Battles and Tactics

by Bob Bennett

  Initially, things had gone well for the octogenarian Antigonus, his pikemen outnumbered the opposition and even without his son’s assistance it appeared likely that his veteran infantry would win the day. Problems arose when the enemy moved round them to attack the Antigonid right, exposed when Demetrius had chased headlong after Antiochus’ horsemen. Light infantry would surely have guarded this vulnerable flank but they must have been driven off. Antigonus’ phalangites then began to be harassed by horse archers and javelineers brought all the way round from the enemies’ right wing. These fired missiles into the packed ranks of Antigonus’ phalanx and threatened to charge against their exposed side. Unnerving even for these hardy fighters, to the front they faced the enemy pikes whilst their right, unshielded flank faced wounds from arrows and javelins against which they could not respond. Morale was inevitably affected and Antigonus looked desperately for the return of his son, who could even then have saved the battle. With no sign of his arrival some of Antigonus’ warriors began to go over to the enemy. Desertion became infectious and whole units disintegrated. Once begun, loss of cohesion was fatal to bodies of ancient infantry and extraordinarily difficult to reverse in a huge melee of tens of thousands of battling soldiers. Antigonus attempted to rally those he could reach but his efforts were undermined by the increasing number of enemy horse and foot who were firing volley after volley into his ranks. Many of these skirmishers were closing in on Antigonus himself, his guards were falling around him and in the confusion the old man was eventually hit by several javelins. At 80, when most would have retired from the fight years before, he made a last stand but finally succumbed to wounds inflicted by the spears of what were almost certainly Seleucus’ troops. When news of his death became known, what fight was left in the phalanx ebbed away and a total rout ensued.

  Demetrius eventually returned but, by then, it was too late. Myriads of his father’s veteran foot were dead, dispersed, prisoners or gone over to the other side. What happened to the cavalry on the Antigonid left we don’t know but presumably they too had retired or transferred allegiance to the winning side. So, all the young king could do was collect the few thousand cavalry that he still had under his command and withdraw. With him was another notable refugee, Pyrrhus, the 18-year-old king of Epirus, who had fought valiantly under Demetrius in his first battle, and would show himself to be a very competent Antigonid officer, until he returned from exile to lead an expansionist Epirus in a direction that would not infrequently clash with the interests of the man he was following in defeat.

  So as the century ended the man who had filled it most significantly in the last twenty years departed. What is odd, but perhaps appropriate, is that as this giant leaves the stage so the best and only continuous source crumbles into fragments. With the demise of Antigonus, the man who had tried and had the resources to restore the Macedonian Empire to a whole again, its fragmentation was entrenched. There no longer was a powerful, rich central power that might have contested with the houses of Ptolemy, Seleucus and the others to prevent the institutionalizing of the division of what Alexander had created.

  Chapter Seven

  Siege Warfare

  The wars of the Diadochi are like so much military activity in ancient or modern times; capturing cities and strongpoints was the constant aim of many an enterprise. Sieges and escalades were what armies involved themselves in through almost the whole of the annals of organized conflict. Indeed, as often as not, if open battle came about, it was as the result of an army arriving to try and lift the siege put in place by their opponents.

  Whether they are the boasts of Egyptian pharaohs inscribed on temple walls or Assyrian palace reliefs, the first examples of recorded campaigns most frequently consist of lists of sieges begun and towns taken. And this picture continues through Greek and Roman times down through the medieval period, when sieges were almost the whole of warfare with a battle only encountered every few years or so. Even the advent of modern war (when it is considered a Napoleonic revolution led the way in ensuring that bringing the enemy army to battle and destroying it was the new orthodoxy) did not see the end of great sieges. There were plenty of them during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Massena in Genoa, keeping the Austrians occupied while Napoleon prepared to cross the Alps and triumph at Marengo, and Davout holding on to the very end in Hamburg as his monarch was losing his whole empire. And, in the later years of the nineteenth century, the sieges of Sevastopol in the Crimea, of Petersburg in Virginia, of Lucknow in India and of Peking (modern day Beijing) in China are the events that punctuate the years just as much as the climactic battles that were fought. Indeed, by the beginning of the twentieth century, from the Russo-Japanese war fought round Port Arthur to the Balkan Wars and the First World War itself, the whole of military conflict had seemed to become one great siege – a complete matter of trenches and badly-bungled escalades.

  The Macedonian kings of the fourth century BC, Alexander and Philip, his father, had been great besiegers of cities. The older king lost his right eye at the siege of Methone in northern Greece in 354 BC and, if he failed in front of the walls of Perinthus and Byzantium, this did not prevent his eventually achieving hegemony over the great cities of Classical Greece. And the younger conqueror punctuated his conquests in the Balkans and Asia with epic sieges at Thebes, at Halicarnassus, at Tyre; and if the great cities of Babylon, Persepolis, Susa and Ecbatana did not require reducing he found plenty of rock forts in Sogdia and India to test his mettle. Equally, the very same was true of his marshals when they fell to fighting for forty years over the world he left on his death at Babylon in 323 BC.

  These Macedonians brought some celerity to the matter of assailing enemy strongholds. The sieges of Potidaea, Plataea and Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War, if not quite of the duration of the siege of Troy, were affairs of years not months. Though other strategies might be tried, starvation was, in the end, the main tool of subjection. Battles were fought around the walls to aid relief or to ensure complete isolation but often little enough was done to actually attack the garrison inhabitants and walls of the places themselves. To some extent ramps and ladders might be used but they were far from always effective and much work was put in to build earthworks both to enclose the besieged and to protect against attack from relieving forces. Battering rams were used, as were picks, to try to weaken the walls; they dug mines to bring them down or raised ramps to get up to them. But the masonry more often than not was the winner. Walls themselves were so important that they might be a pivotal reason for major warfare. The Athenian Long Walls, defending the lifeline to Piraeus and the sea, were so central to the city’s survival as a great power that the destruction of them was the key condition of their Spartan enemies when it came to dictating peace.

  By 360 BC or so, the Greeks showed that they had been thinking deeply about siege warfare just as they thought about everything else. At that time Aeneas wrote his Tacticus on how to fight a siege. Rams, towers and mines were threats that he was aware of and had suggestions to counter but what most concerns him is the threat from within. Dissident citizens, class spite and the presence of foreigners are his concerns and the history of the Diadochi suggests he was prescient in the extreme. If his advice to get rid of the untrustworthy residents and only allowing the most loyal of citizens to hold key posts had been adhered to, many of the campaigns described would have turned out very differently.

  But new expertise and weapons had been changing the balance of power. Siege towers and sheltered rams and tortoises (to protect sappers filling in defensive ditches) were not as such new weapons (they had been in use in Asia for centuries), but their increasing size and sophistication was making them far more effective. The siege engineer and miner was becoming a dependable and highly-paid specialist in any army. Philip had Polyidus of Thessaly who built a helepolis (siege tower) for his ultimately fruitless siege of Byzantium in 340 BC but we have no details of it. Alexander, never one to pass up the opportunity to be bigger
and better than his father, reportedly had huge helepoleis built by Poseidonius of Macedonia and Diades of Pella for his sieges of Tyre and Halicarnassus. Demetrius, the son of Antigonus, is associated with many talented engineers, Epimachus of Athens and possibly Hegetor of Byzantium. And the weapons they could deploy had become increasingly devastating following developments in the middle decades of the fourth century. In particular, torsion-powered catapults and ballistae had become the regular artillery of ancient armies and would remain so down through the Roman period. The precursor had been the belly bow developed by the resourceful artificers of Syracuse. At the siege of Motya in 397 BC, Dionysius of Syracuse used them and possible catapults (belly bows placed on a stand with the cord winched back) as well as large towers to overtop the walls and drop men on top of the houses of the town.

  In Macedon, others in turn had developed their ideas to make use of the propellant potential of twisted hair. Which, when kept under tension in great cords, was marvellously effective in giving far greater motive power to the catapult arm than anything possible with the wood, sinew and bone mixtures previously used. It also had the advantage of having no real limit to the size to which weapons could be constructed. Philip gratefully made use of the results of these experiments to add to the range of weapons available to his new model army. They could fire bolts at enemy soldiers as well as stones at their walls and ensured that, at least for himself and his son, an advantage lay with the besieger rather than the besieged. These weapons had really ratcheted things up. The use of missile men in the Greek world had already gradually increased as armies were no longer dependent on just hoplite phalanxes but these machines extended hitting power in an exponential way. With them missiles could be fired at defenders on the walls, making it possible to give cover to well-organized and effective assaults. They could keep the enemy heads down while the attacker attempted escalades or brought up towers, rams and the other paraphernalia of assault.

  These developments seemed to have given siege warfare in this period a dramatic and epic quality and this form of warfare appeared to have appealed in a particular way to the first generation of Alexander’s Successors. The size and complexity of the war engines that were made should not surprise us when it would only be a short time before scientists in Alexandria would be discovering steam power (although social factors would inhibit it being deployed as a power source, thus pushing back the Industrial Revolution 2,000 years). This fancy for engineering even had Plutarch, almost 300 years later, lovingly describe the machines brought out at Rhodes:

  This was a siege tower with a square base, each side of which measured seventy two feet at the bottom. It was ninety nine feet high with the upper part tapering off to narrower dimensions. Inside it was divided into many separate storeys and compartments, the side which faced the enemy being pierced with apertures on each story through which missiles could be discharged

  And very seldom showed much interest in the minutiae of military matters.1 Despite this, and though many of the campaigns of this era are a catalogue of sieges, there are only two that are described in any great detail and where the sources allows us to understand what was really going on. Only at Megalopolis in 317 BC and at Rhodes in 304/303 BC are we given the kind of detail we could wish for in so many others of them.

  The first of these affairs took place soon after Polyperchon had established himself as guardian of the two kings, following the death of Antipater, and promulgated the first decree of Greek freedom. He had descended from Pella, but arrived too late to forestall his enemies from securing the port of Athens. Although he had a considerable army of 25,000 men, 65 elephants and the support of the vast majority of the Athenian citizenry, he found Piraeus almost impregnable. It was surrounded on three sides by the sea and Cassander’s fleet controlled the waters. Alexander, Polyperchon’s son, remained with a force adequate to blockade Piraeus, while his father marched west on the Megara road and pondered developments. Rather than have his men idle, waiting upon events in Attica, he decided to try and complete his control over the Peloponnese. Encouraging news had already arrived from there that many of the cities had responded to his Decree of Freedom, expelled Antipater’s oligarchic friends and were seeking alliance with the kings’ guardian. These coups had in many cases been bloody, with massacre and exile of the old rulers. They were reaping their reward for the years of repression and savage treatment of the local democratic factions. Polyperchon had every reason to expect a warm welcome in the south as he and his army crossed the Isthmus of Corinth to take advantage of his new-found allies’ successes.

  But the city of Megalopolis was different. It was the one major place in the Peloponnese whose people had refused to depose their oligarchs and remained true to their allegiance to the family of Antipater. Their obduracy against the groundswell of regional support for Polyperchon seems initially inexplicable but it probably arose from a regard for Cassander, as the son of the man who had saved them from the vengeance of Agis’ Sparta just over a decade before. Then, the Spartan king had besieged the town and would have wiped it from the face of Arcadia if Antipater had not arrived to save the day and put the genie of brutal Lacedomonian hegemony over the Peloponnese back in its bottle. Another probable factor was the presence of an outsider, a man called Damis who we know was in the city. He was a veteran of Alexander the Great’s army and had been active as a Greek messenger between the camps of Perdiccas and Meleager in those chaotic days at Babylon. Such a man knew a wider world outside Arcadia and had some idea that Polyperchon, though apparently dominant, had still far from won the day against Cassander. Damis was almost certainly Cassander’s agent at this time and was subsequently raised to considerable heights when Antipater’s son came into his own.

  Polyperchon could not allow this important place to hold out against the royal edict of Greek freedom with impunity; if they would not get rid of their oligarchs themselves, he would do it for them. Accordingly the royal army moved inland in high spirits, having marched from Macedonia to the Isthmus of Corinth without any enemy opposing them in the field, and began to plunder the countryside around Megalopolis. The citizens were not unprepared, having had advance warnings of their enemies’ intentions. They had called in the population from the surrounding farms and villages and set them to work, building a wide moat and a palisade around the walls. Catapults were constructed in large numbers to counter the ordnance that Polyperchon would be bound to bring in the train of his invading army. The defences of Megalopolis were impressive but Polyperchon had confidence borne of long experience in siege warfare in the armies of both Philip and Alexander, generals who had seldom failed in front of enemy walls. He divided his force into two, the Macedonians he encamped on one side of the city and his Greek allies on the other. Trenches were built between the two camps which soon surrounded the city. Whether he split up the troops on national lines because of animosity between them or merely for convenience is unclear but with the Lamian War only recently behind them it would not be surprising if some bad blood remained. The guardian of the kings had no intention of being delayed for too long in front of Megalopolis, if he could avoid it, and immediately ordered the building of siege towers, tall enough to overlook the walls, and the digging of mines under the defences.

  Mining proved to be particularly effective and, when the pit props were burned and the tunnels collapsed, three towers and the intervening curtain wall came tumbling down. The besiegers poured into the rubble-strewn breaches and for a moment it seemed as if the city was bound to fall. The citizens, reacting swiftly, concentrated their best men to defend the breaches and Polyperchon’s soldiers began to struggle to make progress over the broken masonry and debris. It is surprising how frequently in sieges of this era the obstructions created by the bringing down of city defences proved almost as much of an obstacle as the original wall itself. In any event, the struggle lasted the whole day and well into the night, with the bolt-throwing machines brought to bear by the defenders from their remaining fla
nking walls proving particularly effective in harassing the royal troops. It seems likely that Megalopolis had defences of the most up-to-date kind, the walls and towers having galleries where torsion-powered catapults were deployed. Severe losses were sustained by not only the soldiers in the breach but also those in the siege towers. While the Megalopolitan warriors had been defending the breach, the non-combatants had been busy throwing up a makeshift second line of defence, cutting off the area that had been exposed by the fallen section of wall. With darkness closing and further fighting difficult, Polyperchon reluctantly ordered his men to withdraw to rest, so they could return to the attack the next day.

  The army’s spirits had been affected by the rebuff and Polyperchon felt impelled to harangue the troops in a singular manner:

  Polyperchon inspired his own soldiers in face of the danger. He put on an Arcadian cap, fastened with a pin, double tunic and took a stick, and said to them; ‘Fellow soldiers, these are the kind of people we are going to fight.’ Then he threw off all these things and put on his full armour and said; ‘And these are the kind of people who are going to fight them, people who up till now have won many great contests.’ The soldiers hearing this decided to hesitate no longer but immediately go into battle.2

  The old orator now showed he was very much a soldier of the new school, able to embrace the developments he had seen in the years with Alexander. He decided the second assault was to be spearheaded by the war elephants. How many were used in the attack is not known, but sixty-five had been available when the army marched south to Piraeus. Whatever the number, they would have made a terrifying sight for the defenders who, with few exceptions, would never have seen such beasts before. He banked on their shock value being enough to unnerve the besieged so the rest of his army would have a relatively easy task to force their way through the resultant gap. However, he had not reckoned on the cunning of Damis, who also had experience of elephants in war under Alexander: