Ambush

by Rose Mary Sheldon

  Advance contingents of any kind are referred to first as prodromoi by Herodotus, such as the force sent to Thermopylae under the command of Leonidas.71 These are not all scouts, but later the term prodromoi is used to describe units created during the reforms of Iphicrates.72 Kromayer and Veith write that their chief purpose was for intelligence gathering, especially trained skirmishers.73

  In The Cavalry General Xenophon recommends the use of proodoi in advance of the army primarily to show the men what paths they should follow, but also to discover an enemy. His advice could hardly be more succinct:

  … a prudent general can hardly show his wisdom better than by sending out advanced patrols in front of the ordinary exploring parties to reconnoitre every inch of ground minutely. So to be apprised of the enemy’s position in advance, and at as great a distance off as possible, cannot fail to be useful, whether for purposes of attack or defence.74

  His recommendations for reconnaissance are equally useful:

  It is the business of the hipparch to take infinite precautions … to make himself acquainted with the details, not only of his own, but of the hostile territory … should he personally lack the knowledge, he should invite the aid of others – those best versed in the topography of any district. Since there is all the difference in the world between a leader acquainted with his roads and one who is not; and when it comes to actual designs upon the enemy, the difference between knowing and not knowing the locality can hardly be exaggerated.75

  For Athens, Aristotle mentions mounted prodromoi.76 They appear to be a selected body of light cavalry used for scouting, who were successors to the horse archers of the fifth and early fourth centuries.77 The hamippoi existed among the Boeotians as light infantry who were stationed with and fought alongside the cavalry. The Athenians may have copied this practice.78

  By the first century, Onasander in his Strategikos writes with regard to military formations: ‘He [the general] must send ahead cavalry as scouts to search the roads, especially when advancing through a wooded country, or a wilderness broken up by ridges. For ambushes are frequently set by the enemy … in a level and treeless country, a general survey is sufficient.’79

  Although the Greek military organisation did not advance to a state of highly specialised functions, these passages mentioning skiritai, proodoi and prodromoi suggest that marching armies and their commanders realised the need for protection on the march against ambush. The vanguard of an army should be made up of men, including horsemen, whose function it was to establish the route and prevent ambushes. By the Hellenistic period such forces became prolific. Arrian has Alexander taking the lightest armed troops and archers to march along a rough and difficult road, leaving troops behind to guard the roads where he thought they might be ambushed.80

  In short, the use of ambush is a type of warfare best described by Mao Tse Tung in his masterpiece Guerrilla Warfare:

  What is basic guerrilla strategy? Guerrilla strategy must be based primarily on alertness, mobility, and attack … In guerrilla warfare, select the tactic of seeming to come from the east and attacking from the west; avoid the solid, attack the hollow; attack; withdraw; deliver a lightning blow, seek a lightning decision. When guerrillas engage a stronger enemy, they withdraw when he advances; harass him when he stops; strike him when he is weary; pursue him when he withdraws. In guerrilla strategy the enemy’s rear flanks, and other vulnerable spots are his vital points and there he must be harassed, attacked, dispersed, exhausted and annihilated.81

  The tactics followed by Demosthenes’ light infantry operated basically along these lines.82 E. C. Woodcock notices this and observes that: ‘There is only one way by which an inferior power can win battles against an enemy who has superior numbers, and Demosthenes discovered it …’83 He believes it was done by concentrating forces at a given time and in a given place where the enemy would be, for the moment, inferior. We should add, however, that it can be done by surprise attack.

  Communications

  Good communications between the ambushers was necessary for a successful attack. Similarly, communications between fifth columnists and the enemy were necessary for the success of a betrayal.84 All such communications had to be kept secret. In the case of attacking a city at night with the use of conspirators within, the fewer people who knew about the plot the better. Thucydides notes the secrecy involved in the betrayal of the long walls at Megara.85 There are only a few cases where numbers are mentioned. At Torone and Mende, the conspirators were few86 and at Byzantium apparently five men arranged the betrayal.87 These were all successful. The planned ambush on the gates of Megara, however, was known to many88 and was betrayed.89 The plot to betray Siphae and Chaeronea involved a number of conspirators90 and was also betrayed91 because the ambush was planned a considerable time before it was actually executed. There was, therefore, more time for the information to leak out.92 This was also true in the betrayal of cities when diplomatic channels and spies had to be used to communicate with the conspirators. One had to be very careful about signalling, especially using lights, lamps or torches at night. They could be seen by the enemy and tip off the target that an attack was imminent.93

  Counterintelligence

  Since the primary aim of an ambush or a betrayal was surprise, the best defence against it was to know about it ahead of time. Some would say foreknowledge was, in fact, the only effective defence.94 Walls and harbours could be fortified and guarded to thwart a surprise attack. Festivals could be cancelled if it was suspected they would be used as a cover for a surprise attack.95 At Megara, when the oligarchs found out about a suspected plot, they argued that it was not in the best interests of the city to march out to battle. They did not let on what they knew about the planned ambush, but they were careful to guard the gates against any fifth columnists.96 Apart from basic defensive measure, a city could call in allied forces to secure the walls. Spartolus appealed to Olynthus for a garrison to prevent its betrayal to the Athenians.97 One of the ways to prevent a betrayal was to detect the fifth columnists and have them executed before they could do any harm.98 Informers were often used to reveal the conspiracies. Sometimes the informers were people actually involved in the plots.99 Their motives are not always clear, but certainly rewards were offered by cities for such valuable intelligence. In fact, Aeneas Tacticus recommends that rewards be offered for information leading to the arrest of anyone plotting against a city.100 Informers were encouraged at Athens from Solon’s time on.101

  In short, the increase in the use of light-armed troops and smaller tactical units contributed to the active solicitation of fifth columns by attacking forces. The techniques required for these types of surprise operations included the clandestine exchange of information between traitors and the enemy, timing of attacks at night or during festivals, the strategic deployment of forces in commando-type strikes, and surprise attacks. Except for Losada’s study on fifth columns, these techniques have been largely ignored in the study of Greek military history. The basic strategic aim of such techniques was surprise, and yet this seems to go unnoticed by historians. Gomme, when discussing sieges in the fifth century, says that it was ‘a matter of wonder … that surprise was not more often attempted’.102 Frank Adcock writes:

  … surprise is highly valued by all good judges of war, and the power to achieve it is one criterion of military and naval resourcefulness. Yet surprises are not common in Greek or Macedonian war by land or sea. It is on the whole true that the art of reconnaissance and the gathering of intelligence was not a strong point of fleets or armies in antiquity. To achieve surprise usually needs good intelligence, just as does the capacity to guard against it.103

  These kinds of attitudes need to be discarded. Surprises were not rare during the fifth century, and were much in evidence during the Peloponnesian war. The offensive and defensive techniques employed, and the number of fifth columns used to subvert cities, make it clear that the use of surprise and the capacity to guard against it were common.104 The
use of intelligence to both plan surprise attacks and to detect them was present even if we do not have a huge amount of information about it.105 The numerous examples of surprise attacks – at night, at dawn, at sea, etc. – and the number of subversive plots, both successful and unsuccessful, support this conclusion. The cultural and intellectual history of the generation that lived through the Peloponnesian war was affected by this constant danger of surprise and subversion. Their reactions to the betrayals, their attitudes towards treason and internal security, and their fortress mentality may have been a result of these events. There were cultural implications for subsequent Greek military, political and cultural history.106

  CONCLUSION

  The Complexity of Greek Warfare

  CONSIDER THE IRONY THAT the Greeks never developed a word, a true generic term, for surprise attack – something they did so frequently that one can fill ten chapters with examples. And yet scholars assert that this is something the Greeks rarely, if ever, did.1 If the material collected here proves anything, it is that ambush and the use of surprise had always been a part of ancient Greek warfare. The Greeks were very good at sneaking up on their enemies – even other Greeks. Concomitantly, they also had ambivalent attitudes towards the appropriate and inappropriate routes to military success and to admirable and despicable human qualities or behaviours.

  As Hans van Wees writes: ‘It is the nature of nostalgia to project ideals onto the past, to make believe that the highest standards and noblest achievements used to be everyday realities. For Demosthenes and Polybius, pitched infantry battle clearly was such an ideal: a form of combat more prestigious than any other.’2

  From Homer onwards we hear warriors quoted by ancient writers expressing disdain towards ambushes, surprise attacks or any form of what they consider ‘unfair advantage’. Some even denounced the use of fortifications and siege engines as cowardly. A brave man kills his enemy face to face.3

  Ancient historians had already done some editing of their own record. They eliminated a discussion of ambush for the same reason they eliminated women’s participation in war – they considered it beneath them.4 This élitist attitude left little for modern historians to work with. It did, however, obligate the modern historian to explain the absence of the use of surprise by giving reasons ranging from poor source material, cultural inhibitions or the impracticality of mounting such operations because of insufficient intelligence gathering.5

  Many historians have found the realities of ambush distasteful, and they have dealt with them in several different ways. First, there are those who postulate that there was little use of ambush by infantry in Classical Greece, and thus edit it out of the narrative. Pritchett plays down the important of ambush, and says that the Greeks were ambivalent about ambushing.6 Whitehead reached a similar conclusion when he says that ancient sensibilities about deception and theft were ‘manifestly different’ from our ‘modern, cynical sensibilities’.7 While we certainly recognise that pitched infantry battle was always important to the Greeks, both as a military practice and a military ideal, we must never be led to think that it was the only significant form of warfare in Greece.

  The Ubiquity of Ambush

  The argument that ambush was a rarity in Greek warfare simply will not hold because there are too many examples of it in the historical record. Even in periods when we have poor, fragmented sources, the Greeks still wrote about ambush and surprise attacks. The Homeric, Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic Greeks all ambushed and, furthermore, they spoke and acted similarly with regard to ambush and surprise attack. Warfare, in all its diversity, took on many different forms, but the warrior mentality remained much the same from Homer to Xenophon, or at least was much more uniform than previous writers have believed. One did what one had to do to win, minimising one’s own casualties while maximising those of the enemy.

  That the Greeks understood the concept of ambush is displayed in their earliest writings on warfare. In the Iliad and Odyssey, ambushing an enemy was no different than trapping a lion on a hunt. There was no disapproval except from the person who was caught in the ambush.8 While a man might declare his disdain for being ambushed, deceived or shot from a distance, this would not mean he would hesitate to use such a tactic against his own enemies if the possibility arose. To set an ambush was to act as a person at war would normally act.

  The problem here is one of focus. If historians only focus on large battles, then they will only see hoplites fighting them. The practice of raiding, as opposed to agricultural ravaging as a challenge preliminary to pitched battle, existed in all periods of Greek history. Hoplite battle was only part of the repertoire of intracommunal violence. Freebooting raids and petites guerres were frequent.9 The polis was a military organism, and its capacity for self-defence, violent interaction with neighbouring communities over disputes, and aggression meant there would always be local military activity.10 Historians and poets tend to fasten on the big ‘agonal’ or ritually competitive pitched battles, but much fighting would have been what the Germans called kleinkrieg – guerrilla warfare, attacks on cities or villages, impromptu raiding and response to raiding (the Greek for impromptu is ex epidromes). The Iliad tells us about this sort of thing as well as the big battles and the great main siege. In these informal, non-ritualised fighting types of warfare there was not as much room for Achillean heroism.

  Those who focus on the big battles tend to see the use of other types of troops as a breakdown of the hoplite system and of Greek morality in general. Such historians see a change in the ‘unwritten hoplite code’. For Josiah Ober it was the Peloponnesian war, especially Pericles’ strategy of avoiding a decisive battle, that changed Greek warfare for ever.11 For Victor Davis Hanson, the change came earlier during the Persian wars with the growth of the Athenian navy, and the increasing wealth of Athens, which allowed new kinds of fighting in the decades before the Peloponnesian war.12 No matter how far back one goes in time, however, there are always accounts of deception, guile and surprise. Whatever the hoplites are doing, there is always a parallel story happening with other troops.

  Certainly warfare changed over time as more mercenaries and light-armed troops entered the fray and the Greeks found themselves fighting overseas. As the reformed peltast of Iphicrates became the model for mercenaries in general, the more we see ambush, forays and retreats in place of the decisive battle. The poorest citizens could equip themselves for service as light-armed and such troops were highly effective.13 They proved tactically superior to the cavalry and the hoplites. Mercenaries provided specialists and a more fluid style of warfare.14 They had never been totally absent from Greek warfare.

  Another argument used to diminish the importance of ambush is that it never decides battles or wars. But this is to expect a result that ambush can never be expected to deliver. Ambush has never been the main way of fighting a war. The use of surprise has always been situational. As Clausewitz notes, the weaker the forces a commander had the more appealing boldness and deception or surprise attack became.15 When a commander feels he is unable to defeat the enemy in an open battle, then the idea of an ambush becomes more appealing. Since the best opportunities for ambush do not come during a pitched battle, it is hardly surprising to find ambushes taking place most frequently against armies on the march.16

  Another major objection that historians, both ancient and modern, have had to the technique ambush is that surprise attack is a form of deception. They do not like having such ‘sneaky’ techniques attributed to the Greeks or Westerners in general. As we have seen, however, deception has always been a part of Greek warfare. Peter Krentz collected over 120 examples of deception used by the Greeks. As long as ‘the habit and discipline of war’ existed, there would be ambush as well as set-piece battles. There is a long list of Greek commanders who used deceptive tactics and were admired for it. The list starts with legendary figures and continues on to historical deceivers.17 Xenophon writes: ‘For there is really nothing more profitable in war than d
eception … On thinking over the successes gained in war, you will find that most of them, and the greatest ones, have been won with the aid of deception.’18 This is not an isolated quotation taken out of context. Deception seems to have fascinated Xenophon and he mentions it in eleven different works.19 He insisted that a good general must not only learn deceptions from others but must also invent his own, i.e. new devices to deceive his opponents. Furthermore, a good commander should expect others to try and outwit him and guard against being deceived.

  Surprise was considered an essential element of victory by almost all ancient military writers. Aeneas Tacticus, Frontinus and Polyaenus wrote entire collections of the ways and means of surprise – textbooks for victory. These books, especially Frontinus, were well known in late antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages.20 The use of surprise, deception and originality reflected well upon the quality of a general both then and now. Again, I am not suggesting that surprise and ambush were the basis of military planning, nor as the condition sine qua non of victory. Rather, ambush was considered a welcomed technique that could complete or facilitate a victory.

  Ancient Attitudes

  Part of the blame for ambiguous attitudes towards ambush must be laid at the door of the ancient Greeks themselves. It is certainly not difficult to find statements made by ancient authors disparaging ambushes, surprise and deception. But it is important to consider the context of the quotation, the bias of the author, and the audience to whom the comment is aimed. The Spartan Brasidas mocked barbarians who avoided set-piece battles21 and told the Acanthians that it was more disgraceful to gain an advantage by deception than by open force,22 but then at Amphipolis he told his own men that the most successful soldiers do not attack openly but take advantage of the opportunities offered, and that such tactics have the ‘most brilliant reputation in war’.23 Pausanias says there was a tradition disparaging the Athenians for their victory at Sphacteria because it was ‘stolen’ by a surprise attack.24 On the other hand, Plutarch quotes Archidamus as saying after defeating the Arcadians that ‘it would have been better to have defeated them by intelligence than by strength’.25 Even the oft-quoted passage of Polybius, which characterises ambushes as violations of the ‘ancient sense of military honour’, can be balanced against his own statement26 that a rash general is susceptible to plots, ambushes and deceptions, and in the following section he says that the commander who perceives and takes advantage of the weakness of an enemy’s leader will most quickly win a decisive victory. He implies that a good commander will use deception when he can.