At the moment of impact, the attackers’ spears (6–8 feet long, weighing about 4 pounds) would have been held underhand in order to thrust upward into the unprotected groin, the thigh, or the gut under the breastplate:
This indeed is afoul thing, that the older man falls among the forefront and lies before the younger
His white head and his grey beard breathing out his strong soul in the dust,
Holding in his dear hands his groin all bloody.68
This sounds entirely plausible. Vase paintings show hoplites unprotected on their thighs and, as far as one can judge, on their genitals. But something, nevertheless, seems contrary to common sense. If, over time, warriors find that they have a particular vulnerability—that is, they get killed on a regular basis because of a lack of armor in a vital place, or their tactics expose them to often repeated fatalities, or their gear is defective—they tend to do something about it. On the whole, fighting men have a particular aversion to getting killed. In addition, being gored in the genitals is a very special risk men would passionately seek to avoid (one thinks of the steel codpieces of medieval knights). But this does not seem to have been the case in hoplite warfare (or Roman legion warfare either).
Two ideas present themselves (though neither entirely convincingly). One, that they did have effective protection, or felt they did, in the shield; or, two, that another advantage—a tactical one—outweighed the disadvantage: Was it more important to be mobile, to be relatively unencumbered? (There is, of course, a third possibility—that they did not rate self-preservation very highly. But this would seem unlikely in the context of citizen-soldiers who sought limited warfare.)
Once engaged, hoplites would change to an overhead grip in order to thrust down over the shield into the neck, face, arms, and shoulders. Spears had butt spikes that could be used for stabbing a fallen enemy, but they also posed their own problem to comrades behind. Plutarch relates that in the great press of bodies in Pyrrhus’s phalanx during the battle of Árgos in 272 BCE many were killed by “friendly fire”—accidental blows from comrades.69 Some spears would have shattered on impact with the enemy front line, but the great press of bodies would have made sword fighting difficult (hoplites were usually armed with the double-edged short sword—although there is pictorial evidence of a sicklelike design not dissimilar to a Ghurka kukri—as well as a dagger called the parazonium, or “belt companion”).70 In the great shove a disarmed hoplite himself became a weapon, as companions behind pushed him into the enemy ranks.
The heaviest mortality would understandably be in the front rank, and again one can see the function of providing a special heroic status to those who fought there. Men have to be, in the most literal meaning of the word, encouraged to risk their lives. For example, in the age of musketry, it would often be junior officers, young men seeking advancement (but also the most expendable), who were given the honor of carrying the regimental colors. It was a highly dangerous job because the color bearer was an obvious target and, due to the nature of his role, often exposed. But the function had been, over centuries, invested with glory, and if he survived he not only progressed in his career but also enhanced his social standing among his peers as well as the wider society. Through his risk taking he had become empowered. The same could be said of the Roman velites, lightly armored forward skirmishers of the legion who, young and eager to prove themselves, were rewarded for acts of conspicuous individual bravery.71 As the Spartan Tyrtaeus expressed it: “Glorious indeed is death in the front rank of the combat, when the brave man falls fighting for his country.”72
Once the two phalanxes were locked together, the battle came down to othismos—the push of shields—by which the rearward ranks sought to shove their comrades deeper into the enemy formation in order to form bridgeheads that could be reinforced and exploited—assuming the pioneers survived long enough to hold the pocket. Hand-to-hand battle would have been frenzied and ugly, rather like the trench-raiding combat of World War I—desperate, fear-choked, grabbing, slashing, brutal killing about as far removed from some heroic model of warfare as one could imagine. Death by trampling and suffocation (a high risk in any close-in combat by massed infantry, as Agincourt eighteen hundred or so years later would demonstrate) was the fate of many who lost their footing. But the need to maintain a heroic aura around battle is compelling (if civilians knew how truly gruesome combat is, societies would be hard-pressed to sustain it), and mass warfare is very rarely depicted on ancient Greek vases; the image that had to be promoted was one of heroic individual combat. The engine of war runs on the intoxicating vapor of mythology.
At some point came the critical moment of resolution when on one side there was a rapid evaporation of morale and the defeated began to peel off from the rear and sides, quickly triggering a general flight (the whiff of defeat is pungent). Retreat often unleashes some primitive bloodlust in the victor, and if there was a complete collapse, undoubtedly men were run down and killed in number, but if some order was maintained by the defeated, a fighting withdrawal would have been a sufficient disincentive to the attackers to take further casualties. Battle, after all, was about driving the enemy off and doing so while minimizing risk. There was a life to return to. Casualties generally remained on the low side compared with modern warfare—5 percent for the victors and about 14 percent for the defeated.73
But hoplite battle was far from a bloodless ritual. Victor Davis Hanson describes the aftermath:
Besides the sheer concentration of bodies, the most common sight to these onlookers would have been the quantity of spilled blood and gore. In some of the larger battles—Delion, Leuktra, or Plataia—thousands of corpses lay with huge, gaping wounds from the spear and the sword. Since the flesh was never incinerated as it came to be in modern battles by the explosion of bomb and shell, and because the entry and exit wounds created by double-edged iron spearheads tend to be larger than those caused by small-arms fire, the bodies would have drained much of their body fluids upon the ground. Walking among the pile of corpses entailed treading everywhere over stained earth and pools of blood.… Plutarch recorded a similar picture after the death of some 25,000 Macedonian pikemen at Pydna.74
(Pydna, 168 BCE, was the battle in which Macedonian phalanxes were massacred by Roman legions. The Macedonian death toll has been estimated as exceeding 60 percent.)
Victory was usually signaled by the erection of a panoply of armor mounted on a tree or pole, and custom dictated that it should not be permanent (too showy an edifice was considered in bad taste). Under the strict code of hoplite combat the dead were invariably reclaimed by their respective sides and an accounting by tribal affiliation was relayed back to the city. Where the bodies lay would have told its own story reflecting the tribal composition of the phalanx. As with any unit based on geographical proximity, whole communities could be devastated (the British Pals battalions of World War I, and the men from Bedford, Virginia, who died at D-Day, are classic modern examples). At Plataea, for example, (479 BCE) the Athenian dead came from one tribe, the Aiantis. At Leuctra (371 BCE) almost all of the Spartan high command, many of whom were related, were killed.75 The Roman writer Onasander, describing hoplite warfare, remarked that men fought best when “brother is in rank beside brother, friend beside friend, lover beside lover.”76 The last category is certainly at odds with “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” The Theban “Sacred Band” of 150 homosexual couples died to a man resisting the Macedonian invasion at the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE. Plutarch describes the Macedonian king, Philip, reviewing their corpses: “He stopped at the spot where the three hundred lay: all slain where they had met the long spears of the Macedonians. The corpses were still in their armor and mixed up with one another, and so he became amazed when he learned that these were the regiments of lovers and beloved. ‘May all perish,’ he said, ‘who suspect that these men did or suffered anything disgraceful.’ ”77
In Sparta also homosexuality was an institutionalized part of the society and an enti
rely accepted part of the military.78
In Greek warfare, victory went to the side that controlled the battlefield and not necessarily to the side with fewer casualties. At the battle of Paraetacene (c. 316 BCE), for example, Antigonus’s army lost more than 3,700 killed, while his opponent, Eumenes, had only about 540 dead. But Eumenes could not persuade or force his army to camp among the corpses, and it insisted on moving off for the night. Antigonus, on the other hand, did cajole his men to sleep among the slain and claimed the victory.79
SHIFTS IN WEAPONS technology and the tactics that flow from them can spell doom for those warriors on the wrong side of change—the battlefields of history are littered with the corpses of military mastodons. But military change should never be pinned on one factor in isolation. Technical and tactical innovations have a dynamic exchange with social and political ideas. The response to economic pressures such as overpopulation or the dwindling of some natural resource may be expressed in a desire for colonial expansion, or to redress a perceived wrong, and is then packaged in the ideology necessary to the day and to the cause. Ideas, as much as weapons, get warriors killed, and this symbiotic relationship radically alters the lethality of the battlefield. These sea changes happen periodically, and Macedonia in the latter half of the first millennium BCE was the seat of just such a military revolution.
It is sometimes difficult for us to appreciate small changes. We live in an era in which military science, over a period of only a few decades, learned how to potentially evaporate the world. That the Macedonians in about 400 BCE extended the length of a spear by about 8 feet does not seem that much of a big deal. But the extended reach of the 16-to-18-foot sarissa multiplied both the potential lethality and the defensive capability of the Macedonian phalanx by an order of magnitude. The longer spear meant that the front five rows (rather than the three of the conventional hoplite phalanx) could present spear points to the enemy—an increase in “firepower” of 40 percent.80
It was a densely packed and determined body that offered what must have been a stomach-churning prospect to its opponents. There was also a radical change in personal armor. The relatively heavy hoplite panoply was discarded in favor of much lighter leather and composite elements; and because the warrior needed both hands to hold his much weightier and longer spear, the great hoplite shield was reduced to a vestigial disk hung at the neck or shoulder (a similar diminution of armor is seen in the purely symbolic gorget of an eighteenth-century infantry officer). This was not the armor of self-preservation that had characterized the southern Greeks but something much more aggressive. Killing rather than concession drove the Macedonian war ethic, and unlike the southern Greeks, with their emphasis on limited war, the Macedonians brought a totalitarian blitzkrieg mentality to the battlefield that was reflected in their general tactical scheme.
Ancient Macedonia was a frontier of Greece, and there was perhaps more contact there with the horse-raider societies of the steppes. It would not be surprising, therefore, that it adopted from them a horse culture that was lacking in southern Greece. Macedonian society was rough-hewn and tough. Compared with southern Greeks, Macedonians had more in common with other outliers of ancient history—Celts, Picts, Gauls, or Germans: ruled by clan kings, fierce warriors, and stupendous boozers, and not much concerned with the etiquette of their more sophisticated neighbors. Cavalry, and particularly an elite-based cavalry (the Companions), played a critical role in Macedonian tactics. (The word aristocratic is often used to describe the social structure and the men who made up the Macedonian cavalry, but with its genteel associations it is perhaps not the best descriptor; we need something much closer to the raw power of a Mafia consigliere or Scottish tribal laird than, say, Louis XIV—more clenched fist than crooked pinkie.)
The general shape of Macedonian battle tactics was in some ways reminiscent of modern armored warfare. The Companions—essentially a royal household unit (hetaroi) armed with sword, shield, and short cavalry spear (xyston) used for throwing and thrusting—was anchored on the right of the battle line (the right, throughout history, has been the position of honor and status). Alexander, in a shift from the tradition of Greek commanders fighting as infantry, fought with the Companions. The auxiliary cavalry was on the left wing, while the center was filled by the phalangites with their massed spears. A lighter infantry component—hypaspists (from aspis, shield)—operated between phalanx and cavalry as mobile attack infantry. The Companions’ role was to smash, panzer-style, deep into the enemy cavalry and with the utmost determination fight its way to its command center. While the phalanx held the opposing infantry, the hypaspists exploited the confusion caused by their cavalry’s incursions. It was a tactical model based on the combination of great speed and concentration of force from the cavalry, and a rock-solid infantry center that could either hold or move forward at a steady and irresistible pace.
This combined-force approach has been described as “an entirely new development in the history of Western warfare,” and it took a man of extraordinary ambition (perhaps even to a psychotic degree) to harness its lethality.81 Alexander of Macedon had inherited the military machine from his father, Philip II, and he drove it with a ferocious intensity through the ranks of his enemies. He was not just the commander of killers but a frontline killer himself. He was an inheritor of a heroic tradition of combat leadership. Greek generals and kings fought in the phalanx, and “there is not a single major Greek battle—Thermopylae, Delium, Mantinea, Leuctra—in which Hellenic generals survived the rout of their troops.”82 The Spartan king Cleombrotus was killed in the phalanx at Leuctra, for example, the usual fate of a defeated Spartan king. This exposure of commanders to the risks of the battlefield lasted until the nineteenth century (one thinks, for example, of the high mortality rate among general officers of the American Civil War), when it was replaced by the bureaucratization of leadership: the commander-as-manager. Plutarch has Alexander recite the cost of his hands-on involvement: “First, among the Illyrians my head was wounded by a stone and my neck by a cudgel. Then at Granicus my head was cut open by an enemy’s dagger, at Issus my thigh was pierced by the sword. Next, at Gaza my ankle was wounded by an arrow, my shoulder was dislocated.… Then at Macaranda the bone of my leg was split open by an arrow.… Among the Mallians the shaft of an arrow sank deep into my breast and buried its steel.”83
It was a risk shared by his subordinate officers; some 120 were killed in the phalanx at Issus in 333 BCE—and this in a battle he won. At the battle of the Granicus River in 334 BCE, Alexander was the center of attention for the Persian high command. If he could be killed quickly, despondency might break the will of his army. Alexander personally killed Mithridates, the son-in-law of the Persian king, Darius (who was not present), with a spear thrust through the face and, having survived a blow to the head from Rhoesaces,84 a Lydian nobleman, killed Rhoesaces with a spear thrust to the chest.85 The death toll among the Persian high command at the Granicus was staggering—perhaps ten of the thirteen major commanders were killed or, as in the case of Arsites, later committed suicide. As for the Macedonian high command, one of the greatest risks of being killed came from Alexander himself. Two of his greatest and most valiant generals, Parmenio and his son, the cavalry commander Philotas, were killed on Alexander’s order, as was Cleitus, who had saved Alexander’s life at the Granicus; Cleander and Sitacles, Agathon and Heracon were also executed on flimsy pretexts.86
Alexander brought a ruthlessness to battle that was reflected in hitherto unprecedented mortality rates. At the Granicus, having destroyed and driven off the main Persian army, he reserved his particular ire for the Greek mercenaries fighting on the Persian side, who had stood their ground and were surrounded. All were put to the sword except 2,000 who were sent back to Macedonia as slaves. About 5,000 Persians were killed plus 2,000–3,000 Greek mercenaries, while some historians have put the figure for the killed Greek mercenaries alone at 15,000–18,000.87 At the battle of Issus the following year Alexander’s arm
y inflicted something in the region of 20,000 deaths on the Greek mercenaries fighting for Darius III, plus “anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 Persian recruits … a formidable challenge of time and space to butcher more than 300 men every minute for eight hours. This was extermination taken to new heights.… The Macedonian phalanx did not push men off the battlefield as much as slaughter them from the rear for hours on end after the battle was already decided.”88 (It should also be noted that all the Macedonian wounded whom Alexander left behind in the town of Issus were slaughtered by the returning Persians.) This uninhibited killing of the wounded and defeated set a pattern seen in other Alexandrian battles such as Gaugamela (331 BCE) and the Hydaspes (326 BCE), and served to emphasize that possibly the greatest risk of death for a warrior comes when cohesion breaks and retreat begins, reflected by the disparity between the death count of the victorious and the slaughter of the defeated. (At the Granicus, Macedonian losses were perhaps as few as 150, and at Issus, 450.)
AT THE BATTLES of Cynoscephalae in 197 BCE and at Pydna almost thirty years later, the mighty Macedonian phalanxes met their own nemesis in the form of the Roman legions. In defeat, the Macedonian pikemen stood quite still with their sarissae upright. It was a signal that they wished to surrender, but the problem was that their opponents could not or would not recognize this convention of the battlefield. The Macedonians, so stalwart in action and so stoical in defeat, were unceremoniously and savagely cut down where they stood. The phalanx died because it had become too good at what they had been good at. Fixed in place, they would be destroyed for it. The legions, for their part, did what they had been rigorously trained to do: They attacked with formidable energy and killed with ferocious single-mindedness. For them, a dead enemy was a peaceful enemy.
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