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Abstract
Influential and widespread approaches to archaic and classical Greek warfare maintain that pitched battles were simple and straightforward clashes of heavy infantry, fought according to a set of highly ritualized protocols that ultimately entailed the rejection of any kind of tactical refinement. Thus, this denial of tactics is supposed to be the result of the agricultural and agonistic nature of Greek warfare. Literary evidence, however, shows that Greek commanders had a constant concern about tactical issues and multiple tactical choices at hand. Therefore, what will be suggested here is a revision of the concept of 'tactics' applied to archaic and classical Greece. The idea of 'cultural tactics', the set of pragmatic decisions taken on the battlefield according to the ideological and cultural framework of the polis, will be put forward. This concept entails that all tactical decisions were guided by the cultural principle of favoring and protecting the citizen body.
This article highlights two aspects of the language used in Classical Greek literary sources to discuss pitched battle. First, the sources regularly use unqualified forms of the verb kinduneuein , “to take a risk,” when they mean fighting a battle. They do so especially in contexts of deliberation about the need to fight. Second, they often describe the outcome of major engagements in terms of luck, fate, and random chance, at the explicit expense of human agency. Taken together, these aspects of writing on war suggest that pitched battle was seen as an inherently risky course of action with unacceptably unpredictable results, which was therefore best avoided. Several examples show that the decision to fight was indeed evaluated in such terms. This practice casts further doubt on the traditional view that Greek armies engaged in pitched battles as a matter of principle.
Forty four years elapsed between the successive full-length treatments of the campaign and battle of Leuctra by J. Wolter, in: J. Kromayer, Antike Schlachtfelder IV, Berlin 1931, 290-316, and J.K.Anderson, in: Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon, Berkeley-Los Angeles 1970, chapter 10. After only another fifteen years it is perhaps not yet time for a new comprehensive discussion. In this article I merely wish to consider four specific problems connected with the campaign upon which various scholars have attempted to cast light in the last two decades.
INTRODUCTION Wars and fighting are very prominent in the literature of classical antiquity. That is notoriously true of Greek historians from Thucydides on. It is true of those early Greek poets who wrote about real events, like Simonides, and of those many others who wrote about a mythical world but one realistically set. It is even true of a poet like Sappho for whom a troop of horse, an infantry battalion, and a fleet of ships are numbers two, three and four in a list of desirables in which number one is the love-object (fr. 16 LP); and L. H. Jeffery once pointed out that the names of the Spartan girls in Alcman's Partheneion, Astymeloisa and so on, stress that they are the ‘daughters of a warrior aristocracy’. But in neither Greek nor even Roman culture was war glorified or regarded as the natural state of affairs, though winners naturally ‘glorified’ one aspect of war – their own victories. I will argue that war, at least of the full-scale ritual agonal sort found in literature, was not so common a feature of actual life as is often thought; also that non-literary evidence attests a range of institutionalized ways of avoiding armed conflict, about which literary sources are nearly silent. So if this was the reality, why the literary prominence of crude male war? This is the paradox of the sub-title of the present chapter; but there are really two related paradoxes, first that literature professes a dislike of war, and is yet fascinated by it; second, that the prominence of war is disproportionate to its frequency and significance in practice. © Cambridge University Press 2007 and Cambridge University Press, 2008.
LAND BATTLES INTRODUCTION: DEFINING THE BATTLEFIELD OF DEBATE From a traditional perspective Greek warfare suffered two ‘revolutions’: first, in the seventh century the emergence of heavy infantry in a dense formation (phalanx) coincided with the birth of the polis and demarcated the archaic period from the Dark Age warfare of Homeric epic, featuring fluid battles of a few heroes. A stringent unwritten code of warrior ethics and limited warfare came to govern operations within an in-group of major Greek poleis, and the expansion of the warrior function to all citizens capable of equipping themselves democratized warfare without abandoning completely the aristocratic ethos of Homeric heroes. The seeds of a second ‘revolution’ sprouted in the early fifth century. Conflicts with ‘outsiders’ (the Persian Wars, 490, 480–479) vindicated Greek belief in heavy infantry's superiority to mobile combat with the bow, cavalry and light infantry, but awakened both the concept of strategy, when faced with opponents not recognizing the Greek rules of the game, and the realization of the limited defensive resources of individual poleis vis-à-vis wealthier, numerically superior ‘outside’ powers. A horizon, accented by the length and horrors of the Peloponnesian War (431–404), had been crossed. Gazing over this divide, fourth-century and later writers (e.g. Isocrates, Demosthenes, Ephorus and Polybius) could romanticize ‘the good old days’ of the archaic period as a time of civilized warfare by an accepted code of behaviour. © Cambridge University Press 2007 and Cambridge University Press, 2008.
INTRODUCTION In a passage extolling the virtues of order the fourth-century historian and former general Xenophon waxes eloquent on the beauty of a well-organized army. >An orderly army elates its watching supporters, but strikes gloom into its enemies. I mean, who – if he is on the same side – could fail to be delighted at the sight of massed hoplites marching in formation, or to admire cavalry riding in ranks? And who – if he is on the other side – could fail to be terrified at the sight of hoplites, cavalry, peltasts, archers, slingers all arranged and following their commanders in a disciplined way? As we can see from Xenophon's list, hoplites were the most conspicuous and usually the most important Greek troops, followed by the four other major types of land troops in descending order of status: cavalry, peltasts (light-armed spearmen), archers and slingers. Most scholars argue that the basic trend in military forces from the early archaic period through the classical period was the establishment and then the decline of hoplite primacy. According to this model, hoplite supremacy was established in the early seventh century. All cities that wanted to win land battles had to man large hoplite armies and fight it out on the small agricultural plains of Greece. Light-armed troops and cavalry were of minimal significance. The late fifth and the fourth centuries saw the dominance of hoplites challenged as their vulnerabilities and the advantages of mixed armies became obvious. It is for this reason that Victor Hanson entitled a chapter on fourth-century warfare, ‘Hoplites as dinosaurs’. © Cambridge University Press 2007 and Cambridge University Press, 2008.
CONCEPTUALIZING INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS It is perhaps to be regretted that we no longer possess the treatise that the fourth-century Athenian philosopher and statesman, Demetrius of Phalerum, is supposed to have penned on the subject of international relations. If he owed any intellectual debt in this regard to Aristotle (whose pupil Theophrastus had advised Demetrius during the ten years that he ruled Athens as a Macedonian puppet), it is likely that the polis constituted his primary level of analysis. Certainly, in general accounts of Greek history today the origins and nature of the polis are almost invariably discussed prior to the protocols that governed relations between states. International relations are conceived as the political outcomes of interaction between individual states, each already endowed with a specific identity, interests and agendas, and the external behaviour that is exhibited by such states is conditioned by the internal or domestic structures that pertain in each case. Thus, in Thucydides’ scheme of things, the conservative and archaizing tendencies of the Spartan state predispose it to launch old-fashioned infantry raids on Attica in the early years of the Peloponnesian War, while the disastrous Athenian expedition to Sicily in 415 BC is the inevitable over-reach of a maritime imperialist ideology inextricably linked with the radical democracy. Yet in some respects this ‘atomistic’ model of international relations (the metaphor sometimes used is of ‘colliding billiard balls’) is not entirely satisfactory. First, it is clear that there was interaction among communities prior to the emergence of the polis – a process that was undoubtedly long and gradual but in terms of proto-urban nucleation, consolidation of territory and the formation of a ‘closed’ political community was already under way by c. 750. © Cambridge University Press 2007 and Cambridge University Press, 2008.
War was a holiday for the Spartans, a relief from the rigours of military training to which they dedicated their lives, according to Plutarch (Lyc. 22.1–2). The Spartan reputation for discipline, professionalism and even militarism was – and is – second to none in the ancient world. But if the Spartans stood out, it was more because military standards in the rest of Greece were remarkably low than because their dedication was extreme in comparison with, say, a modern soldier's. The other Greeks hardly engaged in any military training at all and showed no true dedication to warfare, as Xenophon was always keen to point out. For all the accounts and images of war in art and literature, for all the temples littered with dedications of booty and victory monuments, the impact of war on Greek society was rather limited. The demands of war usually did not dictate the daily routine of citizens, or shape social and political structures, or dominate economic activity. On the contrary, in archaic and classical Greece it was the demands of social, political and economic life which shaped warfare. war and the leisure class A defining feature of Greek society was the distinction between those who could afford to live off the labour of others – ‘the rich’ (plousioi) or leisured classes – and those who had to earn a livelihood – ‘the poor’ (penetes) or working classes. How best to spend one's leisure was a much-debated moral issue from the seventh century onwards, with poets and philosophers warning against idle displays of luxury and increasingly urging that a man's leisure should be spent actively participating in civic life, above all in politics and warfare. © Cambridge University Press 2007 and Cambridge University Press, 2008.
INTRODUCTION: CONCEPTS AND APPROACH ‘States make war and war makes states.’ Charles Tilly's dictum represents a view widely shared by political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists. ‘State’ and ‘war’ are not self-explanatory or uncomplicated concepts. Max Weber's immensely influential definition posited that the state encapsulated a human community, a definite territory and a monopoly of legitimate physical force (Gewaltsamkeit). That force is usually understood to have two functions: an internal one, consisting of the enforcement of legal order by a police force; and an external one, consisting of the defence of the state's territorial sovereignty by the army and navy. Guided largely by this thinking, several scholars classify ancient Greek communities, particularly the polis, as stateless societies: legal order was not ensured by a police force but through the custom of self-help practised by the community members themselves, and with rare exceptions there were no standing armies. In short, in most places legitimate violence had not yet become the monopoly of a central political authority. Recently, however, Mogens Hansen has pointed out that Weber's criterion of a monopoly of legitimate violence was not met even by major European states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; while it was often posited as an ideal, this monopoly seems never to have been realized in full. Such a partial emancipation from Weberian influence is a great leap forward. The present chapter argues that the concept of state is perfectly compatible also with polities in which legitimate force exists within an oligopolistic rather than a monopolistic system. © Cambridge University Press 2007 and Cambridge University Press, 2008.
I must begin with an explanation of my reasons for writing this paper. I have for some years been interested in modern attempts to reconstruct ancient campaigns and battles”especially those between Greece and Persia”in fact, most of the arguments I am using tonight were first written down in a rather different form in 1913. But I should not have thought it worth while to read them to this Society had not Admiral Custance's book, his lectures, his address to this Society and the discussion which followed it made me feel that this subject is still one of fairly general interest, that we are still far from arriving at certainty with regard to the history of ancient fights, and that it may be worth while to raise some general questions such as, “How far it really is possible to reconstruct ancient battles with any finality” and “how far the methods of attempting to do so usually followed by modern writers really are the soundest methods to employ”. © 1964, The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. All rights reserved.
It was once a commonplace of early Greek history that a major factor involved in the demise of the aristocratic regimes of the dark ages was the adoption of the hoplite form of warfare: that the rise of the early tyrants and other contemporary political developments were brought about at least in part by the inability of aristocrats to maintain their monopoly of privilege in the face of demands from non-aristocratic hoplites for political power commensurate with their new military importance. But in an important article in this Journal (lxxxv [1965] 110–22) Snodgrass challenged this view. He first argued that the hoplite phalanx was unknown in Greece before c. 650, and that its adoption can therefore not have affected the rise to power of the earliest tyrants. Similarly, if the Spartan rhetra is to be dated to the early seventh century, it cannot have been the result of demands made by a hoplite class. His case was not, however, merely chronological, for he suggested that it is in any event difficult to believe that the hoplite reform had immediate political consequences. The reaction to his case has been mixed, but his arguments have not been subjected to the careful examination they deserve.
I. INTRODUCTION
It has become a commonplace in contemporary historiography to note the frequency of war in ancient Greece. Yvon Garlan says that, during the century and a half from the Persian wars (490 and 480–479 B.C.) to the battle of Chaeronea (338 B.C.), Athens was at war, on average, more than two years out of every three, and never enjoyed a period of peace for as long as ten consecutive years. ‘Given these conditions’, says Garlan, ‘one would expect them (i.e. the Greeks) to consider war as a problem …. But this was far from being the case.’ The Greek acceptance of war as inevitable was contrasted by Momigliano and others with the attention given to constitutional changes and to the prevention of stasis : ‘the Greeks came to accept war like birth and death about which nothing could be done …. On the other hand constitutions were men-made and could be modified by men.’
Moralist overtones were not absent from this re-evaluation of Greek civilization. Havelock observed that the Greeks exalted, legitimized, and placed organized warfare at the heart of the European value system, and Momigliano suggested that:
The idea of controlling wars, like the idea of the emancipation of women and the idea of birth control, is a part of the intellectual revolution of the nineteenth century and meant a break with the classical tradition of historiography of wars.
This examination of the unwritten rules of Greek warfare suggests that the ideology of hoplite warfare as a ritualized contest developed not in the 7th century, but only after 480, when nonhoplite arms began to be excluded from the phalanx. Regular claims of victory, in the form of battlefield trophies, and concessions of defeat, in the form of requests for the retrieval of corpses, appeared in the 460s. Other 5th-century changes in military practice fit the theory that victories over the Persians led to the idealization of massed hand-to-hand combat. Archaic Greeks probably fought according to the limited protocols found in Homer.