Strategy

by Lawrence Freedman

  From Homer came the contrasting qualities, represented respectively by Achilles and Odysseus, of biē and mētis (strength and cunning), which over time—for example, in Machiavelli—came to be represented as force and guile. This polarity continued to find expression in strategic literature. Outsmarting the opponent risked less pain than open conflict, although winning by cunning and subterfuge was often deplored for a lack of honor and nobility. There was also the more practical problem that reliance on deception was apt to suffer diminishing returns as opponents came to appreciate what they were facing. As the previous two chapters demonstrate, there was nothing unnatural or surprising in efforts to get the better of stronger opponents by catching them by surprise or tricking them in some way. Other ways of coping with superior strength, however, were combining with others or disrupting an opponent’s coalition.

  A preference for force or guile might reflect a temperamental disposition, but it could not be a strategy in itself. That must depend on how best to turn a complex and developing set of affairs to advantage, which in turn must depend on an ability to persuade those who must implement the strategy that it is wise. The master of casting a strategy in its most compelling form, at least according to Thucydides, was the Athenian statesman Pericles. The ability to persuade not only one’s people but also allies and enemies was a vital attribute of the successful strategist. In this way, strategy required a combination of words and deeds, and the ability to manipulate them both.

  Odysseus

  Mētis described a particular notion of a strategic intelligence for which there is no obvious English equivalent. In Greek it was related to mētiaō: “to consider, meditate, plan,” together with metióomai, “to contrive,” conveyed a sense of a capacity to think ahead, attend to detail, grasp how others think and behave, and possess a general resourcefulness. But it could also convey deception and trickery, capturing the moral ambivalence around a quality so essential to the strategist’s art. According to the mythology, the goddess Mētis was chosen by Zeus as his first wife. Fearful that a son combining his strength with his mother’s intelligence would become too powerful, Zeus employed her own methods of deceit and surprise to avoid that risk and so ate her. He intended to control the source of all mētis forever when he swallowed Mētis. What he did not know was that Mētis was already pregnant, with a daughter Athena, who was born—fully formed—through Zeus’s head. Athena, the goddess of both wisdom and war, came to be associated with mētis more than the other divinities. She developed a close association with the mortal who most embodied mētis, Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s Odyssey. Athena described him as “far the best of all mortals in thought and word, and I’m renowned among all the gods for my wisdom and my cunning ways.”1

  Odysseus exhibited an agile and expedient intelligence. He could evaluate situations quickly, think ahead, and stay sharply focused on the ultimate goal even when caught in ambiguous and uncertain situations. More concerned with success than glory, he was indirect and psychological in his methods, seeking to confuse, disorient, and outwit opponents. But Odysseus also suffered from the challenge of the known deceiver. After a time, he became a victim of the liar’s paradox: it became hard to get anyone to believe him, even when he was telling the truth. His greatest triumph was the wooden horse left outside the gates of Troy, which ended a decade of siege and opened up the city for utter destruction and mass slaughter. Virgil, the Roman who took a less generous view of Odysseus than did Homer, described how the Greeks made a show of giving up on their struggle to seize Troy. A large horselike construction, filled with up to fifty soldiers, was hauled to a position just outside the city walls. It carried the inscription: “For their return home, the Achaeans dedicate this thank-offering to Athena.”2

  The Trojans, hoping that the decade-long siege had been lifted, came out to inspect this strange horse. King Priam and the elders debated what to do. The choice was simple. They could treat it as a threat and either burn it or break it up to see what was inside, or haul it inside and use it as an opportunity to honor Athena. But Athena was known to have favored the Greeks and be prone to trickery. After all that had happened, was it really wise to trust either her or the Greeks? Odysseus always knew that the Trojans would need some persuasion. This was accomplished by Sinon, an expert liar. He claimed to the Trojans that he was a defector. His story was that he had escaped the Greeks after falling out with Odysseus. He was about to be offered up as a sacrifice to persuade the gods to provide favorable winds for the Greek ships to get home. The Trojans were half persuaded. Priam asked whether the “huge monster of a horse” was for religious purposes or “some engine of war.” Sinon explained that it was indeed designed to placate Athena, whom the Greeks had offended. It was not meant for the Trojans, he added. In fact it had been built so large because the Greeks were worried that if the Trojans got the horse into the city they would never again be vulnerable to invasion.

  Sinon had arrived on the scene as the priest Laocoön was warning that this apparent offering was a fraud, a “trick of war.” When Laocoön threw a spear at the horse, the frightened soldiers inside had moaned. This might have been something of a giveaway, were it not for the intervention of Athena, who sent sea serpents to strangle Laocoön and his two sons. This suggested he was being punished for sacrilege—a good reason not to follow his advice. The other warning came from Cassandra, Priam’s daughter, who told the people they were fools and faced an “evil fate.” Alas, Cassandra had been granted the gift of prophecy by the god Apollo but was then cursed for not returning his love. Unlike Sinon, who could lie and be believed, Cassandra would make accurate predictions and never be believed. And so the decision was made. The Trojans decided to take the horse through the gate. During the night, the hidden Greek soldiers got out. On a signal from Sinon, the Greek army advanced and the gates of Troy were opened for them. The city was sacked and the people massacred.

  Homer mentioned the wooden horse only in passing in The Odyssey, as a special example of the sort of craftiness that distinguished Odysseus from his more pedestrian peers. He had a talent for getting out of predicaments that might have led others to succumb to fatalism or lash out with hopeless bravado. Homer’s indulgent view of Odysseus’s escapades was not shared by Virgil. He thought such behavior deplorable and unfortunately typical of untrustworthy Greeks. In later centuries, Sinon was placed with Odysseus in Dante’s Eighth Circle of Hell, a place for those guilty of fraudulent rhetoric and falsification. Proper heroes would be guided by virtue and truth rather than opportunism and trickery.

  In his epics, Homer contrasted mētis with biē, or brute force. Biē was personified by Achilles, famed for his exceptional physical strength, bravery, agility, and mastery of the spear, but also his great rages. While The Odyssey was about mētis, The Iliad was largely an exploration of biē. Achilles demonstrated not only the limits to what force could achieve but also how it could become associated with a certain wildness, a bloodlust that led to terrible deaths and slaughter. Yet it was hard to do without force. When Achilles gave up on the war against the Trojans after being slighted by King Agamemnon, it was Odysseus who led the delegation sent to plead with him. Achilles’s response was to denounce Odysseus and his methods: “I hate like the gates of Hades, the man who says one thing and hides another inside him.” Just as pointedly, Achilles drew attention to the failure of mētis to stop the Greeks being pushed back to the sea by the rampaging “man-killing” Hector, the equivalent Trojan superhero.

  Hector was also described as a man of mētis, the only Trojan with Zeus-like qualities and therefore the man in whom the Trojans invested their greatest hopes. On crucial occasions, the strategic good sense associated with mētis deserted him. This was attributed to the malign influence of Athena, who the poor Trojans believed was still protecting the city at a time she was doing anything but. At the council of the Trojans, an opportunity for a negotiated peace was missed when Hector was guided more by hatred for the Greeks and enthusiasm for battle t
han a shrewd understanding of what the future might hold. He advocated an offensive course. When the offensive began, he went on the rampage, driving the Greeks back. One casualty was Patroclus, a close friend of Achilles. His death led Achilles to turn his considerable rage away from Agamemnon and against Hector. Having reentered the fight, Achilles cut down many Trojans, while all the time searching for Hector. Eventually, tricked again by Athena, Hector found himself facing Achilles, something he had understandably hoped to avoid.3 He was soon killed with a single blow to the neck. Achilles then tied Hector’s body to his chariot and dragged it round the battlefield.

  As this is close to the end of The Iliad, we are led to think that Achilles’s victory sealed the fate of Troy. Yet the Greeks could not press home their advantage. Achilles was soon killed by Paris, the man who had caused the war in the first place by taking Helen from King Menelaus of Sparta. Paris struck Achilles with an arrow from a distance. According to one account—though not Homer’s—the arrow had to hit him in his heel. In this legend, his mother had dipped the newly born Achilles in the river Styx. He gained invulnerability where the waters touched him but not on his heel, where his mother’s hand had gripped him. Achilles’s heel served as a reminder that even the strongest have their points of weakness which, if found, can be used to bring them down. Hector killing Patroclus and Achilles killing Hector could also be taken as salutary warnings of the dangers of overreaching, of using force without intelligent restraint. Brute force is not enough. “In the final analysis,” notes Jenny Strauss Clay, “the humane heroism of Odysseus, based as it is on intelligence and endurance, is set above the quicksilver glory of Achilles.”4

  After the war had been decided by the ruse of the wooden horse, the Greeks began their journey home. It was as challenging as the original siege. Terrible storms caused their ships to sink or crash against rocks. Odysseus was blown off course and took another ten years to get home. His adventures along the way provided ample opportunity to apply mētis. A striking test came when Polyphemus, a giant one-eyed Cyclops, devoured a number of his men. Odysseus and his surviving men were trapped by a boulder that only Polyphemus could move. The first stage of Odysseus’s plan was to get Polyphemus to drink more than was good for him. Then Odysseus told the drunk Cyclops that his name in Greek was Outis, made up of ou tis, meaning “not anyone.”5 This allowed Odysseus to conceal his identity and set up Polyphemus for a later piece of deception. Next, Odysseus blinded the giant by drilling a stake into his eye. As Polyphemus cried out in agony, his fellow Cyclopei asked, “Is any man stealing your flocks and driving them off? Is any man trying to kill you through cunning or superior strength?” When he replied, “Noman (Outis) is trying to kill me through his cunning,” they took this literally and so thought no more about it.6 Polyphemus removed the boulder to let out his sheep. He tried to feel to see if Odysseus and his men were escaping on top of the animals, but they had tied themselves underneath the animals. Unwisely, Odysseus then decided to boast. No longer Outis, he identified himself as one “known for his cunning.” Polyphemus’s father, the sea god Poseidon, then determined to make Odysseus’s life miserable on his long journey home.

  The Method in Mētis

  For Odysseus, the ends justified the means. The trickster was always prepared to be judged by results. The moral unease that this approach generated was evident in Sophocles’s play, Philoctetes. This was the name of a Greek warrior en route to the Trojan War. His advantage was a bow given to him by the god Heracles; his disadvantage, a painful and smelly wound resulting from a snake bite. Odysseus found the smell and Philoctetes’s cries of pain intolerable and left the poor man angry and in agony—but with his bow—on an island. A decade later, Odysseus realized that the bow was essential in the fight against Troy and set off with Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles, to acquire it. Given his past treatment of Philoctetes, Odysseus knew neither brute force nor persuasion would get the bow, so Odysseus encouraged Neoptolemus to trick Philoctetes. The young man, however, had his father’s “natural antipathy/ to get [his] ends by tricks and stratagems.” He would prefer to “fail with honor” than to win by cheating. Did not Odysseus find the lying “vile”? No, came the reply, putting scruples above the common good placed the whole war effort at risk.

  In the play, the matter was resolved by the favored device of the deus ex machina. The god Heracles told Philoctetes to join the battle. The response was immediate: “Voice for which I have long yearned, Form, long visioned, now discerned! Thee I cannot disobey.”7 So craven obedience to a god quickly solved the dispute in a way that cunning could not. All ended happily. Odysseus succeeded in his mission, Neoptolemus maintained his honor, and Philoctetes gained glory and healing of his wound. The play underlined the difficulty of relying on deception and then expecting to be trusted. Those who knew Odysseus’s reputation rarely trusted him even when he was being straight.8 The impact of the best story was diminished when the teller lacked credibility.

  Odysseus has been described as exemplifying “a particular idea of practical intelligence.” According to Barnouw, he was able to consider “intended actions in the light of anticipated consequences.” He kept his main purpose in mind and thought “back from that final goal through a complex network of means (and obstacles) to achieve it.” The contrast therefore was not just with brute force but the recklessness of those who were not so well tuned to the signs of danger and who failed to think through the potential consequences of their actions. When Odysseus decided not to succumb to some short-term impulse for revenge, it was because he remembered how much more he wanted to achieve his long-term goals of returning safely to his wife Penelope and his kingdom in Ithaca. Rather than seeing reason and passion in opposition to one another, practical intelligence was about finding the appropriate relations between competing ends, each with an associated bundle of passions and reasons. Odysseus’s understanding of how others viewed the world allowed him to manipulate their thought processes by giving out signs that he knew they would read in a particular way. He was not playing pranks on others just because he enjoyed their discomfort. Rather, his craftiness and capacity for deception were geared to his ultimate objectives. Mētis was therefore forward-looking, with elements of anticipation and planning, as well as guile and trickery. Barnouw described this intelligence as being as much “visceral as intellectual,” less an “impassive weighing of alternatives,” and more a prioritizing of aims or impulses that are most desired. It reflected more “the strength and depth of passion as the work of reason.”9

  Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant similarly argued that mētis as exemplified by Odysseus was a distinctive form of practical intelligence. More than being shrewd and crafty, it was also forward-looking, locating current actions as part of a longer-term plan, grasping the potential of situations so as to be able to manipulate others into error. This suggested a cast of mind as much as a plan of action, a way by which the underdog could triumph over the notionally stronger. Despite the association between mētis and the “disloyal trick, the perfidious lie, treachery,” it could also be “the absolute weapon, the only one that has the power to ensure victory and domination over others, whatever the circumstances, whatever the conditions of the conflict.” Whereas strength could be defeated by superior strength, mētis could defeat all strength.

  Mētis was of most value when matters were fluid, fast moving, unfamiliar, and uncertain, combining “contrary features and forces that are opposed to each other.” It was suited to situations when there could be no formulaic or predictable behavior, benefiting from a “greater grip” of the present, “more awareness” of the future, “richer experience accumulated from the past,” an ability to adapt constantly to changing events, and sufficient pliability to accommodate the unexpected. This practical intelligence operated in circumstances of conflict and was reflected in such qualities as forethought, perspicacity, quickness and acuteness of understanding, as well as a capacity for trickery and deceit. Such a person was elusive
, slipping through an “adversary’s fingers like running water,” relying on ambiguity, inversion, and reversal.10 All this described a strategic intelligence, able to discern a way through complicated and ambiguous situations and then come out on top. But it was also largely intuitive, or at least implicit, and at moments of sudden danger and crisis, this might be all that could be relied upon. There was no reason, however, why the same qualities could not come into play when there was time to be more deliberative and calculating.

  Thucydides

  Atē, the daughter of Eris, the goddess of strife, spent her time encouraging stupidity in both mortals and immortals. She was banished from Mount Olympus to earth. Barbara Tuchman described her as the goddess of infatuation, mischief, delusion, and folly. Atē was said to blind her victims to considerations of morality or expedience and render them “incapable of rational choice.” Such gods, lamented Tuchman, provided humans with an excuse for their folly. Homer has Zeus, the king of the gods, insisting that if mortals had suffered “beyond that which is ordained” it was not because of the gods but because of the “blindness of their own hearts.” It was not fate that led to disaster, but bad strategy.11 Yet appeals to the gods continued to be made regularly in Athenian affairs. Omens were sought and oracles consulted.

  Then, during the Athenian enlightenment of the fifth century BCE, an alternative approach developed that rejected explanations for events based on the immortals and instead looked to human behavior and decisions. In addition, warfare became too complicated to be left to the heroic deeds of individual warriors; more coordination and planning was needed. The Athenian War Council consisted of ten strategoi who were expected to be able to lead from the front, fight with the best, and show total commitment. In this respect the origins of strategy lie with generalship, that is, the qualities that made for effective leadership.12 Thucydides, who lived from around 460 to 395 BCE, was a strategos. After he failed to prevent a Spartan occupation of Amphipolis, he was exiled for twenty years, which provided opportunities to get to know Spartans as well as Athenians. “I had leisure,” he recalled, “to observe affairs somewhat particularly.”13 This leisure was used to write what he considered to be the definitive history of the war between Athens and Sparta, known as the Peloponnesian War. This was fought from 431 to 404 BCE between the Peloponnesian League, led by Sparta, and the Athenian empire, known as the Delian League. Sparta was the clear victor. Before the war Athens had been the strongest of the Greek city states. By the war’s conclusion, Athens was much diminished.