Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome
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Makers of Ancient Strategy
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Makers of
Ancient Strategy
From the
Persian Wars to the
Fall of Rome
Edited and Introduced by
Victor Davis Hanson
Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2010 by
Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press,
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom:
Princeton University Press,
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Makers of ancient strategy : from the Persian wars to the
fall of Rome / edited and Introduced by Victor Davis Hanson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-13790-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Military art and science—History—To 500.
2. Military history, Ancient.
I. Hanson, Victor Davis.
U29.M26 2010
355.409’014—dc22
2009034732
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Dante MT Std
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
press.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Contents
List of Contributors vii
Introduction: Makers of Ancient Strategy 1
From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome
Victor Davis Hanson
1. From Persia with Love 11
Propaganda and Imperial Overreach in the Greco-Persian Wars
Tom Holland
2. Pericles, Thucydides, and the Defense of Empire 31
Donald Kagan
3. Why Fortifications Endure 58
A Case Study of the Walls of Athens during the Classical Period
David L. Berkey
4. Epaminondas the Theban and the Doctrine of
Preemptive War 93
Victor Davis Hanson
5. Alexander the Great, Nation Building, and the
Creation and Maintenance of Empire 118
Ian Worthington
6. Urban Warfare in the Classical Greek World 138
John W. I. Lee
7. Counterinsurgency and the Enemies of Rome 163
Susan Mattern
8. Slave Wars of Greece and Rome 185
Barry Strauss
9. Julius Caesar and the General as State 206
Adrian Goldsworthy
10. Holding the Line 227
Frontier Defense and the Later Roman Empire
Peter J. Heather
Acknowledgments 247
Index 249
vi Contents
Contributors
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in
Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution,
Stanford University, and emeritus professor of Classics at California
State University, Fresno. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Dis-
tinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches
courses in military history and classical culture. He is the author
of many books, including A War Like No Other: How the Athenians
and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (Random House, 2005);
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power
(Doubleday, 2001); The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Pres-
ent Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny (Free Press,
1999); Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience (Routledge, 1993);
The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (Knopf,
1989); Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western
Civilization (Free Press, 1995); and Warfare and Agriculture in Classical
Greece (University of California Press, 1983).
David L. Berkey is assistant professor in the Department of History
at California State University, Fresno. He received his doctorate in
Classics and ancient history in 2001 from Yale University and his
bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in international
studies in 1989.
Adrian Goldsworthy was educated at St. John’s College, Oxford, and is
currently Visiting Fellow at Newcastle University. His doctoral thesis
was published in the Oxford monographs series under the title The
Roman Army at War, 100 bc–ad 200. He was a Junior Research Fellow
at Cardiff University and subsequently an assistant professor in the
University of Notre Dame’s London program. He now writes full
time. His most recent books include Caesar: The Life of a Colossus
(Yale University Press, 2006) and How Rome Fell: The Death of a Super-
power (Yale University Press, 2009).
Peter J. Heather is professor of medieval European history at King’s
College, London. He was born in Londonderry, Northern Ireland,
and educated at Maidstone Grammar School and New College, Ox-
ford. He was awarded a postdoctoral degree by the History Faculty
of Oxford University. He has since taught at University College,
London, Yale University, and Worcester College, Oxford.
Tom Holland is the author of three highly praised works of history.
The first, Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic,
won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History and was short-listed for
the Samuel Johnson Prize. His book on the Greco-Persian wars,
Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West, won
the Anglo- Hellenic League’s Runciman Award in 2006. His latest
book, The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise
of the West, was published in the spring of 2009. He has adapted
Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Virgil for the BBC. He is cur-
rently working on a translation of Herodotus for Penguin Classics.
In 2007 he was awarded the 2007 Classical Association prize, given
to “the individual who has done most to promote the study of the
language, literature and civilisation of Ancient Greece and Rome.”
Donald Kagan is Sterling Professor of Classics and History at Yale Uni-
versity. He has won teaching awards at Cornel University and at Yale,
and was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2002. He was
named the Jefferson Lecturer by the National Endowment for the Hu-
manities in 2004. Among his publications are a four-volume history of
the Peloponnesian War, Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy,
and On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace. He is also co-
author of The Western Heritage and The Heritage of World Civilizations.
John W. I. Lee is associate professor of history at the University of Cali-
fornia, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. in history from Cornell
University.
He is the author of A Greek Army on the March: Soldiers and
viii Contributors
Survival in Xenophon’s Anabasis (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
He has also published on women in ancient Greek armies, on the
Persian army in Herodotus, and on ancient soldiers’ memoirs. Lee is
currently working on a new book that examines warfare and culture
in the eastern Aegean and along the west coast of Anatolia, from the
Ionian Revolt (499–494 BC) to the fourth century BC.
Susan Mattern is professor of history at the University of Georgia.
Her most recent book is Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing (Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2008), a study of the medical practice of
the ancient physician Galen, based on his stories about his patients.
She is also the author of Rome and the Enemy: Imperial Strategy in the
Principate (University of California Press, 1999; now in paperback)
and co-author of The Ancient Mediterranean World from the Stone Age
to a.d. 600 (Oxford University Press, 2004). She is now working on a
biography of Galen.
Barry Strauss is professor of Classics and history and chair of the His-
tory Department at Cornell University, as well as director of the
Program on Freedom and Free Societies. He is the author of six
books, including The Battle of Salamis, named one of the best books
of 2004 by the Washington Post, and The Trojan War: A New History,
a main selection of the History Book Club. His most recent book,
The Spartacus War, appeared in March 2009. He is series editor of
Princeton History of the Ancient World and serves on the editorial
boards of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, Historically
Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society, and the International
Journal of the Classical Tradition. He is the recipient of the Heinrich
Schliemann Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies
at Athens, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship
for University Teachers, and Cornell’s Clark Award for Excellence
in Teaching.
Ian Worthington is Frederick A. Middlebush Professor of History at
the University of Missouri. Previously he taught for ten years in
the Classics Department at the University of New England and the
Contributors ix
University of Tasmania, Australia. He is author or editor of fourteen
books and more than eighty articles. His most recent publications
include the biographies Alexander the Great: Man and God (Pearson,
2004) and Philip II of Macedonia (Yale University Press, 2008), and
the Blackwell Companion to Greek Rhetoric (Oxford University Press,
2006). He is currently writing a book on Demosthenes, editing the
Blackwell Companion to Ancient Macedonia, and serving as editor-in-
chief of Brill’s New Jacoby. In 2005 he won the Chancellor’s Award
for Outstanding Research and Creativity in the Humanities and in
2007 the Student-Athlete Advisory Council Most Inspiring Professor
Award, both at the University of Missouri.
x Contributors
Makers of Ancient Strategy
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Introduction: Makers of Ancient Strategy
From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome
Victor Davis Hanson
Makers of Strategy
Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, edited by
Peter Paret, appeared as a 941-page volume comprising twenty-eight
essays, with topics ranging from the sixteenth century to the 1980s. The
work was published by Princeton University Press in 1986, as the cold
war was drawing to a close. Paret’s massive anthology itself updated
and expanded upon the classic inaugural Princeton volume of twenty
essays, Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to
Hitler, edited by Edward M. Earle. The smaller, earlier book had ap-
peared more than forty years before the second, in 1943, in the midst of
the Second World War. It focused on individual military theorists and
generals; hence the personalized title, “Makers.”
Although the theme of both books remained the relevance of the
past to military challenges of the present, the 1986 sequel dealt more
with American concerns. Its chapters were built not so much around
individuals as on larger strategic themes and historical periods. Al-
though both the editors and the authors of these two books by intent
did not always explicitly connect their contributions to the ordeals of
their times, the Second World War and the cold war are unavoidable
presences in the background. Both books cautioned against assuming
that the radical changes in war making of their respective ages were
signs that the nature of conflict had also changed.
On the contrary, the two works served as reminders that the history of
both the immediate and more distant past deals with the same concerns
and dangers as exist in the tumultuous present. The study of military
history schools us in lessons that are surprisingly apt to contemporary
dilemmas, even though they may be largely unknown or forgotten—and
al the more so as radical y evolving technology fools many into thinking
that war itself is reinvented with the novel tools of each age.
Why the Ancient World?
In what might be thought of as a prequel to those two works, Makers
of Ancient Strategy resembles in its approach (not to mention its smaller
size) the earlier 1943 volume edited by Earle. The ten essays in Makers
of Ancient Strategy frequently focus on individual leaders, strategists,
and generals, among them Xerxes, Pericles, Epaminondas, Alexander,
Spartacus, and Caesar. The historical parameters, however, have ex-
panded in the opposite direction to encompass a millennium of history
(roughly from 500 BC to AD 500) that, even at its most recent, in the late
Roman Empire, is at least 1,500 years from the present. As a point of
modern departure, this third work on the makers of strategy appears
not merely in the second generation of industrial war, as was true of
the 1943 publication, or in a third era of high-tech precision weapons
of the nuclear age, as in 1986, but during so-called fourth-generational
warfare. The late twentieth century ushered in a baffling time, char-
acterized by instant globalized communications, asymmetrical tactics,
and new manifestations of terrorism, with war technology in the form
of drones, night-vision goggles, enhanced bodily protection, and com-
puter-guided weapons systems housed from beneath the earth to outer
space. Nevertheless, the theme of all three volumes remains constant:
the study of history, not recent understanding of technological innova-
tion, remains the better guide to the nature of contemporary warfare
As the formal lines between conventional war and terrorism blur,
and as high technology accelerates the pace and dangers of conflict,
it has become popular to suggest that war itself has been remade into
something never before witnessed by earlier generations. Just as no
previous era had to deal with terrorists’ communiqués posted on the
Internet and instantly accessible to hund
reds of millions of viewers,
so supposedly we must now conceive of wholly new doctrines and
2 Introduction
paradigms to counteract such tactics. But as the ten essays in this book
show, human nature, which drives conflict, is unchanging. Since war
is and will always be conducted by men and women, who reason—or
react emotionally—in somewhat expected ways, there is a certain pre-
dictability to war.
Makers of Ancient Strategy not only reminds us that the more things
change, the more they remain the same, it also argues that the classi-
cal worlds of Greece and Rome offer a unique utility in understanding
war of any era. The ancient historians and observers were empirical.
They often wrote about what they saw and thought, without worry-
ing about contemporary popular opinion and without much concern
either that their observations could be at odds with prevailing theories
or intellectual trends. So there was an honesty of thought and a clarity
of expression not always found in military discussions in the present.
We also know a great deal about warfare in the ancient Western
world. The Greek and Roman writers who created the discipline of
history defined it largely as the study of wars, as the works of Herodo-
tus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, and Livy attest. And while much
of ancient history has been lost, enough still survives to allow a fairly
complete account of a thousand years of fighting in the Greek and Ro-
man worlds. Indeed, we know much more about the battle of Delion
(424 BC) or Adrianople (AD 378) than about Poitiers (732) or Ashdown
(871). The experience of Greece and Rome also forms the common her-
itage of modern Europe and the United States, and in a way that is less
true of the venerable traditions of ancient Africa, the Americas, and
Asia. In that sense, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western prob-
lems of unification, civil war, expansion abroad, colonization, nation
building, and counterinsurgency all have clear and well-documented
precedents in both Greek and Roman culture.
Makers of Ancient Strategy explores the most ancient examples of
our heritage to frame questions of the most recent manifestations of
Western warfare. The Greeks were the first to argue that human na-
ture was fixed and, as the historian Thucydides predicted, were confi-
dent that the history of their own experiences would still be relevant
to subsequent generations, even our own postmodern one in the new