Mercenaries in the Classical World- To the Death of Alexander
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The final element of remuneration for mercenaries is one of the most important for the majority: booty. For many mercenaries, and indeed a great number of regular troops, booty was a major source of funds and a significant motivational factor in taking up mercenary service in the first place.10
The desire to enjoy the spoils of war is as old as Greek warfare itself; it is a central theme of the Homeric epics, where there is no clear dividing line between plunder and legitimate trading activities.11 The traditional view amongst Greeks was that the conquered peoples and their possessions passed to the conquerors: to the victors belong the spoils. The desire for the acquisition of wealth as a motivating factor in warfare, both for the state and for individuals, cannot be denied. In terms of states, the distribution of plunder was even included as a clause in some treaties.12
Booty could come in a number of forms. It could be actual items of intrinsic value that could easily be carried away by the victor; this was probably a major source of this type of income for mercenaries. One such ‘item’ was the captured enemy; individuals captured in warfare automatically became slaves and were often sold after the battle to provide a major source of income for the state, some of which was likely to be distributed amongst the army. We see, for example, Alexander selling 30,000 Thebans into slavery after his Sack of Thebes in 335. The sale brought much needed revenue into the Macedonian treasury, some 440 talents, each Theban being worth on average eighty-eight drachmae. 13 The state could also sell any captured livestock and especially land; the scope for income from warfare was vast, if successful, of course.
Violence and plundering after a battle or siege reached something of a peak in the Greek world in the fourth century, with a number of cities being sacked and pillaged, although the Hellenistic period was arguably worse. It is entirely possible that this trend is linked to the increasing use of mercenaries, who saw plunder as a major source of income, a form of bonus payment for successful service. It is also likely linked to the generally parlous state of the finances of some of the major protagonists in the fourth century.
Individual rank-and-file mercenaries could become wealthy as a result of plunder, but how many actually did is an interesting question. The choicest artefacts would likely have been taken by regular state troops, with the mercenaries picking over whatever was left. Commanders would also have their choice of items before the lower ranks, and therefore, there may not always have been a great deal left worth stealing.
Some mercenaries undoubtedly did very well out of plunder, particularly the commanders. Xenophon, for example, made enough money from the expedition to Persia to enable him to make a dedication to Apollo at Delphi, and also to buy a plot of land in the Peloponnese, upon which he built a temple and an alter to Artemis: 14
Here Xenophon built an altar and a temple with the sacred money, and from that time forth he would every year take the tithe of the products of the land in their season and offer sacrifice to the goddess, all the citizens and the men and women of the neighbourhood taking part in the festival. And the goddess would provide for the banqueters barley meal and loaves of bread, wine and sweetmeats, and a portion of the sacrificial victims from the sacred herd as well as of the victims taken in the chase.
To perform such acts it would have taken a great deal of plunder, but as a commander and aristocrat, Xenophon was in prime position to receive more than his fair share.
We do also have some circumstantial evidence of the amount of plunder a rank-and-file mercenary could achieve.15 Nicostratus, an Athenian who saw mercenary service overseas and died in the 370s, left two talents of property at his death. This estate was contested in court, and we have the speech of Isaeus demonstrating some of the detail of the case. 16 It seems impossible that this money could have come from a wage alone, or even with a bonus payment included. Some of this figure must have come from plunder, which he invested in property in Athens.
In terms of the collection of booty, Aeneas Tacticus presents us with a vivid and interesting picture from the perspective of a commander under siege:17
After your defensive force has been concentrated in a specific place and the enemy are dispersed in search of plunder, now is the time to attack them, to cut off their routes of retreat with cavalry and to form ambushes composed of select troops.
The implication being that almost as soon as the siege had begun there would be raiding parties out looking for plunder and pillage. It is certainly true that foraging parties would constantly accompany an army looking for food and water, and it is not difficult to see plundering taking place alongside this. Whether these parties were large enough to reduce the size of the attacking force sufficiently to make a sortie viable is highly debatable, and I think unlikely, unless the attacking force was desperately short of supplies.
Aeneas Tacticus goes on to tell us:
Attack the enemy where you are not unwilling to give battle and in doing so you will suffer no disadvantage. From my previous discussion you can see that it is advantageous to allow the enemy to plunder as much of your territory as possible, so that plundering and burdened with booty, he will be readily open to your vengeance and all that has been taken can be recovered and those who have committed aggression will receive just what they deserve.
I doubt that local landowners would support this policy, and there seems little evidence that it was ever actually adopted.
The fact of the victorious army owning the property, and indeed the person of the conquered, was never questioned; exactly who amongst the conquering army owned which part of the booty was, however, a major source of difficulty after a battle. We see this as a central theme in Homer in the dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles over Briseis.
The distribution of booty amongst the victors seems to have been a highly controlled affair. In theory, the commander of the victorious force took possession of all of the captured goods, including people and livestock. Much of the ‘living’ booty would then be sold; what was not would be distributed and then (likely) sold.
In general, it was the responsibility of the commanding general to organize the distribution and sale of the booty, and it tended to be distributed according to a series of unwritten rules. These rules would generally govern how much senior commanders, junior commanders and the rank and file would receive from the total.18 Whatever remained would temporarily remain in the possession of the general until the army returned home. At that point, the remaining spoils would become the property of the state, no doubt after a certain amount had been squirreled away by the general for his own purposes. In terms of mercenary generals, there was no home state as such, so they could become rich beyond the dreams of their subordinates from the spoils of war.
The major city-states like Athens and Sparta had officials whose responsibility it was to assist a commander with the sale and distribution of booty, and likely to ensure the state received its fair share. Merchants and slave traders would be part of the baggage train of an army and would provide an immediate market for captured goods. The immediate market was, however, limited, and a sizeable amount of booty could cause a saturation of the market, with supply seriously outstripping demand, and the inevitable drop in price that this situation always brings. This occurred, for example, in Sicily after the failure of the Athenian expedition in 413.19
Some plunder could, however, be acquired outside of the strict control of the general and of state officials. We see from Xenophon again that towards the end of the Anabasis he organized a raid, with his closest friends, on a local wealthy estate, with the sole intention of gathering plunder. Xenophon presents this raid as a way of gathering plunder for himself and of helping out his closest friends. Whatever was collected on such raids was kept by those involved, although probably distributed along similar lines as those applied to the army as a whole, i.e. the commander receiving the lion’s share and then progressively less gooing to those lower down the food chain. Mercenary armies were, therefore, remarkably dangerous to the civilians in are
as where they passed. Xenophon tells us: 20
Xenophon set out and took with him, with the idea of doing them a good turn, the captains who had been his particular friends and faithful to him through everything. About 600 others too came up to him, trying to force their services upon him, but the captains turned them away, so as not to have to give them a share of the booty, which they regarded as being already theirs.
This is an interesting illustration of the views of the mercenaries at the end of the Anabasis, and likely illustrative of mercenaries and others more generally. Plunder was a way of life for such people, and as Xenophon says, they considered the property to be ‘already theirs’.
Now that we have established the methods and mechanisms by which mercenaries were paid, we should turn our attention to the amount of pay and its regularity. In terms of the regularity of payment, the theory and practice of payment appear to differ significantly. It is not greatly surprising that sometimes mercenaries, and even the regular troops, were not paid at regular intervals. There are several reasons for this, but by far the most important would have been a lack of funds, which was a major cause of the increase in plunder during campaigns into the fourth century and beyond. Mercenaries would nominally have been paid on a monthly basis, as suggested by Xenophon in an address to his gathered mercenaries:21
Now I promise, in case you set sail from here, to provide you with pay from the first of the month at the rate of a Cyzicene per month to each man; and I will take you to Troas, the place from which I am an exile, and my city will be at your service; for they will receive me willingly.
The above quotation from Xenophon illustrates the regularity of pay for the 10,000, but it is rare to have such information; for the most part, whenever rates of pay are cited they are always presented as a daily rate. In terms of administration on the march, monthly remuneration was no doubt easier to calculate and distribute.22 Different forms of payment would be distributed at different times of the month, of course. Financial payments that were specifically intended for the purchase of food would likely be paid in advance, i.e. at the start of a month. No sensible commander would allow his troops to go hungry for the sake of keeping coin in his treasury for a few more days, to say nothing of the indiscipline that this would inevitably lead to.
There is some surviving evidence that expenses incurred by a mercenary whilst travelling to meet up at a muster point with his new commander would be met by the individual, and that part of his wage, the ephodia, would only be paid upon his arrival. We see this from both Callicratidas and Xenophon.23 Xenophon gives us a very vivid picture of the different types of people who signed up to be part of Cyrus’ mercenary army, and suggests that some would have funded themselves in terms of travelling expenses:
For most of the soldiers had sailed away from Greece to undertake this service for pay, not because their means were scanty, but because they knew by report of the noble character of Cyrus; some brought other men with them, some had even spent money of their own on the enterprise, while still another class had abandoned fathers and mothers, or had left children behind with the idea of getting money to bring back to them, all because they heard that the other people who served with Cyrus enjoyed abundant good fortune. Being men of this sort, therefore, they longed to return in safety to Greece.
Some men were motivated to take up mercenary service by the fact that they were unable to make a living in any other way. Indeed, this trend would have gathered in pace through into the Hellenistic period, where it became a way of life. It was something of a vicious circle, with more opportunities leading more people to become dependent on that way of life. However, the fact that travelling expenses would likely have come out of the pocket of the mercenary himself would have ensured that those in absolute penury could not become mercenaries, at least not at any great distance from home.
It seems likely, however, that mercenaries did receive some form of upfront payments, likely for food at the very least. Diodorus presents us with a number of passages in which an employer would send a representative with large sums of money in order to hire new mercenaries. We see Alexander the Great doing this, for example, by sending recruiters back to Greece on more than one occasion. Diodorus also supports this view by his reference to a commander gathering funds before embarking upon a programme of recruiting a body of mercenaries. He tells us of the recruitment policy of Dionysus in 383, for example: 24
Now that Dionysius was well supplied with money, he hired a multitude of soldiers from every land, and after bringing together a very considerable army, was obviously preparing for a war against the Carthaginians.
And of the Carthaginian response: 25
Now the Carthaginians formed an alliance with the Italian Greeks and together with them went to war against the tyrant; and since they wisely recognised in advance that it would be a great war, they enrolled as soldiers the capable youth from their own citizens, and then, raising a great sum of money, hired large forces of mercenary troops.
These passages tell us that some form of advance payment was made to the mercenaries being hired, although perhaps not a great deal, as we also see in the other cited passages that some needed to pay their own travelling money. The same passages also tell us that mercenary armies were not cheap, and that the finances needed to be planned and in place up front.
How much mercenaries were paid is a rather more complex question to address. There are a number of reasons for this. It is partly a simple lack of surviving source material that makes reference to their remuneration, and partly for the reasons discussed above, that there were a great many ways a mercenary could be paid, not all of them easily measurable. It is also worth noting that what we have in the surviving literature is largely the theory of what mercenaries, or indeed regular troops, would have been paid. The reality may have been very different. 26 It is certain that there were periods where mercenaries would not have received any remuneration, perhaps because of a lack of funds on the part of the employer. In those instances the mercenaries could either desert in search of a more reliable paymaster, or stick with what they knew in the hope that the situation would improve. If the mercenary chose the latter course we would be unlikely to hear of this from the surviving source material and will assume a regular salary was paid.
It seems to be generally accepted that the wages paid to mercenaries fell from the fifth to the fourth centuries. It has been noted that by the fourth century the wage was little above a subsistence level, and that the cost of living had risen significantly during and after Alexander’s conquest of Asia, making mercenary service very unattractive.27 The more recent trend is to downplay the wage deflation argument in favour of saying that the wages may have fallen in the fourth century, but not by a great deal. 28 The reality of the situation is probably somewhere in between. It does seem that the wages for mercenary service did decline in the fourth century, but that mercenaries appear to have had a little more of a free rein in terms of the collection of plunder, which could have more than made up for the drop in base salary.
As noted earlier, however, the collection of plunder was not guaranteed, but there was an undoubted rise in violence in the fourth century and into the Hellenistic period. There were a number of factors for this, but mercenary activity was certainly one of them. There were notable exceptions in the fourth century, of course, in terms of the size of mercenary remuneration. Cyrus, Jason of Pherae, the Phocian generals and probably Alexander the Great were all generous paymasters, and we must therefore draw a distinction between those wealthy employers and the mercenaries who were employed to fight in a less lucrative war. However, as with modern salaries, there does appear to have been something of a significant gap between those at the bottom and those further up the pay scale: there was not one standard rate. Whatever the rate, there does not seem to have been a shortage of willing applicants when mercenaries were required.29
It has long been supposed, and it does seem logical (although there is no actual direct evid
ence to support this), that mercenary pay would have been linked in some way to the wages of regular troops in service overseas. 30 Of course, the word ‘linked’ is critical here; it is not the same as saying that pay would have been the same; it further seems logical that mercenary pay may have been a little lower. We will examine this in more detail later when we examine the situation in the Macedonian army.31
In terms of monetary value, Thucydides gives us a number of examples of the size of misthos payments (regular wages) made during the Peloponnesian War to both soldiers and sailors.32
Thucydides tells us:
At this time when their ships were at sea the Athenians had the largest number of ships on active service and in fine condition, though there were similar or even greater numbers at the beginning of the war . . . the total number of ships in service in the course of one summer was two hundred and fifty. This and Potidaea were particular drains on their finances. The men on duty at Potidaea were two-drachmae hoplites (receiving one drachma a day for themselves and one for their servant) . . . All the ships were paid at the same rate.
The payment of one drachma a day does appear to have been the standard rate for infantry and sailors during the fifth century.33 Aristophanes mentions this figure in the Acharnians in 425, whilst in 424 in the Wasps he suggested that three and two obols a day were a standard wage.34 The two obols a day suggested by Aristophanes could well be a confusion with the two obols of sitêresion (ration money) mentioned by Demosthenes and noted earlier.35 Plutarch also tells us that Alcibiades paid the sailors in his fleet three obols a day (half a drachma):36
Lysander, who had been sent out as admiral by the Lacedaemonians, paid his sailors four obols a day instead of three, out of the moneys he received from Cyrus; while Alcibiades, already hard put to it to pay even his three obols, was forced to sail for Caria to levy money.