The Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  The elder backs his mate up. “One thing your victories have taught us, lord, is to see all foes as potential allies. Why compel such formidable warriors to contest us, when, incented aright, they may march at our sides? After all, it is not our object to defeat and smash all peoples simply for the sake of defeating and smashing them.”

  I raise a palm to shield the sun, regarding both officers. The older, Matthias, is near thirty, as I have said, with a dense chestnut beard and eyes that call to mind the image of Diomedes in the hero shrine at Leucadia. The younger, Crow, cannot be twenty-two, beardless and lean as a whippet, but with an aspect crackling of purpose and intelligence.

  I have taken to our two lieutenants. Command of the Malcontents, I tell them, shall be theirs.

  “Do you understand, gentlemen, why we must cross this river? God help us, upon those ramparts yonder stands the only worthy foe this army has faced since Persia! Look at me. Do you think I don’t share your dissatisfaction? Am I not as frustrated by the petty campaigns and gloryless sieges we have been compelled to fight since the fall of Darius? There look, across the river . . . Raj Porus and his princes. I love him! He has brought me back to life! And he will reinspirit this corps too, and your company with it, when we face him, again as soldiers and as an army.”

  Four

  TELAMON

  WHEN I WAS A BOY I HAD TWO TUTORS. Aristotle taught me to reason. Telamon taught me to act. He was thirty-three; I was seven. No one appointed Telamon over me; rather I fell in love with him and refused to be driven from his side. He seemed to me then, and does to this day, the perfect incarnation of the soldier. I used to trek the drill field in his train, aping his gait. The men pissed themselves laughing. But I intended no disrespect. I wished only to walk like him, stand like him, ride like him. He is from Arcadia in southern Greece. My mother wished me to speak pure Attic. “Listen to the boy! He drawls like an Arcadian!” Telamon was a sergeant then; he is a general now. Still I cannot bring him in from the field to the staff tent; he will not come. His idea of a good breakfast is a night march, and of a good dinner, a light breakfast.

  When I was ten I begged Telamon to teach me what it meant to be a soldier. He would not respond in words. Rather he packed Hephaestion and me three days into the winter mountains. We could not get him to speak. “Is this what being a soldier means, traveling in silence?” At night we nearly froze. “Is this what it means, enduring hardship?” Was he trying to teach us to hold silence? Obey orders? Follow without question?

  At the third dusk we chanced upon a pack of wolves, chasing a stag onto a frozen lake. Telamon whipped onto the ice at the gallop. In the purple light we watched the pack fan out in its pursuit, turning the prey first one way, then another, always farther from the treeline and the shore. Wolf after wolf made its run at the fast-fatiguing buck. At last one caught him by the hamstring. The stag crashed to the ice; in an instant the pack was on him. Before Hephaestion and I could even draw rein, the wolves had torn his throat out and were already at their feed.

  “That,” Telamon declared, “is a soldier.”

  I remember looking on as a lad of eleven, when Telamon (serving then under my father) formed up his company prior to the first march-out against the Triballians. He ordered each trooper to unshoulder his pack and set it upright at his feet. Telamon then proceeded down the line, rifling each kit, discarding every item of excess. When he was done, the men had nothing left but a clay cup, an iron spit, and a chlamys cloak-and-blanket.

  There are further items, Telamon taught, which have no place in the soldier’s kit. Hope is one. Thought for future or past. Fear. Remorse. Hesitation.

  On the eve of battle at Chaeronea, when I was eighteen and first commanded squadrons of Companion Cavalry, Hephaestion and I paced the lines, puzzling over this axiom of our mentor. How could a soldier perform without hope? Clearly our men’s expectations were heaven-high, as were our own; in fact we had spared no measure to elevate their hopes of glory, riches, the mastery of Greece. We were laughing, as young men will, with our mates when a sergeant of the staff rode up with a secretary, taking down each man’s will. Not a fellow would sign of course. “Give my globes to Antipater!” “Leave my ass to the army!” I was about to chip in my own remark, when Black Cleitus asked, “Who will get your horse, Alexander?” He meant Bucephalus, a prize worth ten lifetime’s wages. The thought of parting from him sobered me. At once Telamon’s axiom came clear.

  A warrior must not advance to battle hopeless—that is, devoid of hope. Rather let him set aside all baggage of expectation—of riches, celebrity, even death—and spur beneath extinction’s scythe lightened of all, save surrender to that outcome known only to the gods. There is no mystery to this. All soldiers do it. They must, or they could not fight at all.

  This is what Telamon meant when he pared his soldiers’ packs or trekked to frozen peaks to show two boys the cold kill of predation.

  Another time when we were youths, Hephaestion and I asked Telamon if self-command had a place in the soldier’s kit. “Indeed,” he replied, continuing to stitch his overcloak, which chore our query had interrupted. “For the self-control of the warrior, which we observe and admire in his comportment, is but the outward manifestation of the inner perfection of the man. Such virtues as patience, courage, selflessness, which the soldier seems to have acquired for the purpose of defeating the foe, are in truth for use against enemies within himself—the eternal antagonists of inattention, greed, sloth, self-conceit, and so on. When each of us recognizes, as we must, that we too are engaged in this struggle, we find ourselves drawn to the warrior, as the acolyte to the seer. The true man-at-arms, in fact, can overcome his enemy without even striking a blow, simply by the example of his virtue. In fact he can not only defeat this foe but also make him his willing friend and ally, and even, if he wishes, his slave.” Our mentor turned to us with a smile. “As I have done with you.”

  There is a clue here.

  Perhaps in the simple virtues I learned as a boy lies a way back, for myself and for this army. Time is short. The men will not wait, nor will this river.

  Let us retrace the route then, my young friend—I to recount and you to attend. From the start.

  From Chaeronea.

  Book Two

  LOVE OF GLORY

  Five

  THE OBLIQUE ORDER

  CHAERONEA IS A PLAIN NORTHWEST OF THEBES. Here, in his forty-fifth year (and my eighteenth), Philip led the army of Macedonia against the assembled corps of the Greeks. It was the last great battle of his life and the first of mine.

  The plain at Chaeronea runs northwest by southeast. The ground is in lavender and fragrant herbs, perfume plants, with the fortified acropolis on the rising ground to the south and Mount Acontion opposite across the pan. An army advancing from the northwest enters the plain at its widest part, where it stretches beyond three thousand yards. You cross a stream called the Haemus. Blood River. On the left is the course called Cephisus. Upon this the Greeks anchored their right wing. Their left rested on the citadel of the city. The foe’s front was something under two miles across, or about twenty-eight hundred shields.

  For centuries Chaeronea has been the site of clashes at arms. It is a natural theater of war, as are the neighboring plains of Tanagra, Plataea, Leuctra, Coronea, and Erythrae. The history of Greece has been written here. Men have bled and died on these fields for a thousand years.

  This day a different kind of battle will be fought. This day my father will put an end to the preeminence of the Greeks. We will be the Greeks now. We of Macedon. We whom our cousins of the south have spurned and despised, whom Demosthenes of Athens has called “suppositious bastards.” Today we will wring from Greece’s grasp the standard of the West. From this day, we will be civilization’s champions.

  The enemy force is between thirty-five and forty thousand; our own just shy of forty. The foe has sufficient strength to stack his infantry between eight and sixteen shields deep across the entire front.


  The elite regiment of Greece is the Sacred Band of Thebes. Its numbers are three hundred. The unit is constituted, so the poets declare, of pairs of lovers. The notion is that each man, dreading disgrace in the eyes of his beloved, will fight like one possessed, or, if overrun, stand by his comrade to the last.

  “What rubbish!” Telamon is corrosive on the subject. “If bungholing your mate was all it took to make first-rate soldiers, the sergeant’s chore would be no more than ‘Face about and bend over!’” My father likewise knows Thebes well, having endured three years there as a hostage in his youth. Of course the Sacred Band is not pairs of lovers. How, after the youth’s first beard? What the band is, is the boldest and most athletic of Thebes’s noblest families, including, this day, six Olympic champions and scores of prizewinners from Greece’s lesser games. The expenses of the regiment are borne by the state, her members relieved of all civic obligation, save training for war. Theban maids fling themselves at the knights of the Band, in vain, alas, for these, as their countryman Pindar attests

  have taken Strife as their bride,

  and to her are faithful unto death.

  The Sacred Band are all hoplites, heavily armored infantry. Their panoply is a helmet of bronze or iron (six pounds), bronze front-and-back cuirass (twelve pounds), shin guards (two pounds each), and a three-foot-across bowl-shaped shield, oak faced with bronze (twelve to fourteen pounds). In other words, thirty-four to thirty-six pounds of “pot and plate,” not counting weapons (another ten pounds), cloak and chiton, and footgear. The Greek hoplite is the most heavily armored infantryman in the world. With shields at high port and lapped, helmet crowns and eye slits alone visible above the upper rims, the Sacred Band presents to the foe a solid wall of bronze and iron.

  The Band is three hundred on the parade ground only. In the field it is twenty-four hundred. Each hoplite is complemented by seven militia infantrymen, to make a file of eight, and has reserve companies to pack it sixteen deep, a total of forty-eight hundred. The Band has no cavalry and fears no cavalry. Horse troops are useless, the Thebans believe, against the bronze-armored, densely packed, spear-bristling phalanx.

  Like all elite infantry of the southern Greeks, the Sacred Band fights in close order. The warriors’ weapons are the eight-foot spear, with which they strike overhand from behind the lapped faces of their shields, and the short Spartan-style cut-and-thrust sword, which they use for the close work. The Band advances to the cadence of the flute, and has no call for retreat. Its code is Stand and Die. Its men are beyond question the finest infantry of Greece and, the ten thousand Immortals of Persia not excepted, the elite armored corps of all the world.

  This day I will destroy them.

  Here is how I learned the job was mine. At Pherae in Thessaly, the final staging stop before Philip’s army pushed south to Chaeronea, my father commanded a full-dress run-through. The exercise was supposed to strap up at dawn, but the day had passed without orders, midnight had come and gone, and only then, well into the third watch of the night, did the word come down to bring the troops on line, in the dark, amid a cacophony of groans, gripes, and sergeants’ bellowing. Of course Philip had planned it so. He wanted the men tired and hungry, half-pissed and disordered. It would more closely simulate the disarray of battle. Now at the last minute he arrived himself, with half the Companion Cavalry, a thousand Light Horse of Thessaly and three hundred Thracian lancers. The mass of horse threw the field into even greater disorder. A waxing moon stood over; the plain, freshly drenched by an unseasonable downpour, glistened slick and treacherous in a still-misting drizzle. “Plugs off! Skin ’em back!” Philip commanded via the brigade master sergeants, meaning the corps was to strip the cornel caps and oiled-fleece covers from the warheads of its eighteen-foot sarissas.

  At once it felt like a fight. Honed iron emerged to the wet. Now an infantryman must take care and not jostle, for with the slightest mishandling, these whetted edges could dice a comrade’s ear or put out his eye. Philip ordered shields uncovered too. Off came the oxhide liners. Curses rustled. Now the wet would work its mischief, the bronze facings would take hours of toil for the men to reburnish. We could hear the grumbling and bitching. Horse piss sluiced; you could smell shit now, from the men and the mounts, and liquor and leather, the acrid breath of the mingled squadrons mixing with the tang off the grass and the smell of oil on iron, which evokes battle like no other.

  My father had taken a post on the knoll beneath the shrine of the Aleuadae. I rode up with Hephaestion and Black Cleitus, a crack cavalry officer who would come to command the Royal Squadron of the Companions; we reined to the left of the king, who was addressing his generals Parmenio and Antigonus One-Eye, likewise on horseback. The other brigade commanders ringed in on the right and rear. Philip recited the order of battle. One question hung unspoken: To whom would go the honor of facing the Sacred Band?

  Philip passed right over it. No mention. Until Antigonus, unable to contain himself, spat in impatience across the front. “Who gets the Band, Philip?”

  The king ignored him, continuing his recitation. Then, casually as shooing a fly: “The Thebans? My son will take care of them.”

  This was the first and only time Philip spoke in my presence on the subject, adding only (this addressed not to me but to the company as a whole) that I would have four brigades of heavy infantry, six thousand men, and all of the Companion Cavalry.

  Hephaestion was furious when we left. “Your father has overarmed you.”

  My friend feared Philip diluted my glory by offering so stout a force. I told him he did not know my father. “On battle’s eve, he’ll pull one brigade of foot and half the horse.” Which he did.

  My father was not mad or perverse, as many believed, but canny as a cat. He read his generals, as he put it, like a whore her steady fucks. And he knew me. He loved me, I believe, more than he knew or told. But Philip was a king, and he wished his son to be no less. Antipater has not told me so to this day, fearing my displeasure, but another has reported of that dawn, that he, Antipater, when Philip jerked half my force two hours before battle, had confronted his master: “Are you trying to kill Alexander?” To which my father had replied, “Only to try him.”

  Three nights later we reach Chaeronea. The enemy’s main armies—Thebans, Athenians, and Corinthians—already occupy the waist of the plain, with their several corps of mercenaries and citizen troops of Megara, Euboea, Achaea, Leucas, Corcyra, and Acarnania rolling in all night. It takes our own force the whole of the next day to complete its march-up, lead units first, then the main body, finally the stragglers.

  I arrive with my own squadrons immediately after the scouts and rangers. We are the lead elements, the first main-force Macedonian units on the field. It is our job to range ahead of the advancing army, to alert Philip to the enemy’s dispositions and to any treachery laid in the main body’s path. There is no call to worry. The Greeks are in plain sight, waiting for us to come up and crack skulls. We chase off the foe’s skirmishers and seize a likely-looking camp. I order the ranger horse to fan out across the plain, stake out the line for the whole army. As each succeeding unit comes up, the quartermasters steer it into place.

  My command, if such a grand term may be applied to it, is constituted in equal parts of veteran infantry officers—great Antipater, Meleager, Coenus—handpicked by my father to temper any youthful rashness on my part, and mates my own age—Hephaestion, Craterus, Perdiccas, longhaired Leonnatus, whom we call “Love Locks.” These will take squadrons of Companion Cavalry. Black Cleitus commands my Bodyguard; Telamon is my master-at-arms. He points out the Sacred Band across the way. “Let’s have a look.”

  Any evolution by the army of Thebes will be spearheaded by the Sacred Band. Far more significant, however, will be its signature formation: the oblique order. As we ride across in the failing light, our eyes scour the terrain and the foe’s configuration, seeking clues to how he will deploy.

  The oblique order was invented by Thebes�
�s legendary general, Epaminondas. Before his time, Greek wars were simple slugfests. Armies lined up across from each other, came to close quarters, and proceeded to beat one another’s brains out, until one side cried quit. Often one army bolted before the other had even struck a blow. That served just as well to settle whatever issue had been in dispute.

  The Spartans had made themselves masters of this type of shoving match and regularly thrashed the Thebans and all other rivals.

  The oblique order ended that. Epaminondas never favored that term. He called it systrophe, “amassment.” It worked like the fists of a boxer, who does not punch with both hands simultaneously but holds one back while striking with the other. Epaminondas lined up his army as before, on a parallel front across from the foe. But instead of clashing with equal weight along the full length of the line, he concentrated his strength on one wing, the left, and held the other wing back, or “refused” it. In battle the Spartans always placed their superior troops on the right: This was their post of honor; it was where their king fought, surrounded by his agema—the bodyguard of his corps of knights. By setting his power on the left—immediately opposite the Spartan king—Epaminondas took the enemy head-on. If he could make their crack companies break, he believed, all lesser elements would turn and run.

  How did Epaminondas strengthen his left? First he arrayed it, not eight shields in depth, as the Spartans did, or sixteen, as Theban generals had done in the past, but thirty- , even fifty-deep. Next he put into his soldiers’ fists a new weapon—the twelve-foot pike, which outreached the Spartan eight-foot spear by half. Last, Epaminondas reconfigured his countrymen’s shields, scalloping recesses left and right and taking up the weight by straps around the neck and shoulder, so that his pikemen had both hands free to wield the long spear.