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Waldemar Heckel and F.S. Naiden

Although the study of ancient Greek military history has flourished in the last few decades, no handbook or survey exclusively about this subject has appeared. The Wiley Companion to Greek Warfare fills this intellectual and pedagogical gap. It considers how Greek states prepared themselves, materially, psychologically, and politically, for confrontations with their adversaries; how the techniques used to overcome the enemy on the battlefield—whether on land or sea—were honed through training, tactical innovation, and technological advances; how the logistical demands of maintaining an army on the march or in distant lands were met, and how their warfare was justified in the face of moral and religious prohibitions against murder and other types of violence.

Even though an army moved on its stomach, it was motivated to move by the heart, and directed by the mind. Propaganda was used for justification and condemnation; the noble and manly virtues of the good soldier contrasted with the alleged cowardice and effeminacy, or the inhumanity and brutality, of the enemy, who was on some occasions to be feared and on others to be despised. For Greek imperialists, degraded enemies were easily confected, and invented atrocities promulgated. For those who faced aggression, the defense of family, property, and shrines was sufficient motivation; but even then the accumulated warrior traditions of the past, such as those that inspired the Thebans in 335 (Diod. Sic. 17.11.5), were no less essential than mobilizing troops or digging trenches and strengthening walls.

Equally important were the skills of the general, scout, spy, mechanic, smith, diviner, architect, teamster, and horseman. These and other technai let the ancient Greeks invent or make better artillery, improve ship design, create some genres of military literature, advance the use of combined arms, and make strategy, previously a royal and aristocratic monopoly, a matter of public debate. In all these regards, the Greeks were learning from, and competing with, their Near Eastern and European neighbors from Thrace to Persia. Notions that Greek warfare was unique or seminal, or even that it was superior to the warfare of neighboring peoples, are all exaggerated, the truth being that the Greeks and the Macedonians were distinctive and influential, but superior only for a brief period, one not much longer than the period of German superiority in modern Europe, and much shorter than the period of Roman superiority that would begin in the third century BCE.¹ The Romans came to regard the Greeks as unmilitary, if not effeminate.² The Pharaohs who hired Greek mercenaries thought differently.

Waging war was not an isolated event (or even a series of events), but a process that touched upon virtually all aspects of Greek life. And, even though the Greeks did not worship Mars (Ares) as the Romans did—indeed Ares is depicted in a most unsympathetic way by Homer (Il. 5.888–898)—war dominated much of their lives or at least hovered on the horizon. Alexander the Great was paradigmatic. From birth, he had been raised for war, as both a combatant and a tactician, a leader and a comrade—a soldier foremost in both the formulation and execution of orders. His first teachers imbued in him a passion for the aristeia of the Homeric hero and the strict discipline that had made Sparta the living guidebook of military virtue, and he went on to read not only the Iliad and the works of the Athenian tragedians but also Xenophon and, most likely, Herodotus. The written word and its interpretation by some of the Greek world’s greatest minds provided the underpinning of his warcraft, while the veteran generals of Macedon were there to advise, their actions clearly visible; for the prince had been thrust at an early age into the thick of battle.

Although arguably the greatest warrior of antiquity, Alexander was not unique. Every man’s fame, as the man from Seriphus reminded Themistocles, depended on the prestige of his homeland, and that, in turn, depended on public and especially military service. Even those leaders who were orators rather than generals celebrated military heroes, many of them ancestors, others ordinary citizens. What these men did, and how they acted in what must be one of life’s greatest trials, reflected the many arts (and the mundane demands) of war described in this volume, one that probes beyond the familiar if often dubious record found in the works of the historians and orators or in contemporary public documents.

Unlike two other recent books, The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare and The Oxford Handbook of Warfare in the Classical World, this volume does not subordinate Greece to Rome, or the entire length of Greek history to whatever part of it is “Classical.” So much is clear from the titles of these books, but this one also differs from the other two by covering more topics in a larger number of chapters.³ The editors have sought to include all major topics in the field of Greek and also Macedonian military history, including not just armies and their operations but also the economic, social, psychological, and cultural context of warfare. We have added neglected operational topics such as strategy and the role of Greeks in foreign service, and four chapters on the armies and methods of the Greeks’ and the Macedonians’ opponents, but we have also added new contextual topics such as religion, civil war, iconography, propaganda, and the roles of slaves and women. Basics such as generalship and siege warfare receive whole chapters. Compared to other works, this book has more to say about realia, less about discourse, and in the latter case, it pays more attention to propaganda and monuments and less to general features of Greek culture.

This book also draws on more diverse contributors, totaling 28 from 11 countries. The majority are not from the United States and the United Kingdom; 11 are not from English-speaking countries. Some are authorities who have written for other military handbooks; others are young scholars working from monographs in neglected fields; most are ancient historians, but some are specialists such as archaeologists, or historians of religion. All in all, these scholars have less investment in idées reçues concerning Greek hoplites, Greek models, and Greek distinctiveness.

These differences reflect a bigger one, concerning method. The chapters in this book center on some type of evidence, or some period that written sources establish as distinctive, or some locale that archaeological and artistic sources establish as distinctive. Approaches to this body of evidence vary; they may be biographical, operational, institutional, social, economic, or cultural. Operations do not always predominate, but always matter: why and how wars are won or lost, and made or avoided, is crucial for some topics, important for others, and relevant to all. The prelude and sequel to wars receives less attention; any homology between war and society receives less attention than differences between the two.

Both the Cambridge and Oxford volumes center largely on themes derived from social scientists, especially Weber, Durkheim, and Marx—although the last of these is manifest indirectly, via the Annales school of history. Sociology, in a word, outweighs political history. Operations reflect the influences of technological determinism or cultural hegemony. Why and how wars are won and lost thus becomes a misleading question. For combatants and civilians, all wars are lost. War itself is the only victor, and an undeserving one at that.⁴ These two books are not pacifist any more than this book is militarist, but an ethical as well as intellectual gap divides the two.

Never acknowledged, but nonetheless felt, is an assumption on the part of the Cambridge authors that Greek warfare is a distinctly Greek, not ancient, phenomenon; in other words, that it owes little or nothing to either neighboring societies or earlier ones, even if it may serve as the origin for later, Euro-American warfare. In this regard, the volume is better termed Finleyite than Marxist, since it adheres to a history of warfare that runs parallel to Finley’s notion of ancient Greece as the first slave society.⁵

At the same time, the book does not attempt to supplant the best work done in the Cambridge and Oxford volumes, such as the essays on navies and land battle in the former and the treatment of military medicine and mercenaries in the latter, all of which topics are accordingly omitted. In two cases, intelligence gathering and mental trauma, Frank Russell and Lawrence Tritle, who also contributed to (and, in the latter case, co-edited one of) the earlier volumes, provide updated essays focused on certain aspects of their subjects.

This book suffers from several of the same gaps as its predecessors. It does not describe Greek federal armies, and it leaves aside important Near Eastern forces against whom the Greeks and Macedonians did some fighting, including the forces of Carthage, Lydia, and Assyria.

All manuals of ancient warfare derive from the dated but valuable reference works written by German, often Prussian, scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁶ In the Cambridge History, the German legacy influences chapters on “Military Forces,” “War,” and “Battle,” whereas interest in the context of warfare accounts for “Warfare and the State” and “War and Society,” the switch from the one to the other being the occasion for introductory chapters on methods and sources. In the Oxford Handbook, similar introductory chapters come first, but a social and psychological concern, the common soldier’s experience of combat, supplies the title of the next part, “The Face of Battle,” as in John Keegan’s 1976 book, whereas the other large part, “Impacts and Techniques” reconfigures traditional matter such as operations. This book again follows a different course, for it avoids generalizations about sources and methods, issues left to the authors of the chapters. It also avoids long, broad chapters such as “Warfare and the State,” which lead to some subjects being raised briefly in one chapter, and then briefly in another, yet leads to other topics being omitted. As for the context of warfare, this book avoids favoring any one perspective, and with it, any one author—in the case of “The Face of Battle,” Keegan’s work on infantry combat of the same name. Operational matters still come first, but each topic receives its due, repetition and omission both being avoided. The context of warfare is divided in two parts, on the one hand, the economic and technical context, and, on the other hand, the social and political, a third part being reserved for warfare in art and literature, in other words, for the ancient cultural context, as opposed to any contemporary, twenty-first century intellectual context into which ancient literary and artistic sources should fit.

Part I, a “Historical Survey,” focuses on changing issues in strategy and grand strategy—on Greek motives, goals, and responses to military success and failure, the Macedonians, Persians, Romans, and Carthaginians being given due weight. These five chapters cover chronological fundamentals, but deal with modalities and patterns more than with campaigns, and with campaigns more than with battles. Johannes Heinrichs, in Chapter 1 “Bronze Age and Early Greek Wars,” sees Mycenaean warfare in terms of “the centralized organization of life,” then deals with Homer as evidence of an ideological rather than sociological character. Among late Archaic Wars, Sparta’s efforts to dominate the southern Peloponnesus illustrate a grand strategy that evolves from annexation to domination. Chapter 2, Sabine Müller’s “The Persian Wars to Alexander,” gives a holistic account of the conflicts between the Achaemenids and both the Greeks and Macedonians, one that dismantles propaganda and rationalizations in order to demonstrate interdependence as well as rivalry. Frances Pownall’s Chapter 3 on “Internal Wars from the ‘First Peloponnesian War’ to Chaeronea” covers much the same period but centers on alliance systems and spheres of influence; one after another, the Greeks states failed to implement strategies that would that would do more collective good than harm. She emphasizes Persia’s role in this sequence of events.

Edward Anson, in Chapter 4 “Hellenistic Land Warfare,” shows how innovations introduced by Philip II of Macedon improved and professionalized armies, and thus enlarged the scale of Greek politics and warfare. Some changes occurred in weaponry, some in tactics, and some in the composition of armies. In this instance, military changes affected politics more than politics affected the military. Yet Melanie Jonasch, in Chapter 5 “Greek Warfare in Sicily,” this part’s last chapter, points out a major regional exception, in Sicily, where problems of colonization and rivalry with Carthage led to some technical innovations that Philip would adopt, but also to uniquely Sicilian patterns of warfare.

Part II, “Military Operations,” deals with the fundamentals of infantry, cavalry, and sieges, but not in uniform fashion. Heavy infantry fighting has received too much attention for too long, and has been used, or misused, to explain too much, from Greek constitutions to Greek farming, and so Fernando Echeverría Rey, in Chapter 6 “The Nature of Hoplite Warfare,” sets out to correct these emphases. This chapter is polemical, whereas Chapter 7, Carolyn Willekes’ “Cavalry Battle in Greece and the Hellenistic East,” builds on recent useful work about cavalry by analyzing the use of horses in combat. She seeks to recapture the experience of the ancient rider in handling his mount, whereas Echeverría Rey seeks to demolish the speculations of scholars who, unlike some German writers of the nineteenth century, did not have the benefit as well as the drawback of being infantry officers. David Whitehead’s topic, “Siege Warfare,” in Chapter 8 presents an altogether different challenge, that of blending Greek historiography with the long, complex development of ancient literature on the subject of poliorketika. He thus begins and ends with the most important siege writer, Philo of Byzantium, but after evaluating evidence from Herodotus and others. Here, as with the innovations of Philip II, changes in materiel did not by themselves confer decisive advantages.

Part III, “Military Personnel,” identifies a topic treated in handbooks going back to the nineteenth century, but never emphasized. The four chapters in this part of the book seek to correct the misplaced egalitarianism found in recent hoplite studies by acknowledging the place of both superiors and inferiors in Greek armies. Chapter 9, F.S. Naiden’s “The Organization of Greek Armies,” assesses the size of Greek and Macedonian forces, identifies large and small units, and specifies the numbers and ranks of Greek and Macedonian officers. Better command and control emerge not only among Spartans as opposed to others, but cavalry as opposed to infantry, and Macedonians as opposed to Greeks, while Hellenistic increases in army size do not accompany ascertainable gains in this regard. In Chapter 10 on “Generalship,” Joseph Roisman shows how effective high command, a long-recognized feature of fourth-century warfare, began far earlier, as shown by Homer, and thus was never a Spartan monopoly. Roisman describes the development of strategy through the career of Pericles as well as that of Philip II. The Hellenistic commander Epichares of Athens reveals another aspect of Greek generalship, protecting resources and frontiers in time of peace.

Many ancient authors report camp followers and their doings, but Chapter 11 by Mauricio Álvarez Rico on “Greek Camps and Camp Followers” is the first ever devoted expressly to this subject. Working from his monograph of 2013, he summarizes evidence from Aeneas Tacticus and others that the Greeks practiced castramentation, contrary to clichés about Roman orderliness and discipline and a Greek lack of the same. Camp followers, called “the mob” (ho ochlos) in Thucydides, might better be termed the denizens of a city on the move, to which the Macedonians imparted their own distinctive features.⁷ Another neglected aspect of Greek military personnel, Greeks serving in foreign armies—not merely mercenaries, but mercenaries adapting to the needs of foreign rulers—illustrates this book’s theme of Greek and Near Eastern interdependence. Jeffrey Rop’s Chapter 12 on this subject, “Greeks in Foreign Service: The Case of the Achaemenid Empire,” is also adopted from a recent monograph. Rop rebuts the common view that Greeks in Persian service were very largely hoplites who became valued by the Persian kings after Marathon. In fact, they first entered Persian service in 525, and often served as sailors and engineers.

Part IV, “War with Non-Greeks,” takes up the theme of Greco–Persian overlap through Michael Charles’ Chapter 13 “The Royal Elite of the Achaemenid Army,” in which he summarizes his recent articles to show that the famed 10,000 “Immortals” disappeared sometime after Xerxes, to be replaced by mercenary hoplites; two other units, the smaller Kinsmen Cavalry and the Apple-Bearers, an infantry counterpart to this cavalry, both survived. In Chapter 14 “Parthian Warfare under the Early Arsacids,” Marek Olbrycht surveys Parthian military organization, weapons, and armor before concentrating on the cataphracts, whom he describes as a heavy cavalry that developed from the confluence of “Central Asian nomadic cavalry tradition, Achaemenid military innovation, and the Macedonian challenge.” The long spear was first borrowed from the Macedonians not by the Arsacids, but by steppe peoples, the Massagetae and Dahae. It reached Parthia by an indirect route typical of the cross-connections traced in this volume.

The remaining chapters in this part deal with two less studied enemies, India and Thrace. India provided the Macedonians with elephants, the subject of Chapter 15 by Christopher Epplett, “Elephants in Hellenistic Warfare,” which asks whether the Successors and later the Romans made good use of this Indian military export. Epplett answers that at Gaugamela Persian mismanagement of elephants offered the Macedonians a warning that Alexander ignored, especially after he witnessed the success of Porus in using them at the Hydaspes. The Successors (but not Alexander) then put this new military arm to the test in more than a century of battles. The record was mixed: success at Ipsus, but failure on some other occasions. The Successors thus abandoned this exotic weapon, in spite of its shock power.

If Indian elephants were a luxury for Macedonian rulers, Greek and Macedonian equipment and methods were a necessity for Thracian tribes wishing to prevail against each other and against foreign invaders, as described by Emil Nankov in Chapter 16 “Thracian Warfare.” Nankov’s study explores the methodological problems of reconstructing military history from exiguous literary sources and scattered archaeological remains, especially battlefields, weapons hoards and militaria from graves and tombs.

The remaining parts of this book, Parts V–VII, turn from what might be called the foreground of warfare—strategy, operations, personnel, and foes—to the background, which is the general context in which ancient states made war. Part V deals with economic and technical context that directly affected victory and success; Parts VI and VII deal with topics that affected performance indirectly.

The first chapter in Part V, Chapter 17 deals with logistics—the little studied art of keeping soldiers alive and well before battle. The author, Stephen O’Connor, takes advantage of the numerous remarks on this subject in Xenophon, and branches out toward other commanders and other problems. Clichés about Greek improvisation and self-reliance prove untrue, the same as similar clichés about castramentation. The next chapter, Silke Müth-Frederiksen’s Chapter 18 on “Fortifications,” builds on recent scholarship that has shown how fortifications, “besides being military necessities, … are architectural monuments with multiple purposes and historical witnesses with much information to impart.” This chapter provides the material background for Whitehead’s on siege warfare, Chapter 8. Third in this part is Frank Russell’s “Military Intelligence,” Chapter 19, which deals with both strategic concerns and operations, and divides the latter according to defensive and offensive contexts. His pages on towers and fortlets complement Müth-Frederiksen’s in Chapter 18.

The remaining chapters in this part deal with economic matters. In Chapter 20 “The Economics of War,” Johannes Heinrichs moves from war finance, a much-treated topic, to the actual or expected effects of war on production, distribution, wealth, and growth. Greek states cared more about these issues than scholarship on taxes and budgets has recognized. Another underestimated aspect of Greek warfare is the use of slave labor, the subject of Peter Hunt’s Chapter 21 “War and Slavery in the Greek World.” Hunt finds the role of slaves to be ambiguous—indispensable as attendants and porters, but prone to desert, valuable as rowers, and occasionally as soldiers, but prone to rebel, easy to replace by taking captives, but only if the would-be captor was not captured and enslaved himself. Slave labor was thus both an asset and a potential liability, as especially illustrated by the Peloponnesian War. The same was true of agricultural land, as described in Chapter 22 “Agriculture and Greek Warfare” by Jeanne Reames and Anne Haverkost. This chapter shows how wars fought to obtain agricultural land gave way to devastating farms and fields as a military aim, a change culminating in the Peloponnesian War, which again is central. Then, in the Hellenistic period, belligerents increasingly relied on farmers’ markets to feed larger armies operating farther from home. Instead of providing a socioeconomic basis for armies, as in the work of Victor Davis Hanson, agriculture alternately provided an asset and a target.

Like Part V, Part VI has two sections, the first devoted to the social and psychological context of warfare, and the second to the political and legal. In Chapter 23 on “Battle Trauma in Ancient Greece,” Lawrence Tritle narrows the focus of his previous work on suffering in battle and considers psychological trauma, as reported in Herodotus and other sources. The disorientation, or even hallucinations, that Tritle discovers overlap with the military epiphanies reported by F.S. Naiden in Chapter 24 “Religion and Warfare,” which covers epiphanies as well as sacrifice, divination, and post-battle supplication, games, and the erection of trophies. This chapter describes all the religious rites that would commonly occur during a campaign. The following piece, Elizabeth Carney’s Chapter 25 “Women and War in the Greek World,” might appear in any of several parts of this book: the abuse of women captives links it to the subject of trauma, the enslavement of captives links it to slavery, and the role played by women in sieges links it to siege warfare. Most camp followers were women, and just a few of them, all Macedonian or Epirote, were in charge of armies, even if they left operations to a male lieutenant.

The chapters touching on politics begin with Chapter 26 by Sheila Ager on several phenomena that these rules did not always either prevent or recognize, the “Piracy, Brigandage, and Terrorism” of her title, for all of which Greek literature supplies examples from Homer onwards. She draws discrete parallels with modern events, while always mindful of tendentious vocabulary, whether ancient or modern. Last in this part of the volume is Chapter 27 by Gordon Shrimpton on “Civil War: Forgetting as the Path to Reconciliation,” for which he provides a range of examples of stasis, showing how this term applies both to civil wars and to the disagreements and rivalries leading up to it, mainly by the use of elaborate examples from the history of Athens and Corcyra.

Finally, Part VII on “Warfare in Art and Literature” includes two chapters on visual material and two on literary texts. The first, Chapter 28 “The Iconography of War” by Olga Palagia, deals with the iconography of historical battles in Greek art. She provides a survey from the Persian Wars down through the battle of Pydna some 300 years later. Next, Lawrence Tritle, in Chapter 29, writes on “War Monuments and Memorials,” with sections on battlefield memorials, battlefield graveyards, military cemeteries, military inscriptions, and heroic military sculpture. All these forms of expression extolled “civic virtue,” and thus civic responsibility. José Vela Tejada finds the same civic propaganda in Chapter 30 “War in Greek Poetry,” beginning with Homer, who inaugurates the enduring theme of the “beautiful death” suffered in exchange for imperishable glory. Archaic poets add a civic motive for this sort of death. Some plays deprecate civic martyrdom, but only some, and none of these works, Vela Tejada warns, should be termed pacifist. Civic propaganda, a Greek invention, was never subjected to thorough Greek criticism. “War and Propaganda,” in turn, is the title of the last chapter in this volume, Chapter 31. In it, Sabine Müller analyzes the propaganda propounded by Greek assemblies and officials, and later by Macedonian kings, and finds several themes that have lasted until our own times: protecting the homeland, liberating the oppressed, exacting revenge, safeguarding the peace, and fighting in a just cause. All might be accompanied by claims of divine support, even of predestined victory, a conclusion linking this chapter to Naiden’s Chapter 24 on religion and warfare, which describes the rituals used to make these claims.

The editors wish to thank both the contributors and the team of Todd Green and Andrew Minton at Wiley for their patience as we assembled and prepared the 31 chapters in this book. Waldemar Heckel conceived this volume and recruited nearly all the contributors;F.S. Naiden recruited the others and joined Heckel in editing it; and Erin Garvin and John Vanderspoel did the indispensable work of line editing and compiling the index and bibliography.