by Jim Lacey
Through recent popular books and movies such as 300, the Persians, and particularly their rulers, have entered the public imagination as a collection of particularly obnoxious effetes. As a result of Greek writers such as Xenophon and orators such as Isocrates, who in the decades after Marathon fed their audiences a constant diet of tales of Persian feebleness, even the ancient Greeks believed the Persians were inferior warriors. If the Persians did lose some of their warlike character in the later days of the empire, it certainly was not the case in the empire of Darius and his immediate successors. As Herodotus describes, “From the age of five to the age of twenty, they teach their sons just three things: to ride horse, to shoot the bow, and to speak the truth.…”12 The Persian forces that the Greeks fought at Marathon and then again, a decade later, at Thermopylae and Plataea were not soft. They were seasoned warriors within a culture that prized warriors above all else. The example began with Darius himself, who despite his undoubted achievements in consolidating the administrative infrastructure of the empire was most proud of the fact that he was a king on horseback—a true warrior.13
It is important to understand that the Persian army the Greeks faced at Marathon was considerably different from the typical Persian force generally depicted. First of all, it was a veteran army, inured to hardship and the terror of battle by six years of fighting in Ionia and Thrace. While no Persian army ever approached Greek levels of tactical integration, this one probably came the closest. Six years of war would have seen to that. Over time, national differences within the army eroded, as common experiences and the natural adaptation that takes place on the battlefield brought about a convergence of fighting methods and equipment. Furthermore, this force was superbly disciplined and probably possessed a high level of tactical flexibility as a result of training and fighting together over a long period of time. The only time Persians may have ever seen massed hoplites was when the Milesians marched to the assistance of the Carians, and the Persian army possessing that experience was massacred in a later ambush.
It was also predominantly an infantry force, although the Persians appear to have brought a thousand or so cavalry to Marathon. Still, it would have used the typical Persian methods of battle as outlined earlier. This was because at no time during the Ionian revolt did this force face an organized hoplite army. It therefore never found it necessary to make any of the adaptations required to face a phalanx.
The army sent to Marathon was a supremely confident force that had never suffered defeat. It was a skilled force, capably led, with overwhelming numbers, and full of confidence. This was not the soft Persian force typical of later generations. It was a veteran army, slimmed down for war. It was a force to reckon with and could not be taken lightly. No one in Greece could have liked the Athenians’ chances in the upcoming fight.
Chapter 15
HOPLITE WARFARE
Up until 650 BC, warfare had been the job of aristocrats, as only they could afford the implements of war, particularly horses. However, as Greece recovered from the collapse of the Bronze Age, the population grew at a steady rate (probably approaching 3 percent a year).1 This growth in turn led to dramatic changes in agriculture as the Greeks converted land from pasture to farming. Moreover, as the population continued to rise, this farming became progressively more intense. As the population continued to expand, increasing food requirements pressed marginal land into agricultural service, and even the poorest tracts of territory were now worth defending.2 As farming intensified, large tracts were divided into small family-owned plots, which came to dominate the landscape. These two transitions, in turn, had led to the development of a unique style of conflict—hoplite warfare—by 650 BC.3 Now that farmers needed to protect their holdings and could do that only as part of a collective, the concept of a hoplite was born. In turn, this collective action came to be centered around the polis, or city-state.
No one has ever figured out how this took place in practice, but medieval history may provide a clue, as it had a strikingly similar developmental curve. As in ancient Greece, the mounted warrior (the aristocrat) had been the dominant military force. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, town-centered economic changes whittled away at the political dominance of the knight. Unwilling to cede their hold on power, the mounted nobility fought to hold their gains. In one notable instance, the French king sent an army to subdue what amounted to a revolt of townspeople in Flanders. The resulting Battle of Courtrai pitted heavily armored mounted knights against an infantry formation.4 Similar to a Greek phalanx, the Flemish townsfolk were well disciplined, closely packed, and eight deep, with spears extending to the front. Against them came the flower of French chivalry. When the battle was over, the flower of French chivalry was reduced to “dung and worms.”5
Western Europe was on the edge of a technological revolution that was about to radically change the character of war, if not its nature. However, had technology and gunpowder not intervened, this steady Flemish infantry would have been well on its way to establishing a military order very similar to that of the Greek phalanx.6
While a spear stuck in the ground or protruding forward was sufficient to stop a charging horse, it was insufficient against a similarly armed force of infantry. As each city-state developed a phalanx, its rivals were forced to follow suit, as there was no other way to hold one’s own in a pitched battle. As the character of war changed from aristocrat centered to crowded fields of massed men rushing at one another with extended spears, it quickly became apparent that the better-protected and better-drilled force had a distinct advantage. To further protect themselves from opponents stabbing at them with spears, these warrior farmers progressed to adding breastplates, greaves, and the distinctive hoplon shield to their panoply.7 Similarly, the difference in quality of men who drilled together over those who refused to practice soon made itself felt, and regular drilling became a requirement in many cities.8
As small city-states could not typically afford to maintain a standing army, the most practical and efficient means of defense was to have a large body of men with a vested interest in defending their soil on immediate call to rush to the city’s defense.9 As these part-time soldiers had many other concerns and commitments, war tended to become a ritualized process, and rules developed over time.10 These rules can be summarized as follows: One side would declare war and march its phalanx into the territory of another; its opponent would mobilize its phalanx; and finally, both sides would agree on a level place on which to fight. After the proper sacrifices were made, each side made straight for the other and a climactic crash ensued. It was all over in a morning or afternoon, and one side or the other would retreat off the field. Both sides accepted the verdict of the battlefield, and the losers either gave up the strip of land claimed or (if the aggressors lost) gave up their claims and marched home. Rarely were battles costly in terms of personnel losses, nor would wars continue past this climactic engagement.11
For the past century, historians followed the ancient evidence and what appeared to be common sense. The poor land of Greece could barely sustain the population in good times. Thus no city could afford to hole up behind its walls while an invader laid waste to its lands, as that would mean economic ruin and famine. Moreover, farmers practicing intensive agriculture could not afford to be away from their farms for prolonged periods, either sheltering behind walls or besieging them. Considering these circumstances, each side in a conflict had a strong interest in ending a war as rapidly as possible. The climactic head-to-head hoplite battle appeared to fit everyone’s needs.
However, by the time of Marathon, the whole ritualized system was breaking down. For example, Sparta in its battle of annihilation against the Argives at Sepeia, and Athens in the decades prior to Marathon, appear to have fought with the intention of winning decisively enough to change the political landscape permanently. By the time of the Peloponnesian War, all that was left of the former system of warfare was the phalanx itself.
This Greek way of war made little sense to
the Persians. Herodotus quotes the thoughts of the Persian general Mardonius on the matter: “The Hellenes are in the habit of starting wars without the slightest forethought, out of obstinacy and stupidity. For whenever they declare war on one another, they seek out the finest and most level land and go there to fight, so that the victors depart the battlefield only after much damage has been done [to themselves], and I won’t say anything at all of the defeated, as they are completely destroyed … if they must wage war against one another, they should seek out the place where either of the two sides would be the most difficult to subdue and try to fight there. Thus the Hellenes do not employ intelligent strategies.”12
Greek warfare was much simpler than that fought by the Persians. Two armed bodies of men would form into a solid phalanx of bristling spears and then advance at the double and collide with one another on an open plain.13 Here, they stabbed, pushed, screamed, and kicked until one side gave way. Every hoplite went into battle carrying a large round shield (hoplon) that covered his left side as well as the right side of the man to his left. According to Thucydides, this caused a phalanx to move at an oblique angle as it advanced, as each man covered as much of the right side of his body as he could behind his neighbor’s shield. These densely packed hoplites could not maneuver easily, so an engagement soon resembled a rugby scrum, the difference being that each side was trying to kill the other.
Moreover, the men of the Greek phalanx had no respect for light troops, which made up the bulk of the Persian army. As Euripides commented in one of his plays:
Archery is no test of manly bravery; no! he is only a man who keeps his post in the ranks and steadily faces the swift wound the spear may plough.14
Although every man who could afford the full hoplite panoply was expected to so equip himself, many peasants could not afford such an expensive purchase. It is unlikely that these peasants and urban poor were denied a chance to aid their city in time of war. In many cases, they probably played a critical role, but being despised by those of higher social standing (the hoplite class), they rarely received their due. In this regard, the Spartans at the Battle of Plataea brought seven helots for every hoplite, all of whom were armed and apparently joined in the battle. Herodotus, unfortunately, did not consider their accomplishments worthy of recording. It can be assumed, however, that thirty-five thousand or more armed helots accomplished quite a lot that has been lost to us.
Still, the core of any Greek city’s army was the phalanx, which came into existence for only one reason: to fight decisive, pitched battles. Unfortunately, as with almost everything else in ancient military history, one finds that there is no general agreement on how they did this. The debate currently breaks down into only two schools of thought, the orthodox and the heretical.15 The orthodox school maintains a traditional picture of the phalanx consisting of a dense formation of interlocked shields with typically eight or more ranks pushing one another forward in a tight mass. The heretics claim that this is an impossible way of fighting, as the crush of men would have made it impossible for individual hoplites to wield their weapons. They argue that instead of the compact mass, the phalanx fought in an open order like the Roman maniple, where every hoplite was given enough space to engage in individual combat. However, the heretics are substituting their imaginations for an overwhelming body of literature and archaeological evidence that supports the traditional view.
None of this should suppose that the phalanx did not sometimes fight in open order. The purpose of the phalanx push—the othismos—was to break open an opposing phalanx, and one can suppose that such an act could easily lead to individual fighting as one or both phalanxes began to lose cohesion. In fact, the center of the Greek phalanx at Marathon almost broke under the pressure of facing overwhelming numbers and had to resort to individual combat for a time. However, when phalanxes engaged each other, individual combat in the Homeric tradition was the exception rather than the rule. The simple truth is that all of the time available for training a citizen army was spent on collective training as part of a phalanx, to make this formation as invincible as possible. Except for the Spartans, most Greeks did not have the time required to also hone individual fighting skills to a degree that would have made it practical to attempt it on the battlefield against an unbroken enemy.16
In summary, hoplite warfare amounted to a brief brutal encounter that put a heavy toll on the courage and discipline of the individual. Any moral weakness within the phalanx would destroy its cohesion and make it easy prey for the enemy. For this reason, those suspected of showing any sign of cowardice were severely punished. The Spartans, for instance, required a coward (trembler) to wear a beard on only one side of his face so that everyone knew he was only half a man.
Chapter 16
THE WESTERN WAY OF WAR
Victor Davis Hanson and his supporters view the development of the phalanx and its employment as a shock instrument as the beginning of the “Western way of war.” He has theorized that the Western way of war has been far superior to the war-making ethos of any other culture and society for the last twenty-five hundred years and marks the Battle of Marathon as the first example of this superiority. Others, rallying around the standard of Professor John Lynn, say that the historical record is so fractured that no enduring influence is possible over time.1 It would be unforgivably neglectful to write a book on Marathon and fail to weigh in on this debate.
When I first read Hanson’s writings on the topic, I was not entirely convinced. After all, how could the Western way of war be declared superior to all others when it was bested by the Mongols and the armies of Islam, to name just two groups that have been more than a match for Western armies over the centuries? However, after years of reflection on the matter, I have become a convert and now stand in the minority of historians who find themselves in general if not complete agreement with Hanson.2 I should also admit that I enter this discussion with some trepidation, as it has become a rather uncivil battlefield itself. One former West Point history professor, Robert Bateman, has even gone so far as to refer to Hanson as the “devil” and called his work “a pile of poorly constructed, deliberately misleading intellectually dishonest feces.”3
According to Hanson, the Western way of war rests on five principles that first manifested themselves at Marathon:
1. The use of superior technology to compensate for inferior numbers.
2. The exaltation of discipline, which turns individuals into organized units capable of unified action and sustaining horrendous levels of punishment.
3. An aggressive military tradition that seeks decisive battle.
4. The ability to change, adapt, and innovate over time and as required by changing circumstances.
5. The creation of dynamic financial systems able to accommodate the expense of this type of technologically intensive and highly destructive warfare.
It is hard to quibble with this analysis, because for the most part these principles have held up in every military conflict through most of the last twenty-five hundred years of history. Unfortunately, there are a number of places where the historical continuity appears to have been broken or where Western armies were decidedly inferior to those of other societies, such as against the Mongols or in the early decades of the Arab conquests. Hanson recognizes these gaps but never really confronts them or their implications in his writing. He believes that for every setback in battle Western armies suffered, he could list a hundred examples where the reverse was true, and therefore in the “big picture” rare counterexamples are mostly irrelevant. That, of course, is one of the problems with writing “big history” or creating a sweeping context in which to place twenty-five hundred years of warfare. There are always dozens of instances where the big picture is not correct in every particular or circumstance. However, that does not mean the theory is wrong on a macroscale. Although the comparison is not exact, I liken this to a person saying that quantum physics has proven Isaac Newton wrong in many particulars. This may be so, but
Newton’s theories still explain almost everything observable to the human eye: Apples do still fall to earth when dropped.4 Likewise, I could hand a betting man a list of a hundred major battles between Western armies and those of other civilizations and tell him to pick the winners. Even if he did not know one whit of military history, he would win most of his bets by blindly checking off the Western side of each pair. If he was to use the same approach for wars and not just battles, he would get rich even quicker. For even when defeated in battle, Western states have shown a remarkable ability to absorb horrendous losses and in a short period of time reconstitute their armies and reenter the fray.
Lynn defines Hanson’s Western way of war (and I believe Hanson would accept this assessment) as follows: “In its mature form … [the] Western Way of War theory asserts a unique and continuous military culture that is dependent for much of its character on a societal and political culture that is equally unique and continuous. The conjunction of the two supposedly created the singular lethality of Western culture at war in comparison to the other traditions that grew up in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In short, it made the Europeans the ‘most deadly soldiers in the history of civilization.’ ”5 Hanson might qualify that statement by adding that they were the deadliest “on the battlefield,” as many cultures proved just as adept as the West at the mass slaughter of innocents.
Lynn counters this argument with “claims that a Western way of warfare extended with integrity for 2,500 years speaks more of fantasy than fact.”6 He presents numerous examples of this continuity being broken, starting with the differences between the Roman Empire and classical Greece. From there, he lays out how difficult cultural transmission would have been in the Dark Ages and through the Middle Ages. However, to me this line of argument misses some key points. First, Lynn agrees with Hanson that the way a society’s military fights reflects its culture, as it is adapted to the particular circumstances of the moment. The question should therefore be, is there a Western culture and has it had continuity over the last twenty-five hundred years? For if there is a distinct Western culture that has given rise to a particular societal framework, then by extension there must be a Western way of war that grew up alongside it. Simply put, the answer again has to be yes. Rome may have been different, but the Romans looked back to Greece for many aspects of their civilization, including for their early military system. The same holds true for every Western historical epoch since then, which have all looked back on Greco-Roman antecedents for guidance and direction. How, then, does one argue that Western art, philosophy, and literature can trace their roots back to Greece and Rome, but Western military institutions are not permitted to do so?
