CHAPTER 3

WRITERS ON WAR

Part I Greece: Winning Ways in Warfare

P. C. MILLETT

IN the summer of 341 B.C., Demosthenes addressed the Athenian assembly in a speech now known as his Third Philippic. After confronting his fellow citizens with a catalog of Philip of Macedon’s aggressive interventions, he turns to describe Philip’s new way of fighting (47–50). Although other speakers have pointed reassuringly to Athens’ earlier success in resisting the all-powerful Spartans, even when supported by the Persians, this Macedonian way in war is something unprecedented:

For I hear that, in former times, the Spartans, like everyone else, would ravage and invade the enemy’s land with hoplites and with citizen armies. This went on for only four or five months during the campaigning season, then they would go home. But now you hear of Philip marching where the fancy takes him. He is followed, not by a phalanx of hoplites, but by light-armed troops, cavalry, archers and mercenaries.… I need hardly tell you that he makes no difference between summer and winter, and has no season set aside for inaction.

Demosthenes advises against risking a pitched battle against Philip, for which he is the better prepared. The Athenians must first supply themselves with ships, money, and men, then win the support of other Greek states. We will return to consider the plausibility of Demosthenes’s presentation of Philip’s waging of war.

Some thirty years later, Theophrastus produced for the benefit of his pupils in the Lyceum a collection of Characters: thirty or so caricatures of imagined Athenian citizens, including the portrait of a Coward (XXV). Having described the Coward’s near panic on board ship (he sees pirate ships everywhere), Theophrastus suddenly switches to his demeanor in battle. The Coward is evidently wealthy enough to serve as a hoplite (3–8):

Hearing cries and seeing men falling he says to his neighbours that he was in such a hurry that he forgot to bring his sword, and he runs to his tent, sends his slave outside with instructions to see where the enemy are, and hides it under a pillow, then spends a long time pretending to look for it. While he is in the tent, he sees one of his friends being brought back wounded, and so he runs up to him and tells him to be brave and lends a supporting hand. Then he gives him medical attention and sponges him down and sits beside him and keeps the flies off the wound—anything rather than fight the enemy. Spattered with blood from the other’s wound he meets the troops returning from battle and announces, with the look of one who has risked his life, “I have saved one of our men.” Then he invites his fellow-demesmen [clansmen], and tribesmen to come in and look at the patient, and as they enter he explains to each one of them how he carried him to the tent with his own bare hands.

Taken together, these two passages might seem to tell a coherent story. When Demosthenes warned the assembly how Philip had rendered obsolete the time-honored, seasonal way of fighting with a hoplite phalanx of citizen-soldiers, Chaeronea was only three years in the future. Yet Theophrastus, writing well after Athens’s defeat in the Lamian War and the Macedonian takeover (321), wanting to show up cowardice and (by contrast) the need for courage, does so with what reads like a traditional hoplite battle. The implication is that the Athenians, having failed to learn their military lessons, were overwhelmed by the Macedonian way in warfare.

Demosthenes’s observation that nothing changes so much as the business of war might serve as a classical maxim for military historians and strategists. Writing in the interwar years, Captain B. H. Liddell Hart famously sought to demonstrate how three hundred years of The British Way in Warfare (relatively small forces moved rapidly by sea to where most effective) had been disastrously superseded from 1914 by the “French way” of mass attacks on defended positions. More than two thousand years earlier, the traditional “Greek way in warfare,” characterized by the restricted scope of hoplite battle, had seemingly been superseded by the Macedonian emphasis on combining branches of arms (notably cavalry) on the battlefield, so as to annihilate the opposition.

But alternative readings of both passages are possible and even preferable. Demosthenes, in his attempt to persuade the assembly, plays on the rhetorical ploy of telling hard truths (3–5, 46–54): the Demosthenic equivalent of “blood, toil, tears, and sweat”. In fact, what he chooses to tell the Athenians regarding Philip’s war machine are arguably half-truths. Virtually all those “new” aspects of fighting had been anticipated in the Peloponnesian War and developed during the first half of the fourth century. It may be significant that Demosthenes omits the battlefield innovation traditionally attributed to Philip: the sarissa or formidable twenty-foot pike wielded by the Macedonian infantry. Better, perhaps, to keep to more institutional and moralizing aspects of Philip’s campaigning, avoiding the “face of battle,” so sparing his listeners the sharp end of Macedonian war-making.¹ After all, a fair number of the audience (those aged eighteen to sixty) would be the ones doing the fighting; including, as it turned out, the speaker.

As for Theophrastus, his Characters is not quite as at first appears. Although certain Characters mention events and individuals from well after the death of Alexander (VIII, XXIII), the Athens in which they do their stuff seems fully democratic, with assembly, courts, and frustrated oligarchs (XXVI, XXIX). Current consensus sees these inconsistencies as reflecting composition through time, rather than wilful anachronism (Diggle 2004: 27–36). Either interpretation presumes, as does Demosthenes’s speech before the assembly, an audience in part willing to suspend disbelief. In the case of the Coward, this is promoted by incidental yet authentic touches: the cries of the fallen, the trumpet sounding the advance, blood-spattered clothing, flies buzzing around the wound.

I have cited these passages at some length as paradigmatic of the problems inherent in reading as history Greek writers on warfare. Hindsight inevitably colors our perception of the Third Philippic and the entire public debate in Athens over Macedon. Like so much of the surviving ancient testimony, the Philippics are framed from a contemporary Athenian viewpoint. From the vantage point of the second century, Polybius provides a powerful critique of Demosthenes’s understandable but blinkered pro-Athenian perspective. Small states in the central Peloponnese, overshadowed by a vengeful Sparta, benefited from more distant Macedonian supremacy (18.14). Other key issues of interpretation include context (physical and ideological), authorial intention, and audience expectations: all aspects of the so-called “performance culture” that was such a feature of Athenian society. In a competitive arena (agon), “actors” put on a distinctive display (epideixis), cultivating a particular appearance (schema) before the gaze (theoria) of an informed and critical audience (see Goldhill 1999; Millett 2007: 28, 72–3, with reference to the Characters). This obviously applies to Demosthenes before the assembly, and also to Theophrastus “acting out” his Characters in the Lyceum. As will emerge, issues of orality and performance directly affect almost all Greek authors concerned with warfare (on orality and literacy, Thomas 1989 and 1992 remain essential).

SOME POETIC USES OF WARFARE

Commonplace but still striking is the sheer range of “Greek writers on warfare,” as broadly conceived. Each author calls for a different set of considerations, but emphatically at their head stood Homer, profoundly influencing almost all that was to follow. “This is Arniadas’s tomb: him grim Ares slew as he fought by the ships at the streams of Araththus, foremost by far in the mournful battle-din” (Tod no. 2). This suitably Homeric epitaph in hexameter verse is from Corcyra, dated circa 600. The durability of the epic tradition is also apparent from its deliberate burlesquing in the late mock-Homeric Battle of the Weasel and the Mice and Battle of the Frogs and the Mice (see West 2003: 259–79). Analogous are the twin accounts of the Trojan War, probably from the Second Sophistic, purporting to be by Dictys the Cretan and Dares the Phrygian, both setting Homer to rights (translation: Frazer 1966; cf. Highet 1949: 51–3).

The long gap between Homer and the intensely Homeric Herodotus (ca. 700–430) is bridged by the surviving and surprisingly extensive fragments of archaic poetry, here presented as a case study in the uses of warfare in early Greek literature. The range of possible performance contexts (festivals, games, symposia) reinforces the public and oral characteristics of early poetry.² The poems of Mimnermus, Callinus, Alcaeus, and Tyrtaeus themselves were conceived and performed in the context of the ongoing if uneven process of state formation, incorporating the creation of constitutional government and the emergence of the citizen-soldier. Demarcation of frontiers and development of political tendencies provided plenty of scope for armed conflict: between and within Greek communities, between Greeks and barbarians (discussion in Pritchett 4: 33–44; Arnould 1981).

This interplay of ideas between generations and genres of authors, complicating and enriching our reading of Greek warfare, is already present from the mid-seventh century (or earlier) in the hardly heroically correct persona of Archilochus of Paros. In what is arguably the earliest surviving “personal poetry,” Archilochus portrays himself as an infantry soldier and a poet: “I am the servant of Enyalios, Lord of Battle, and I know the lovely gift of the Muses” (fr. 1); and possibly (fr. 2; cf. Gerber 1999a and Davidson 1968a), through his “spear-won” (en dori) barley bread and imported wine, as a mercenary. According to tradition, Archilochus was killed in battle, in hand-to-hand combat (T 12–18). But the autobiographical implications of the lyric “I” are notoriously open to debate.³

On occasion, Archilochus can moralize like a Homeric hero: how Ares “favours the enemy with guest-gifts (xeinia) of grief” (fr. 6). But more arresting is Archilochus’s apparent undercutting of the heroic ideal. His defiantly carefree reaction to throwing away his shield (“I’ll damn’ well get another just as good”) either inaugurated or, more likely, responded to an existing poetic tradition of lost shields (rhipsaspasia). The relevant fragment (5) is cited by Plutarch as a pendant to his account of the Spartan banning of Archilochus for his self-proclaimed cowardice (Mor. 34.239B; cf. Val. Max. 6.3 = T 46). According to Aelian (VH 10.13 = T 33), the pro-Spartan Critias also criticized Archilochus for this unnecessary piece of honesty: “far more shameful than his lechery or arrogance.” “That’s Critias’s opinion, not mine,” as Aelian hastens to add.

According to one of Athenaeus’s learned diners, Alcaeus of Mytilene (fl. 600) was “warlike to a fault” (14.627a; cf. T 22), introducing the poet’s evocative account of a whole armory “gleaming with bronze,” with its plumed helmets, and other accoutrements of war (fr. 140; cf. 350, 383, 427). “To die in war is noble” is a saying attributed to the resolutely aristocratic Alcaeus (fr. 400), who some said did die in battle (T 9c). Other fragments of Alcaeus offer a more equivocal attitude to fighting including an apparent appeal for an end to civil strife (fr.70; cf. 36).

Some decades later, verses attributed to Theognis of Megara (fl. 580) echo both Alcaeus’s self-consciously aristocratic outlook and his mixed response to warfare. The common factor may be the experience of war within the developing community (39–52, 77–8, 53–68). According to Theognis, the abiding fame (kleos) of a spearman defending land and city is to be contrasted with the worthlessness of wealth in the wrong (non-noble) hands (865–8; cf. 549–54). Yet there is also a prayer for peace and prosperity for thepolis: “So that I may hold revelry with the others. I have no love of cruel war” (885–6; on identification of which verses in the collection are actually by “Theognis,” cf. Lane Fox 2000).

The story of archaic poetry so far might suggest a spectrum of military engagement, along which the remaining major poets may be located. Even poets representing (at least, in surviving fragments) the more pacific tendency routinely incorporate military material, by way of imagery and allusion, and even mockery. Hesiod’s Works and Days (from Boeotia, fl. 700) is possibly the only extended piece of archaic poetry devoid of any hint of warfare. Hence, perhaps, the slighting saying attributed to King Cleomenes: “Homer was the poet of the Spartans and Hesiod that of the helots, because the former encouraged men to make war, and the latter to farm” (Plut. Mor. 223A). Apart from Tyrtaeus, the Apophthegmata Lakonika or “Spartan Sayings” preserved by Plutarch (Mor. 208B-236E), provide the closest approach to Spartan “writing” on warfare (cf. Plut. Lyc. 21 with Alcman fr. 41).

Solidly “militaristic” are the surviving sections of Callinus of Ephesus (fl. 650) and his near contemporary, Tyrtaeus of Sparta, exhorting their respective armies to fight bravely. Callinus was concerned with barbarian, Cimmerian invaders (frs. 1, 5); Tyrtaeus with rebellious Greek Messenians. Extended fragments from Tyrtaeus hint at the actualities of early hoplite battle (fr. 11): “Come, let everyone stand fast … biting his lip with his teeth, and covering thighs, shins below with the belly of his broad shield … let everyone draw near … and fight against a man, seizing the hilt of his sword or his long spear” (cf. fr. 10 with Lycurg. Leoc. 106–8: compulsory recitation to Spartan soldiers before battle).

In similar vein were the lines delivered by Solon of Athens (fl. 600), shaming his fellow citizens (“Salamis-ceders”) into renewing their war with Megara for control over Salamis (frs. 1–3). Although only a handful of verses survive, Plutarch exceptionally preserves a tradition concerning the original performance (Plut. Sol. VIII.1–3 = T 1): Solon feigning madness, rushed into the agora, wearing a pilidion or little felt cap (cf. Irwin 2005: 134–46; Podlecki 1984: 122–4 for the possible historical context). Mimnermus of Smyrna (fl. 630) described in his quasi-epic Smyrneis the earlier defense of the city (ca. 660) against Gyges and his Lydians (Podlecki 1984: 58–61; West 1993: 5–6). The aristeia of an unnamed warrior is Homeric in conception (cf. Il. 4.370ff), but said by Mimnermus to have been heard from an older relation (Paus. 9.29.4; cf. frs. 9, 13, 13a, 14). He may have provided a model for Simonides of Ceos (fl. 610) in his elegiac poems on (possibly) the battles of Artemisium, Salamis, and Plataea (fr. 532–6; cf. 524). Of the numerous epitaphs for the war dead supposedly commissioned from Simonides (Elegs 1, 10; Epigs II-LXXI; see also Molyneux 1992), only two seem likely to be authentic (cf. Kowerski 2005: 151–60, including discussion of P.Oxy. 3965 and the fragments now identified as the “new Simonides”; West 1993: 1).⁴

Simonides and his younger contemporary Pindar from Thebes (fl. 490) carry over lyric poetry into the Classical period with its increasingly autonomous history. But contemporary events (notably the Persian Wars), confronted directly by Simonides, enter only obliquely into Pindar’s poems (text and translation: Race 1997; Pindar’s complex poetic persona: Lefkowitz 1991). Isthmian VIII manages to allude to the victory over the Persians without mentioning it directly (10–11). It seems natural to associate Pindar’s reticence with the medism of Thebes (suggested by Ehrenberg 2011: 143–6, who identifies fr. 110 as advice to the Thebans on the eve of the Persian invasion: “To the untried, war is sweet …”).

Assimilation of victory in the games to success in war, with shared heroic associations, generates a range of reference to epic warfare and warriors. He likens his own verse to an arrow from his quiver, hitting the mark (Ol. 2.83–93; cf. 9.5–14; Isth. 5.46–9; cf. Nagy 1979: 199–214). Pindar’s close contemporary and competitor, Bacchylides of Ceos (nephew of Simonides), invokes a near-identical range of military motifs. Apart from a Paean for Apollo (fr. 4. 61–80), in praise of the “peace dividend” (“Peace gives birth to noble wealth for mortals”), Hiero and his brothers are hailed, as by Pindar, for their victory at Himera (5.31–5).

Among the most telling evocations of warfare in archaic literature are isolated, chance survivals. Such are the enigmatic pronouncements of Heraclitus of Ephesus: “It is necessary to know that war (polemos) is common and right is strife (eris), and that all things happen by strife and necessity”; and “War is the father of all and king of all, and some he shows as gods, others as men, some he makes slaves, others free” (Kirk, Raven, and Schofield 1983: nos. 212–13). Although the sense is presumably metaphorical (cf. Guthrie 1962: 446–9), Heraclitus plays upon the perceived impact of war on individuals and society. A further case in point also sheds light on a possible “performance context” for some of this poetry. Apropos of erebinthoi or “chickpeas,” one of Athenaeus’s diners (2.54e) quotes from the Parodies of Xenophanes of Colophon (fl. 540), the natural philosopher and poet (II.54E = D-K fr.18). “As you lie stretched on a soft couch by the fire in the winter season, these should be your words … sipping sweet wine while munching chickpeas…. How old were you when the Mede came?” The question (reminiscent of “What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?”) probably refers to the Persian invasion of Asia Minor circa 540, here framed as a defining moment and point of reference. No doubt the identical question would be asked more frequently in mainland Greece in the fifty or so years after Marathon, and then Plataea.

THE CLASSICAL CONTRIBUTION: MAINLY ATHENIAN

Apart from demonstrating the pervasiveness and the variety of uses of warfare, archaic poetry provides an antidote to the overriding Athenocentricity of later “Greek writers on war.” Aside from Homer, origins of poets so far encountered encompass the Greek world from Ionia to Southern Italy. Solon is the sole representative from archaic Athens; but from Athens in the classical period, warfare either dominates or impinges significantly on all the major genres.

Drama in Athens reaches back into the archaic period. The elaborate festivals in which tragedy and comedy were embedded enhanced their complex role in fashioning and reflecting polis ideology (festival and civic ideology: Goldhill 1990; festivals and the competitive element: Osborne 1993). Of the thirty-two surviving tragedies, perhaps half are set in wartime or are war-related. Shortly after the Persian destruction of Miletus in 494, Phrynichus, with his Capture of Miletus, had moved the Athenian audience to tears and landed himself a thousand-drachma fine (Hdt. 6.21). In 480, it was the turn of the city of Athens. Aeschylus’s Persians of 472 (the earliest tragedy to survive intact) celebrates through Persian eyes the subsequent Greek victory. The audience in the theater of Dionysus only had to raise their eyes to survey the real-life “backdrop” of their city, destroyed twice-over by the Persians and still being rebuilt (Pelling 1997b; Goldhill 1988; Hall 1989 remains fundamental). The play was the product of a survivor of the Persian Wars (his brother was killed at Marathon), who preferred in his epitaph to commemorate his role as soldier rather than playwright: “The famous grove of Marathon his valour can tell/As can the long-haired Persian, who knew it well” (Ath. 10.627c; cf. Paus. 1.4).

In Aristophanes’s Frogs (1013–29), a thoroughly militant Aeschylus is made to mention the Persians as making citizens “yearn always to defeat the enemy.” He is Dionysus’s eventual choice to return to Athens to “save the city” (1419), while his rival Euripides, accused (by Aeschylus) of rendering the Athenians unfit for war making (1058–98), is left to languish in the Underworld. For surviving Athenian expressions of “the pity of war” (the phrase is famously that of Wilfred Owen), the natural choice is Euripides’s plays on the imagined aftermath of the Trojan War: Trojan Women, Hecuba, and Andromache.⁵ Elsewhere, Euripides causes Medea to represent the experience of childbirth in terms his male audience might appreciate (Medea 250–1): “And, they [husbands] tell us, we at home/Live free from danger, they go out to battle: fools!/I’d rather stand three times in the front line than bear/One child.”

Of the eleven extant comedies of Aristophanes, four date from and deal directly with the Peloponnesian War (see Dobrov 2010 for the context and history of comedy). Characteristic episodes are the hostile caricature of the commander Lamachus (Acharnians572–625; cf. Sidwell 2009: 139–44), humiliation of a ruined arms salesman (Peace 1210–64), and the gentler mockery of the chorus of Old Men in Lysistrata as self-styled “Cleomenes-besiegers” and even “Marathon-fighters” (254–86): the fifth-century equivalent of “Old Contemptibles.” From a twenty-first-century vantage point, it might be thought remarkable that all four plays, competitors in a state-sponsored drama festival, could be characterized as “anti-the-war.”

The war naturally finds its way into other plays. In the opening scene of Clouds (1–7), Strepsiades curses wartime conditions: “One can’t lay a hand on one’s own slave nowadays, when they oversleep.” True to form, a few moments later (56–9), he is cheeked by one of his household slaves. The pressing circumstances of the last phase of the war resulted in an exceptional grant of freedom and probably citizenship to slaves rowing in the fleet at Arginusae (406). “Curse it! Why didn’t I fight in the naval battle?,” exclaims the slave Xanthias in The Frogs (33, cf. 694–5; Xen. Hell. 1.6.24). Elsewhere, mainstream writers seem systematically to have ignored “slaves-as-soldiers,” presumably as undercutting the prevailing ideology of the citizen-soldier (cf. Hunt 2002: 26–8, 83–101, with Paus. 1.32.3–5, 7.15.7).

Several of Menander’s supposedly domestic comedies feature mercenary soldiers (suitably named) as leading characters: Kleostratos (“Famous Army”) in Aspis, Bias (“Force”) in Kolax, Polemon (“Warfare”) in Perikeiromene (Hunter 1985: 66–9; MacCary 1972). In the opening scene of Aspis, “The Shield” (1–92), Kleostratos’s slave/batman vividly recreates episodes from a failed Greek mercenary campaign. His account culminates in the misidentification, through a battered shield, of a bloated battlefield corpse as that of his master. Mnesimachus, from the mid-fourth century, provides an earlier and more explicit example. A character at a symposium in his comic play Philip (presumably the father of Alexander) is made to say (Ath. 10.421b-c):

Don’t you know that you’ve got to fight against us men who dine on swords freshly sharpened, and who, instead of a starter, eat up lighted torches?

That might serve as the comic counterpart to Demosthenes’s expression of Macedonian war making.

From the breadth of Attic oratory, some nineteen-or-so “public” speeches explore in detail aspects of warfare, politics, and diplomacy; fourteen were delivered before the assembly, four are law court speeches (see Gagarin 2011; Hunt 2010: 15–25). The great majority are either by or are attributed to Demosthenes. In 354, he contributed his earliest surviving assembly speech, On the Navy Boards (XIV), on the intricacies of naval finance. His earlier speeches, the Olynthiacs (I–III) and the Philippics (IV, VI, IX, X) confront the Athenians with the challenge of war making. Embarking on the final stage of his career (338–22), Demosthenes delivered the traditional Funeral Oration over the ashes of the dead from Chaeronea (LX; cf. Plut. Dem. XXI), part of the public ceremony so memorably recreated by Thucydides. There survive from Athens five real or imitation speeches commemorating the war dead, representative of what came to be seen as a peculiarly Athenian sub-genre (see further Loraux 1986, with discussion of Thuc. 2.34–46 Pl. Menex. 236b-49c; Lysias II [with Todd 2008: 210–74]; Hyper. VI; Dem. LX).

The so-called “Private Speeches” of the orators regularly engage with military service, as might be expected from the frequent appearance as litigants of Athens’s politico-military elite. The Demosthenic speech Against Timotheus (XLIX) followed from Timotheus’s large-scale borrowing from the bank of Pasion, in order to fund his campaigning (Millett 1993: 191–4). Of Lysias’s surviving speeches, some eight are linked directly to military matters, ranging from corrupt commanders to insubordination and deserting the ranks (speeches I–XI, see Todd 2008). Half of Isaeus’s twelve speeches over disputed inheritances arose directly out of death in war (speeches IV, VI, VII, XI: see Wyse 1904, Wevers 1969).

Alongside death in battle, prosecutions arising out of military offenses have a relatively high profile in the Orators (cf. Andoc. I.74; Pritchett 2: 232–45): desertion (lipotaxia), absenteeism (astrateia), and cowardice (delia). In Lysias’s speeches Against Alcibiades(XIV, XV), the son of the fifth century commander stands accused of having fled from the line of battle. After Chaeronea, Aeschines thought it worthwhile to remind the jury how Demosthenes had been formally accused of cowardice, simultaneously highlighting his own dutiful service (2.148–51, 167–9). Lycurgus’s full-length speech from 331/0, Against Leocrates, accusing his opponent of deserting the city in defeat, may be read as his personal, patriotic manifesto for Athens after Chaeronea. Along the way (70) Leocrates rewrites the Battle of Salamis, stating the intention of the Spartan, Corinthian, and Aeginetan fleets to leave their Athenian allies in the lurch (see Allen 2000; Whitehead 2006).

Such high-profile prosecutions over alleged military misconduct are part and parcel of political maneuverings in the courts in Athens. But “ordinary Athenians” might also find themselves in court as a consequence of warfare. A case in point is Demosthenes’s speech Against Eubulus (LVII), where the course of the Peloponnesian War proved doubly unfortunate for the speaker, accused of usurping Athenian citizenship. His opponents claimed that his father spoke Attic Greek with a foreign accent (18–30). What they have conveniently forgotten (he claims) is that, during the later stages of the war, his father was taken prisoner and sold into long-term slavery on the island of Leucas, where he acquired his nonstandard pronunciation. As for his mother, the fact that she sold ribbons in the agora and acted as a wet nurse is not evidence of her metic or servile status, but rather the consequence of the hard times inflicted on the whole polis in the final stages of the war and the civil war that followed (30–45).

Taken literally, the “writing on war” that loomed largest for ordinary Athenians was the thousands of inscriptions around the city, testimony to Athens’s “epigraphic habit,” relating to warfare in the public domain. Of the ninety-five inscriptions selected by Meiggs and Lewis, some twenty-five relate directly to warfare, of which twelve are Athenian (ML 7; see also van Wees 2004: 211, 232). Aspects covered include celebration of victory (nos. 15, 18, 19, 26), decrees concerning campaigns (nos. 23, 51, 61, 78), and casualties (nos. 33, 48). The casualty lists from 460/59 and 447 name individually, gathered by tribe, those citizens dying in the course of the previous campaigning season. To date, a minimum of thirty such lists have been identified from Athens (Bradeen 1969, 1974: 3–34; lists outside Athens, Pritchett 4: 140–5).

The uniform and implicitly democratic aspect of this final stage of the civic process of memorialization may be compared with the carefully crafted relief (a horseman spearing his adversary) on the private monument, erected in the Ceramicus in 394, to commemorate the death of the young cavalryman Dexileos (Rhodes-Osborne 7B; illustration: Osborne 1998: 14, pl. 3; cf. Goldhill 1990: 110–1; Strauss 2000: 263–7). Poignantly, on the casualty list for 447, the stonecutter left additional space under each tribe, in the expectation that further names might be added. Lists of names on war memorials, ancient and modern, may be approached as examples of “symbolic writing,” making a visual impact, and not necessarily meant to be read (Clairmont 1983: 1: 29–73; Tritle 2000: 143–64).

THINKING ABOUT WAR

For mainland Greeks, what we call the fifth century was given its shape by two wars, a phenomenon familiar from our twentieth century. Given the embeddedness of warfare in the written and spoken words in both private and public spheres, and, by extension, in Athenian culture in general, its uneven treatment by mainstream thinkers might seem anomalous: the unbalanced relationship between practice (quite a lot) and theory (not very much).⁶

Practicalities are apparent in Plato’s Laches (178a–84c), where a display of simulated hoplite fighting involves two commanders, Laches and Nicias, in a debate about the role of private military training as part of paideia. This leads by stages into a consideration of the nature of courage. In the initial conversation, Laches introduces and commends Socrates’s own service as a hoplite in the Delium campaign (181a-b). In Plato’s Apology (28d-e), Socrates is realistically made to remind the jury of his service at Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis (cf. Hunt 2010: 279–82).

The theme of military training recurs at length in the Republic (369b), where the actual theory of war and peace receives relatively short shrift. In a few sentences, Socrates causes Glaucon to agree that the quest for a city enjoying anything more than the most basic standard of living calls for detailed division of labor, necessitating a substantial increase in population (372d). This in turn means occupying the territory of neighboring states: aiming at “unlimited acquisition of wealth,” matched against the implied idea of the “limited good” (see Millett 2001: 36–7). The process might seem in part to reflect the reality of recurring frontier disputes within the Greek world; what Herodotus caused Aristagoras to describe to King Cleomenes as “wars over a scrap of land, and poor land at that” (5.49).

Having discovered what Socrates terms “the origin of war” (373e), it seems imperative to the discussants that the ideal state should develop the strongest possible army to protect and preserve what has been taken from others. Hence their rejection of part-time citizen-soldiers, in favor of suitably trained phulakes: the first mention in the Republic of the “Guardians” (374d), followed by a lengthy account of their education as both soldiers and philosophers (cf. 525b).

The shared role of men and women in Guardianship over other citizens includes the active role of women in warfare, which leads into a digression on the conduct of war (466d–471c). Cowards are to be demoted to the status of artisans or farmers; those taken prisoner are not to be ransomed (again, against current Athenian practice, noted by Lys. 12.20). By the same token, there are to be rewards for the conspicuously brave (supported by Homeric precedent); the dead are to be suitably honored, according to instructions sought from Delphi.

As for the enemy, a fundamental distinction is drawn between Greeks and others. Those Greeks taken prisoner are not to be enslaved but spared, so as not to weaken collective resistance to the barbarians. The enemy dead (who are all to be buried) are to be relieved only of their weapons (contrast the behavior of Homeric heroes: van Wees 1992: 97–8); plundering of the dead (indicative of “feminine small-mindedness”) provides an excuse for cowards to abandon pursuit. Although the enemy’s harvest may be carried off, lands (supposing they are Greek) are not to be devastated nor houses burned. Such destruction is to be reserved for barbarians as “natural enemies.” This is on the grounds that wars between Greek states are effectively an extension of stasis or internal conflict between people who should be friends, and will be so in the future, once those in error have been “corrected.” Apart from the faintly chilling notion of corrective “re-education” (Plato wrote, after all, in the aftermath of the Thirty Tyrants), the argument reflects theoretical preoccupation with “inner war,” for which Thucydides famously supplies a far less optimistic analysis than Plato (2.69–85; see Price 2007).

Plato’s preoccupation with internalized conflict recurs close to the beginning of the Laws (624a–26b). In essence, the unnamed Athenian speaker (normally associated with Plato himself) wishes to question the apparently overwhelming emphasis placed by Cretan and Spartan lawgivers on success in warfare. Cleinias, the Cretan contributor, explains the nature of military training and equipment peculiar to Crete: the mountainous terrain encourages running rather than horse riding, with light armor and weight-saving bows and arrows. He explains how their lawgiver Minos (instructed by Zeus himself) stipulated common meals so as to simulate practice in wartime:

In this, I think, he censured the stupidity of ordinary men, who do not understand that they are all engaged in a never-ending lifelong war against all other states.… The legislator’s position would be that what most men call “peace” is really only a fiction, and that in cold fact all states are by nature fighting an undeclared war against every other state.

The passage is routinely cited as indicative of “the Greek” (or possibly Plato’s) view of warfare as opposed to peace as the norm (see Connor 2004: 12–17). In fact, Plato causes the Athenian speaker politely to undercut the Cretan’s observation with a reductio ad absurdum. If states are permanently in a condition of undeclared war, what about villages, then households, then individuals, and finally each individual at odds with himself?

The Athenian develops the argument so as to cast doubt on the seemingly deep-seated military orientation of Cretan and Spartan institutions (627–32). He causes Cleinias to agree that stasis (“total war,” as he labels it) is more damaging than external warfare. Accordingly, the best or “genuine” lawgiver is one who is able to restore and preserve internal peace. But of the two kinds of war, it is the internal type which is most bitterly fought (seemingly contrary to the argument of the Republic, above). This means that those fighting internal wars must display a superior courage. Theognis is cited (frs. 77–8) to clinch the argument that, with stasis, “a man will never prove sound and loyal unless he has every virtue,” whereas the courage praised by Tyrtaeus ranks only fourth among the “divine” benefits or virtues. In any case, in external war, citizen-soldiers will be supported by hordes of brainless mercenaries. Cleinias expresses dismay at the apparent failure of the Cretan lawgiver. Not at all, replies the Athenian; rather, we were wrong in assuming that the primary aim of Minos and Lycurgus in their lawgiving was preparation for war.

That is virtually all the theorizing about warfare to be found in the Laws. In the laws for the projected Cretan colony that make up the heart of the work, there are details, for example, concerning the appointment of commanders and their subordinates (755b–756b) and regulations for the well-being of the territory (760a–761d). Military training is a major preoccupation, including dancing and parading which should involve carrying arms and armor (796c–d). Particular attention is to be paid to the punishment of cowardice, with elaborate rules governing the loss of shields. Finally (955b–c), stasis is to be formally outlawed by making death the penalty for waging private war of any kind.

A similar pattern may be traced in Aristotle, not himself Athenian but a long-term resident of Athens. Although the business of war makes frequent appearances in the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians (cf. 42.2–5, 49.1–2, 61, with Rhodes 1981), and presumably in the other 157 constitutions attributed to Aristotle and his school, warfare as a concept is only intermittently introduced into the synoptic Politics. Contrast may be drawn with his devotion of the whole of Book V to an exploration of stasis, introducing external war only as an intermittent factor (1306a20–32, 1306b37–07a3).

The closest approach to an analysis of warfare comes in the closing pages of the Politics (1333a32–34a10). Life is divided into leisure (schole) and absence of leisure, into peace and war. Absence of leisure must be for the sake of gaining leisure, and war for the sake of ensuring peace. In short, what is useful and necessary should serve what is noble. It is the job of the lawgiver to promote this overall approach through appropriate paideia. This leads into a critique of writers who praise the Spartan constitution, on the grounds that it is entirely focused on warfare and conquest. But that is easily refuted by theory and by the experience of history: the Spartans have, after all, lost their empire. This prompts a brief contemplation of the proper purpose of military training, which is not to enslave the undeserving, but for three other reasons: (i) to avoid being enslaved; (ii) to rule over those who would benefit from being ruled (not indiscriminate despotism); (iii) to hold despotic power over those deserving to be slaves.

This passage is to an extent paradigmatic of Aristotle’s overall thinking about war in the Politics, picking up a point made close to the beginning of Book One (1256b21–7). A consequence of the presumption that nature has made all animals for the sake of men is that the art of war, of which hunting is a part, is “by nature” an art of acquisition. So warfare is just which is aimed against those persons who are natural slaves, but refuse to acknowledge it. The criticism of Lycurgus’s legislation recurs through the Politics, with explicit acknowledgment of Plato in the Laws (1271a42–71b7; cf. 1324b2–9, 1325a1–11).⁷

Aside from practical considerations of defense and metaphorical use of military matters, this seems in large part to be the extent of theoretical engagement with warfare in the Politics (practicalities: 1326b5–31a181; metaphor: 1277b10–11, 1299a22, 1303b12, 1321a16–19). Instead, both Plato and Aristotle reveal a preference for “internalizing” implications of warfare; not just stasis, but the relationship of military service to the entire social and political order. Confirmation that this “under-theorizing” of warfare is not peculiar to Plato and Aristotle comes from the lists of philosophical writings compiled by Diogenes Laertius in his Lives of the Philosophers. From the hundreds of titles preserved, not one seems to promise a sustained analysis of the phenomenon of war (Demetrius of Phalerum comes closest with his Strategikon or “Military Matters” [5.80]; cf. his Peri eirenes [“On Peace”; 5.81]). The obvious explanation for this intellectual incuriosity may well be correct. Rather like our resignation in the face of winter or bad weather, warfare was “taken for granted” to the extent that it did not provoke sustained contemplation. There is an analogue in the absence from antiquity of any widespread discussion of the nature of slavery. The sole significant exception from Aristotle’sPolitics (1253b15–55b40) was apparently prompted by awkward and unique questions about the naturalness and therefore the justice of slavery (1253b20–3). In the case of warfare, no one apparently thought to ask the necessary questions (cf. Shipley 1993: 18–22; weather and slave analogies: Garlan 1989: 8–9, 1975: 15–18).

“IN COMMAND OF HISTORY”

The phrase is from the book of that name by David Reynolds, a brilliant exploration of the circumstances of Winston Churchill’s composition of his famous history, The Second World War (1948–1954), through which Churchill created his own compelling vision of the war itself (Reynolds 2004: 37–8, 545). Churchill’s oft-quoted words (approximately his own), that “it will be found better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself,” seem a fitting introduction to this selective treatment of the four outstanding Greek writers on warfare, Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, all of whom created for posterity the wars they set out to describe (cf. Tritle 2000: xi-xv; Shipley 1993: 3–4).

There are two significant differences from the Churchillian experience. Even before Churchill’s death in 1965, the process of revisionism had begun; first, tentatively and apologetically (Alanbrooke 1957), then with increasing candor (Moran 1966), and even apparent malice (Ponting 1994). In the case of the Greek authors, the materials for systematic reassessment are virtually or entirely absent.⁸ Secondly, for the Greek historians, there is added complication (and enrichment) in the ways each author responds to the work of his predecessors, over all of which are set the epics of Homer. The development is not linear, with additional strands feeding in from contemporary and earlier authors. An intriguing case has been made for the connection from Thucydides back to Pindar, himself heavily engaged with Homer (Hornblower 2004; Flower and Marincola 2002: 4–5).

It may be thought misleading to include Homer as a “writer” on warfare. In Xenophon’s Symposium (3.5, 4.6), Niceratus tells how his father, the distinguished commander Nicias, made him learn by heart the whole of the Iliad and Odyssey. Since Homer, “that wisest of men,” wrote about virtually all human affairs, the son can claim to be an authority on managing landed estates and becoming a leading politician or military commander.

Although Niceratus’s audience is suitably skeptical, behind the obvious caricature lies some kind of reality. The richness and range of the Iliad and Odyssey explain the reach of their influence within and well beyond the classical world. So Odysseus has been claimed as a model for the life of Jesus, and books XXII and XXIV of the Iliad for the Passion, both as told in Mark’s Gospel (McDonald 2000). The implied message is that Christ transcends even the greatest pagan heroes. Two millennia later, Achilles and Odysseus have memorably served as prompts for the discussion of aspects of combat trauma in the Vietnam War (Shay 1994, 2002; cf. Tritle 2000: 4–7; also Havelock 1972 and Verdenius 1970).

Something of this Homeric breadth is reflected in the subject matter of the three historians, none of whom wrote uniquely “military history.” The strand pursued here relates to ways in which the historians both echo Homer and also reflect realities of ancient warfare through their individual interweaving of the destructive violence of war with the concentration, deployment, and redistribution of material resources, public and private (cf. Immerwahr 1960; Hornblower 1991; Kallet-Marx 1993: Kallet 2001). They share the philosophers’ conception of warfare as promoting acquisition and loss, made the more pressing by the underlying notion of the “limited good.” The sheer unpredictability of warfare made it a high-risk enterprise, beyond the battlefield. With good reason did the “ancient oracle” reported by Thucydides associate war with famine and plague (2.54; cf. 1.23.2–3, with Hornblower 1991: 62–4).

The Iliad opens appropriately enough with “deadly plague” ravaging the Greek army besieging Troy. The action of the poem arises out of the associated dispute over Agamemnon’s disdainful appropriation of plunder: behavior on which even Achilles and Thersites can agree (1.92–190, 2.212–42). The war against Troy is conceived against the background of the accumulation and concentration of resources, as exemplified by the “Catalogue of Ships” (2.484–759) and the prospect of major plunder from Troy (1.127–9), balanced against its progressive dissipation (cf. van Wees 1992: 207–58).

From the Odyssey, the story told by the disguised Odysseus to Eumaeus might serve as a case study of the interplay of fighting, acquisition, redistribution, and reputation (14.191–359). He tells how, though the son of a wealthy Cretan landowner by a bought concubine, through his own merits he made his reputation, rejecting farm work and family life. Soon after returning to Crete from Troy, he fitted out ships for an expedition to Egypt. The undisciplined behavior of companions, greedy for plunder, led to military disaster. Fortunes lost and shipwrecked, he was rescued by the king of Thesprotia, witnessing by the way the fabulous wealth of Odysseus, deposited with the king. A further betrayal resulted in his arrival in Ithaca, destitute and in rags. “By the stubble, see what the harvest was like,” is how Odysseus introduces his tale (14.214–5; cf. Donlan 1973: 153–4; van Wees 1992: 207–10, 238–9).

The monumental scale of Herodotus’s history and its possible public performance in Athens align it loosely with the Homeric epics (Plut. Mor. 862B, with Thomas 2000: 249–69; Marincola in de Sélincourt 2002: xii–xiii).⁹ “Longinus” where he labeled Herodotus as “most Homeric,” presumably referred to his style and language (13.3). But the connection to Homer is apparent, literally from Herodotus’s opening sentence. His stated intention, that “human achievements” and the “great and marvelous deeds” of the Greeks and barbarians should not be “without their glory” is a verbal reminiscence of Achilles in the Iliad singing to Patroclus of the “glorious deeds of men” (9.189).¹⁰ The Homeric model is again evident in Herodotus’s overarching theme of conflict between East and West: incorporating the Trojan War and culminating in the invasion of Xerxes. Also shared with Homer is Herodotus’s frequent explanation in terms of reciprocity and retribution. A tit-for-tat sequence of seizures of women from Europe and Asia supposedly provided the inspiration for Paris’s abduction of Helen (1.1–3). For Herodotus (5.97), the “beginning of evils for Greeks and barbarians” (the phraseology is Homeric: Il. 5.62, 11.604; cf. Thuc. 2.12) was the sending by the Athenians of twenty ships to assist the Ionian Greeks in their war against the Persians. Darius (then Xerxes) allegedly responded to subsequent Athenian participation in the destruction of Sardis by singling them out for future punishment (5.105; cf. 7.1, 8; cf. Gould 1989: 82–5; Finley 2002).

Herodotus closes his “introductory digression” (1.1–5; cf. Asheri 2007: 36–9), by stating his intention of treating “small cities of men no less than great” on the grounds that, given the instability of prosperity, cities formerly great have become small and vice versa. Warfare naturally has a major role in the process of growth and decline. Wholesale destruction has its part to play, as with the Persian razing of Miletus (6.18–20), but the experiences of the Phocaeans introduce a range of factors into the physical creation, acquisition, abandonment, and relocation of communities (1.162–7). The Persian Harpagus besieged the city, offering easy surrender terms, but the Phocaeans, rejecting the idea of slavery, secretly evacuated the city, which the Persians then occupied. The Phocaeans unexpectedly returned and murdered the Persian garrison. Half remained behind; the remainder settled in Corsica where five years of plundering provoked their neighbors to war, forcing the surviving Phocaeans to relocate to Rhegium in southern Italy.

The Phocaeans rated preservation of freedom above the material loss of their city and other non-portable property. Elsewhere, Herodotus introduces the motif of weighing likely gains from warfare against outlay: the rhetoric is not always consistent. Xerxes justifies his plans for the invasion of Greece as the conquest of country “richer than our own” (7.8). Mardonius seeks to discourage Xerxes by emphasizing the slenderness of Greek resources (7.9). The essential rightness of Mardonius is confirmed by the anecdote closing the whole history (9.122; cf. Cartledge 1990: 40).

The complexity of Thucydides’s relationship to Herodotus is well documented. Although Thucydides begins his narrative where Herodotus leaves off (1.89), there are significant departures: his non-use of Herodotean historie, minimal use of the first-person singular (some thousand times in Herodotus), and detailed correction of his predecessor (1.20.3).¹¹ There is similar development and distancing by Thucydides from Herodotus’s preoccupation with material achievement. This is apparent close to the beginning of the history (I.10), where Thucydides digresses to argue by analogy that Agamemnon’s Mycenae, though physically unimpressive, might have been as powerful as Homer implies:

Suppose, for example, that the city of Sparta were to become deserted and that only the temples and the foundations of buildings remained, I think that future generations would find it very difficult to believe that the place had really been as powerful as it was represented to be.… If, on the other hand, the same thing were to happen to Athens, one would conjecture from what met the eye that the city had been twice as powerful as in fact it is.

Thucydides here diverges sharply from Herodotus’s association of monumental erga with overall achievement. Right through the so-called “Archaeology” (1.1–20), there is repeated reference to the importance of accumulated “wealth” as a key to the ebb and flow of power (cf. Hornblower 1991: 3–58).

These opening pages give an impression of the laborious and precarious process of accumulating resources, culminating in the aftermath of the Persian Wars with the emergence of Sparta and Athens as easily the two most powerful states, by land and sea respectively (1.18.2). The Archaeology is framed by statements of their exceptional power and preparedness for war (1.1.1, 1.18.3). The Athenians obtained the substantial wealth needed to wage naval warfare by appropriation of others’ resources through their maritime empire; the Spartans achieved access to military manpower through the cultivation of sympathetic regimes in the Peloponnese (1.19). Extended and intensified warfare, made possible through accumulated resources, brought unparalleled scope for dislocation and destruction, anticipated by Thucydides in terms of cities destroyed, populations expelled, banishments, and general bloodshed (1.23.2; destructions: Cobet 1986; Parry 1981: 114–20).

The Archaeology seems programmatic, informing the remainder of the history, punctuated by references to acquisition and deployment of resources (so Hornblower 1991: 7–8). Paradigmatic is King Archidamus’s “warning speech” before the Spartan assembly (1.79–85), advising of Athenian superiority in public and private wealth, ships, armament, population, and tribute-paying subjects. By contrast, the Spartans have no money in their treasury nor the prospect of readily raising any through taxation (80). He later revisits the importance of revenue raising (83): “War is not so much a matter of armaments as wealth … particularly is this true of a war fought between a land power and a sea power.” Sthenelaidas, in his opposing speech (1.86), is made to gloss over the imbalance in resources.

Archidamus’s arguments are amplified in the correspondingly “resource-sensitive” speech from Pericles before the assembly early in the war, reviewing the assets available to each side (1.141–142.1). The financial flexibility he attributes to the Athenians anticipates the adaptability characteristic of the later “fiscal state,” typically in response to the demands of warfare (further Millett 2009: 479–81). A case in point was the decision of the Athenians in 413, against the background of increasing expenditure on the war and falling revenues, to abandon the collection of tribute in favor of an empire-wide harbor tax of 5 percent; according to Thucydides (7.28.4), “thinking that in this way they should derive more revenue.” As Pericles had earlier advised the Athenians (echoing Archidamus), “It is accumulated wealth, and not taxes levied under duress, that sustains wars” (I.141.5). Perhaps the psychological satisfaction of exacting annual tribute (and parading it around the Theater of Dionysus) succumbed to fiscal prudence.

Thucydides’s fullest reflection on the implications of war combines material with psychological considerations (3.82.2):

In times of peace and prosperity cities and individuals alike follow higher standards.… But war is a stern teacher. In depriving them of the power of easily satisfying their daily wants, it brings most people’s minds down to the level of their actual circumstances.

The passage follows on from Thucydides’s account of the ferocity of stasis on Corcyra, but the sentiment seems to apply to war more generally. Control over resources is a strand running through Thucydides’s presentation of the Sicilian Expedition, beginning with his account of the opposing assembly speeches by Nicias and Alcibiades (6.9–23). Thucydides introduces Alcibiades as anxious to conquer Sicily (and Carthage) so as to increase his private wealth (6.15); he also suggests that the majority of the Athenians present saw success in Sicily as offering a permanent source of pay (6.24).

The disastrous end of the Sicilian expedition is in obvious contrast with its initial grandeur, reprised with a Homeric-style roll call of Athenian forces and their allies (7.57). The massive expenditure of wealth (and the expectation of perpetual pay) are reduced to four upturned shields filled with the cash surrendered by the troops under Demosthenes (7.82). The massacre of Nicias’s men in the River Erineus, fighting each other for the privilege of drinking water fouled with mud and blood (7.84), offers an extreme manifestation of war depriving people of their daily needs, matching disposition to material conditions.

The success of the Spartans in securing Persian subsidies can be traced, falteringly at first, through the final stages of Thucydides’s account (8.5, 29, 37, 87), then with decisive success in Xenophon’s Hellenica (1.5.1–7, 2.1.10–15, 3.8). Xenophon’s post-Peloponnesian narrative regularly refers to problems in raising resources for war making: a feature of the straitened circumstances characteristic of public economies through the fourth century. Elsewhere, Xenophon manipulates the theme of plunder-as-revenue (e.g., 4.4.16, 4.5.6–9, 5.1.7, 6.5.27; cf. 5.3.14 for money offered to “buy off” a planned invasion).

Xenophon recounts how the political circumstances of the fourth century involved the major poleis in plenty of campaigning on the basis of inadequate wealth (cf. 2.1.1, 6.2.37; 4.8.35, 5.1.12; cf. McKechnie and Kern 1988). Athens was particularly exposed: “As for the Athenians, they could see that owing to their help the power of Thebes was growing, yet no money came in to them from Thebes for the upkeep of their fleet” (6.2.1). Such is Xenophon’s prelude to the peace of 375 with Sparta. A second, unstated characteristic of Xenophon’s writing is an awareness of the “peace dividend.” Apart from the Athenians (as above), it is imputed to the Corinthians (4.4.1), who are made to contrast the devastation of their own land and population with the prosperity of their allies at peace. The economic advantages of peace over war are made explicit in Poroi or “Ways and Means” (5–6), apparently conceived in the aftermath of the wasteful “Social War” between Athens and her former allies (4.40).

Poroi is arguably the most sophisticated piece of political economy to survive from antiquity (Gauthier 1976). This reassessment is in line with the general revival of appreciation for Xenophon as author. Like other of Xenophon’s writings (Cyropaedia, Anabasis, Agesilaus), Poroi has no obvious antecedents, suggesting that he found existing genres unsuited to his intentions. No other Greek author provides a comparable range of perceptions of warfare, albeit from an aristocratic perspective. The possibilities can only be hinted at here (reassessments in Dillery 1995; Dewald 2007; Tuplin 2004, 2007; Gray 2010).

Xenophon’s experience with the Athenian cavalry is directly reflected in his Hipparchios or “The Duties of a Cavalry Commander” and in Peri hippikes or “On Horsemanship,” which is explicitly concerned with the war horse (1.2, 3.7, 12.1). But military matters feature in almost all his writings; even Cynegeticus or “On Hunting with Dogs” is advertised as “affording the best training for war” (12.1; cf. 1.17). The Anabasis is the fullest account to survive of a Greek military campaign, seen from the inside. Recent studies also testify to its sociological, anthropological, psychological, and topographical content (especially Nussbaum 1967; Lee 2007; Rood 2005, 2010). Above all, the Anabasis is an extended case study in military leadership, perhaps the recurring theme in Xenophon’s writings. It dominates his Agesilaus: an exposition of the manifold virtues of Agesilaus as king and commander. The Battle of Coronea (394) forms a centerpiece (2.9–16), including a terse account of the debris of death left on the battlefield (14). Xenophon’s strong Spartan connection shapes his Constitution of the Lacedaemonians, which focuses on the process attributed to Lycurgus for producing first-class soldiers. The misleadingly named Cyropaedia or “Education of Cyrus” is actually a fictionalized account of Cyrus’s upbringing and military achievements, conceived as to elucidate the art of leadership (1.1–5; see Due 1989). It has been described as: “The most illuminating evidence for the nature of classical infantry combat … a vehicle for Xenophon’s ideas about military practice and leadership…” (van Wees 2004: 99).

From Xenophon’s more theoretical writings, Oeconomicus or “The Estate Manager” (see Garlan 1975: 89–90; social and historical commentary by Pomeroy 1994) repeatedly relates work on the land to warfare (4.2): both necessitate ponos (endurance of effort). The third book of Memorabilia or “Reminiscences of Socrates” opens with a series of vignettes in which Socrates discusses with his followers aspects of military command (1–5). The ability of one Dionysodorus to teach the art of generalship for a fee is tested and found wanting (1); a disappointed candidate for a generalship is reluctantly made to agree that a “good estate manager” (oikonomos) might prove a successful commander (4). The sequence ends with a wide-ranging discussion between Socrates and the younger Pericles about the best ways to ensure success in battle against the Boeotians. As reported by Xenophon elsewhere (Hell. I.7), things turned out rather differently for Pericles (see also III.6.6–10 [defense of territory]; 9.1–3 [courage]; 12.4–8 [desireability for fitness in war]).

“THE REAL WAR WILL NEVER GET IN THE BOOKS”

So wrote Walt Whitman in his autobiographical fragments Specimen Days (1892: 80–1), recalling in part his experiences as a surgical dresser in the Civil War: “Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors … and it is best they should not.…” Not until the First World War did warfare in modern literature begin to approach the place it held for the Greeks. War was not generally deemed a suitable subject for literary treatment, nor were writers much involved or even interested in battle (cf. Harvey 1998). For Whitman, what mattered was the response he witnessed of rank-and-file soldiers to suffering caused by wounds or disease. As has been seen, much of Greek writing (and speaking) on war before Plutarch contained the equivalent of these indirect traits and asides. Even the major Greek historians (pace Whitman) were not writing conventional military history; with differing emphases, their accounts embed warfare in contemporary society and economy. That is crucially the case with our final text: Aeneas Tacticus’s pamphlet How to Survive under Siege (cf. Whitehead 1990: 34–42).

The author is plausibly identified with Aeneas of Stymphalus, whom Xenophon reports as an influential commander-in-chief among the Arcadians in the 360s (Hell. 7.3.1). In any case, the writer’s practical involvement in warfare could have been suspected from the voice of authority and experience. His military thinking is tightly tied in with civil life in the polis, here conceived as a small-scale community, half a world away from Athens or Sparta. Openness to attack from near or more distant neighbors may be inferred from Aeneas’s advice (3.4) that the citizens organize themselves for military action, “in time of peace”(see further Chaniotis, 447–9).

Aeneas introduces the reader to familiar aspects of the city (astu) and its territory (chora), but mobilized for the better waging of war. Under threat of invasion, the territory cannot fulfill its prime function of supplying itself and the city with raw materials. By proclamation, crops and free persons are to be brought into the city (10.3); the “infrastructure” of the chora is to be systematically devastated, denying anything of use to the enemy (8.1–5), who will, in any case, loot and destroy what he can (16.3–12).

Normal types of social interaction are curtailed in the interests of security. Private sacrifice is forbidden as are communal; festivals are not to be canceled, at least, not in the city (10.4), but should be viewed with suspicion as providing cover for conspirators (4.7, 17.1, 22.17). At a given signal, all stores and shops are to close their doors (10.14). There is to be monitoring of slaves and strangers who may wish to leave to contact disaffected citizens in exile (10.5–6).

As for the citizens, they are to be carefully integrated into the military machine. The “most prudent and experienced in war” are to liaise with the civil authorities; the fittest men are reserved for commando-like actions (1.4–5); at a pinch, womenfolk may be disguised as men to appear on the walls, but they must not try to throw anything: that will give the game away (40.4). Even animals had their part to play. Dogs and cocks which might give away a night sortie are to be made mute (23.2; cf. 22.14, 24.18). On the other hand, dogs tethered outside the walls may alert the guards to spies or deserters (22.14).

Interaction between citizens and mercenaries is to be carefully managed (12–13). Mercenaries (even allies) must not outnumber the citizen-soldiers. Pay is predictably a major issue; best assured by having the wealthiest citizens assume responsibility for several mercenaries apiece. The mercenaries themselves are to be called together in camp and, “when everyone is listening,” informed of their terms of employment, concluding with: “undermining morale in camp is a capital offense” (10.18–19). Aeneas then turns to citizen morale, stressing the need for unanimity, which emerges as a major preoccupation, indicative of the interface within the polis between warfare, stasis, and internal politics (10.20–11.14, 14). Such is the context for Aeneas’s concern that, should any agreement with the besiegers be broken, parents of children taken as hostages should be prevented from witnessing the “sad end” of their execution (10.23).

In its blending of pathos with pragmatism (anxiety that the parents might turn subversive), this passage seems an appropriate conclusion to Greek writing on warfare. Aeneas and his predecessors, intimately involved with the life of the community, contrast with the academic Tactics of Asclepiodotus (first century), and his ideal phalanx of 16,384 men. Of this Oldfather writes, “The tramp of the phalanx, that had once reverberated among the hills around Thermopylae and Marathon, now echoed feebly in the halls of theorists and rhetoricians” (1923: 231).

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