. This horror left a mark too in the literary tradition, as Euripides in his Suppliant Women (c. 420–415) gives prominent mention to the rituals for the war dead and their refusal. His reference to Thebes makes clear that it is the Thebans he has in mind and their conduct after Delium provides the context.
While the Athenians might have been shocked and outraged by the sights of Delium, they would have paled in comparison with what the soldiers of Germanicus found when they finally reached the Teutoburg Forest and Varus’s destroyed army in A.D. 15. In hisAnnals Tacitus graphically describes the scene: piles of bones scattered across a wide area giving some idea of how the fight unfolded and how some units, or more likely individual soldiers, grouped together and stood and fought as long as they could. Elsewhere nastier scenes came into view: heads now skulls, nailed to trees; bodies now skeletons laid out in ritualistic fashion and also horses and mules sacrificed just like their owners. Tacitus makes clear that the scene angered Germanicus’s men at what the barbarian Germans had done to their friends and comrades. Of course these men probably did not know what their own side had done at Munda and other civil war engagements in Africa and elsewhere. The Roman response was to bury as many of the remains as they could and offer the usual rites to the dead (in which Germanicus himself played a part, much to the annoyance of the emperor Tiberius). But the place was dangerous, and Germanicus, acting more cautiously than had Varus, moved his troops out quickly before any complete accounting of the dead could be done (Tac. Ann. 1.61–62; Wells 2003: 196–7).
COMING HOME
Few of the men who went into the Teutoburg Forest with Q. Varus ever saw home again. For Roman Imperial soldiers the camp was home and if they survived their lengthy terms of enlistment (sixteen years, later expanded to twenty-five), most would settle locally, finding work as military contractors in various capacities. Men who ascended the ladder of command, centurions for example, might assume comparable position in local municipal life, playing various roles as community leaders, as seems to be the case of the veteran soldier who calms a raging mob in Virgil’s Aeneid (1.150–152: meritis, i.e., service to the state; who else but an old soldier could do this?). This was a big change from the days of the Republic when common soldiers returned to their homes and farms after celebrating victories over Greeks, Macedonians, and Carthaginians.
These Roman survivors of violence find their counterparts in the Greek world. Thucydides remarks that of the men who sailed off to fight in Sicily as part of the Athenian expedition, few ever returned home (Thuc. 7.87.6). Others, like those observed by Gorgias, were left incapacitated by war physically and psychically; their counterparts are to be found in the tresantes, the cowards, of Sparta, the Athenian Epizelus, and the men of the Epidaurian miracle lists (Tritle 2010: 159–60, 163–4). These after effects of war may explain too the Athenian Socrates, who had witnessed the carnage at Delium and other fights, and later remarked that he would rather suffer injury than injure. Even Alexander, the greatest warrior of the Greek world, was not untouched by the sights and sounds of battle. When death came in Babylon it was the product not only of alcohol, malaria, and exhaustion, but also a body weakened by fatigue and multiple wounds, a mind burdened with the deaths of Hephaestion, Cleitus, and Parmenion, among others. Few too would have been the Macedonian and Greek soldiers who returned home from Alexander’s Grand Armée, including the Greek mercenaries massacred in the east after Alexander’s death as they struggled to return home (Diod. 18.7.2, 5). But some of these men did make the journey: the Boeotian cavalrymen who dedicated a memorial to their service and survival (IG vii. 3206; discussion in Heckel 2006: 345), the Macedonian elites who returned with enough wealth to provide grand tombs for their burials (e.g., the “Great Tomb” at Lefkadia [Hatzopoulos 1994: 178–81] and Thessaloniki [Tsibidou-Avloniti 2002]).
A truism of war: surviving battle, survivors always remember the experience. This manifests itself in the stories they tell, the memorials they build, the literature and histories they write. Evidence of these abounds in our modern world and did no less so in the ancient one (see further Shay 2002).
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