Ambush
Page 9
In spite of this blind spot about other troops caused by the admiration Greek historians had for the bravery of citizen hoplites, we can still glean enough information to say that great numbers of poor, light-armed citizens almost always fought alongside the heavy infantry and that cavalry, mercenaries, archers and other ‘helpers’ could have taken part in auxiliary operations.53 The appearance of light-armed troops in the early Spartan army of Tyrtaeus’ day shows that they had played the same role at least since the seventh century BCE.54 In some cases their numbers were reduced for practical reasons. Far fewer light-armed troops went on overseas campaigns in the Archaic period, for example, when warships were small and commanders tried to fill them with as many hoplites as possible.
The Greeks had no squeamishness about slaughtering their enemies in any way possible, including during ambush and flight. In a fragmentary poem found on papyrus, Tyrtaeus imagines that Messenians ‘will kill every Spartan that they catch fleeing the battle’.55 In 510 the men of Croton routed the invading Sybarites and killed every single one they caught.56 Fleeing from the Athenians after a defeat in 460, some Corinthians became trapped in a field surrounded by a ditch, with no exit. The Athenians blocked the front with hoplites, surrounded the Corinthians with light-armed troops, and stoned them to death.57
The Propaganda Factor
The reason there is so much debate over the nature and development of the hoplite phalanx is that only a handful of passages define our perceptions of Archaic and Classical battle. Besides the comments of Mardonius, the interpretation of the mechanics of a phalanx largely depend on Thucydides’ account of Mantinea58 and Polybius’ well-known comparison of the phalanx and legion.59 Polybius points out that the phalanx has only one time and one place in which it could perform its peculiar function.60 If the enemy phalanx declined battle when one side offered it, the formation was quite useless. He goes on to explain that the Macedonian phalanx was not adapted to encounter unexpected attacks, unlike the Roman legion which could adapt itself to every place and time and could meet attack from every quarter.61 Of course, Polybius had a subtlety concealed agenda of Roman propaganda behind his analysis – a comparison slanted to highlight Roman tactical superiority, which was aimed at discouraging further Greek resistance to Rome.62 He also compares current Roman practices concerning deception with those of the Greeks: ‘The ancients chose not to conquer their enemies by deception (apaté) regarding no success as brilliant or secure unless they crushed their adversaries’ spirit in open battle … Therefore they declared wars and battles in advance, announcing when and where they were going to deploy. But now they say only a poor general does anything openly in war.’63 Polybius condemns secrecy, surprise attacks and trickery in war, while upholding the Romans as paragons of virtue.64
We see the same attitude in Demosthenes when he wraps himself in a nostalgia about the ‘Achilles ethos’ and glorifies the ‘good old days’ when there was open warfare with citizen armies and conflicts were restricted to the spring and summer and without bribery.65 His idealised vision of the past is in contrast to the revolutionising of warfare under Phillip II. They are both singing the same tune about ‘the ancients’ in contrast to the miserable present. Demosthenes’ attitude comes from his series of outbursts against Philip and has no more historical validity that the supposed Archaic treaty banning missile weapons that belongs to the pan-Hellenic glorification of Archaic Greece as the golden age.66 Ephorus, the fourth-century historian, is usually cited as the source for this pact, but, as Everett L. Wheeler has recently argued, the story was probably invented by Ephorus as part of a protest against the catapult, a frightening new distance weapon in his day.67 Archaic battles included projectile weapons with light-armed men – javelin and stone throwers, slingers and archers fighting in the phalanx, not in separate units or behind the hoplites.68 There was never a point when only hoplite fighters were used. Light-armed troops were able to fight in a more open formation than hoplites, with every man independent of his fellows. They existed throughout the Classical period. These light-armed troops could move rapidly from one threatened pass to another or stage an ambush.
Certainly fighting with hoplites caused the Greeks to be concerned about not merely the fact, but also the manner, of victory in battle. In Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, a character urges an attack upon a small and vulnerable group of enemy soldiers. Cyrus says instead that it is better to wait for them all to assemble: ‘If less than half of them are defeated, be sure they will say that we attacked a few because we feared the mass of them, and so they will not consider themselves defeated, and you will have to fight another battle.’69 It is from this context of large battles that the Greek sense of ‘fair play’ in war may come, famously pointed out as characteristic of the Greeks by a Persian character in Herodotus.70
When Light-Armed, When Hoplite?
Some particularly poverty-stricken regions such as Aetolia had always used light-armed troops to stage ambushes, while larger poleis such as Athens had both hoplite forces and light-armed troops that are mentioned fighting side by side in a number of armed conflicts. At the Battle of Delium in Boeotia in 424, the Athenians found themselves with only hoplites and cavalry while their adversaries marshalled a force of 7,000 hoplites, 10,000 light-armed soldiers, 500 peltasts and 1,000 cavalrymen. The outcome is not surprising. The Athenians lost. Later in the Sicilian expedition, the Athenians imported peltasts from Thrace with the intention of transporting them by ship, together with other reinforcements. But the 1,300 mercenaries reached Athens too late and they were sent back to their homeland. They achieved an ‘inglorious renown’ through the carnage they inflicted on the little town of Mycalessus in Boeotia.71
References to light-armed troops become much more frequent in the course of the Peloponnesian war. The rules of engagement were changing. During an expedition to Aetolia, the Athenian general Demosthenes learned, to his cost, how effective these fighters and their type of combat could be against regular hoplites. The hoplites suffered constant harassment from projectiles and were unable to react with sufficient speed, for their opponents fled out of range as soon as they attempted to pursue them. It is true that, one year later, Demosthenes resorted to light-armed troops to overcome Spartan hoplites entrenched on the island of Sphacteria. The Spartans, too heavy and slow, were unable to catch up with their enemy over the undulating ground. They were also extremely vulnerable to the arrows, javelins and slingsmen’s stones.72
While it is true that the Greeks of the Classical period deployed their hoplite troops on an open plain and did not sneak up on the enemy when attacking other hoplites, we actually have many examples of the Greeks attacking an enemy’s camp or springing an ambush at night.73 In spite of the image of the Spartans as the ultimate combat warriors, scholars have pointed out the irony of their having this image when they trained their warriors in stealth and deception.74 On the one hand there is the idealised picture of their courage, valour and loyalty, often referred to as the ‘Spartan mirage’.75 On the other hand there is an image of them held by others who knew them, expressed by Pausanias,76 that describes them as the most traitorous of the Greeks in war. It is true that they trained for battlefield combat but they also trained their soldiers in stealth, theft and other types of duplicity. Even the Spartans agreed that trickery could be heroic.77 When a commander brought his hoplites out into a plain, he did so because he believed that his troops were a match for the enemy. Under these circumstances, there was no reason to try risky or deceptive manoeuvres. But we must also realise that a large hoplite battle was not always the venue of the action, and it was never the proper milieu for an ambush. The ambush is the preserve of lightly armed, mobile troops on broken terrain.
Ambush and Deception
Scholars have traditionally posited a period of decorous hoplite warfare, neatly contained in the Archaic period. Then, as the Peloponnesian war progressed, these conventions broke down and there suddenly appears, to everyone’s horror, a gloves-off, no-h
olds-barred, realistic warfare. This change usually requires an explanation having to do with everyone’s moral degeneration. But this is an artificial framework. Military trickery goes all the way back to the beginnings of Greek warfare.78
Big wars were never the whole story, not in the Archaic Age and not even in the great conflict between the Athenian Empire and the Peloponnesian League. Because of the prevalence of local conflict, the Peloponnesian war was not fought just by two ‘blocks’. Hostility between neighbouring cities determined adherence to Sparta or Athens, in a quiltlike pattern.79 Even within city-states themselves, a polis might just as easily be betrayed by a fifth column from within than an assault from without. Luis Losada writes: ‘Developments in the use of light-armed troops and smaller fighting units, a natural result of the limitation of traditional hoplite battles, contributed to the tendency to attempt fifth-column captures.’80 Indeed, the Athenian strategy during the Peloponnesian war was to avoid decisive land engagements and trust in their ships and walls. No battle of the traditional sort occurred until the eighth year of the war at Delium.81 This is why light-armed troops, which were more manoeuvrable in smaller actions on different types of terrain, came into use to a greater degree than had previously been the case in Greek warfare.82 Why would Greeks who would rather see their cities in the hands of a foreign enemy rather than in the hands of their domestic political enemies, have any moral qualms about sneaking up on their opponents?83
It is true that Greek city-states in the Classical period waged agonistic warfare against similar states, limiting it with agreed laws and conventions. At the same time Greek political rhetoric glorified the Archaic hoplite’s love of honourable, pre-arranged pitched battles that were bloody but decisive.84 But, as John Lendon correctly writes: ‘Greek hoplite warfare existed in perennial tension between battle conducted according to understood rules and the crafty subversion of those rules.’85 Classical warfare was full of deceptions and ambushes. Why the Greeks continued to apply the rules despite the fact that they were frequently broken, and despite the advantage that breaking them frequently yielded, has been discussed elsewhere, but one might ask whether the practical Greeks were simply choosing the tactics that were most appropriate for any given situation.86 After all, the Greeks had to adapt to competition in the real world. My goal is limited to discussing the exceptions, and explaining why their tactics seemed appropriate at the time and whether or not they were successful. The examples are so numerous, I have divided them into three different categories: surprise attacks; night ambushes; and surprise attacks at sea. These will be the subject of the next three chapters. It seems a bit ironic, perhaps even surprising, that one can fill so many chapters with accounts on an activity that supposedly never happened in ancient Greek warfare.
CHAPTER 5
Surprise Attacks – Fifth Century
AS ILLUSTRATED IN THE last chapter, the Greeks of the Classical Age chose to fight in hoplite formations, which followed very specific rules of conduct when fighting. Scholars would agree that hoplite tactics were not based on surprise or speed.1 Yet, although surprise attacks and ambushes were not tactics appropriate to the phalanx or the heavily armed soldier, there are dozens of examples in the Classical Age where operations were conducted at night or at dawn for the sole purpose of surprising the enemy. The statement that ‘there is very seldom any attempt to take advantages or effect surprises’ can only be true if it refers to attacking an enemy’s phalanx before it was properly drawn up.2 Surprise attack and ambush were certainly used in the Classical Age, and there is enough evidence to suggest that, when executed well, these were effective techniques, albeit difficult to stage. Surprise attack was a tactical possibility when the proper type of troops were available, and the right circumstances presented themselves.
While modern commentators insist that only infrequently do we find surprise attacks on Greek hoplite armies or their camps, nevertheless we see that a daring commander such as Pisistratus attacked an enemy during an afternoon siesta in 546,3 and the Spartan king, Cleomenes, attacked an Argive camp during breakfast in 494.4 The same Greeks who had no fear of fair fights were very afraid, according to Herodotus, of being ‘worsted by guile’ and often attacked first to avoid being unpleasantly surprised.5 Even though the etiquette of Classical Greek hoplite warfare remained fixed, the ruse of attacking an army while it was off-guard never went out of style. Examples of surprise attack begin in the Archaic Age and continue non-stop into the next centuries.
When the Greeks told stories about their distant past, they always included clever ambushes: for example, Polyaenus reports an event concerning the Messenians in the eighth century that is a classic deception operation. The Spartans had been at war with the Messenians for twenty years, when the two kings, Polydorus and Theopompus, pretended to have a disagreement. A deserter was sent to leak the information that the kings were quarrelling and would separate their forces. The Messenians watched closely. Theopompus moved a little distance away with his army. When they saw his departure, the Messenians assumed Polydorus was by himself and advanced on him from the city with all their forces. When the scouts gave the signal, Theopompus came around unseen, captured the deserted city and attacked the Messenians from the rear, while Polydorus’ men attacked from the front. Surrounded, the Messenians were defeated.6 While the story comes from a much later date, and Polyaenus can be notoriously unreliable as a source, there is no reason why this operation could not have been staged in the eighth century. The Greeks loved to attribute clever stratagems to their ancestors, and seemed to have no moral qualms about using such techniques or attributing them to an earlier age where they might sully the supposed pristine reputation of their ancestors.
Surprise was a good principle in theory, but in practice it was hard to achieve.7 Clausewitz himself warns that it would be a mistake to regard surprise as a key element of success in war. Surprise attack is not a magic bullet that works every time or in every situation. It must be used selectively. Two of the most common times to stage an ambush were at night or at dawn. For a night attack to succeed, for example, it is necessary to have a good knowledge of the layout of the defence as well as the enemy’s dispositions during battle since the enemy knows the ground he occupies better than the attacker.8 While night attacks can be especially effective against small forces, a larger force has enough resources to keep fighting until help arrives.9 In planning a night attack, the projected cost can be tightly calculated, but the benefit is always a matter of speculation until the ambush is executed.10 Clausewitz recommends that night operations stop at daybreak to enable the attacker to profit from the enemy’s confusion.11 Whatever the obvious difficulties, ambushes at night and dawn continued to occur throughout Greek history.
Thucydides, for example, uses the adverb exapinaios (all of a sudden, by surprise) to describe how during the winter of 429/8 the Thebans had entered the city of Plataea at night and both surprised and frightened the Plataeans who had posted no guards.12 The fright was caused by the invasion being done by night when the Plataeans could not see, and also because they thought a far greater number had entered the city. Their fear caused the Plataeans to put up no fight and ask for terms. During the negotiations, they discovered how few Thebans there actually were, and only then did they counterattack. Their operation, too, was set up at night. The Plataeans dug through the common walls of their own houses and joined each other without being seen. They attacked while it was still night to create a panic among the enemy troops.13 They also had the advantage of knowing the city better that the Thebans who were ignorant of the right way out. The only effective way out was the gate through which they had entered, and the Plataeans had that blocked. Even the women contributed to the effort as they pelted down roof tiles on the heads of the Thebans trying to escape.14 However, it was also a Plataean woman who gave an axe to the Thebans so they could chop open the city gates and escape.15
One of the most famous events, and indeed a turning point of the Pelopon
nesian war, was an Athenian surprise attack in 425 on a hemmed-in force of Spartan hoplites on the island of Sphacteria (see map 2).16 About 420 hoplites and an equal number of retainers occupied this cigar-shaped island. The Athenians had them blockaded, but they knew they could not maintain the blockade through the winter when the trapped men could escape. Each day of the truce allowed food to be smuggled to the Spartans on the island, and this meant they could hold out a little longer.17 The Athenians did not want to lose this bargaining chip and were searching for a way to overcome the Spartans. Cleon saw this danger and committed an Athenian force to capturing the Spartans on Sphacteria.18
The Athenians were dubious about landing on an uninhabited island with pathless woods that would favour the enemy.19 Even if they landed with larger force, they would suffer losses by being attacked from unseen positions (i.e. ambushed) because the Spartans knew the terrain better. Demosthenes is given the command20 and the Athenians attempt a landing on both sides of the island (see map 2). They found themselves on the island in cramped conditions, which were then exacerbated by an accidental forest fire started by Athenian soldiers trying to cook a meal.21 It was only after the woods were burned off that the Athenian commander, Demosthenes, could see how many Spartans they were up against.22 He discerned that most of the enemy troops were concentrated near the centre of the island, guarding the water supply.23 There was another force near the northern tip of the island opposite Pylos, meaning there were only thirty hoplites guarding the point of landing at the southern end.24 The men in the Spartan outpost are described by Thucydides as being ‘still in their beds and trying to snatch up their arms’.25