itself is the only victor, and an undeserving one at that.4 These two books are not pacifist any more than this book is militarist, but an ethical as well as intellectual gap divides the two.
Never acknowledged, but nonetheless felt, is an assumption on the part of the Cambridge authors that Greek warfare is a distinctly Greek, not ancient, phenomenon; in other words, that it owes little or nothing to either neighboring societies or earlier ones, even if it may serve as the origin for later, Euro-American warfare. In this regard, the volume is better termed Finleyite than Marxist, since it adheres to a history of warfare that runs parallel to Finley’s notion of ancient Greece as the first slave society.5
At the same time, the book does not attempt to supplant the best work done in the Cambridge and Oxford volumes, such as the essays on navies and land battle in the former and the treatment of military medicine and mercenaries in the latter, all of which topics are accordingly omitted. In two cases, intelligence gathering and mental trauma, Frank Russell and Lawrence Tritle, who also contributed to (and, in the latter case, co-edited one of) the earlier volumes, provide updated essays focused on certain aspects of their subjects.
This book suffers from several of the same gaps as its predecessors. It does not describe Greek federal armies, and it leaves aside important Near Eastern forces against whom the Greeks and Macedonians did some fighting, including the forces of Carthage, Lydia, and Assyria.
All manuals of ancient warfare derive from the dated but valuable reference works written by German, often Prussian, scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.6 In the Cambridge History, the German legacy influences chapters on “Military Forces,” “War,” and “Battle,” whereas interest in the context of warfare accounts for “Warfare and the State” and “War and Society,” the switch from the one to the other being the occasion for introductory chapters on methods and sources. In the Oxford Handbook, similar introductory chapters come first, but a social and psychological concern, the common soldier’s experience of combat, supplies the title of the next part, “The Face of Battle,” as in John Keegan’s 1976 book, whereas the other large part, “Impacts and Techniques” reconfigures traditional matter such as operations. This book again follows a different course, for it avoids generalizations about sources and methods, issues left to the authors of the chapters. It also avoids long, broad chapters such as “Warfare and the State,” which lead to some subjects being raised briefly in one chapter, and then briefly in another, yet leads to other topics being omitted. As for the context of warfare, this book avoids favoring any one perspective, and with it, any one author—in the case of “The Face of Battle,” Keegan’s work on infantry combat of the same name. Operational matters still come first, but each topic receives its due, repetition and omission both being avoided. The context of warfare is divided in two parts, on the one hand, the economic and technical context, and, on the other hand, the social and political, a third part being reserved for warfare in art and literature, in other words, for the ancient cultural context, as opposed to any contemporary, twenty-first century intellectual context into which ancient literary and artistic sources should fit.
Part I, a “Historical Survey,” focuses on changing issues in strategy and grand strategy—on Greek motives, goals, and responses to military success and failure, the Macedonians, Persians, Romans, and Carthaginians being given due weight. These five chapters cover chronological fundamentals, but deal with modalities and patterns more than with campaigns, and with campaigns more than with battles. Johannes Heinrichs, in Chapter 1 “Bronze Age and Early Greek Wars,” sees Mycenaean warfare in terms of “the centralized organization of life,” then deals with Homer as evidence of an ideological rather than sociological character. Among late Archaic Wars, Sparta’s efforts to dominate the southern Peloponnesus illustrate a grand strategy that evolves from annexation to domination. Chapter 2, Sabine Müller’s “The Persian Wars to Alexander,” gives a holistic account of the conflicts between the Achaemenids and both the Greeks and Macedonians, one that dismantles propaganda and rationalizations in order to demonstrate interdependence as well as rivalry. Frances Pownall’s Chapter 3 on “Internal Wars from the ‘First Peloponnesian War’ to Chaeronea” covers much the same period but centers on alliance systems and spheres of influence; one after another, the Greeks states failed to implement strategies that would that would do more collective good than harm. She emphasizes Persia’s role in this sequence of events.
Edward Anson, in Chapter 4 “Hellenistic Land Warfare,” shows how innovations introduced by Philip II of Macedon improved and professionalized armies, and thus enlarged the scale of Greek politics and warfare. Some changes occurred in weaponry, some in tactics, and some in the composition of armies. In this instance, military changes affected politics more than politics affected the military. Yet Melanie Jonasch, in Chapter 5 “Greek Warfare in Sicily,” this part’s last chapter, points out a major regional exception, in Sicily, where problems of colonization and rivalry with Carthage led to some technical innovations that Philip would adopt, but also to uniquely Sicilian patterns of warfare.
Part II, “Military Operations,” deals with the fundamentals of infantry, cavalry, and sieges, but not in uniform fashion. Heavy infantry fighting has received too much attention for too long, and has been used, or misused, to explain too much, from Greek constitutions to Greek farming, and so Fernando Echeverría Rey, in Chapter 6 “The Nature of Hoplite Warfare,” sets out to correct these emphases. This chapter is polemical, whereas Chapter 7, Carolyn Willekes’ “Cavalry Battle in Greece and the Hellenistic East,” builds on recent useful work about cavalry by analyzing the use of horses in combat. She seeks to recapture the experience of the ancient rider in handling his mount, whereas Echeverría Rey seeks to demolish the speculations of scholars who, unlike some German writers of the nineteenth century, did not have the benefit as well as the drawback of being infantry officers. David Whitehead’s topic, “Siege Warfare,” in Chapter 8 presents an altogether different challenge, that of blending Greek historiography with the long, complex development of ancient literature on the subject of poliorketika. He thus begins and ends with the most important siege writer, Philo of Byzantium, but after evaluating evidence from Herodotus and others. Here, as with the innovations of Philip II, changes in materiel did not by themselves confer decisive advantages.
Part III, “Military Personnel,” identifies a topic treated in handbooks going back to the nineteenth century, but never emphasized. The four chapters in this part of the book seek to correct the misplaced egalitarianism found in recent hoplite studies by acknowledging the place of both superiors and inferiors in Greek armies. Chapter 9, F.S. Naiden’s “The Organization of Greek Armies,” assesses the size of Greek and Macedonian forces, identifies large and small units, and specifies the numbers and ranks of Greek and Macedonian officers. Better command and control emerge not only among Spartans as opposed to others, but cavalry as opposed to infantry, and Macedonians as opposed to Greeks, while Hellenistic increases in army size do not accompany ascertainable gains in this regard. In Chapter 10 on “Generalship,” Joseph Roisman shows how effective high command, a long-recognized feature of fourth-century warfare, began far earlier, as shown by Homer, and thus was never a Spartan monopoly. Roisman describes the development of strategy through the career of Pericles as well as that of Philip II. The Hellenistic commander Epichares of Athens reveals another aspect of Greek generalship, protecting resources and frontiers in time of peace.
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