18 M. R. Davie, Evolution of War (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1929), p. 176.
19 J. J. Ardant du Picq, Battle Studies; Ancient and Modern Battle (Harrisburg, PA: The Military Service Publishing Co., 1947), p. 43.
20 Ardant du Picq, p. 112.
21 C. Oman, A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages I (New York: Franklin, 1959), p. 205.
22 J. F. Cooper, The Deerslayer (New York: President Pub. Co., 1940), p. 36. The British criticised Francis Marion’s guerrilla unit as ‘criminal’ and blamed him for his ‘ungentlemen-like’ methods of fighting. Best, p. 26.
23 http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=lljc&fileName=005/lljc005.db&recNum=94(accessed 6 February 2012); Porter, p. 3.
24 See especially Col. C. E. Callwell, Small Wars. Their Principles and Practice (Wakefield: E. P. Publishing, 1976), 49–50 and passim.
25 LTC Alfred Ditte, Observations sur les Guerres dans les Colonies (Paris: Henri Charles-LaVauzelle, 1905).
26 V. D. Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (New York: Knopf, 1989), p. 1.
27 Hanson, Western Way of War, p. xv.
28 See E. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), p. 328.
29 J. H. Poole, Tactics of the Crescent Moon (Emerald Isle, NC: Posterity Press, 2004), p. xxvi. This simply does not hold up. For set-piece battles east of Constantinople, see 100,000 Ottomans facing off against 40,000 Safavids, at the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514, or the Battle of Khanwa in 1527, one campaign in Mughal Babur’s bid to lay claim to northern India.
30 John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 387.
31 C. Coker, Waging War Without Warriors? The Changing Culture of Military Conflict (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002), pp. 147–8.
32 P. Bracken, Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), p. 130.
33 R. M. Cassidy, Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror; Military Culture and the Irregular War (Stanford, CA: Stanford Security Studies, 2008), p. 3.
34 Poole, Tactics, pp. xxviii, 5.
35 William Lind in his Foreword to H. John Poole, Phantom Soldier: The Enemy’s Answer to US Firepower (Emerald Isle, NC: Posterity Press, 2001), pp. xiii–xiv.
36 US Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual (Washington, DC: 1940), pp. 13, 18, 28; available at www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/swm/full.pdf (accessed 6 February 2012).
37 Porter, p. 12 poetically describes the span as ‘from Themistocles to Schwarzkopf’, but this author will argue it begins with Homer.
38 W. E. Kaegi, ‘The crisis in military historiography’, Armed Forces and Society 7 (1981), p. 311; Wheeler, Stratagem was the first study of the vocabulary of military trickery.
39 Among the questions asked are: is culture a constant? Is it an ethnocentric error to speak of universal principles of strategy? The poles of this debate are represented by Michael Handel who sees strategy as having a global objective logic and Ken Booth who argues that strategy is heavily dependent on cultural context. See Porter, p. 3.
40 Porter, p. 1.
41 Keegan, A History of Warfare, p. 387.
42 Porter, p. 1.
43 Porter, p. 1.8
44 Pritchett, vol. 2, p. 179 citing Polybius 13.3.2–7.
45 Polybius 13.3.2–7. Pritchett, vol. 2, p. 179; Wylie, ‘Demosthenes the general’, p. 28 following Hanson, The Western Way of War, p. 11. For the corrective, see Wheeler, Stratagem, 1–24.
46 For examples of this attitude see Sallust, The War with Jugurtha, trans. by J. C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 81.1; Livy 42.47.4–9. Cf. Diodorus 30.7.1; Polybius 13.3 and other sources listed in Sheldon, Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome, p. 35. Hoplite fighting is immortalised in the work of Tyrtaeus, The War-elegies of Tyrtæus, Imitated and Addressed to the People of Great Britain, with Some Observations on the Life and Poems of Tyrtæus, trans. by Henry James Pye (London: printed for T. Cadell, jun. and W. Davies, successors to Mr Cadell, 1795), 10.11–24.
47 For examples of Roman moralising, see Julius Caesar, The Gallic War 1.13: ‘The Helvetii had learnt from their parents and ancestors to fight their battles with courage, not cunning nor rely upon stratagem’ (Loeb translation). For modern examples see Poole, Tactics, p. xxvi; G. Brizzi, I Sistemi Informativi dei Romani. Principi e Realtà Nell’ Età Delle Conquista Oltremare (218–168 a.C.), Historia Einzelschriften 39 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1982), 8–37, 56–77, 87, 269–73.
48 On the need for a more multifaceted, variegated and ultimately accurate picture of the Greeks, see P. du Bois, Trojan Horses. Saving the Classics from Conservatives (New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 19.
Chapter 1: Ambush in the Iliad
1 The nature of Greek combat is still a hotly debated topic. Joachim Latacz published a monograph in 1977 arguing that Homeric warriors fought in hoplite phalanx resembling those of the Archaic Age. See J. Latacz, Kampfparänese, Kampfdarsteelung und Kampswirklichkeit in der Ilias, bei Kallinos und Tyrtaios, Zetemata 66 (Munich: Beck, 1977). He is followed by V. D. Hanson (ed.), Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 80–1, nn. 11–12. Pritchett, vol. 4, 25–6 even went so far as to suggest there were distinct ‘companies’ or ‘battalions’. Although Latacz’ argument quickly became popular, see now the argument against it in H. van Wees, ‘The Homeric way of war: the Iliad and the hoplite phalanx’, G&R 41 (1994), 1–18.
2 B. Fenik, Typical Battle Scenes in the Iliad: Studies in the Narrative Techniques of Homeric Battle Description (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1968), found a remarkable series of formulaic patterns in the battle books of the Iliad. All of these involved single combat or warriors fighting in pairs.
3 M. F. Williams, ‘Crossing into enemy lines: Military intelligence in Iliad 10 and 24’, Electronic Antiquity 5, 3 (Nov. 2000), p. 1–2. On the societal duty to show one’s courage publicly, see A. W. H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility; A Study in Greek Values (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1960), 30–60 on ‘Homer: Mistake and moral error’ (critiqued by A. A. Long, ‘Morals and values in Homer’, JHS 90 [1970], pp. 121–39) and James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 99.
4 See M. Mueller, The Iliad (London and Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1984), 77–8 on the ethos of Homeric fighting. He says there is not room for strategy or cunning in Homeric Greek warfare, with the exception of Book 10 which he sees as a ‘later addition’. He is followed by M. F. Williams, p. 3. The question of the historicity of Homeric society, in general, is still a thorny one. See K. A. Raaflaub, ‘A historian’s headache. How to read “Homeric society”’, in N. Fisher and H. van Wees (eds), Archaic Greece: New Approaches and New Evidence (London: Duckworth and The Classical Press of Wales, 1998), pp. 169–93.
5 One of the first people to comment on this was Heza, p. 227 who writes: ‘Il y a beaucoup d’embuscades dans L’Iliade’, Krentz, ‘Fighting by the rules’, p. 116 and P. Krentz, ‘Deception in Archaic and Classical Greek warfare’, in H. van Wees (ed.), War and Violence in Ancient Greece (London: Duckworth, 2000), pp. 167–200. E. L. Wheeler points out that sneaky behaviour pre-dated the vocabulary describing it: Wheeler, Stratagem, p. 1.
6 M. F. Williams, p. 4.
7 M. F. Williams, p. 4. It is hazardous trying to date individual elements in the Iliad. On possible anachronisms concerning weapons see G. S. Kirk, The Songs of Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), pp. 183–4 and G. S. Kirk, ‘War and the warrior in the Homeric poems’, in J. P. Vernant, Problèmes de la guerre en Grèce Ancienne (Paris: La Haye, Mouton, 1969), 94–95, 111–113.
8 Raaflaub, pp. 169–93 argues that the poem does not represent the Mycenaean Age when the war supposedly happened. Kirk, ‘War and the warrior in the Homeric poems’, p. 93 also points out how hard it is to resist the temptation of viewing the ‘Homeric world’ as a real one when the truth is, of course, that the epic
is, to an important extent, fictional.
9 Anthony Edwards argues that the ambush (lochos) was generally categorised as a form of trickery (dolos). Anything that led to a victory except through strength or might (kratos) was deemed unworthy of a Homeric warrior: A. T. Edwards, Achilles in the Odyssey (Königstein: Anton Hain, 1985), p. 19. M. Flaumenhaft, ‘The undercover hero; Odysseus from dark to daylight’, Interpretation 10, 1 (Jan. 1982), p. 14 claims that ambushes are dishonourable, the tactics of transgressors. She believes that ambushers, like animals, have no shame (ibid. p. 15).
10 See Heza, p. 228 who points out that it is the word dolos that Nestor uses to describe the military activities of the Greeks during the nine years of the Trojan war in Homer, Iliad 3.118–119. Edwards, Achilles in the Odyssey, p. 20. See also P. Vidal-Naquet, ‘The black hunter and the origin of the Athenian Ephebia’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 14 (1968), 49–64 who outlines the mythic, ritual and historical foundations for a contrast between heavy-armed, disciplined infantry combat and attack through trickery, often by light-armed warriors.
11 C. Dué and Mary Ebbott, Iliad 10 and the Poetics of Ambush (Washington, DC: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 313. Mera Flaumenhaft disagrees and makes a distinction between the lion who attacks a farm at night and who acts on his own behalf, as opposed to human warriors who are supposed to fight for their communities. In wartime, ambushes are generally community affairs: Flaumenhaft, p. 15. For examples of the hunting metaphor, see Homer, Iliad 4.107: Pandarus breaks the truce using a bow which Homer says he made from the horn of an unsuspecting ibex he killed while lying out of sight. The ambush in 18.510 goes after sheep and sleek cattle. The unsuspecting herdsmen, ‘with no foreknowledge of the guile’ being used against them, lose their life.
12 Homer, Iliad 20.89–90; 188–90. Achilles as ambusher of Lycaon in Homer, Iliad 21.34–39 and the commentary by Dué and Ebbott, p. 68. See also A. H. Jackson, ‘War and raids for war booty in the World of Odysseus’, in J. Rich and G. Shipley (eds), War and Society in the Greek World (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 64–75 who discusses raiding and warfare in the Dark Age.
13 Homer, Iliad 1.154, 11.670ff.; Flaumenhaft, p. 16.
14 Homer, Iliad 3.443–46.
15 Cattle raids by Nestor, Homer, Iliad 11.670–81; by Achilles, Homer, Iliad 20.89–90, 188–90. Kirk, ‘War and warrior in the Homeric poems’, p. 116 who points out that such raids, while not in keeping with the heroic world ascribed to Agamemnon and his companions, are perfectly consistent with what we know about Bronze Age warfare.
16 Dué and Ebbott, pp. 80, 82–4, 352, 362, 373 on cattle raids and horse stealing. They point out that S. I. Johnston, ‘Myth, festival, and poet: The Homeric hymn to Hermes in its performance context’, CP 97 (2002), pp. 109–32 shows that the cattle raid tradition is, in fact, the central theme of the Homeric hymn to Hermes whose diction resembles that of Iliad 10 in many places.
17 Homer, Iliad 1.227. Dué and Elliott trans. Stanley Lombardo translates this passage as: ‘You’ve never had the guts to buckle on armour in battle or come out with the best fighting Greeks.’ He leaves out any reference to ambush entirely. For the importance of a daring or enduring heart for spying missions or ambush, see Homer, Iliad 10.231, 10.244 and 10.248 and Dué and Ebbott, p. 275.
18 Edwards, p. 18 where he lists fighters in this formation as laos, promachoi and promos aner, various forms of front-line fighters.
19 See G. S. Kirk, The Iliad: A Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985–93), vol. 1, p. 77. The ambush is composed of ‘the best Achaeans’.
20 Edwards, p. 18. Xenophon, Cyropaedia 1.6.39–41; Polyaenus, Stratagemata 1, proem 3–5.
21 Homer, Iliad 13.275–86. A. T. Murray trans., Loeb Classical Library edn.
22 This claim is also made in Homer, Iliad 1.227; 6.188, 13.270; Homer, Odyssey 4.277, 4.778, 8.512.
23 Homer, Iliad 1.227, 6.188, 13.276, Homer, Odyssey 4.272, 8.4.409512–13, 11.523–24, 14.217–218. See Dué and Ebbott, p. 283, 375; Edwards, 18–24.
24 Homer, Iliad 13.280. Ambushers are imagined as pukhinos – closely packed because of the density of the men hiding together in a cramped space. The Odyssey used the term in 4.277 and 8.515 for the wooden horse which involves many men enclosed in a small space. In the ambush of Tydeus in Homer, Iliad 4.391–398 fifty-two men lay in wait for him.
25 Edwards, p. 21; Flaumenhaft, pp. 13, 17.
26 See Edwards, p. 19 who considers it just another example of dolos; R. G. A. Buxton, Persuasion in Greek Tragedy; A Study of Peitho (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 63–6; G. Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 1–24; M. Detienne and J. P. Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, trans. from the French by Janet Lloyd (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1978), 12–13.
27 Dué and Ebbott, p. 86.
28 Homer, Iliad 11.379.
29 Edwards, p. 24.
30 The story of Pandarus attempting to shoot Menelaus (Homer, Iliad 4.112–115) is used as a parallel by Dué and Ebbott, 59–60. They discuss the overlap in the descriptions of archery and ambush. Pandarus is not chosen for the job because he is lacking in moral character (and thus willing to sneak up on someone) but because he is an excellent archer. See also ibid. p. 252 on the ways archery and ambush are conceptually and even visually linked and how Paris’ wearing a leopard skin is iconographic sign of his archer status.
31 See R. Edgeworth, ‘Ajax and Teucer in the Iliad’, Rivista di Filologia e di Instruzione Classica, 113 (1985), 27–31 for his discussion of this fighting method; Dué and Ebbott, p. 60.
32 In Homer, Odyssey 8.215–222 Odysseus boasts of his pre-eminence at military archery. See Hornblower, ‘Warfare in ancient literature’, p. 41, and Dué and Ebbott, p. 294.
33 S. Farron, ‘Attitudes to military archery in the Iliad’, in A. F. Basson and W. J. Dominik (eds), Literature, Art, History: Studies on Classical Antiquity and Tradition in Honour of W. J. Henderson (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003), p. 169. W. McLeod, ‘The bow at night: An inappropriate weapon?’, Phoenix 42 (1988), pp. 121–5 on the bow as a particularly appropriate weapon for night attacks.
34 Farron, pp. 171–5 highlights the passages in which Teucer’s success with the bow in battle is actually praised or desired by his comrades. He is followed by Dué and Ebbott, p. 61. Cf. B. L. Hijmans, Jr. ‘Archers in the Iliad’, in J. S. Boersma (ed.), Festoen; Opgedragen aan A. N. Zadoks-Josephus Jitta bij Haar Zeventigste Verjaardag, Scripta Archaeologica Groningana 6 (Groningen: H. D. Tjeenk Willink, 1976), pp. 343–52.
35 The controversial scene featuring a debate about archery in Euripides, Hercules, trans. by Tom Sleigh, with introduction and notes by Christian Wolff (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 140–235 illustrates how complex and even conflicting the ancient attitudes could be. Dué and Ebbott, p. 61. J. E. Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts, p. 34 writes: ‘Despite the contempt in which using the bow is held by some heroes, it is heroic arête just like fighting with a spear.’ This is in complete contrast to V. D. Hanson, The Wars of the Ancient Greeks (London: Cassell, 1999), p. 158 who calls bowmen nothing more than ‘savage tribalists’.
36 J. E. Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts, p. 34.
37 Homer, Iliad 13.227. See Dué and Ebbott, p. 311 on Tydeus and ambush as a theme in Theban epic tradition.
38 Homer, Iliad 6. 191.
39 Edwards, p. 25.
40 Edwards, p. 23.
41 Following Edwards, 22–3. See also Dué and Ebbott who also discuss the subthemes that constitute an ambush.
42 Dué and Ebbott, p. 244.
43 Dué and Ebbott, 73–5; also 274, 289 on the difficulties of a night watch.
44 Edwards, p. 23 points out that the exchange of taunts by which heroes usually identify themselves in a Homeric battle and count coups prior to the fighting are missing in the ambush. Also missing are the exchange of
spears, the anger of a hero at the death of a friend or comrade, and the attempt at revenge. Cf. Fenik, Typical Battle Scenes in the Iliad, passim. E. Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry, The Sather Classical Lectures 46 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 83–6.
45 See the discussion of the battlefield by M. Detienne ‘La phalange: Problèmes et controversies’, in J. P. Vernant, Problèmes de la Guerre en Grèce Ancienne (Paris: La Haye: Mouton, 1968), pp. 123–4; J. Latacz, 76–171 who believes that the battle tactics portrayed by Homer are essentially the same as those of hoplite and phalanx familiar from Tyrtaeus and Callinus. See however van Wees, ‘The Homeric way of war’, 1–18.
46 On dolos see Dué and Ebbott, 71–2.
47 In a discussion of the trials and exploits which are typically encountered by the youthful hero in Greek myth, Francis Vian includes: ‘to emerge unscathed and victorious from an ambush’. Vian lists the ambushes set for Tydeus and Bellerophon discussed above, but also the ambush set for Theseus by the Pallantids as he returned to Athens. F. Vian ‘La function guerrière dans la mythologie grecque’, in J.-P. Vernant (ed.), Problèmes de la Guerre en Grèce Ancienne (Paris: La Haye, Mouton), p. 67.
48 ‘Ambushes were regarded by Homer as the best test of a man’s courage.’ H. van Wees, War and Violence in Ancient Greece (London: Duckworth, 2000), p. 132.
49 Homer, Iliad 11.369.
50 Homer, Odyssey 14.217.
51 Commentators have taken the example of the night raid in Book 10 and then generalised to the rest of the poem. They claim ambush denies the humanity of one’s opponent. To some, an ambusher can never aspire to a code of honour. An ambush is the complete antithesis of honourable battle. See Flaumenhaft, 9–41.
52 For the Trojan horse, one must turn to Apollodorus’s Epitome which gives a grand summary of traditional Greek mythology and heroic legends in three books. The Little Iliad is a lost epic of ancient Greek literature. It was one of the Epic Cycle, that is, the ‘Trojan Cycle’, which told the entire history of the Trojan war in epic verse. About thirty lines of the poem survive. Quintus of Smyrna, Posthomerica (Fall of Troy), trans. by A. S. Way (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913), pp. 314–35 gives the names of the thirty Greeks inside the horse. John Tzetzes, Antehomerica et Posthomerica (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2010), Book 12, pp. 315–30, gives a figure of twenty-three, in late tradition it seems it was standardised at forty.
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