The later Greeks romanticised their earlier history and tried to believe that there was a time when a uniform code of ethics existed that had somehow later been lost. We can see such romanticising in Demosthenes’ rhetoric in his Third Phillipic, where he argues that Philip was a more dangerous enemy than the Spartans, who always played by the ‘old-fashioned rules’. We see the same rhetoric in Herodotus27 and Polybius.28 That is not to say that the contrast with the past had no validity. Demosthenes was contrasting the days gone by, when war was seasonal and ‘principled’, whereas contemporary war was permanent and waged by any means.29 True, war had changed, but the reality of war had always been brutal and had always included an element of surprise and deception.
So when Polybius, comparing the practices of his own day to those of an earlier era, writes: ‘The ancients would not even consent to get the better of their enemies by fraud, regarding no success as brilliant or secure unless they crushed the spirit of their adversaries in open battle,’ he was engaging in a nostalgia over a lost time that may have never existed.30 As we have seen, Homeric warriors happily deceived their enemies. The Homeric term metis (cunning intelligence) could encompass many characteristics that included flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance and opportunism with various other skills.31 These are the sorts of mental skills displayed by any general worth his salt. Deception, trickery and foresight imply that one has collected intelligence properly. The success of an ambush or a surprise attack depends to a great extent upon foreseeing the result of a particular situation and knowing the exact time to employ the proper means.32
Herodotus, Thucydides and Polybius all included speeches against deception and made their speech-makers claim that the Greeks’ ancestors waged strictly non-devious warfare. Patrick Porter labels this phenomenon ‘exaggerated self-celebration’.33 Commanders used ruses, night ambushes and raids when they believed they would work. Duplicitous moves included pretending to be friendly, pretending to be done for the day, sending false information, feigning flight, making a misleading agreement and seizing undefended cities. They were all a part of the Greek toolbox. Sparta trained boys to steal food, stay awake at night, lay ambushes and prepare spies.34 A number of scholars have tried to argue away these references by saying the ‘stealing’ was actually a ritual activity, or that ambush and living off the land were training to hunt down escaped helots, but the fact remains that when Brasidas made his speech he was talking to Spartan hoplites about how to attack Cleon’s hoplites.35 Xenophon believes that apaté produced the greatest success in war. Cassius Dio echoes this view when he praises the generalship of P. Martius Verus and praises him for his ability, like Odysseus, to outwit the enemy by apaté, which is the ‘true strength of generals’.36 In Xenophon’s Anabasis, Cyrus takes the Armenian king by surprise, capturing both him and his family.37 The moral argument in the passage is about the king acting unjustly by refusing troops and the tribute, not the surprise attack.38
The military ethics of Odysseus, i.e. avoiding pitched battle and embracing indirect means, always competed with the ‘Achilles ethos’ of open battle, for the mind of Greek commanders. Both Athenians and Spartans denounced their enemy’s stratagems, but carried out their own. Greek strategic culture could also sustain conflicting ideas about grand strategy. Greek culture contained both Achillean traditionalists who saw the world as an anarchic place where only power could ensure security, and Odyssean ‘modernists’ who stressed multilateralism and co-operation.39 This is not too different from our modern debate between unilateralism, power and the role of force in international affairs.40
Military Hierarchies
We have encountered many stereotypes used by ancient Greek writers that held up certain modes of fighting for praise while ignoring or degrading others. Mocking Paris for being a bowman is the best example. The figure of Odysseus, however, clearly shows that the virtues of the spearfighter and the bowman could be easily combined. Alexander historians certainly knew the value of auxiliary troops such as archers. It is ridiculous to suppose that archers, who in pre-artillery days before 400 held off many city-besiegers, were held in universal contempt. To refer to a bowman as nothing more than a ‘savage tribalist’ is as incorrect as it is condescending.41 Even in Athens, where foreigners and citizens were categorised separately, the official casualty lists show barbarian archers who were honourably recorded alongside the citizen dead. Simon Hornblower, in his article ‘Warfare in ancient literature’, points out that many things about ancient warfare were left out, including the participation of women and slaves. He goes on to say that not all warfare was regular warfare and that what is left out is due to the ‘bias of ancient historians’. Less organised, non-ritualistic fighting occurred at a level below which poets and historians had no interest. They concentrated on groups and individuals from the élite. They did so to ‘uphold an essentially male ideology …’42 Graham Shipley says the same thing when he notes that: ‘The selection of war as the paramount activity can be regarded as an attempt to direct energy towards maintaining a particular social structure, one in which citizen was dominated by aristocrat, non-citizen by citizen, female by male, and barbarian by Greek.’43
The reason some warriors disparage other warriors is a certain snobbery that gives a higher social status to one type of fighting over another. Complex societies have been establishing such hierarchies since time immemorial. Some ways of fighting mark the participants as brave and estimable while others do not. The status of a type of military force depends more on the power of the people who serve in it than upon the difficulty of the skills involved, its demands on participant’s courage or their military effectiveness. Whenever we talk about status and prestige we must add ‘prestige with whom?’44 With the Greeks we find the most status is attached to hoplite warfare. But Greek warfare had more aspects to it than this and should not be reduced to hoplite snobbery.45 The Greeks used many types of fighting, and some of the techniques they used, like ambush, were controversial – then as now.
In Greece, the relative status of military forces could vary geographically as well as between different classes. Thessalian nobles, for example, secure in their formidable reputation as the best cavalry in Greece, were unlikely to have esteemed the peasant levies that composed their infantry. Mercenaries were, by definition, outsiders so their professionalism and military contributions did not prevent Athenians from considering them impoverished, thieving, brutish semi-barbarians. Yet mercenaries were manifestly effective troops – or they would have been quickly out of work. The types of forces in which mercenaries typically served suffered by association. Peltasts, archers and slingers were often mercenary outsiders and less esteemed as a result.46
Despite the usefulness that major city-states found in hiring slingers, their status remained low. Xenophon calls slingers ‘the most slavish’ of soldiers since no number of slingers alone could stand up against even a few hoplites.47 Slingers were no more dependent on other forces than were hoplites or cavalry, but their status was low because they were often mercenaries from outside the world of the city-states. Also, slings were cheap to make and carried by poorer men. Slings also lacked the Homeric cachet that may have counterbalanced some of the contempt for the peltast or archers.48 Nor were there important military states that depended primarily on the sling, as horsemen and archers were among the most important troops of the Persians and Scythians. Yet even here prestige is in the eye of the beholder: the city of Aspendus, which was probably a source of these specialised troops, put a slinger on some of its coins to advertise its proudest export.49
War and Morality
The morality of ambush is the sticking point of this entire discussion. Is it merely sour grapes when the Spartans complain about Sphacteria, or narcissism when Alexander brags at Gaugamela about never using surprise attacks? Were ancient sensibilities manifestly different than ours, or were they capable of the same stereotypes that we make today?50 People such as Xe
nophon, who not only saw nothing wrong in breaking the rules, but also positively recommended it, are accused of not being ‘gentlemen’. This label may work on the cricket field, but it has nothing to do with battlefield realities either ancient or modern. Expecting people to act like gentlemen on the battlefield is nothing more than a utopian ideal. The notion of hoplite warfare being a contest to be won in a properly chivalrous way and crowned with a fair victory really does not hold up to close scrutiny. Much of wartime activity was taken up by ambushes and surprise attacks. Nor will the argument stand that such behaviour was considered bad by Homeric and pre-Classical standards and pragmatic when warfare became more brutal. Warriors throughout Greek history knew the reality of warfare; only the armchair historians or those with an ideological axe to grind moralise about it.51 There is no precedent in earlier Greek literature for the Plutarch–Curtius–Arrian view of Alexander with its ‘heroic disavowal of ambush and surprise’. The Greeks felt that dolos (trickery) was a perfectly fair way to win a duel, and both polemos (war) and lochos (ambush) were equivalent fields of a warrior’s endeavour.52 Indeed, ambush was the best test of a soldier’s bravery.53 The assertions of the moral superiority of open fighting on a battlefield as opposed to ambush is, as one scholar labels it, the ‘retrospective, artificial analogue in Latin Literature’.54 The Roman condemnation of the ‘Odysseus syndrome’ has been identified by more than one author for the hypocrisy it represents.55
That is not to say that pejorative terms were not used for such behaviour, but one must always ask through what lens such value judgements are being made.56 The only generalisation that seems to hold is that trickery used against you is base, but trickery against your enemy is prudent.57 Everett Wheeler’s study of the Greek and Latin vocabulary of trickery shows that the tone of the various words used to describe such stratagems is usually positive or at least neutral. But as he points out, in war losers seek excuses for defeat: ‘Victims of deception or even an opponent’s superior skill can always cry “foul” with or without just cause. Often the attitude of a writer toward the respective parties or a particular even determines whether a stratagem is praised as genius, defended as necessity, or condemned as a war crime.’58
The old chestnut about hoplites vs. light-armed troops is repeated over and over: that hoplites despised light troops because they disapproved of what they considered to be the ‘dishonourable fighting methods’ employed by the peltasts, and they ‘disdained weapons that killed indiscriminately at a distance’. Peltasts were only capable of closing in and cutting down dispirited and panic-stricken individuals or small groups of hoplites who had become separated from the main phalanx, but no army of light-armed troops could stand and fight shoulder-to-shoulder against an array of armoured hoplites with levelled spears.59 But why should they? To foist the hoplite ideal into ages where it may not have existed, and onto troops that were never meant to fight by those rules, is as bad as inserting our own ‘disdain’ into ancient contexts.
Many of the things listed as ‘military protocols’ followed by the Greeks turn out to be chimeras when more closely examined. Peter Krentz writes eloquently on the subject of practices such as limiting the pursuit of retreating opponents, restrained punishment of captured opponents, returning enemy dead and the use of non-hoplite arms. He concludes that most practices turn out to be a matter of tactical necessity rather than formal conventions designed to ameliorate warfare.60 The notion of klope in warfare evidently contains no intrinsic moral element. If any implication is detectable at all, it is that a sensible commander is doing a sensible thing.61
Orientalism
Our attitudes towards how Greeks and non-Greeks fought can degenerate into a form of Orientalism. This type of historical distortion, caused by our misperceptions of the East, has been debated in a rich body of scholarship concerning the way Westerners define themselves in relationship to ‘the other’.62 And nowhere has there been a more potent site for this Orientalism than in the discussion of warfare.63 Crude generalisations based on the idea of ‘national character’ and how it manifests itself in ‘fighting abilities’ have caused some of the biggest mistakes in military history.64 Yet, this stereotype about Western warfare continues to exist in the military, the Academy and the public mind. It is dangerous because it distorts our understanding of ourselves and our enemies. The stereotype distorts our perceptions of the data and the histories we write about our past.
Patrick Porter has written a book on what he calls ‘Military Orientalism’. Military historians in the West have used war to formulate what it means to be ‘Western’ or ‘non-Western’. The battlefield has been particularly heated in the discussion of the Greeks, who are seen as the avatars of Western culture. This cultural debate is thus not new; it is not even modern. The clash between East and West had already begun with Homer’s Iliad and the battle between Achaeans and Trojans. Even later, Greek historians would cast this as a struggle between Europe and Asia.65 Herodotus sets up the war with Persia as a battle of East against West, and an argument over what constitutes ‘Greekness’ in warfare. His description of the Persian wars only hardened this division. His battle narratives contrast Greek hoplites with Persian bowmen, and citizen-soldiers with heavy shield and spear juxtaposed against Eastern archers.66 Persia’s armies revealed its culture as being ‘fierce, opulent and servile’ while the Greek hoplites came to symbolise the clash of freedom against autocracy.67 Hoplite warfare became an extension of the culture that produced it and thus there was now a ‘Western Way of War’. The problem with this picture is that it is a stereotype.
One of the ways this ‘Orientalism’ has been expressed is in the nineteenth-century fascination with the ‘decisive battle’. Works such as Edward Creasy’s 1851 classic, The Fifteen Decisive Battles from Marathon to Waterloo, featured clashes between the bearers of Western civilisation against the ‘Orientals’. Heroes of Western warfare such as Alexander the Great and Scipio Africanus defeated the ‘Eastern peril’ and kept the world safe for democracy.68 These discussions were not just about simple battle descriptions and tactics, but also about the morality of the tactics used.69 This same discussion has been interjected into Greek military history and has resulted in the hijacking of the Greeks wholesale for modern political purposes. Victor Davis Hanson’s books The Western Way of War and Carnage and Culture70 have become among the best-known examples of this stance. His books on Greek warfare, the American family farm and the greatness of military leaders use Greek models to create the vision of a neo-conservative rural utopianism that follows Classical models. He stresses the importance of the agrarian heartland for the defence of the state, a kind of ancient Greek ‘homeland security’ before the term became popular in America.71 Here statements about Greece’s (or America’s) way of war are not so much ethnographic insights as an assertion of power.72
These ideas had a huge effect on the Bush administration and other historians.73 War’s power to express and reproduce cultural identity has never been more evident than at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The current conflict between America and al-Qaeda has been endlessly described as a ‘culture war’. This defence of empire, however, is not new. Before Hanson, Basil Liddell Hart and Russell Weigley had already identified British and American ‘ways of war’.74 As recently as 2005 The Cambridge History of Warfare had a ‘Western Way of War’ as its organising principle.75 What these books all have in common is their underlying theme, the triumph of the West; indeed, it is the subtitle of the Cambridge history. Historians wish to see ambush as ‘primitive warfare’ characteristic of tribes but not city-states. Rational, civilised men such as the Greeks did not need to stoop to such tactics.
John Lynn argues against this idea of a continuous ‘Western military tradition’,76 and I would argue against there being even a continuous Greek military tradition. He is certainly correct that the entire Western military tradition is never free from deception and indirect warfare.77 Jeremy Black also comes down decisively against
Hanson’s thesis when he writes:
… modern doctrine in the US army – presumably, a Western Force – stresses not face-to-face mass charges, as in Greek phalanx warfare, but indirection, weak spots, and mobility, the very strategies and tactics that Hanson characterise as inferior, non-Western ways of war. It is hard to see what, other than politically motivated polemic, can be salvaged from Hanson’s thesis – certainly nothing of value for serious military history.78
Deception and overwhelming force are not mutually exclusive absolutes but relative parts of a spectrum. The fact that the Greeks took hostages as security against deception is a clear indication that this was a common occurrence. In 479, before the Battle of Mycale, for example, the Samians sent a delegation secretly to the commander of the allied Greek fleet then stationed at Delos, and proposed their help in the forthcoming attack on the Persians in Asia Minor. According to Herodotus, they offered themselves as hostages and to sail with them ‘if you suspect us of treachery’.79A similar proposition of hostages to be held as security against deception is reported by Herodotus in the story about the behaviour of the Corinthians during the Battle of Salamis.80 It seems to have been the custom of the Greeks to propose themselves as security for the truth of an important diplomatic or military offer.81
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