THE WESTERN WAY OF WAR
Infantry Battle in Classical Greece
Victor Davis; introduction by John Keegan
New York: Alfred Knopf, 1989
244 pp., $19.95
What was it like to be an armored Greek infantryman (hoplite) standing in a phalanx, armed with a spear and sword, facing a similar phalanx on a hot summer's day in Greece? Inspired by John Keegan's Face of Battle, Victor Hanson has, with impeccable scholarship and a clear prose style, brought us as close as we are ever likely to get to the nitty-gritty reality of hoplite battle in ancient Greece.
He begins by telling us about the Greek way of war in the period 650-338 B.C. As he did in an earlier book, Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece, Hanson explains that invading armies posed little threat to the livelihood of the Greeks (whose economy was based upon agriculture), as they caused minimal lasting damage. Fields of grain could be set on fire and were, but they could be sown again; and if the invaders came at the best time for destroying grain, they had to leave their own fields with inadequate harvest labor. Destroying vineyards and fruit trees with hand tools takes time and is an arduous task: Olive trees, with which Greece abounds, are tough indeed. There was never time for a thorough job of destruction.
The Greeks developed a method for waging war that was, as John Keegan points out in his introduction, "different in kind from the warfare that preceded it." It was, he says,
different not merely in technique but in ethos; and… its
ethos pervaded Greeks life, culture and politics--and thus
our own, too. What Hanson suggests … is that the Greeks
of the city-states were the first people on earth to
contract between themselves, as equals to fight the enemy
shoulder to shoulder, without flinching from wounds, and
not to yield the ground on which they fought until either
the enemy had broken or they themselves lay dead where
they stood.
The author has eschewed information about casualty ratios, logistics, burial practices, and such, and has focused sharply upon the infantryman in the phalanx. Cavalry, archers, and lightly-armed missle throwers were sometimes used for skirmishing and for pursuing routed foes, but it was in the phalanx that battles were won, quickly and decisively. In the three hundred years from 650 to 350 B.C., "no foreign army, despite any numerical superiority, withstood the charge of a Greek phalanx." The hardest fights were when Greek fought Greek, when phalanx met phalanx.
Herodotus pointed out that the Persians were defeated because they suffered from that most dangerous of tendencies: "a wish to kill, but not to die in the process." The Greeks, however, knew well that they might die. They stood stolidly in ranks with no reserve, no rear guard, and no attempt at
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