O Captain! Our Captain!

There’s a line in the Aeneid where a heartbroken Aeneas steels himself to tell his shipwrecked compatriots that a time will come when they will look back with fondness on their misfortunes. 

'My friends, this is not the first trouble we have known,’ he says in the West translation I read back in UCD thirty years ago. ‘We have suffered worse before, and this too will pass. God will see to it. You have been to Scylla's cave and heard the mad dogs howling in the depths of it. You have even survived rocks thrown by the Cyclops. So summon up your courage once again. This is no time for gloom or fear. The day will come, perhaps, when it will give you pleasure to remember even this. Whatever chance may bring, however many hardships we suffer, we are making for Latium, where the Fates show us our place of rest. There it is the will of God that the kingdom of Troy shall rise again. Your task is to endure and save yourselves for better days.'

I’ve been thinking of this a lot since Saturday, when I got the shocking news that Vic Connerty had died. These few days have been ones where deep sorrow has mingled with gratitude, and the thought that I’ve been so lucky to have been taught and guided by Vic, and to have known him for so long as a friend.

It’s strange to think back to to those magnificent lectures in UCD where Vic could cast his spell over a packed Theatre L, the 450 or so students who were meant to be there bolstered by cohorts who’d come over from the faculties of Engineering, Science, and Architecture to hear Vic tell us about the Gracchi, of Marius and his seven consulships, of Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, and the constant fatal relationship of land and the army. Despite how many wonderful lecturers there were in the Arts faculty at that time - I had a lot of great ones across Greek and Roman Civilization, History, and one year of English - it’s hardly surprising that when thousands of UCD alumni were polled a dozen or so years back and asked who their favourite lecturer had been, Vic was the winner for the 1990s.

Starting second year I met my tutor from first year, the lovely Jane McEntaggart, who said Mr Connerty wanted to meet me, so when I spotted him in a stairway a few days later I nervously approached him. We were talking in no time at all about my working in the pub in Palmerstown, about the comics convention I’d been at in London because I’d wanted back then to be a comic artist, and about how he and my mum had both moved here from Liverpool within a couple of years. Within a a week or so the tutorial lists were up and I was thrilled to see that I was in his group, along with Valerie who I’d known from the previous year, Claire who’s still a dear friend to this day, Joanne, Paula, Johanna, Gerry, Jacqui, and Suzanne. And so began a year of such wonderful memories, anecdotes, lessons, and ideas. Too many to share, though I’ll never forget in particular how Vic told us of the last words attributed to the emperor Vespasian, distracted from the canonical “I think I’m becoming a God” by the sight of a rainbow apparently ending in the bushes of Belfield.

Small wonder, then, that I did his third-year course on the decade of the Triumvirate, immersed in Caesar, Cicero, Plutarch, and others, letting the ancients speak for themselves, even if we viewed them at times with sceptical eyes. And even now I can’t but think of those classes without hearing Vic’s warmly growling voice with that unforgettable cadence, quoting Cicero’s “to listen to him you’d think he lived in Plato’s Republic, and not in the sink of Romulus.”

And so the following year I started my Master’s and became a tutor under Vic’s mentorship, making a host of friendships I still am so lucky to have, even if we’ve lost a few since: poor Renate passed on a couple of years ago, and Carine died just a few months back. Vic would be my boss whether tutoring or invigilating, my supervisor when Andrew Erskine was away in Munich, and most importantly my friend through the decades of his retirement: I was so glad to be able to build my first flexi-day off from my current job around one of our regular coffee meetings at Dunne and Crescenzi, there to talk of life and academia and the very different fortunes of our respective Merseyside football clubs. I’d never have imagined it would be our last coffee meeting, or that seeing him at UCD’s Classical Society Inaugural a couple of months back would be our last meeting of any sort.

In truth, countless people could tell stories like mine: when one of my friends shared the news of his death on Facebook she began with the words “O Captain! My Captain!” I’d had those words - whether thought of as Walt Whitman’s, or Robin Williams’s, or Ethan Hawke’s - in my head ever since Tom had sent me the news, and I’m sure there are so many others who could say the same.

I want to say that the world is darker today, but Vic’s was a fire that lit thousands of candles. One of my friends described him the other day as a champion of the ancient world who exemplified how to be a person in the modern world, and this is surely right: his warmth, his wisdom, his curiosity, and his deep care for people are things that will surely stay with me and so many others as long as we live. May he rest in peace.

Hannibal, Cyrus, and lessons in followship

Back in 2003 Toni Morrison met Peter Olson, the then CEO of Random House, at that year’s Book Expo America, and mentioned having watched a documentary on the Mongols in her hotel after a flight which had left her unsettled. Olson lit up. “I wrote my college thesis on an anti-Soviet revolt in South Central Asia,” he said, continuing, “I would contend that military histories are better for learning about corporate strategies and management technique than any other books.”

Military history is one of those fields that lends insights, ideas, and examples aplenty to modern management discussions: given how it covers leadership, intelligence, logistics, tactics, strategy, and so much more, this probably shouldn’t surprise us, but the link wasn’t always so obvious.  Indeed, according to Peter Drucker, probably the twentieth century’s most influential management guru, strategy itself was seen as a military concept, largely irrelevant to business management, as late as the 1960s:

‘Managing for Results was the first book to address itself to what is now called “business strategy”. It is still the most widely used book on the subject. When I wrote it, more than twenty years ago, my original title was, in fact, Business Strategies. But “strategy” in those days was not a term in common usage. Indeed, when my publisher and I tested the title with acquaintances who were business executives, consultants, management teachers, and booksellers, we were strongly advised to drop it. “Strategy,” we were told again and again, “belongs to military or perhaps to political campaigns but not to business.”’

The situation wasn’t quite as stark as that, of course – just two years earlier, for instance, Alfred Chandler had published Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the history of the American industrial enterprise – but certainly it seems clear that the idea that warfare had anything to say to business was far from an orthodoxy at the time. Indeed, Drucker would later state that he had not written a book on leadership because an ancient Greek had made such a project superfluous. ‘The first systematic book on leadership was written by Xenophon more than 2,000 years ago,’ he told a student, adding, ‘and it is still the best.’

The book he had in mind, oddly, was not the extraordinarily instructive Anabasis, Xenophon’s memoir of the exploits of an army of 10,000 Greek mercenaries in the Persian Empire and their attempts to come home; neither was it his Hellenica, detailing the defeat of Athens by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War and the subsequent defeat of Sparta by the resurgent Thebes. Instead, he was referring to the Cyropaedia, the fictionalised biography of the Persian Cyrus the Great, which Drucker saw as a study in both leadership and followship.  The latter, Drucker felt, was too often neglected, to the detriment of any enterprise because it is impossible to be a leader without followers. ‘To lead, one must follow,’ he observed, ‘because it is only from the viewpoint of the follower that we can reflect on the basis of followship, which when turned around becomes the essence of leadership.’

I’ll talk about the Cyropaedia another day, but I think it’s worth saying that the point that the best leaders are willing to learn, to serve, and to follow wasn’t unique to Xenophon. Here, for instance, is the Roman historian Livy describing the Carthaginian Hannibal’s brilliance both as a commander and as a subordinate:

‘Power to command and readiness to obey are rare associates; but in Hannibal they were perfectly united, and their union made him as much valued by his commander as his men. Hasdrubal preferred him to all other officers in any action which called for vigour and courage, and under his leadership the men invariable showed to the best advantage both dash and confidence. Reckless in courting danger, he showed superb tactical ability when it was upon him.

Indefatigable both physically and mentally, he could endure with equal ease excessive heat or excessive cold; he ate and drank not to flatter his appetites but only so much as would sustain his bodily strength. His time for waking, like his time for sleeping, was never determined by daylight or darkness: when his work was done, then, and then only, he rested, without need, moreover, of silence or a soft bed to woo sleep to his eyes. Often he was seen lying in his cloak on the bare ground amongst the common soldiers on sentry or picket duty. His accoutrement, like the horses he rode, was always conspicuous, but not his clothes, which were like those of any other officer of his rank and standing. Mounted or unmounted, he was unequalled as a fighting man, always the first to attack, the last to leave the field.’

Much of this – perhaps all of it – should be seen as a series of rhetorical clichés, but things often only become clichés because they’re basically true. If these are conventional compliments, they merely highlight how Livy and his audience recognised that the best leaders are good followers, and that effective leadership demands a willingness to share the hardships of those being led.

Some things don’t change. 

Silos and synods

I was at a conference in Rome a few years ago where people from Google explained that Catholic websites tend to punch well below their weight compared to those of other religious groups for the simple reason that they don’t link to other sites; in the digital environment as so often in the world at large today, Catholicism is a siloed landscape. It doesn’t have to be, though. Even just thinking about Irish history, and the kind of lessons we might draw from our most influential period, those centuries between the coming of Patrick and the Viking attacks when we supposedly saved civilization – we didn’t, but we did a lot – it shouldn’t take long for us to realise just how important networks and networking were to ‘the land of saints and scholars’.

That won’t typically be our first thought, of course. We’re far more likely to think of the likes of the island monastery of Skellig Michael. Famously isolated, the stone huts on the pyramidal island are dramatically inaccessible, so much so that they were perfectly cast in recent Star Wars films as Luke Skywalker’s hermit hideout. This very inaccessibility, this remoteness – the monastery is high on a rugged rocky spike that arises from stormy waters that cut the island off from the south-western corner of the Irish mainland – defines the monastery, but can too easily mislead us into thinking that this kind of community was somehow typical of Irish Christianity in its earliest centuries. Anything but!

That’s not to say that there weren’t Celtic monks who went off into the wilderness to seek God through contemplation – the Cambrai Homily, written around AD700, speaks of this ‘green martyrdom’, as distinct from the classical red martyrdom of those who died for the Faith and the white martyrdom of those who left their homelands to become missionary exiles – but we go wildly astray if we ever think of this as the norm. On the contrary: in the first centuries of our recorded history the Irish countryside was dotted with hundreds, even thousands, of monasteries, and while some certainly were discreet centres of contemplation, many others had roles that were pastoral, administrative, scholarly, and evangelising. They were platforms for outreach, and they were linked together.

Clonmacnoise, established by St Ciarán where the river Shannon meets the great road that was the Esker Riada, is perhaps the most obvious of these, but even when we think of the ostensibly remote beauty of Glendalough, we should keep in mind that though St Kevin settled in a beautiful spot in the Wicklow Mountains, he hardly did so in an obscure one; the monastic city that grew up around him is, after all, barely a mile from the crossroads of Laragh. St Cronán is famously described in his medieval biography as having moved his community to Roscrea because people couldn’t find it in its original home. ‘I will not be in a desert place where guests and poor people cannot easily find me,’ he supposedly said, continuing, ‘but I will stay here now in a public place.’

Our early lives of St Brigid show her travelling around the roads of central Ireland by chariot, praying as she went like an efficient commuter, and even helping her people in the building of a road, designed to carry chariots and wagons even across bog and riverside swamps. They describe her too as paying careful attention to how Mass was celebrated in Rome, so the prayers could change in Ireland if they changed in Rome, while contemporary letters from the likes of St Columbanus underline how letters and appeals to Rome were indeed a real phenomenon for the Celtic saints.

Roads, rivers, and letters all served to bind communities together, and communities would be aware too of their familial links – not merely because they’d often be expressions of local tribes and kingdoms, but because they’d be part of loose familial federations, known as paruchia, deriving from particular founder saints and those with whom he or she had studied. These federations could cross the sea, or even straddle the continent. Not that all was harmonious in or between these paruchia, of course – families can be tricky things, after all – but there were links, and the links mattered.

What’s more, the monastic leaders would travel to meet with each and learn from each other, and could come together occasionally in gatherings called synods. One synod from AD 697 begot the Cáin Adomnán, attempting to ban violence in warfare against non-combatants and especially women, for instance, while another, known as the Synod of Patrick, issued more than thirty rulings, including ones banning the receipt of donations from pagans and  threatening excommunication against anyone who believed in vampires!

Coming from the Greek syn-odos, meaning a shared journey or even a common path, synods are things we hear a lot about in Church circles nowadays, with talk of synods, synodality, synodal paths, and synodal ways. In the end, though, we should realise that they are, above all else, antidotes to siloed landscapes, a way of helping give reality and life to the Church as a network of networks. If St Brigid helped build roads across bogs, it must in part have been because without such ways – without such common paths – our monasteries would have been isolated and ineffective. Like the proverbial lighthouse in a bog, they’d have been brilliant but useless.

If synodality does nothing more than keep people talking together and praying together and working together towards common ends, it will have achieved something. Networks matter, after all.

Samildánach

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about specialisation, about picking one area and being known for being great at one thing. I’m not sure about this, though, because to take a pointer from Archilochus, the world surely needs foxes as much as it needs hedgehogs. One of the great insights in medical practice over recent decades has been that for all the status that accords to consultants, general practitioners are experts too: general practice is a specialism, as being good at many things is a remarkable gift, a speciality in its own right. Sometimes jacks of all trades are indeed masters of none, but sometimes too they are masters of many.

This reality has been recognised for millennia through the repository of human wisdom that is the world’s myths and legends, of course. Back in the seventh century BC Homer famously described Odysseus as polytropos – a word literally meaning ‘of many turnings’ – and also as polymētis (‘many-skilled’) and poikilomētis (‘dapple-skilled’). Even more than Achilles, the intense and shortlived hero of the Iliad, the hero of the Odyssey is a figure who excels in all manner of fields. As H.D.F. Kitto put it in a passage so memorably quoted in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

‘Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Pheacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by song.  He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing arēte.’

Irish legend has made the same point since time immemorial, with one of its most remarkable figures being the mercurial Lugh, hero of the wars against the Fomorians and eventual father of Cuchulainn. Lugh would be famously known as Samildánach  –  ‘equally skilled in many arts’, the story of how he came to Tara underlining how wide-ranging his abilities were. As told in the medieval Second Battle of Moytura, it goes something like this:

One day, after Bres the traitor had been banished and Nuada was once more king, the Tuatha Dé Danann were feasting and celebrating at Tara when a young and handsome warrior arrived at the palace’s gate. 

‘Who are you?’ asked Gamal and Camall, the palace doorkeepers. 

‘I am Lugh Long-arm,’ the young man answered, ‘son of Cian son of Diancecht and of Ethne, daughter of Balor, fosterson of Eochaidh and Tailtiu, daughter of the King of Spain.’

‘And what can you do? No one without an art enters Tara.’

‘Try me. I am a carpenter,’ said Lugh. 

‘Then we don’t need you. We have a carpenter already – Luchta son of Luachaid.’

‘I’m a smith too,’ said Lugh.

‘We also have a smith – Colum Cualleinech of the three new processes.’

‘I am a champion.’

‘We don’t need one! Ogma son of Ethliu is our champion.’

‘I’m a harper as well.’

‘We have a harper already, Abcan son of Bicelmos, who we chose in the fairy-mounds.’

‘Well, I am a hero.’

‘We’ve no need of one – Bresal is our hero.’

‘I am a poet, and I am a historian.’

‘En son of Ethaman is our poet and historian.’

‘I’m also a sorcerer.’ 

‘Sure, we’ve no shortage of sorcerers!’

‘I am a healer.’

‘No need. Diancecht is our healer.’

‘I am a cup-bearer too.’

‘We have nine of those already!’

‘I’m even a metalworker, skilled at working in brass.’

‘We don’t need you – Credne Cerd is already our brazier.’

Lugh paused, and then said: ‘Ask the king whether he has a single man in his whole household who has all these skills. If he has, I will not enter.’

And so Lugh was welcomed to Tara, where he became the greatest of the Tuatha Dé Danaan, and was known henceforth as Samildánach, for he had many skills. 

Sometimes a breadth of expertise and the vision that comes with that is the skill we are slowest to recognise, but it can be the most valuable skill of all.

Explorations

The river Boyne is tidal outside our house, rising and falling as it ebbs and flows with the salty waters of the Irish Sea. The water can drop to a few inches at times, revealing wide gravel beds and even — to the eagle-eyed — the outlines of a few ancient oak canoes, sunk six thousand years ago when the great solar tomb of Newgrange was being built beyond the bend of the river, and now at risk of being trampled and destroyed by the horses that have taken to exploring. It's navigable, though, at least for small boats when the tide is in, and if you want you can even hire traditional skin-and-wood currachs to row along the river now. 

Such a boat, I suppose, would have been used by the monks who sailed along the river at the dawn of Ireland's Christian era when the Boyne was one of Ireland’s main transport routes, and the story goes that a group of such monks were passing by in the late fifth century when they were flagged down by a man who lived by the banks of the river facing where I live now. His wife and he had a baby boy, he said; would the monks baptise him for them? They could not, they said, because the salty waters of the sea were not the fresh living waters needed for baptism. But, they added, God would provide. And so they came ashore, and one took the child, and placed him on the ground just a few yards from the riverbank, and fresh water bubbled up from the ground where he lay, and so the boy Buíthe, or Boyce, was Christened.

Such at least is the story that was told centuries later, in a medieval life from the twelfth century or thereabouts, seemingly based on earlier accounts that told how St Buíthe, for so he’d become known, studied in Wales and on the continent, and set up a monastery by the Boyne, acting as a miraculous channel of God’s power time and again along the way. On one occasion, for instance, he’s said to have parted the waters of the Boyne so he could cross it and prevent the execution of one of the king’s prisoners. He arrived too late, but was able to restore the executed man to life, and then took him to his monastery, where he would henceforth work. That was one of the more curious roles of monasteries in early Christian Ireland — they could be like open prisons where men who would otherwise be hunted down and executed could find sanctuary, as long as they lived like monks.

Buíthe is best known now for the great monastery named after him he founded a few miles inland at Monasterboice. Site of a majestic round tower and two of the most impressive high crosses in the country, it would be a major ecclesiastical centre until it slipped into insignificance when the new Cistercian abbey of Mellifont was built a few miles away in the middle of the twelfth century. Mellifont, it seems, may have taken its name as a nod to the site of Buíthe’s baptism, the ‘sweet spring’ that flowed with fresh water just yards from the salty Boyne.

I’ve known about this for a while now, but it was only today, following an afternoon of errands in town, that I decided it was time to wander about the place of Buíthe’s baptism for myself, setting foot in the field I’ve been looking over the river at for four years.

Off I headed down Trinity Street into Mell, sheltering from a sudden shower in the little parish Church of St Joseph and accidentally joining in Adoration as I did. I couldn’t see any sign there of the sixteenth-century window and Romanesque arch that were discovered there during expansion work at the start of the last century, though, relics of the time it housed a small community of Cistercians after Henry VIII and his lackeys closed the abbeys. They hung on a while, retaining the title of abbots of Mellifont, but never returned to the monastery.

After Adoration, with the rain having passed, I turned down the narrow, hedge-flanked Toberboice Lane in search of the eponymous well, ‘Toberboice’ coming from the Irish word ‘tobar’, meaning well or spring, and the name Buíthe. On the way I wondered where exactly it was that archaeologists had found early Christian graves beside the lane forty years ago, along with two underground storage tunnels and evidence of an enclosure, all pointing to a small monastic community. There were thousands of these across Ireland in the early middle ages, but that doesn’t make it any less exciting to find or be in one.

 

The lane ends at a small compound, a printing factory and a repair shop for cars. Nobody knew anything about the well, but I’d looked on nineteenth-century maps and it was clearly there, off the south-west corner of what’s now the repair yard. Had it been covered up? Certainly back in the day it was used to supply water for a local brewery, piping it there through wooden pipes. 

Over the gate into the next field, so, squelching through the hoof-churned mud, and then there! There it was! A small bridge over a cut trench with a little stream of water running along it behind the repair yard, and beside the bridge the trench lined with small rocks, a deliberate attempt at building some kind of structure from where people could draw water back in the day. That was it, so, Buíthe’s well — and our apartment quite visible from it across the rushes and the river. Mission accomplished. I’m not sure why, but it didn’t occur to me to ask for his intercession. Next time, so. It’s surely good to have a local saint in this way.

I was tempted for a moment to follow the muddy horse-churned path between the rushes to the river’s edge, but instead I turned to examine the ruined house I’d somehow not even noticed till this morning. Back in the nineteenth century it was believed that the two-storey house at the end of Toberboice Lane housed an upstairs cupboard that had been used as a priest hole for hiding clergy in penal times; this ruin must have been the house in question, with an upper window testifying to the upper storey. 

Time, then, to go home, content. Sometimes, in our eagerness to think of where we’re going, and constant cries to be mindful of where we are, it’s too easy to forget where we’ve come from. Today, though, was for remembering, looking backward to inspiration and guidance in going forward. And all within sight of my home.

Triumphant imposters

Flicking through Herodotus over breakfast, as you do, it occurs to me again that it’s interesting how the first historian implicitly but clearly rejects the notion that history is written by the victors. ‘Winners?’ he effectively says time and again. ‘Maybe, but for how long?’

Mind, this is something I often return to, and was at the heart of the thesis I eventually laid aside, albeit in the hope I could pick it up again someday: Herodotus, as a good student of Homer, knew victory was a profoundly suspect and temporary phenomenon, and not something that was necessarily clear even on the battlefield.

The Carthaginian Mask of Command: Leadership in a Multinational Army

Warfare has traditionally been studied, as a rule, from the viewpoint of the commander with regard to such matters as strategy, tactics, and organisation. In the light of John Keegan’s pioneering work in such books as The Face of Battle and The Mask of Command such an approach seems fundamentally flawed. Even to see the commander’s role as inevitably being primarily focused on strategy, tactics, etc. is to ignore the fact that different societies expect different things of their leaders and military command can therefore widely differ in nature from society to society.

In practice, commanders have two broad areas of responsibility: ‘function related’, which mainly concern administration, and ‘output related’, which involve the army’s basic raison d’être: to defeat the enemy in battle at minimum cost to itself. ‘Output related’ responsibilities themselves require two sets of skills, those of generalship and leadership. The former are essentially technical in nature and concern such things as intelligence gathering, tactics, and putting those tactics into practice. Leadership is a more difficult concept to define which involves exploiting the psychological factors governing the behaviour of troops to encourage them to fight more effectively.

It is interesting that Polybius, a second-century BC Greek historian, in evaluating Hannibal as his commander, regards his leadership as far more important than his generalship, thinking it his supreme achievement to have actually kept his polyglot army together as an efficient fighting force:

‘For sixteen years he waged ceaseless war in Italy, and throughout that time he never released his army from service in the field, but, like a good pilot, kept those numbers under his control and free from disaffection towards himself or one another. He succeeded in this despite the fact that he was employing troops who belonged not only to different countries but to different races. He had with him Africans, Spaniards, Ligurians, Celts, Phoenicians, Italians, and Greeks, men who had nothing naturally in common, neither their laws, their customs, their language, nor in any other respect. None the less the skill of their commander was such that he could impose the authority of a single voice and a single will even upon men of such totally diverse origins.’ (9.19.3-5)

 This passage is highly significant as it largely flies in the face of modern military historiography, which has tended to emphasis the skills of generalship rather than those of leadership. This tendency is understandable as military history has generally been seen as most useful as an education for young officers and the principles of strategy and tactics are relatively straightforward.

Commanders have thus been evaluated primarily with regard to these easily understood principles. The problem with such an approach is that it assumes that the ‘rules of war’ and the commander’s role throughout history are unchanging. This is not the case. Armies are a reflection of the societies from which they issue and fight for their objectives and according to their values. As societies differ so too do armies, and the commander’s role varies in accordance with this fact.

Carthage, a powerful commercial city on the North African coast, seems to have been something of an anomaly in Antiquity in that her army was not essentially based on her citizen body; by the late third century BC there was no real citizen militia except for a small force of cavalry supplied by the aristocracy. Instead, the Carthaginian army, led by an officer corps of Carthaginian aristocrats, was made up of allied levies augmented by foreign mercenaries. This polyglot force was of many races: Libyans and Liby-Phoenicians from Carthage’s hinterland, Numidians, Moors, Balearics, Iberians, Celtiberians, Celts, Greeks, and Italians of various types.

Such an army, essentially fighting for booty, would have had no real commitment to the army, though in theory defeated generals could be crucified. The generals were evidently not trusted as, though elected for a specific campaign rather than a restricted time period, their role was a purely military one with no civil powers whatsoever. This peculiar limitation of powers may have been unique in the Classical world.

To a large extent then, the army was isolated from Carthage and became a society in its own right with a rather special link between the general and troops. In fact, by the time of the Second Punic War, in the late third century BC, the Barcid family, of which Hannibal is the most well-known member, had effectively become an imperial dynasty leading Carthage’s army in Spain.

In practice it seems that the citizen’s assembly in Carthage merely ratified the army’s choice as general, if Diodorus Siculus (25.12.1) and Polybius (3.13.3-4) are to be trusted in their accounts of the successions of Hasdrubal and Hannibal respectively. This may not always have been the case but the soldiers’ choice was certainly an important feature in the First Punic War, when they were so impressed by the generalship of the Spartan mercenary Xanthippus that the generals gave way to the soldiers’ demands for him to lead them into battle (Polyb. 1.22.4-5). In Carthage’s subsequent war with her former mercenaries and Libyan subjects the joint commanders of Carthage’s own army, Hamilcar and Hanno, quarrelled and the army was allowed to reject one of the two (Polyb. 1.82.5.12); Hanno was rejected and Hamilcar, Hannibal’s father, led his men to victory.

Such an arrangement as developed would certainly have made sense as the army would be picking a tried soldier who had served with them as a junior officer and in whose abilities they would have had confidence. This would have allowed an impressive esprit de corps to develop, focused on the mystique of the commanders who virtually became a hereditary monarchy in Spain with political power in Carthage, based on and justified by their military authority and success.

However, to command effectively, commanders cannot solely rely upon their hierarchical link with their men. Rather they must know how to speak directly to them, especially at times of crisis, such as the eve of battle. This is what Keegan identifies s ‘The Imperative of Prescription’, one of the most important duties of any commander. The failure to fulfil this can lead to a distinct lack of morale among the men, as the ‘chateau generalship’ of the First World War clearly showed. Troop morale was described by Montgomery as ‘the single most important factor in war’ and while as a rule the Carthaginian commander would have been a significant enough focus for the soldiers’ loyalty to bind them together, this was not necessarily so at times of crisis.

Prior to his account of the Battle of Cannae in late Summer, 216 BC, Polybius has Aemilius Paulus, the Roman commander, declare to his men that he has no real to exhort or address them before battle as they are already fully commented as they are fighting for their homes and families, but that:

‘For those who in some countries serve for hire or for those who are about to fight for their neighbours by the terms of an alliance, the moment of greatest peril is during the battle itself but the result makes little difference to them, and in such a case exhortation is necessary.’ (3.109.6)

 Whether Paulus ever said such a thing is debatable; the speeches before Cannae have been described as full of commonplaces and unlikely to go back to a genuine record. Nevertheless, what is significant is that Polybius deems such a sentiment worthy of inclusion and favours a citizen militia as being more highly motivated than an army consisting of hired troops, as he points out elsewhere in his Histories, when he contrasts the military system of Carthage with that of Rome (6.52.).

An examination of the early books of Polybius seems to support the claim attributed to Paulus, as exhortation is far more frequently referred to in a Carthaginian context than a Roman one. Polybius refers to exhortations by Carthaginian officers several times in his account of the First Punic War (1.27.1, 32.8, 44.1, 45.2-4, 49.10) but never mentions any Roman exhortations. Furthermore, Polybius only refers to two instances of exhortation by Romans in the Second Punic War prior to the battle of Cannae (3.64, 109), one of which, being that of the elder Scipio at the Trebia, is definitely unhistorical, and the other, being Paulus’ speech prior to Cannae, is fraught with problems, whereas he mentions Hannibal exhorting his offers or men at least eight times (3.34.7-9, 43.11, 44.4-13, 54.1-3, 63, 71.8, 71.10-11, 111). It would seem that exhortation was one of the most important duties of Carthaginian commanders and its frequency was a hallmark of their leadership style.

Of course, the question must then be asked of how this was done. The first obvious problem is one of scale. Apparently Hannibal had over 50,000 troops at Cannae, yet he is presented as addressing the entire army at once. If this was the case it seems unlikely that he could have been heard by the bulk of the army. To take some modern examples, Benjamin Franklin was able to prove to his own satisfaction that a certain travelling preacher, reputed to have addressed crowds of 25,000, could have actually addressed up to 30,000 at once, but Lincoln was badly heard at Gettysburg, addressing 15,000. Gladstone was regularly heard by crowds of 5,000, but that was indoors. In practice it seems that it would not have been feasible to address gatherings larger than 5,000 unless a natural amphitheatre was used. This may well have been done – Philip V of Macedon addressed his men in Corinth’s amphitheatre at one point (5.25.4-5). It would seem to have been more common to ride along the line of battle or among the army addressing units of troops, as was done by Ptolemy and Antiochus at the Battle of Raphia in 217 and by Scipio Africanus at Zama in 202 (5.83.1-2, 15.10.1). It is worth noting that even doing this, Philopoemen had difficulty being heard at the Battle of Mantinea because of the reaction of his men:

‘Such was their ardour and zeal that they responded to his address with what was almost a transport of enthusiasm, exhorting him to lead them on and be of good heart.’ (11.12.2)

 Another major problem for Carthaginian commanders would have been that the army, being multinational in character, lacked a common tongue. Such problems weren’t unique to Carthaginian armies, as Persian armies had been polyglot in character too, as was Alexander’s army after the conquest of Persia.

Interpreters could be used to address armies, as they were at Raphai (5.83.7), and Hannibal did have interpreters with him (e.g. 3.44.5), but there is no record of him using them to address his army. Hannibal’s own knowledge of languages other than Punic and Greek is uncertain, though Zonaras claims he knew several languages, including Latin (8.24). At Zama, having arranged for the Ligurians, Celts, Balearics, and Moors, as well as the Carthaginians themselves, to be addressed by their own leaders (Polyb. 15.11.4-5), he apparently addressed the troops he had brought from Italy himself, imploring them to ‘remember their comradeship of seventeen years’ (15.11.6). He may well have addressed them in Punic rather than in their own languages or through an interpreter, as this seems to have been a lingua franca, to some extent, among veterans in Carthaginian armies; in the mercenary army that rose against Carthage after the First Punic War, a Celt named Autaritas became very influential due to his command of Punic, a language which all the mercenaries were familiar with to some degree (1.80.5-7).

Assuming the army was not addressed as a whole, Hannibal would have been able to appeal to each national grouping on different grounds. It was not unusual to exhort different parts of armies in different ways; for instance, at Raphia both Ptolemy and Antiochus spent more time addressing their phalanxes than any other part of their armies, as these were seen as the most important part (5.83.2). Such an approach made sense in forces as diverse as Successor or Carthaginian armies as the various contingents had their own very different reasons for fighting. Livy effectively describes how Hannibal and his officers did this at Zama, where:

‘In an army composed of men who shared neither language, customs, laws, weapons, dress, appearance, nor even a common reason for serving , the best means of arousing the fighting spirit was no simple matter; hopes and fears, to suit the case, had to be danged before their eyes.’ (30.33)

Different appeals were made to each grouping: booty as well as cash was offered to the auxiliaries; the Celts were inspired by their hatred of the Romans; the Ligurians were reminded of the riches of the plains of Italy; Moors and Numidians were threatened by the prospect of being ruled by the pro-Roman Masinissa; and the Carthaginians were urged to think of what they had to lose. In Polybius’ account the various national contingents are also described as being addressed in different ways.

To conclude, the commander’s role in any army is not limited merely to the traditional tasks of generalship, nor are these inherently his most important tasks. In the polyglot army of Carthage the leader’s skills were more important for commanders such as Hannibal than were the more technical skills of the general, though it must of course be borne in mind that the two were not necessarily mutually exclusive and exclusive and could often overlap.

Being chosen by the army for their ability, Carthaginian commanders had enough influence to bind the diverse elements under their command into an effective fighting force personally loyal to them, if not to the distant paymaster that was Carthage. However, at times of crisis, such as on the eve of a battle, that esprit de corps might not be enough to convince the troops to risk their lives, and so it would fall to their commander to speak to them and rouse their spirits. Despite the many obstacles to doing this effectively in such a large multiracial force, Hannibal proved so adept at this that Polybius considered the fact that he kept his army together in hostile territory for so long to have his supreme achievement.

-- Limerick, August 1997.

________________________________________________________________

My first ever paper, this is another piece discovered recently in the parental shed, originally given as a talk to the Classical Association of Ireland's annual conference, which that year was held in Mary Immaculate College in Limerick. Some of this I still think holds up well, but other bits rather channel Keegan a bit too much.

If you've liked this, before I wrap up, then I suspect there's a high chance you'll also like Darkness Over Cannae. Don't take my word for it. Take a look.

Classic Comics: Thoughts from 1997

Most people think they know what comics are: “crude, poorly drawn, semiliterate, cheap, disposable kiddie fare” in the words of Scott McCloud in his groundbreaking 1993 work Understanding Comics. Recognising this to be a ridiculously narrow, not to mention subjective, definition, McCloud set out to discredit it. Starting from Will Eisner’s description of comics as “sequential art”, McCloud eventually reached a far more precise and comprehensive definition of comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”

Having seen McCloud demonstrate how things as diverse as the Bayeux Tapestry and the Stations of the Cross can thus be regarded as comics, I began to consider whether or not the classical world might have contributed to the artform. When I was fortunate enough to meet McCloud in 1994, he persuaded me that there were probably plenty of examples of comics in classical art and a course in Roman relief sculpture later that year convinced me of this. 

In this article I shall not attempt a comprehensive survey of such examples, as, space restrictions aside, I am hardly qualified to do so. Instead, I shall focus on a very small number of art works that clearly illustrate that the principles of comics were quite evident in Greek art.

Narrative was a vital element in ancient art and by the middle of the seventh century BC Attic vase painters were painting pictures that often continued around vases, separated by bands of decoration. Having an oblong shape, the pictures lent themselves to subjects such as processions, races, and hunts, as, being essentially narrow friezes, they required many figures to fill them. Though these friezes did not always have a chronological element they certainly sometimes did, an excellent example of this being found on the Francois vase, painted by Kleitias around 570BC.

Along with more conventional subjects such as the procession of guests at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis and the funeral games of Patroklos, the vase also illustrates the story of the pursuit of Troilos. The frieze extends halfway around the vase and shows a number of distinct scenes, clearly separate from each other in both time and place, on a continuous background. At the far left is a fountain house where a girl stands waiting for her hydra to fill. Next are the figures of Hermes, Thetis, and Troilos. After is Priam receiving the bad news in sorrow, and finally two of Troilos’ brothers can be seen setting out from the city gates to avenge his death. Assuming that the frieze is “read” in this way, its sequential nature is clear.

Greek art was clearly not “photographic” in nature, in that it was not taken for granted that a single image should represent a single moment. A good example of this is evident on the neck of a mid-seventh-century Attic amphora found in Eleusis. It features an illustration of Odysseus and his men blinding the Cyclops Polyphemos. In the Odyssey the story is clearly related: Odysseus plied Polyphemos with alcohol, the Cyclops then fell asleep, and Odysseus blinded him. Here, however, the Cyclops is depicted sitting up, with one hand trying to push away the heated stake wielded by Odysseus, while clutching his wine cup with the other. Clearly the wine cup, which really belongs to an earlier part of the story, is depicted in order to hint that the Cyclops is drunk rather than still drinking.

Perhaps the most well-known “non-photographic” image in Greek art is a scene showing Achilles and Ajax playing some form of board game on an Attic black-figure amphora made and painted by Exekias between 540 and 530 BC. 

This vase features “speech balloons”, perhaps the most distinctive element of modern comics, a device which through attempting to represent sound in a scene also introduces the concept of time. 

Extracts from Understanding Comics, explaining how in comics speech bubbles can subvert otherwise 'photographic' images.

Achilles says “four” and Ajax responds “three”, possibly referring to dice scores. It is not clear whether Ajax is responding to Achilles, Achilles is responding to Ajax, or both men are speaking at once; what is certain is that this image does not represent a single moment, but rather the length of time it takes the two men to speak.

The two heroes are labelled above their heads: Achilles is on the left, with Ajax on the right.

One black-figure vase, Boston 08.292, is a perfect example of Greek comics. This vase features what McCloud calls an “action to action” transition, probably the most common type of “panel to panel” progression in comics. One side of the vase shows a man in a vineyard courting a young boy. When the vase is turned around, however, the young boy is jumping to embrace the man. Though the background remains continuous, the pictures are clearly intended to represent the same couple, with one scene obviously following the other.

Greek vase painting, therefore, clearly provides examples of what would now be termed comics, but there are also examples to be found in architectural sculpture.

The low-relief metopes on temples offered an obvious opportunity to tell a story in pictures, but it is difficult to tell how often this opportunity was taken. The Parthenon metopes, for instance, seem to have been put in place in such a way that sequence was largely irrelevant, whereas the metopes on the temple of Zeus at Olympia, dating from the second quarter of the fifth century BC, may have been intended to tell a story.

The twelve metopes there represent the twelve labours of Herakles, and are ordered in such a way that Herakles is evidently older in the twelfth metope than the first. The final metope depicts the cleansing of the Augean stables, two places later than conventionally related, with the acquisition of the apples of the Hesperides and the capturing of Cerberus being brought forward to the tenth and eleventh places. This might suggest that the metopes are merely showing scenes for Herakles’ life in no particular order, but as the traditional order postdates the building of the temple at Olympia this seems an unsafe conclusion; it seems more likely that this collection may represent the first attempt to assemble the twelve episodes into one story.

Atlas offering the apples of the Hesperides to Heracles, with Athene watching.

The continuous frieze common to temples built in the Ionic order, however, can be seen to demonstrate principles of comics with remarkable subtlety. The Parthenon offers an excellent example of this.

The Parthenon’s Ionic frieze was about 160 metres long and showed an idealised version of the Panathenaic procession. Though the frieze was continuous and therefore seemed to be one image, there was clearly chronological progression in it. 

The western end, the first to be seen by people coming from the Propylaea, featured horsemen gathering for the procession, which begins at the south-west corner. Continuing along the northern side the procession had many elements –  horsemen,musicians, etc – before reaching the eastern end. Here it culminated with the gods looking on as a group of people held a peoplos, which would have been presented to the sacred olive-wood statue of Athene on the Acropolis. The south side of the frieze, which was not as visible as the other three sides, also had an eastwards direction converging at this scene.

The Parthenon frieze, assembled as one text, read from right to left and top to bottom.

Clearly this was sequential art, the appearance of which would have been heightened by the bright colours in which it was painted. 

The fact that it would have also been seen through gaps between columns would also have given it an added element of timing – the columns would have acted as “gutters” or panel divisions.

Overall, therefore, I think it can be plainly seen that the principles that make comics what they are were quite evident in Classical Art. Though I’ve only dealt with Greek art up to the mid-fifth century BC, the traditions of sequential art continued throughout the Hellenistic period as can be seen in the Telephus frieze surrounding the altar of Zeus at Pergamon and thrived in the Roman world, with Trajan’s column being but the most obvious example.

_________________________________

Originally published in UCD Classical Society Journal, 1996/1997, and tweaked here merely to amend the most clunky of sentences. I found this in the shed today, and was amused to see how my writing had changed. Glad, too. Mind, it has been a very long time. 

The Map is Not the Territory: Herodotus and the Myth of Hoplite Battle

Another piece from the archives -- April 2003, believe it or not -- where it's just been gathering dust...

* * * * * * *

There was an article in the New York Times last week, examining the books which have had the greatest impact of late in the White House. Last Autumn Dick Cheney read An Autumn of War by Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian, whom he later invited to dinner. Cheney told his aides that Hanson’s writings reflected his philosophy. In An Autumn of War Hanson wrote approvingly of the ancient Greek view of war as ‘terrible but innate to civilization — and not always unjust or amoral if it is waged for good causes to destroy evil and save the innocent.’ He asserted that we were in an ‘outright bloody war against tyranny, intolerance and theocracy,’ and he called for going to war ‘hard, long, without guilt, apology or respite until our enemies are no more.’[1]

Hanson has long argued that the ‘Hoplite Battle’ was the central military act in ancient Greece. This ‘Hoplite Battle’ was a swift and decisive clash of well-armed social equals, fighting and willing to die in defence of their lands. These social equals, Hanson believes, relied not on ruse or cunning for victory, instead depending on their own courage, discipline, and martial skill. E.M. Walker, writing in the first edition of the Cambridge Ancient History elegantly explained that ‘To the Greeks a battle was in the nature of a duel; it was an agon, in which honour was satisfied and the pursuit ceased when the enemy acknowledged defeat by asking for a truce for the burial of his dead.’ Such battles were almost inevitably ritualistic, as W.R. Connor argues in his 1988 article on the symbolism of early Greek land warfare.

This model of hoplite battle generated by believers in a Greek way of war is well-known and generally accepted. 

The opposing armies would deploy on a plain, typically agricultural land at the edge of the invaded territory. Often organised by tribal regiments, arrayed in a line with the best men stationed in the front and rear ranks, the heavy infantry would be protected on the flanks by light infantry and cavalry. Omens would be taken, and sacrificial animals slaughtered in a ritual shedding of blood. Commanders would address their men, and the signal for battle would be given. Both armies would advance, covering the last hundred or so yards at a run. It seems unlikely that the two armies collided at full tilt, but when they met a giant melee of pushing and stabbing would begin. Men must have fallen, whether dead or wounded, or simply because they lost their footing due to pressure from behind. As men fell, gaps would have appeared in the front lines, which enemy hoplites sought to enlarge; eventually the pushing – the othismos – would enable one army to penetrate the enemy line. This breaching of the line, the pararrhexis – was a sure sign of defeat, and the army whose line had been broken would turn and run. The victorious army would generally not pursue for long, instead opting to make the battlefield its own; they stripped the armour from the enemy dead and gathered their own dead for burial. A victory marker, called a tropaion, would be erected at the spot where the enemy line had been broken and the enemy had turned and fled. The defeated army, having regrouped, would send a herald to request a truce to enable them to retrieve their dead: this request was an admission of defeat; indicating that the outcome of the battle had been accepted

The basic origins of this thesis are clear enough. In a famous speech he attributes to the Persian Mardonius,[2] Herodotus describes the Greek Way of War, noting that:

‘When they have declared war against each other, they come down to the fairest and most level ground that they can find and there they fight, so that the victors come not off without great harm; and of the vanquished I say not so much as a word, for they are utterly destroyed.’ (Hdt. 7.9)

This passage from Herodotus is generally taken at face value and reinforced by passages from Thucydides,[3] Demosthenes,[4] and particularly Polybius [5] in order to gain an insight into the ‘Greek Way of War’.

The problem with these passages is that they all highly rhetorical; they are hardly sober reflections on the nature of contemporary warfare. The core passage from Herodotus is exceptionally complex, loaded with problems and ambiguities. Remember at all times that this speech surely does not represent anything Mardonius said; rather these words have been put into his mouth by the Greek Herodotus. Why? In the first place its main function is to show the heroism of the free Greeks, who are willing to die to defend their homeland; unlike, in this respect they stand in sharp contrast to the Persians, who like to fight their wars without unnecessary casualties. The Greek willingness to sustain casualties horrifies Mardonius; yet modern calculations suggest that in most Greek battles the defeated army would suffer perhaps 14 or 15 per cent losses, with the victor losing only one man in twenty. It is also odd to see a Persian being surprised at the Greek desire for decisive battle, since earlier in his account Herodotus shows the Persians as deeply exasperated by the Scythian refusal to face them in the open field; the Scythian scorched earth policy so infuriated the Persians that Darius supposedly wrote to the Scythian king to ask him to face the Persians in the open field (Hdt. 4.126). The historicity of this letter may be questionable, but of more interest is the fact that when it suited his purposes, Herodotus was quite capable of presenting the Persians as devotees of decisive battle.

It’s also odd that Herodotus represents Mardonius as seeing the Greeks as tactically inept and not inclined to use terrain to their advantage; think what happened at Thermopylae, one of history’s finest examples of the tactical use of terrain (Hdt. 7.201-228; Diod. 11.6-10). Is Herodotus simply saying that the Persians misunderstood the Greek capacity for flexibility in warfare?

Consider the passages from Demosthenes (9.47-52) and Polybius (13.3.2-7): both men are harking back to a Golden Age of Hoplite Warfare that may never have existed. Polybius appears to be talking about the Lelantine War, more than five centuries before his own day. And Demosthenes is praising the honourable methods of the old Spartan enemies, despite the fact that in the funeral speech ascribed to him by Thucydides, Pericles scorned those very Spartans for their reliance on stratagems and ruses! (Thuc. 2.39.1) The rhetorical content of both passages renders them automatically suspect. Even the passage from Thucydides (4.126.5-6), who at least knew what he was talking about, is not entirely safe. After all, it purports to represent what Brasidas said to inspire a force of troops who were relatively new to hoplite warfare, as they were feeling threatened by ‘savage’ Illyrians. It is hardly surprising that he would laud their method of warfare.

We need to keep these issues in mind, as when presented with a picture as compelling as that drawn by Hanson, it is all too easy to forget that this is a ‘model’ or an ‘ideal type’. It is a tool to enable us to gain understanding of Greek battle, synthesizing features which are common to many, but by no means all, Greek battles in an attempt to manufacture a mental construct which never ‘really’ existed. This does not mean that the model is useless, simply that we have to be careful how we apply it. There’s a school of ‘pop psychology’ called Neuro-Linguistic Programming, one of the central principles of which is that ‘The map is not the territory’. Regardless of the merits or otherwise of NLP, when it comes to Greek Warfare we should make a point of keeping in mind this distinction between maps and territories.

Consider firstly the claim that the ‘Hoplite Battle’ was the central act of Greek warfare. This claim simply doesn’t bear serious scrutiny. It is, frankly, disingenuous to speak of ‘Greek warfare’ and ‘hoplite warfare’ as if the two were synonymous. In Thessaly, for instance, cavalry was the dominant military arm; this is hardly surprising when one envisages the Thessalian landscape’s plains and gently rolling hills (Plat., Leg. 1.625d); there appear to have been Thessalian hoplites, but they were less significant than the cavalry (Xen., Hell. 6.1.8-9). The ‘primitive’ Greeks in the mountains of western Greece, such as the Acharnanians, Aetolians, and Ozolian Locrians, fought as lightly-armed missile troops, specialising in skirmishes and ambushes (Thuc. 1.5, 3.94, 97-8). The Cretans and Rhodians were famous for their skills with the bow and sling, respectively. The Greeks of the island poleis may have been more inclined to naval rather than land warfare – after all, who were they going to fight? The Sicilian Greeks appear to have relied far more on their cavalry than on their hoplites; Thucydides’ account of the early stages of Athens’ doomed Sicilian expedition indicates that the Syracusan hoplites were inexperienced and ineffective, unlike their potent cavalry and missile troops.

It could be countered that although these states were all Greek, none of them was truly a mainstream Greek society. What of the Greeks in the ‘hoplite heartland’ of the Peloponnese, Central Greece, and Euboea? For states such as Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Corinth, Argos, Plataea, and so forth, warfare generally meant hoplite warfare. But in some respects the very term ‘hoplite warfare’ seems meaningless. In the first place, as Louis Rawlings has argued, hoplite warfare did not solely consist of battles. Hoplites could on occasion fight as marines, and could serve a police function or perform garrison duties, as well as participating in raids and reprisals – effectively acts of guerrilla warfare.

In addition to this, the Hanson thesis assumes that Greek warfare followed an uninterrupted learning curve, where two centuries or more of ‘pure’ hoplite warfare came to an end with the Persian Wars, after which hoplite battle became more and more sophisticated over the course of the Peloponnesian Wars and the Theban Hegemony. Such an assumption is unwarranted, and is lacking in evidence, as there is hardly any evidence for how battles were fought before Marathon, and what little evidence there is appears to contradict Hanson’s idea. Furthermore, this thesis ignores cultural differences between various Greek states and assumes that all hoplite armies fought in an essentially identical fashion, which was not the case.

Consider the Athenian army, which appears to have been officially mobilised very rarely before the late sixth century. Scythian archers were a common subject on Athenian vase paintings in this period; curiously, on some vases they are shown as operating in association with the regular infantry, shooting from between the hoplites of the front ranks. They are reminiscent of the archers in the Iliad, relying on their comrades’ shields for protection (Hom., Il. 4.112-4, 8.266-72). It might seem unsafe to rely on Vase illustrations as evidence for Athenian warfare during the ‘Golden Age of Hoplite Battle’, but this notion of missile troops being deployed amongst the hoplites seems to have been a Spartan practice during the seventh century. Several passages from Tyrtaeus testify to the importance of missile troops in early Spartan warfare, notably when he exhorts them as follows:

‘And you, light-armed, squatting under a shield here and there, must throw great rocks and hurl smooth javelins while you stand close to the heavy armed.’ (Tyrt. Fr. 11.35-8)

Lest we be tempted to argue that missile troops were integrated into the Spartan army only in its early history, it is worth contemplating Herodotus’ somewhat cryptic statement that each Spartan at the battle of Plataea was accompanied by seven helots, while a single helot accompanied each hoplite of the perioikoi. These helots were equipped as light-armed missile troops, and were reportedly ‘in attendance’ on the hoplites, which probably indicates that they were not deployed simply on the flanks (Hdt. 9.10.1, 9.29.1). This is irreconcilable with the notion of hoplite battle as a battle of equals, with the disdain supposedly felt by hoplites for the use of missiles in battle, and with the basic notion of hoplite tactics being based on solid lines of heavily armed infantrymen.

Thucydides makes Pericles scorn the Spartans for their reliance on trickery, and their tactics at Thermopylae seem to defy everything that the model of ‘Hoplite Battle’ takes for granted. Herodotus claims that the Spartan hoplites at Thermopylae turned and pretended to flee, only to turn back and strike the Persians who had broken ranks and fallen into disorder in attempting to press their apparent advantage (Hdt. 7.211.3). Such a stratagem looks decidedly unGreek, foreshadowing the famous ‘Parthian Shot’ or even Mongol tactics. It might not be surprising that the Spartans should have been capable of such a manoeuvre, though, considering the fact that unlike the free citizen militias so feted by Hanson, they were in effect professional soldiers who engaged in a life-long training programme. Even the Athenian phalanx at Marathon, however, appears to have exhibited a degree of flexibility unimaginable for the phalanxes we read of in the pages of Thucydides and Xenophon; or at least unimaginable for their phalanxes as seen through the prism of our model of ‘hoplite battle’ (Hdt. 6.113).

If the Spartans and Athenians offer exceptions to the model of ‘Hoplite Battle’, the Thebans stand out in blatant defiance of it. The hoplite infantry was indeed the dominant military arm in Boeotia, but the aristocratic cavalry played a crucial role in Boeotian battles, notably the Boeotian victory over Athens at Delium in 424 (Thuc. 4.90-6). The Boeotian cavalry pursued the defeated Athenians until nightfall; this murderous pursuit cost the Athenians dearly and was hardly in accordance with the spirit of ‘Hoplite Battle’ (4.96.8, 101.2). What’s more, the cavalry had been instrumental in the Boeotian victory, rather than just its aftermath. The Boeotian left wing had been under pressure from the Athenian right, so Pagondas sent two cavalry squadrons to support the beleaguered infantry. The cavalry rode behind a hill, staying out of sight, and appeared in such a way as to surprise the Athenians who broke and fled, thinking that a new army had arrived (4.96.5-6). Such reliance on surprise might seem contrary to the openness so characteristic of conventional model of ‘Hoplite Battle’, but it was clearly not regarded as dishonourable among the Boeotians: it seems clear that the Boeotian victory over Athens at Coronea in 446 was regarded as a heroic victory (3.62.5, 67.3, 4.92.6), despite being an ambush rather than a set-piece battle (1.113.2).

The notion of the ambush at Coronea being a decisive battle – and it surely was decisive – is an interesting one, as it forces the question of what Greeks thought of when they spoke of battle. When Greeks spoke of battle, did they automatically mean the set-piece hoplite battle as envisaged by Hanson, and apparently as indicated by Herodotus in his Mardonius speech? Hanson argues, following Pritchett, that the existence of an extensive vocabulary devoted purely to set-piece hoplite battles demonstrates the centrality of shock battle to Greek culture. The careful delineation of the set-piece battle's various stages and areas of the battlefield might support this thesis, but while this certainly might indicate how important shock battle was to the Greeks, it might equally mean nothing more than that that unlike other forms of military engagement, the pitched battle between hoplites had easily distinguished components. After all, the fact that an activity has its own jargon hardly indicates how important it was to the wider culture.

Such pitched battles were known as ‘drawn-ups,’ as ‘battles by agreement,’ as ‘battles in the plain,’ and as battles that were ‘just and open.’ The problem with this analysis is that with the exception of parataxis – ‘drawn-up’ – these terms are quite rare in our sources. This perhaps suggesting that the pitched battle was a far less frequent occurrence than modern writers would like to admit. There is no doubt, for instance, that the battle of Coronea in 446, as mentioned already, was a fully-credited battle, but it would be hard to use any of the terms Pritchett and Hanson cite to describe it. Or look at the battles of Sphacteria in 425 or Amphipolis in 421 – both battles were notable for the asymmetry of the opposing sides’ losses – for example, seven of Brasidas’ men fell at Amphipolis, as against 600 or so of Cleon’s – this asymmetry is attributed by Thucydides to neither battle being a pitched or drawn up battle (Thuc, 4.38.5, 5.11.2). But even the term parataxis was not used exclusively to refer to hoplite battles. Xenophon uses the term for cavalry formations (Hell. 4.3.5, 7.5.23), and Polybius uses it not specifically for Greek infantry encounters, but also for battles between Romans and Gauls (2.18.2, 2.26.8), Romans and Gauls and Etruscans together (2.20.2, 4), and Macedonian phalangites against Illyrians (2.70.6).

Other terms for battle are frustratingly vague, and are never applied in a manner exclusive to the pitched hoplite battle. The Homeric term ponos, used by Herodotus on occasion, really just means ‘toil’ or ‘struggle’ (Hom., Il. 6.77; Hdt. 6.114, 7.224.1), and the verb symballein, conveying the sense of ‘coming together’ is used to refer to battle in a vague sense by both Homer and Herodotus (Hom., Il. 3.70, 20.55; Hdt. 1.77, 1.82, 7.210.2). Kindunos, meaning ‘danger’ or ‘risk’, is used frequently by Polybius (1.33.4, 34.9, 2.28.9, 3.84.15), but again has no specific application to hoplite warfare, and even agon, which basically means ‘contest’, is usually applied to battles in a largely metaphorical way, whether by Phormio addressing his men (Th.2.89.8) or Polybius describing the battles of the Trebia or Cannae (3.71.5, 116.2).

The term mache is indiscrimately applied to battles of all sorts by Greek writers. It implies virtually nothing about the nature of the fighting which took place. Homer uses it constantly for mass fighting, but also occasionally for single combat (Il. 7.263, 11.255, 11.542). Herodotus describes pitched battles such as Marathon and Plataea as machai (6.117.1, 9.69.1), but also uses the term to mean simply a style of warfare, as practised by the Lydian cavalry, the Sagartians, or even the Greeks, in the Mardonius speech (1.79, 7.85.2, 7.9.1). Thucydides uses the term in a broad sense for the encounters at Sphacteria (4.39.1), Delium (4.93.2, 95.2, 101.1, 101.3), Amphipolis (5.11.2, 12.2), and Mantinea (5.74.1, 75.1, 75.4). This is particularly striking, when we remember that he specifically said that neither Sphacteria nor Amphipolis was a pitched battle; it might seem odd that he does not apply any more precise term than mache to describe Mantinea, say. Xenophon also uses this vague, generalised word when he writes of such classic set-piece encounters as the Nemea River, second Coronea, Leuctra, and second Mantinea (Hell. 4.2.23, 4.3.16, 6.4.8, 7.5.27); but also uses it in the famous ‘Tearless Battle’ of 368 (Hell. 7.1.32), even though this was not even a battle; no fighting took place, only the slaughter of fleeing Argives and Arcadians.

Where does this leave us? The ‘hoplite battle’ is to some extent a chimera; set piece battles took place on a surprisingly infrequent basis. Interstate warfare was indeed a commonplace of Greek life, but when we read that a battle took place, we should not automatically assume that it was a pitched battle between two similarly armed and trained groups of hoplites. Ancient rhetoric has led modern writers to ignore the evidence, and instead to force the facts that we have to fit a flawed and generalised theory. Herodotus’ celebrated description of the Greek way of war, although it is very useful for studying the ideology of what set-piece battles did take place, does not provide us with a microscope to scrutinise all ancient battle accounts. Rather, it is a distorting mirror, warping the way we study Greek warfare. Without Herodotus to lead us astray we might not have been tempted to assume a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model of Greek warfare, and would have recognised that there was no ‘Greek Way of War’. Greece in the Archaic and Classical periods is best viewed as a military matrix, throwing up many variants on how heavily-armed infantry could be used in battle, with or without the assistance of cavalry, missile troops, or even ships.

University of Warwick, April 2003.

---

[1] Kakutani, Michiko, ‘Critic’s Notebook; How Books Have Shaped U.S. Policy’, New York Times, April 5, 2003, Late Edition – Final, Section D, Page 7, Column 5.

[2] Yet wars the Greeks do wage, and, as I learn, most senselessly they do it, in their wrongheadedness and folly. When they have declared war against each other, they come down to the fairest and most level ground that they can find and there they fight, so that the victors come not off without great harm; and of the vanquished I say not so much as a word, for they are utterly destroyed. Yet speaking as they do the same language, they should end this dispute by the means of herald and messengers, and by any means other than fighting; or if needs must that they war against each other, they should discover each where the strongest defence lies, and there make his essay. (Hdt. 7.9.2)

[3] Now as for these Illyrians, for those who have had no experience of them, the menace of their attack has terror; for their number is indeed dreadful to behold and the loudness of their battle-cry is intolerable, and the idle brandishing of their arms has a threatening effect. But for hand-to-hand fighting, if their opponents but endure such threats, they are not the men they seem; for having no regular order, they would not be ashamed to abandon any position when hard pressed; and since flight and attack are considered equally honourable with them, their courage cannot be put to the test. Besides, a mode of fighting in which everyone is his own master will provide a man the best excuse for saving himself becomingly. They think, too, that it is a less risky game to try to frighten you from a safe distance than to meet you hand to hand; otherwise they would not have taken this course in preference to that. And so you clearly see that all that was at first formidable about them is but little in reality, startling merely to eye and ear. If you withstand all this in the first onrush, and then, whenever opportunity offers, withdraw again in orderly array, you will the sooner reach safety, and will hereafter know that mobs like these, if an adversary but sustain their first onset, merely make a flourish of valour with threats from afar in menace of attack, but if one yields to them, they are right upon his heels, quick enough to display their courage when all is safe. (Thuc.4.126.5-6)

[4] But for my own part, while practically all the arts have made a great advance and we are living today in a very different world from the old one, I consider that nothing has been more developed and improved than the art of war. For in the first place I am informed that in those days the Lacedaemonians, like everyone else, would spend the four or five months of the summer “season” in invading and laying waste the enemy’s territory with heavy infantry and levies of citizens, and would then retire home again; and they were so old-fashioned, or rather such good citizens, that they never used money to buy an advantage from anyone, but their fighting was of the fair and open kind. But now you must surely see that most disasters are due to traitors, and none are the result of a regular pitched battle. On the other hand you hear of Philip marching unchecked, not because he leads a phalanx of heavy infantry, but because he is accompanied by skirmishers, cavalry, archers, mercenaries, and similar troops. When, relying on this force, he attacks some people that is at variance with itself, and when through distrust no one goes forth to fight for his country, then he brings up his artillery and lays siege.  I need hardly tell you that he makes no difference between summer and winter and has no season set apart for inaction. […] For so far as a campaign is concerned, provided, men of Athens, we are willing to do what is necessary, we have many advantages, such as the nature of his territory, much of which may be harried and devastated, and countless others; but for a pitched battle [agōn] he is in better training than we are. (Dem. 9.47-52)

[5] The ancients, as we know, were far removed from such malpractices. For so far were they from plotting mischief against their friends with the purpose of aggrandizing their own power, that they would not even consent to get the better of their enemies by fraud, regarding no success as brilliant or secure unless they crushed the spirit of their adversaries in open battle. For this reason they entered into a convention among themselves to use against each other neither secret missiles nor those discharged from a distance, and considered that it was only a hand-to-hand battle at close quarters that was truly decisive. Hence they preceded war by a declaration, and when they intended to do battle gave notice of the fact and of the spot to which they would proceed and array their army. But at the present they say it is a sign of poor generalship to do anything openly in war. Some slight traces, however, of the ancient principles of warfare survive among the Romans. For they make declaration of war, they very seldom use ambuscades, and they fight hand-to-hand at close quarters. (Polyb. 13.3.2-7)