Simon Hornblower

Warfare in ancient literature: the paradox of war

Wars and fighting are very prominent in the literature of classical antiquity. This chapter looks at literary sources about war and fighting and the problems of using them. It concentrates on three types of fighter: archers, women, slaves. The chapter deals with the interaction between military and non-military institutions: the relationship between the state and organized violence, and attitudes to that relationship as they are displayed in the literary sources, are topics of central importance to the ancient historiography of warfare. It explores why there is so much about war in ancient literature if war was not regarded as the natural, normal state of affairs. Homers Iliad, with its nearly incessant fighting, might seem to provide a complete reply to any notion that war was viewed by Greeks as unnatural. The chapter ends with six suggestions for the resolution of the paradox of war.

The Corinthian War

The outcome of the Peloponnesian War had left many of the victors discontented. Sparta had totally disregarded the wishes and interests of her allies and had pursued a policy of aggressive expansion in the Peloponnese, central and northern Greece and the Aegean which had at times seemed directed specifically against them. By 14 August 394, the young king Agesipolis had crossed the borders of Boeotia and was encamped at Chaeronea. There he received news of a different kind: the report that Spartan naval power in the Aegean had been shattered by the victory of Conon and Pharnabazus at Cnidus. Until the first Spartan invasion of the Argolid in 391, the land war was confined to the neighbourhood of Corinth, which served as a base for the allies, while the Spartans operated from Sicyon. Conon certainly financed and perhaps organized the establishment of an Athenian mercenary force at Corinth, the first commander of which was Iphicrates.

Sources and their uses

No guide comparable to Thucydides exists for the fourth century. This means that we have no firm framework for political and military events, and this lack is a serious obstacle to one sort of knowledge. Thucydides’ mind, however, was limited as well as powerful, or perhaps we should say its limits were the price of its power; and in the fourth century certain types of history which he had treated only selectively, particularly social, economic and religious topics, can actually be better studied than was possible in the Thucydidean period. Xenophon, for instance, has glaring faults when judged as a political reporter but is a prime source for the modern historian of religion. In general, fourth-century literary sources (Xenophon, Aeneas Tacticus and others) are less preoccupied than Thucydides had been with the polar opposites, Athens and Sparta. This probably reflects the new multi-centred reality. But we should recall that Thucydides, especially in books IV and V, had allowed us peeps at the politics of Argos, Macedon, Thessaly and Boeotia. A history of the Peloponnesian War written by Xenophon might have told us more about second-class and minor city states than Thucydides did: compare the remarkable detail about the minor cities Sicyon and Phlius at Xen. Hell. VII. 1–3. But a Xenophon with only Herodotus, not Thucydides, for a predecessor and model would have looked very different anyway.

The Bosporan Kingdom

INTRODUCTION: TOPOGRAPHY AND SOURCES Exposed on the extreme north-eastern rim of the classical Greek, and later of the hellenistic, world, was the Bosporan state, ruled from about 438 B.C. for 330 years by dynasts bearing Greek and Thracian names – Spartocus, Leucon, Satyrus, Paerisades. The ruler styled himself ‘archon of Bosporus and Theodosia’, and ‘king of the Sindi, Toreti, Dandarii and Psessi’, or sometimes ‘king of all the Maeotians’. From the early fourth century B.C. the state comprised the eastern portion of the Crimea (Kerch Peninsula) and the opposing part of the northern Caucasus (Taman Peninsula), separated by the sea current flowing through the then Cimmerian Bosporus (present-day Straits of Kerch). On the Asiatic side in Taman were once five islands in the delta of the Antikeites/Hypanis (now River Kuban); here the Sindi, agriculturally very productive, lay immediately inland of the Greek cities in the lower valley of the Hypanis. In the Kerch Peninsula a native population of sedentary Scythians, and perhaps some remaining Cimmerians left behind from their wanderings of the late eighth century B.C., exploited the areas noted fertility. The main cities in the area were three in the Kerch Peninsula, Panticapaeum, Nymphaeum, Theodosia, which last was annexed to Bosporus some years after 390 B.C., and three on the islands and in the Kuban delta to the east of the straits, Phanagoria, Hermonassa, and Gorgippia, in the hinterland of which lay the Sindi who were incorporated in Bosporus between 400 and 375 B.C. A number of other small townships flourished by the Bosporus, situated near salt-water lakes or inlets (limans) or under rocky headlands – Porthmieus, Myrmecium, Tyritace, Cimmericum, Acra, Cytaea, and a lost Hermisium on the Crimean side.

Mesopotamia, 482–330 B.C.

Xerxes and his successors succeeded in consolidating imperial control over Mesopotamia. There is, at least, no explicit record of Babylonian resistance to Achaemenid rule after the revolts in the early years of Xerxes’ reign ( CAH iv 73–5, 133–5). Later political disturbances were not matters of provincial reaction, but struggles among members of the Achaemenid dynasty and the imperial aristocracy. Even these left few plain marks in Babylonian texts. The available Babylonian texts are similar in kind to those from the early Achaemenid reigns, but there are fewer of them. They include few fragments of historiographic texts and royal inscriptions. Most are legal and administrative documents. Among about 1,100 published texts of these kinds from the last 150 years of the Achaemenids, a few are temple records, but most belonged to the private archives of Babylonians – in fact, nearly two thirds of them come from a single source, the Murashu archive (454–404 B.C.) – and, although they record contacts with agencies of the provincial government, they are not documents from the conduct of government as such. What they divulge is limited by the concerns of city-based businessmen. They are conservative in form, almost oblivious to political events, and often enigmatic in their allusions to contemporary institutions. They are a rich source of detail on local conditions, but an episodic source on the history of their times.

South Italy in the fourth century B.C.

The fifteen decades which elapsed between the expedition to Sicily of the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War and the war between Pyrrhus of Epirus and the Romans are something of a heroic age in Italian history. It was a time of trial during which the success or failure of communities was constantly at stake, and in which the patterns of the preceding centuries were often obliterated and those which were to endure until the late imperial period formed. The trial took the form of almost unceasing warfare, confused by continuous changing of sides according to a mutable diplomacy and the exigencies of more or less mercenary manpower. Overall, the losers were the already ancient apoikiai, the city states of the Greek diaspora, whose champions, whether leaders from within the body politic or condottieri summoned from the east, all failed to establish their power sufficiently for either their descendants or their successors to share in it. The victory went to the Italic communities, whose elites in this period provided the forebears of long lines of city aristocrats whose tradition endured until the Roman empire. That such continuity came out of this period reminds us that it was no Dark Age. The victors were not usually in a position to despoil or obliterate completely; the fighting was not genocidal. This was partly because the warfare of the time was promoted and fuelled by background social and economic conditions which were tending, despite the dangers of the time, in positive directions: demographically, Italy was regarded at this time as a place with relatively abundant manpower, and the rewards of the integration of local production systems into Mediterranean-wide networks of distribution and consumption were becoming generally more palpable.

Illyrians and North-west Greeks

Our concern is mainly with the area which today comprises Epirus and north-western Macedonia in Greece, Albania and the Yugoslav cantons of Metohija and Kosovo. Its geographical features have been described in Vol. III.I, 619–24. In ancient times it was inhabited by southern Illyrian tribes and north-western Greek tribes. Our knowledge of them for the period c. 540 to c. 360 B.C. is derived from some fragments of Hecataeus and some passages in Strabo and from the findings of archaeology, especially in Albania. For the subsequent period, 360–323 B.C., there is more literary evidence, and something like a consecutive story can be told. This chapter is therefore divided chronologically into two parts. THE ILLYRIANS c. 540–360 B.C. The lakeland area holds a most important place in the south-west Balkans economically and strategically. Three parallel ranges, running north and south, enclose Lakes Ochrid, Prespa, Little Prespa and until recently Malik (now artificially drained); and these lakes, being more than 800 m above sea level, are exceptionally rich in fish and eels. The lowlands afford excellent arable land and pasture, and the mountains are forested and abound in game. Silver was mined in antiquity by the Damastini to the east and the north east of Lake Ochrid. The economic wealth of the area is somewhat obscured today by the fact that it is divided between three countries – the former Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece. Strategically it stands at the main crossroads of the southern Balkans. Communications from north to south, running through this high corridor, are very easy because there are no considerable rivers or mountains to cross.

The polis and the alternatives

FOURTH-CENTURY ATHENS: THE MACHINERY OF GOVERNMENT Formally, Athens had the same constitution from the tribal reorganization of Cleisthenes in 508/7, or at any rate from the reform of the Areopagus by Ephialtes in 462/1, until the suppression of the democracy by Antipater at the end of 322/1: the oligarchies of 411–410 and 404/3 were brief interruptions, each ending with the restoration of the democracy. The working of this democracy in the time of Pericles has been described in the previous volume. Decisions, on both domestic and external matters, were taken by an assembly of adult male citizens, which by the end of the fifth century had forty regular meetings a year: all topics on which the Assembly pronounced had first to be discussed by the Council of 500, and there were other safeguards by which the Assembly was limited, but any member could propose motions or amendments, or speak in the debate, and decisions were taken by a simple majority. It was not possible for all the citizens to be involved simultaneously in carrying out decisions, as they were all involved simultaneously in making them, but it was possible for them all to be involved in turn. The administration of the democracy was based on a large number of separate boards, usually comprising one man from each of the ten tribes, appointed by lot for one year and not eligible for reappointment to the same board; the scope for competence or incompetence was slight, and the conscientious citizen would serve on several of these boards in the course of his life.

Sparta as victor

THE LEADER OF GREECE The Greek world had long been accustomed to a situation in which there had been two sources of power, Athens and Sparta. The disappearance of Athenian power left the determination of the future to Sparta. Theoretically, the future was clear. The Spartans and their allies had fought the Peloponnesian War for the freedom of Greece and the day on which Lysander sailed into the Piraeus and the demolition of Athens’ Long Walls began was seen as the beginning of that freedom (Xen. Hell. II.2.24). However, the course of the war had inevitably shaped attitudes and aspirations. The simple hope of 431 that all would be well if Athens allowed her allies autonomy had become infinitely complex. It was not only that Sparta had made commitments to Persia which substantially modified the freedom of the Greeks of Asia Minor. The course of the war had produced political changes in many cities which were not easily reversible, and at Sparta itself the effect of success and growing power was to produce a taste for their continuance. Sparta had serious disqualifications for the role of a leading power, even more for that of an imperial power. Her full citizen population was not more than a few thousand and seems to have been in continuing decline. By the time of the Peloponnesian War, she was already using perioecic hoplites alongside full citizens, and from 424 onwards we find increasing use of freed helots, a group rapidly institutionalized under the name of neodamodeis (new members of the demos ).

Peter Fraser MA, MC, FBA (1918-2007)

This is a brief memoir of Peter Fraser, who was Director of the British School at Athens between 1968 and 1971, and a Hellenistic historian and epigraphist of international distinction. Παρουσιάζεται μία σύντομη βιογραφία του διεθνούς φήμης ιστορικού και επιγραφικού της Ελληνιστικής περιόδου, Peter Fraser, ο οποίος διετέλεσε Διευθυνιής της Βρετανικής Σχολής των Αθηνών μεταξύ των ετών 1968 και 1971.