Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome
Page 25
the Poliorkêtika, composed around 355–350 BC.92 Though its title is often
rendered as Siegecraft, the Poliorkêtika is in fact a guide to protecting
a threatened city from internal treachery, surprise assaults, and fickle
mercenaries. It is an extraordinary collection of advice, anecdotes, and
observations, containing everything from practical tips (“when saw-
ing through a cross-bar pour oil on it, to make the task quicker and
quieter”) to astute psychological insight (“In parts of the city which the
enemy can easily . . . attack . . . [station] those with the largest stake
in the community and thus the greatest incentive not to succumb to
self-indulgence”).93
Aeneas stresses many of the same aspects of the urban battleground
that we have already examined. He underlines the importance of the
agora and other strategic spots.94 He offers procedures to help cities
guard against surprise assaults and internal plots. A city’s troops, he
writes, must be wel organized and forceful y led; the hiring and disci-
pline of mercenaries must be careful y regulated. Moreover, Aeneas ad-
vocates al sorts of remarkably modern-sounding methods for keeping
an urban population under control: registering or confiscating weapons,
issuing identity tokens, interrogating merchants and hotel guests, for-
bidding communal dinners, and so on. Even processions and religious
festivals must be watched, he adds, lest they become occasions for vio-
lent revolution. Mutual scrutiny of everyone’s actions, he emphasizes,
wil deprive plotters of any opportunity to carry out their plans.
154 Lee
Now, Aeneas was clearly familiar with classical Greece’s long his-
tory of city fights. He refers to the clashes at Plataea, Sparta, and Argos
as examples of how to defend urban terrain. And he does offer some
techniques for fighting inside the walls, including a stratagem to
lure enemy troops into open gates and then entrap them.95 Even so,
Aeneas’s true goal was not to describe how to win a city fight but to
forestall urban warfare before it broke out, through tight security at
the gates and in the marketplace, active defense of city walls, and strict
supervision of potentially rebellious elements. In a sense, he simply
perpetuated the traditional classical emphasis on a wall-based defen-
sive strategy.
There was irony to Aeneas’s stance, for just as he was completing his
handbook, a new era of Greek military technology was arising. Large
torsion-powered bolt-shooters and stone throwers would give new
dominance to the attackers of cities. Within a few years of the appear-
ance of the Poliorkêtika, Philip of Macedon would use his siege engines
to take the once impregnable city of Amphipolis. By sticking to the old
emphasis on city walls, Aeneas and his fellow Greeks played right into
the offensive capabilities of the powerful new siege machinery. Perhaps
if he had written a few years later, Aeneas might have offered a differ-
ent approach, one that did not try to meet attackers at the walls but
instead drew them into the city, where they could be surrounded and
destroyed, just as the Plataeans had annihilated the Thebans in 431.
Lessons Learned
Spears and swords, mud brick houses, women with roof tiles. At first
glance it seems hard to imagine how stories from twenty-five centuries
ago could shed any light on modern urban warfare, in which high-tech
Western armies confront RPG-armed irregulars in sprawling concrete
conurbations. Outside the experiences of divided cities such as Notium
and Syracuse, there is little in the history of classical city fighting di-
rectly comparable with modern urban counterinsurgency. Yet place
Plataea side by side with Mogadishu in 1993, where an outnumbered
American assault force was bewildered by a maze of unfamiliar streets,
and it is clear some things have not changed.96
Urban Warfare 155
Perhaps the first lesson that emerges from examining Greek ur-
ban war is the importance of good intelligence and local knowledge.
Without understanding urban topography—not only in the physical
sense, but also in the wider sense of the economic and social rela-
tionships that link neighborhoods and people—modern soldiers will
remain as lost in the mud and darkness as were the Thebans at Plat-
aea. For Western armies operating abroad in cities, low-tech, low-cost
solutions, such as having sufficient interpreters or providing all troops
with basic foreign language training, will enable better access to local
knowledge than expensive jet fighters or other high-tech gadgetry can
ever provide.
Furthermore, the classical experience helps contextualize the ven-
geance and factionalism that mark modern urban war. The sectarian hos-
tility that characterizes many of today’s urban conflicts does not seem
so aberrational when placed against the backdrop of civil strife in places
like Corcyra. The classical Greek city was very much a family and tribal
affair. Civil strife was the vessel into which al its antagonisms—class,
politics, personal differences—could pour.97 Bitter factional hatreds,
mass slaughter, choosing suicide over surrender—these were the inevi-
table corol aries of stasis, not the property of one ideology, place, or
time. As Thucydides recognized long ago, the details may change, but
people’s responses wil remain similar.98
Too, the ability of Greek cities to mobilize the entirety of the pop-
ulation for urban war presents a lesson for modern Western armies
used to assuming a strong distinction between military and civilian
personnel. From the classical perspective, an armed populace looks
like a more normal state of affairs than does a professional volunteer
military isolated from the rest of a society. The Greeks, it is true, pre-
ferred to think of hoplite battle as strictly for male citizens. In urban
combat, though, this ideology broke down, and every male and female
inhabitant could take part in the fight. Women’s use of roof tiles in
ancient city fights reminds us how successfully irregular combatants
can employ urban terrain to neutralize the technological advantages
of conventional forces.
The histories of urban combat at Athens and Thebes, moreover,
show that foreign troops and garrisons, however useful they may be
156 Lee
for propping up a sympathetic regime, provide a focal point for lo-
cal opposition. Sometimes military forces in a city cause more harm
than benefit. One wonders, for example, what would have happened
in Athens in 508–507 if the oligarchic party had not called in Spartan
assistance. Perhaps they would have held on to power, and Athenian
radical democracy would have been stillborn. Here Aeneas Tacticus’s
warnings about the dangers of mercenaries provide additional food
for thought. While classical authors sometimes overstated the evils of
hired soldiery, there was truth to their complaints. Arrogant, violent,
or careless mercenaries could inflame popular resentment and cause
uprisings.
These days, unregulated and overaggressive private military
contractors such as Blackwater threaten the success of Western armies
and hinder the accomplishment of strategic goals.
If a city is to be taken or retained, the Greek experience shows that
holding just one central point, whether acropolis or Green Zone, is in-
sufficient. Urban war requires controlling markets, streets, and houses.
Even better, as Aeneas Tacticus recognized, is to achieve victory by
using repression, surveillance, and mutual responsibility to forestall re-
bellion or invasion before it occurs. Aeneas, of course, did not have to
deal with world opinion, but in that difference lies perhaps the great-
est lesson that Greek urban combat has to teach us. The excesses and
atrocities of Corcyra, Thebes, and Syracuse underline the dangers of
letting troops get out of control, of succumbing to the psychology of
“payback,” and of fighting with no higher purpose than the seizure or
maintenance of power. Modern Western democratic armies are not
just military forces. They embody the public reputation and values of
their nations, and are sustainable abroad only to the degree that they
retain majority support back home. As deceptive and dishonorable as
the enemy may be, the officers and soldiers of modern democracies
must always remember their moral and ethical obligations, whether on
the urban battlefield or anywhere else.
Further Reading
Readers wanting to learn more about ancient urban war might start with Aeneas Tacti-
cus; for a translation and commentary see Whitehead, Aineias the Tactician (1990). For
Thucydides and Herodotus, the excellent Landmark editions of Strassler, The Landmark
Urban Warfare 157
Thucydides (1996) and The Landmark Herodotus (2007), may be consulted. Ober, “Hop-
lites and Obstacles” (1991), and Lee, “Urban Combat at Olynthos” (2001), analyze the
mechanics of ancient city fighting. Lintott (1982) offers an overview of civil strife ( sta-
sis) in the classical city. For more about classical Greek armies, see Sabin, van Wees,
and Whitby, The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare (2007). Ashworth, War
and the City (1991), Desch, Soldiers in Cities (2001), and Dufour, La guerre, la ville et le soldat (2002), provide long-term perspectives on the history of urban warfare. For urban
combat in the modern global context, see Kaldor, “New and Old Wars” (2007), and
Thornton, Asymmetric Warfare (2007).
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notes
1 The story of Plataea is told in Thucydides 2.1–5.
2 For an overview of the latest scholarship on Greek warfare, see Sabin, van Wees,
and Whitby, The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare.
3 Herodotus 5.100–101.
4 Xenophon Anabasis 5.2.7–27.
5 Diodorus Siculus 11.67.5–11.68.5, 11.73, 11.76, etc.
6 For useful overviews of the history of urban warfare, see Ashworth, War and the
City; Dufour, La guerre; Antal and Gericke, City Fights.
7 On urbanization and the future of urban war, see Desch, Soldiers in Cities, 3–5;
Glenn et al., “People Make the City,” xiii; Joes, Urban Guerrilla Warfare, 2–3.
8 For surprise in city assaults, see Rusch, “Poliorcetic Assault,” 824–32.
9 For the battlefield archaeology of Olynthos see Lee, “Urban Combat at Olynthos.”
10 On stasis, see Lintott, Violence, Civil Strife, and Revolution, Gehrke, Stasis.
11 Thucydides 3.70–85, 4.46–48.
12 Diodorus Siculus 13.104, 15.57; Hellenica Oxyrhynchia 15.2.
13 Arrian 1.7.1.
14 Thucydides 3.72–76.
15 Thucydides 3.34.
16 Diodorus Siculus 11.73–76.
17 Plutarch Agesilaus 32.
18 Hansen and Nielsen, Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis, 4–153, offer an excel-