Historians create this picture of the Greeks as the avatars of a ‘Western Way of War’ so that they can contrast it with the sneaky Eastern way of war. This Orientalist view has been used against the Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, al-Qaeda or whatever foreign power we happen to be opposing at the time.82 Perhaps one of the most famous recent examples of this is John Keegan who, after 11 September 2001 wrote that the war launched on that day (generally referred to as 9/11) was part of an older conflict between ‘settled, creative and productive Westerners and predatory, destructive Orientals’. Hence the portrayal of ‘Oriental cunning’ evasion or subtlety against Western ‘openness’ or desire for decisive battle with ‘rules of honour’. Orientals like ambush, treachery and deceit. He reduces military history to a morality play that showcases Western virtues and Oriental vices.83 This is a nostalgia shared by British, American and Israeli military writers yearning for a time when their enemies shared their preference for a fair fight.84 Norman Dixon in his book On the Psychology of Military Incompetence writes: ‘One cannot know one’s enemy by stereotyping him.’85 Neither can we know our friends the Greeks by that means.
There is nothing wrong with seeing the Greeks as avatars of Western culture, but to see them as stereotypical beings, completely cut off from anything Eastern, fossilises them and denies the Greeks the ability to change, to learn or to adapt. Too many Classical scholars like to keep their Greeks free from the vices of the modern world and free from mongrelisation. We still see references to ‘the difference between the Greek and the Oriental mind’.86 Their Greeks are brave, honourable but ultimately static. Cultures at war can certainly create a distinct and lasting set of beliefs and values based on the prevailing attitudes, habits and values of their military. They can have preferences regarding the use of force and its role and effectiveness in political affairs. But cultures at war can also contain rival and clashing narratives, taboos that can be enforced or ignored, and ‘porous borders across which new ideas and practices are smuggled’.87 This is particularly true of the Greeks. At any given time, competing views of warfare and tactics were in play. Players were free to choose which methods they thought were most appropriate. Indeed, they found themselves in situations where they were forced to change their culture. The Greeks were capable of changing their tactics, compromising or violating taboos. For reasons of utility, they might find themselves acting in spite of tradition, not because of it. The Greeks were far too competitive to give up the edge because of some traditional practice.
Seeing the Greeks as multifaceted and adaptable is much better than the ‘primordialist’ idea that their behaviour was a clear, semi-permanent tradition rather than the acts of its subjects.88 This is even more true of our view of the enemies of the Greeks. The unbalanced preoccupation with difference and separation, or with the exotic nature of non-Western war, can be a poor basis for understanding how people behave. By depicting culture as a unitary force that drives behaviour, we are oversimplifying the relationship between culture and action, and damage our ability to watch people acting strategically. Amartya Sen points out that culture becomes an impoverished concept when it is treated as homogenous and insular. The Greeks were not a hermetically sealed people with no outside influences. To treat them that way ignores the multiple identities that people are capable of choosing from. To think this way creates a dangerously self-fulfilling notion that the two camps are bound to be separate and hostile.
Hoplite warfare was not the only means of Greek warfare and those who overemphasise it distort the historical picture. Even Victor Davis Hanson, who has written more about the hoplite phalanx than most historians, states that: ‘To suggest that all disagreements between even adjacent Greek poleis would over centuries always follow the same rituals of formal infantry battle is untenable, as many states additionally resolved their quarrels through arbitration, with sneak attacks, at sea, behind walls or simply by capitulation rather than set battle.’89 Greek warfare was like warfare any place else. The Greeks used wars to change the enemy’s position. Like all societies, they used available weapons and methods of warfare to achieve their ends. And their wars reflected the society of which they were a part.90
Cultural determinism, where people are almost prisoners of their own culture, and where strategy and war are bound only by culturally specific norms is too restrictive a picture. The Greeks had all the tools they needed for changing their culture. They had the time necessary because we are observing them over a period of half a millennium. They had the motive to change because of the political situations in which they found themselves (polis to empire). They had the capacity to change, and in the cases where they had skilful leadership their generals recognised how to make the change.91
Warfare evolved because practical people solved specific problems related to their fights against their neighbours and foreign enemies. Often the foreign enemies were much more powerful than the Greeks. Whenever faced with an enemy they could not possibly beat by using conventional tactics, they sought a different path. Each generation added its own refinement, and the cumulative result can be seen in the warfare of the Hellenistic Age.
Fighting the Stereotypes
Western warfare has never been free of deception and surprise. Sun Tzu is often quoted as an example of Easterners stressing intelligence and deception, praising the ideal of the bloodless victory and stressing the economical logic of finding non-military ways to prevail. But he is not alone. Machiavelli stressed the same things when he wrote that: ‘Man is equally lauded who overcomes the enemy by deceit, as is he who overcomes them by force.’92 Machiavelli, like Sun Tzu and the Greeks, lived in a ‘fragile, multipolar and predatory political environment of competing city-states, ever-shifting alliances and meddling foreign powers’.93 In the late twentieth century, the literature on surprise becomes enormous.94 Modern historians are much more likely to appreciate what the Greeks were doing when they incorporated surprise into their repertoire. Historians such as B. W. Liddell Hart who championed the indirect approach and psychologically confounding the opponent would understand immediately what the Greeks were up to. But even he warns that a commander must know what can and cannot be done. For a surprise to succeed it was necessary to take the line least expected by the enemy or attack the place where it offered the least resistance. Clausewitz thought it a mistake to regard surprise as a key element of success in war. It is an attractive principle in theory, but hard to accomplish in reality.
Examples selectively taken from the Greeks are used not just to tell us anything meaningful about the Greeks but use them to justify current policy.95 As Porter writes: ‘For politicians and decision-makers, history is both ambivalent and politically potent as a way to legitimise policy.’ Historians will choose the historical examples that align with their policy preferences. Such selective appeals to tradition distort the historical picture by leaving out examples that do not fit their stereotype. This book has endeavoured to include all those ‘embarrassing exceptions’. The problem is that Greek culture offers no clear grid for policy, but throws up clashing lessons and analogies from the past. The ancient Greek hoplites, with their open and frontal combat between phalanxes in broad daylight, are regarded by some as the epitome of direct battle. But the fact is that the Greeks practised deception as well.
The democratic West, born in ancient Athens and lateer revived, depended on cunning military devices. But the issue is so tied to a quest for the elusive ‘Western cultural identity’ that the overreaching thesis of a Western Way of War becomes selective and ahistorical. It bypasses the history of Western strategies of deception, evasion and indirectness, in its desire to present strategic culture as symptomatic of core societal values or societal pathologies. All sorts of societies have adopted these techniques when coming up against a heavily-armed opponent. Furthermore, ethnocentrism leads to a tendency to reject or ignore information.96 At worst it degenerates into dismissive racism.
The problem with the idea of cultural essentia
lism is that it often fails to highlight the many complexities of people’s wartime behaviour. Both sides are capable of being wily, pragmatic or suicidal if they have to win. This conceptual framework allows people to see only what they want to see in history, making facts fit a theory to confirm its urgent contemporary agenda, which is to advise today’s decision-makers and military leaders. However well intentioned, the theory, traditions and legacies are only part of the context in which strategic decisions are made – one variable in a matrix of negotiated interests along with material circumstances, power imbalances and individuals.97 Cultural legacies are certainly part of the process of decision-making and behaviour, but they are neither exhaustive nor static elements within it.98
Ethnocentrism is a dangerously faulty methodology. It can seriously interfere with historical thinking and strategic thinking. Ethnocentrism makes us incurious about the enemy or even evade reality about them. It creates feel-good history but not a particularly accurate historical picture. It is an important source of mistakes in historical analysis. The original meaning included a strong identification with one’s own group and its culture, the tendency to see one’s own group as the centre of the universe, the tendency to perceive events in terms of one’s own interests, the tendency to prefer one’s own way of life (culture) over all others (seeing it as involving the best and right ways of acting, with an associated bias against other groups and their ways of acting), and a general suspicion of foreigners, their modes of thought, action and motives.99
Surprise is not the whole of war, but it remains one of the means in war. The best means even today:100 ‘Man does not enter battle to fight, but for victory. He does everything that he can to avoid the first and obtain the second.’101 ‘When the arms are similar on both sides, the only way of giving the advantage to one side is by surprise.’102
This pragmatic approach to the use of surprise sums up the reality of warfare both ancient and modern. Certainly, the Greeks debated the justness of certain kinds of warfare. Indeed, they debated the justness of war itself. The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle wrote on the subject in the fourth century.103 But the possibility of treachery in warfare was also always present.104 War was a grim business, and in war the force of cultural influence is limited at every turn by harsh reality. No soldier would be happy to fight in a fashion they thought placed them at a disadvantage relative to their enemies.105
The ‘sheer devilry’ of some of the tricks recorded by Greek and later Roman historians is a tribute to the practicality of commanders who understood that flexibility in the field could keep their men alive and hopefully help them score a victory.106 Historians who concentrate solely on strategy and great battles tend to ignore surprise and characterise it merely as the product of luck. They are robbing the Greeks, and indeed the entire West, of one of its most important military skills. Ancient warfare was a much more subtle and varied phenomenon than the ideal suggested by those historians wanting to view it through the lens of a single ethos. As we get more archaeological evidence from regions such as Thessaly, which were outside the confines of the polis, combined with the growing recognition of the need to consider Greece within its wider Mediterranean context, we find a more complex picture of the military history of ancient Greece.107 And like every civilisation before and after, the Greeks realised that more than courage and endurance alone were needed to win. With the skills, guile and stealth of an Odysseus, they might overcome the most amazing odds.
Notes
Preface
1 P. Sabin, H. van Wees and M. Whitby, Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).The authors are, of course, aware of the literature on the subject; Hans van Wees has written on ambush in his book Greek Warfare. Myths and Realities (London: Duckworth, 2004), pp. 131–50. Another recent publication, L. L. Brice and J. T. Roberts (eds), Recent Directions in the Military History of the Ancient World (Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 2011) suffers from the same lacuna.
2 Chester Starr, Political Intelligence in Classical Greece (Leiden: Brill, 1974).
3 Frank Santi Russell, Information Gathering in Classical Greece (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).
4 See R. M. Sheldon, Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome: Trust in the Gods But Verify (New York and London: Frank Cass, 2005); N. J. E. Austin and B. Rankov, Exploratio: Military and Political Intelligence in the Roman World from the Second Punic War to the Battle of Adrianople (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).
5 W. K. Pritchett, The Greek State at War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), vol. 2, pp. 177, 330.
6 Pritchett, vol. 2, p. 177 citing J. Kromayer and G. Veith, Heerwesen und Kriegführung der Griechen und Römer (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1928); H. Droysen, Heerwesen und Kriegführung der Griechen (Freiburg: Mohr, 1889); Hans Delbrück, History of the Art of War, trans. by Walter J. Renfroe, Jr (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), vol. 1, Warfare in Antiquity. The same lacuna is found in P. Ducrey, Warfare in Ancient Greece (New York: Schocken, 1986).
7 E. L. Wheeler, Stratagem and the Vocabulary of Military Trickery (Leiden: Brill, 1988), pp. 26, 44 for lochos, pp. 26, 44, 86 for enedra, p. 26 for enedreuo.
8 A. Pauly and G. Wissowa, Real-Encyclopädie der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1957) or C. Daremberg and E. Saglio, Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines (Paris, 1877–1919; available at: http://dagr.univ-tlse2.fr/sdx/dagr/index.xsp; accessed February 2012). There are no such headings in Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth, The Oxford Classical Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3rd edn.
9 J. Roisman, The General Demosthenes and His Use of Military Surprise (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1993); E. Heza, ‘Ruse de guerre – trait caracteristique d’une tactique nouvelle dans l’oeuvre de Thucydide’, Eos 62 (1974), pp. 235ff.
10 Van Wees, Greek Warfare, ch. 10.
11 O. Lippelt, Die Griechischen Leichtbewaffneten bis auf Alexander den Grossen (Weida in Thuringia: Thomas and Hubert, 1910).
12 E. L. Wheeler, ‘Land battles’, in CHGRW, vol. 1, p. 190.
13 Wheeler, ‘Land battles’, in CHGRW, vol. 1, p. 190.
14 Wheeler, ‘Land battles’, in CHGRW, vol. 1, p. 190.
15 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. by Walter Blanco, ed. by Walter Blanco and Jennifer Tolbert Roberts (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 6.69.2.
16 See M. Whitby, ‘Reconstructing ancient warfare’ in CHGRW, vol. 1, 54–81.
17 Wheeler, ‘Land battles’, in CHGRW, vol. 1, p. 190.
18 Wheeler, ‘Land battles’, in CHGRW, vol. 1. p. 187.
19 Wheeler, ‘Land battles’, in CHGRW, vol. 1. p. 188.
20 Thucydides 6.17.5; 68.2, 69.1, 98.3, 7.3.3.
21 J. G. P. Best, Thracian Peltasts and Their Influence on Greek Warfare (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1969).
22 Lippelt, Die Griechischen Leichtbewaffneten bis auf Alexander den Grossen.
23 On Demosthenes see especially Roisman, The General Demosthenes; and G. Wylie, ‘Demosthenes the general – protagonist in a Greek tragedy’, G&R 40, 1 (April 1993), 20–30. On Brasidas, see G. Wylie, ‘Brasidas – great commander or whiz kid?’ in E. L. Wheeler (ed.), The Armies of Classical Greece (Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 423–43.
Introduction: The Odysseus Syndrome
1 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. by Robert Fagles (New York: Viking, 1996), line 77. Geddes even advanced a theory that the books of the Homeric poems should actually be divided into two groups. The Achillean and the Odyssean. The Achillead is the work of one age and one poet, and the non-Achillean books of the Iliad and the entire Odyssey are the work of another poet.
2 These are, of course, only very general stereotypes. See the comments of S. Hornblower, ‘Warfare in ancient literature: The paradox of war’, in CHGRW, vol. 1, p. 42.
3 Wheeler, ‘Land battles’, in CHGRW, vol. 1, p. 188. See Wheeler, Stratagem, pp. xiii–xiv, 92–11
0.
4 Peter Krentz, ‘Fighting by the rules: The invention of the hoplite agôn’, in E. L. Wheeler, The Armies of Classical Greece (Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 23–39 argues that such agonal conventions developed only after the Persian wars.
5 See J. L. Myers, ‘Akhruktos Polemos’ (Herodotus V.81), CR 57 (1943), 66–7; V. Ilari, Guerra e Diritto Nel Mondo Antico, vol, I: Guerra e Diritto Nel Mondo Greco-Ellenistico Fino All III Secolo (Milan: A. Giuffrè, 1980), pp. 103–8; Xenophon, Anabasis, trans. by Carleton L. Brownson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961, 2 vols), 3.2.8 for a polemos akeryktos with the Persians after Tissaphernes’ murder of the Greek generals. Wheeler, ‘Land battles’, in CHGRW, vol. 1, p. 190.
6 F. E. Adcock and D. J. Mosley, Diplomacy in Ancient Greece (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1975), p. 202.
7 Thucydides 4.126.5.
8 Herodotus 7.9.2.
9 Herodotus 6.115.
10 Thucydides 3.98.4.
11 Thucydides 4.40.2.
12 On the literature, see J. E. Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts. A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 401–2, 410–11.
13 ‘Fair and open’, Xenophon, Hellenica 6.5.16; cf. Andocides 3.18; Isocrates 15.118. Defeat by strategy not regarded as real defeat: Herodotus 1.212; Demosthenes, 60.21; Plutarch, Pelopidas, 15.4–5; Polybius 13.3.3; Arrian, Anabasis 3.10.3.
14 Herodian 4.14.8 in a speech by Macrinus to his troops when facing the Parthians.
15 Quintus Curtius Rufus, History of Alexander, trans. J. C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 4.13.
16 Quintus Curtius Rufus, 4.13, Loeb trans.
17 P. Porter, Military Orientalism. Eastern War Through Western Eyes (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
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