Ripples of Battle

by Victor Davis Hanson

  When did this ancient practice of uncomplicated head-on collisions change in Greece? Sometime in the 150 years between the repulse of the Persians and the onslaught of the Macedonians, the nature of infantry battle evolved into what we would recognize as the science of tactics. If the Athenians at the battle of Marathon (490 B.C.) in simple fashion weakened their center to lengthen and strengthen their wings, a century and a half later in the era of Philip II and his son Alexander the Great (360–23 B.C.), Macedonian armies routinely practiced feints, used reserves, and attacked in wedges and staggered lines.

  Alexander typically concentrated his force upon a particular spot in the enemy line, and with combined heavy and light infantrymen in concert with cavalry and missile troops sought to shatter his way through as reserves poured in to exploit success. The size of an army suddenly was not so important if the initial battle could be confined to particular points and contingents and be led by highly trained professionals. At his tactical masterpieces of Issus (333 B.C.) and Gaugamela (331 B.C.) he was able to scatter forces five times larger than his own by brilliantly marshaling and coordinating the diverse elements of the royal Macedonian army. In other words, the discovery of Western tactics—the abstract knowledge of how to manipulate forces on the battlefield to overcome enemy numerical superiority, unfavorable terrain, or inadequate training and weaponry—is usually first attributed to Alexander and his father, Philip.

  But if we define tactics more narrowly as the movement of forces on the battlefield itself, then where did the Macedonian kings learn of such innovations in phalanx fighting? Macedon, although it lay outside the world of the polis, was fascinated by things Greek and habitually imported Hellenic expertise of all sorts—from catapult builders and siege engineers to natural scientists, philosophers, and playwrights.

  Consequently, most military historians identify Hellenic roots in the Macedonian military renaissance of the latter fourth century B.C. and thus connect Philip’s new army to the exemplar of the great general Epaminondas the Theban, who led the democratic federation of Boeotia to a brief decade-long hegemony over the Greek city-states (371–62 B.C.). At his first and greatest battle at Leuctra (371 B.C.), Epaminondas had led an outnumbered Boeotian army to a crushing victory over the crack hoplites of Sparta. Key to his success there was the massing of troops on the left flank to a depth of fifty shields to blast apart the Spartan right wing opposite and to kill King Cleombrotus.

  In some ancient accounts of Leuctra, there is also mention of cavalry and infantry coordination and an en echelon attack—in reality Epaminondas had no choice but to advance at an angle to reach the Spartan right that extended far beyond his flank. Since Philip II, architect of the deadly Macedonian army, was a hostage at Thebes in his teenage years (ca. 369–67 B.C.), historians suspect that the future king witnessed Epaminondas’s new model army firsthand and returned to Macedon determined one day to emulate the Boeotian manner of attacking in depth with only a portion of the army on the left rather than right wing.

  But who influenced Epaminondas in his decision to mass troops on a single wing? To find the origins of Western tactics prior to the fourth century B.C., we must return a half century to Delium—not earlier and not outside of Boeotia. Most traditional Greek phalanxes adopted a depth of eight shields. That number was eventually standardized as the apparent ideal ratio between length and depth. Massing deeper would take valuable infantrymen out of the killing zone (only the first three ranks of a phalanx could reach the enemy with their spears in the initial charge) and leave the entire battle line vulnerable to enemy outflanking movements. But columns less than eight shields were felt to lack the weight necessary both to absorb enemy blows and to break enemy formations, inasmuch as there would be neither enough pushing with shields from the rear nor replacement hoplites to take the place of the fallen.

  The Macedonians—whose pikes extended to sixteen feet and more in length—increased the phalanx from a depth of eight men to sixteen, apparently in emulation of Epaminondas’s success at Leuctra and the second battle of Mantinea (362 B.C.), where the Theban general had created a shock column of fifty shields. But even prior to Epaminondas, the Thebans at the battle at the Nemea River (394 B.C.) two decades earlier had arrayed themselves sixteen men deep. Apparently throughout the fourth century B.C., Greek generals—especially Thebans—came to understand that particular segments of their battle line could be strengthened to attack in depth and overwhelm specific areas of the enemy’s army. The Thebans, whose hoplites were legendary for their superior body strength, gained a reputation for attacking in deep columns, confident that they could crush a particular point of the enemy line before their own thinned contingents were outflanked or enveloped.

  Yet neither Epaminondas nor his immediate Theban predecessors of the early fourth century B.C. were the first to adopt such innovations. In fact, the first recorded instance in Greek history of an army charging in a depth greater than eight men was at Delium. There Pagondas’s twenty-five shields on the Boeotian right bowled over and crushed the Athenian left wing. Pagondas, in fact, seems not only to be the forefather of the Theban practice of massing in column, but in some sense the inventor of Western tactical thinking itself.

  In most battles even during the early and mid-fifth century B.C. the outcome was determined solely by the troops who lined up opposite each other in the minutes before the first charge. And once these one-dimensional forces collided, most classical Greek generals—to our knowledge none were either mounted or to the rear—essentially lost control of events and joined in the melee themselves. Their displays of physical courage, not mental acuity, usually brought success in battle. Yet at Delium, Pagondas must have been somewhere other than in the immediate front ranks of the Theban right wing that was charging downhill against the Athenian left wing. Only by being posted outside the heat of the first-rank fighting could he have ordered two companies of horsemen to ride out of sight to the other side of the battle line, where they suddenly appeared over a hill to attack the victorious Athenian right. Thucydides relates that when these relief forces surfaced out of nowhere, the Athenians were so confused that they wrongly surmised that an entirely fresh army was on the horizon. Thus at the moment of their victory, the Athenian right simply panicked and fled from the appearance of a few hundred horsemen. Generalship—not physical strength or mere numbers—destroyed the Athenian right wing and brought the Boeotians victory.

  Not only were these reserves a remarkable new development, but the use of horsemen in close action with infantry was also unusual and antedated Macedonian combined tactics by nearly a century. At most hoplite battles, hostilities began with skirmishing between horsemen in the no-man’s-land between the two phalanxes. Occasionally, successful cavalry action might confuse and disrupt temporarily the subsequent infantry charge. But in most cases horsemen had no success against heavily armed spearmen. Skirmishing before and pursuing after battle, in addition to protecting the flanks of the phalanx, was the traditional—and limited—domain of small numbers of classical Greek cavalrymen, themselves mostly aristocratic prancers rather than professional chargers.

  So Pagondas’s decision to send mounted troops against an infantry wing marked a breakthrough in Hellenic tactical thinking, one that would reach its apex in the deadly charges of Alexander and his mounted companions who punched holes in the Persian royal army and were followed by columns of phalangites. Deepening a column was a dramatic way to tear gaps in the enemy line, but it was also a dangerous gambit—in that it inevitably robbed valuable troops from the front ranks elsewhere on the battle line, leaving the entire army vulnerable to enemy outflanking maneuvers. Reserves, preferably mounted, were the requisite complement to massed columns. Such mobile relief companies could be sent to any trouble spots where the enemy appeared to outflank a shorter line. Somehow the old Theban had thought all this out before his men ran to meet the Athenians in what the latter assumed would be a simple pitched battle. How odd that Boeotian rustics, not Atheni
an sophisticates, would prove to be the real innovators in the art of war.

  If Delium marks the first occasion in the history of Western warfare where deepened columns and mounted reserves appear, there were also other innovations in this strange army of Pagondas. The historian Diodorus mentions the presence of select troops of foot soldiers who fought alongside mounted troops. He notes “out in front of the entire army fought a select group of 300 called ‘the charioteers and foot soldiers’.”

  This same force of parabatai is also mentioned in Euripides’ Suppliants in the tragedy’s allegory of the battle. And after Delium, a Theban select body of 300 soldiers is always associated with the so-called Sacred Band of 150 pairs of lovers. They fought, Plutarch tells us, undefeated at the forefront of Theban battles until exterminated at Chaeronea (338 B.C.), where they were buried by Philip II under the proud stone lion that now watches over the modern highway. We do not know exactly the relationship between the original 300 “charioteers and foot soldiers” at Delium and the later famous “Sacred Band,” but apparently the presence of a similarly sized number of professionals in 424 B.C. marked the beginning of a gradual specialization in infantry practice—a departure from the old idea that hoplite farmers marshaled as militiamen for only a few days of campaigning. In the latter fifth and fourth centuries, we hear of similar elite corps at Argos, Arcadia, and Elis who trained hard at public expense.

  Finally, a few of the panicked Athenians fled not back home to Attica but to their small fortified garrison in the precinct of Apollo at Delium. These desperate Athenians were quickly besieged by the victorious Boeotians and their Locrian allies. But instead of the usual—and often unsuccessful—Greek practice of storming a fortified position through rams, tunneling, aerial assault, or simple blockades to induce starvation, the Boeotians created a huge mobile flamethrower of sorts. Their contraption apparently resembled a queer wooden gun barrel on wheels with iron insides. On one end the attackers used bellows to force a searing blast of lighted coals, sulfur, and pitch out of the muzzle into the Athenians’ wooden barricade, quickly sending the entire wood palisade—and some of the defenders with it—up in flames.

  Military historians usually associate the invention of artillery with Dionysius I’s siege of Motya on Sicily in 399 B.C. During that assault, Syracusan engineers developed nontorsion “belly bows”—essentially large crossbows that were cocked by a slide and stock to hurl iron bolts and spears. A half century later Philip of Macedon first employed true torsion catapults, whose springs of either bundled hair or sinew gave them the propulsive power to shoot with accuracy bolts and stones over three hundred yards distant. Both developments were lamented in classical literature. Traditionalists felt that the new artillery brought a disturbing randomness to the battlefield: both bravehearts and cowards could now be killed from afar without distinction by such infernal machines. Personal courage and muscular strength meant little against the spring-loaded bolts of heartless artillery.

  Yet the flamethrower at Delium predated Philip’s catapults by nearly a century and would much later be emulated by the infamous Greek fire that first emerged at Byzantium somewhere around A.D. 675. Although the exact ingredients and their ratios of mixture remain unknown to this day, the torrent of flame that was shot out of Byzantine galleys was apparently a potent fusion of naphtha, sulfur, petroleum, and quicklime that could not be extinguished by water—a nearly unquenchable toxic spume that could incinerate enemy ships in seconds. While the delivery system for Greek fire was far more sophisticated than the fire gun at Delium, it operated on the same principle of using compressed air to ignite a flammable fuel at the end of the barrel, resulting in a stream of continuous flame spurting out toward the target. The dozens of Athenians who were incinerated in the sanctuary attest to the deadliness of Pagondas’s strange new weapon.

  How are we to explain these extraordinary military developments of the Boeotians that first appear at Delium? What is unfathomable about the course of the battle is not Delium’s military influence on subsequent commanders, which was both profound and revolutionary—but how such innovative tactical thinking arose from the mind of an obscure general in his sixties, at the head of an army of rustics, who alone wished his army of yeomen to fight at Delium and apparently possessed the military acumen to achieve victory.

  The train of events that arose from Delium would have been impossible without the will of a lone Theban who single-handedly brought the Boeotian army to battle. And yet after Pagondas appears out of obscurity in Thucydides’ history to win Delium, he is abruptly forgotten in the narrative when the battle concludes. Nevertheless, his ingenious deployments in the battle were not forgotten, but rather over time became enshrined as the cornerstones of classical tactics—massed columns, reserves, joint infantry and mounted attack, elite units, and sophisticated military technology.

  Alexander the Great did not invent Western tactics nor did Epaminondas the Theban. Rather, both generals followed in a strange and now-forgotten tradition of Boeotian warfare that had its inaugural day at Delium. Rural Boeotia—of all places—was the embryo of Western military thought, home to the first battle in the history of European civilization in which there appeared a real science of sophisticated tactics.

  What Was Delium?

  Delium was an accident. The battle in an out-of-the-way place between two Greek city-states should never have taken place. Only the ardor of one old Theban aristocrat galvanized the Boeotian army and convinced it to pursue to the border a demoralized enemy that had largely abandoned its prior intention of fighting. Why, then, did such a seemingly unimportant clash in a backwater theater of the Peloponnesian War affect thousands more beyond the battlefield, both then and now?

  Delium was not merely influential because of the sheer number of warriors assembled. Compared to other ancient engagements, its magnitude was still not that unusual. There may have been 250,000 seamen at Salamis. Between 60,000 and 80,000 Romans died in three hours at Cannae. In Alexander’s great battles, sometimes over a quarter million men collided. Delium’s 50,000 were far less than the over 100,000 Americans who charged each other over the two days at Shiloh.

  Of course, the thousands who fought at Delium had families and friends, and so the killing, wounding, and trauma of that huge encounter changed hundreds of thousands of lives that are completely lost to the historical record—and in ways we can scarcely begin to imagine. The fate of Thespiae is but a glimpse of the subsequent decades of ruin for thousands of Boeotians that followed from that single afternoon’s killing. We have the names of 164 dead Boeotians at Delium, but not a clue as to how their individual sacrifices changed the fate of either their families or communities.

  As cruel as it is to confess, the historical significance of Delium is not in the numbers of the nameless ranks of the veterans and their kin. Nor are the battle’s consequences found in the realm of grand strategy. Even if one can make the argument that the Peloponnesian War was a watershed event in the history of Western civilization, it is not altogether clear that the Athenian defeat at Delium really changed the course of that conflict.

  But why again has Delium affected us to this day in fundamental ways insidious and scarcely appreciated? The answer, I think, lies in the peculiar nature of the respective city-states of Athens and the Boeotians at a particular moment in 424 B.C. Delium was the first great infantry battle—and defeat—of Athens during the Peloponnesian War, a traumatic setback for an imperial city in its greatest age and at its very border. The result was that there were thousands of classical Athenians of every age drawn up together, fighting in rank, killing, dying, and running away in sight of the Attic border. As cities and civilizations go, Athens in the 420s B.C. was an extraordinary culture, and many of its soldiers who fought were rather different from most warriors past and present.

  Despite the horrific losses of the plague and the waste of the first seven years of the war, Greek tragedy was at its zenith in 424 B.C. True, in the urban area of Athens proper th
ere were no more than one hundred thousand residents—one hundredth the size of greater New York or Los Angeles. In modern terms of material wealth, we would find the city abysmally poor. Yet the combination of radical democracy and imperial grandeur had energized the citizenry, creating a unique but fragile—and transitory—symbiosis between politics, commerce, and the life of the mind. In late-fifth-century Athens there were no real divides between public and private spheres, politics and intellectual inquiry, art and the science of architecture, much less between business and cultural pursuit. The talented were not engaged in the esoterica of financial speculation or the hunt for capital, at least not entirely. No Wall Street brokerage concerns, international law firms, Madison Avenue, or Hollywood wooed bright Athenians with promises of the good life. For a very brief period—six or seven decades at most—the very gifted of Athenian society found avenues for their talents in the most public and intellectual of ways.

  Sophocles’ great masterpiece Oedipus Rex was presented just a few years before the battle. The playwright himself earlier had served on the same board of generals as did the general Hippocrates. Many who fought the Boeotians in 424 had seen the Oedipus (which was set in Boeotia) and dozens like it in the theater of Dionysus less than thirty miles from Delium, on the slopes below the recently finished Parthenon. Sophocles’ Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus were to follow in the years after the battle. His younger contemporary Euripides—who like Sophocles probably saw military service—was in his late fifties by 424 B.C. Since the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 B.C., he had presented in succession Medea, the Heracleidae, Hippolytus, Andromache, and Hecuba. In the next two decades after the battle, besides The Suppliants, his masterpieces Electra, Bacchae, and Iphigenia at Aulis were to follow. When the Athenians marched into Boeotia, the brilliant comic poet Aristophanes was in his mid-thirties; his showpiece The Clouds, the savage attack on Socrates produced the year after Delium, was no fluke. Months before the battle he had put on Knights. And after Delium his greatest comedies were to come—Wasps (422 B.C.), Birds (414), Lysistrata (411), and Frogs (405).