rel="nofollow" href="#u2b27ebfc-da8c-5fee-b63d-80301e70b307">Chapter 11 by Mauricio Álvarez Rico on “Greek Camps and Camp Followers” is the first ever devoted expressly to this subject. Working from his monograph of 2013, he summarizes evidence from Aeneas Tacticus and others that the Greeks practiced castramentation, contrary to clichés about Roman orderliness and discipline and a Greek lack of the same. Camp followers, called “the mob” (ho ochlos) in Thucydides, might better be termed the denizens of a city on the move, to which the Macedonians imparted their own distinctive features.7 Another neglected aspect of Greek military personnel, Greeks serving in foreign armies—not merely mercenaries, but mercenaries adapting to the needs of foreign rulers—illustrates this book’s theme of Greek and Near Eastern interdependence. Jeffrey Rop’s Chapter 12 on this subject, “Greeks in Foreign Service: The Case of the Achaemenid Empire,” is also adopted from a recent monograph. Rop rebuts the common view that Greeks in Persian service were very largely hoplites who became valued by the Persian kings after Marathon. In fact, they first entered Persian service in 525, and often served as sailors and engineers.
Part IV, “War with Non-Greeks,” takes up the theme of Greco–Persian overlap through Michael Charles’ Chapter 13 “The Royal Elite of the Achaemenid Army,” in which he summarizes his recent articles to show that the famed 10,000 “Immortals” disappeared sometime after Xerxes, to be replaced by mercenary hoplites; two other units, the smaller Kinsmen Cavalry and the Apple-Bearers, an infantry counterpart to this cavalry, both survived. In Chapter 14 “Parthian Warfare under the Early Arsacids,” Marek Olbrycht surveys Parthian military organization, weapons, and armor before concentrating on the cataphracts, whom he describes as a heavy cavalry that developed from the confluence of “Central Asian nomadic cavalry tradition, Achaemenid military innovation, and the Macedonian challenge.” The long spear was first borrowed from the Macedonians not by the Arsacids, but by steppe peoples, the Massagetae and Dahae. It reached Parthia by an indirect route typical of the cross-connections traced in this volume.
The remaining chapters in this part deal with two less studied enemies, India and Thrace. India provided the Macedonians with elephants, the subject of Chapter 15 by Christopher Epplett, “Elephants in Hellenistic Warfare,” which asks whether the Successors and later the Romans made good use of this Indian military export. Epplett answers that at Gaugamela Persian mismanagement of elephants offered the Macedonians a warning that Alexander ignored, especially after he witnessed the success of Porus in using them at the Hydaspes. The Successors (but not Alexander) then put this new military arm to the test in more than a century of battles. The record was mixed: success at Ipsus, but failure on some other occasions. The Successors thus abandoned this exotic weapon, in spite of its shock power.
If Indian elephants were a luxury for Macedonian rulers, Greek and Macedonian equipment and methods were a necessity for Thracian tribes wishing to prevail against each other and against foreign invaders, as described by Emil Nankov in Chapter 16 “Thracian Warfare.” Nankov’s study explores the methodological problems of reconstructing military history from exiguous literary sources and scattered archaeological remains, especially battlefields, weapons hoards and militaria from graves and tombs.
The remaining parts of this book, Parts V–VII, turn from what might be called the foreground of warfare—strategy, operations, personnel, and foes—to the background, which is the general context in which ancient states made war. Part V deals with economic and technical context that directly affected victory and success; Parts VI and VII deal with topics that affected performance indirectly.
The first chapter in Part V, Chapter 17 deals with logistics—the little studied art of keeping soldiers alive and well before battle. The author, Stephen O’Connor, takes advantage of the numerous remarks on this subject in Xenophon, and branches out toward other commanders and other problems. Clichés about Greek improvisation and self-reliance prove untrue, the same as similar clichés about castramentation. The next chapter, Silke Müth-Frederiksen’s Chapter 18 on “Fortifications,” builds on recent scholarship that has shown how fortifications, “besides being military necessities, … are architectural monuments with multiple purposes and historical witnesses with much information to impart.” This chapter provides the material background for Whitehead’s on siege warfare, Chapter 8. Third in this part is Frank Russell’s “Military Intelligence,” Chapter 19, which deals with both strategic concerns and operations, and divides the latter according to defensive and offensive contexts. His pages on towers and fortlets complement Müth-Frederiksen’s in Chapter 18.
The remaining chapters in this part deal with economic matters. In Chapter 20 “The Economics of War,” Johannes Heinrichs moves from war finance, a much-treated topic, to the actual or expected effects of war on production, distribution, wealth, and growth. Greek states cared more about these issues than scholarship on taxes and budgets has recognized. Another underestimated aspect of Greek warfare is the use of slave labor, the subject of Peter Hunt’s Chapter 21 “War and Slavery in the Greek World.” Hunt finds the role of slaves to be ambiguous—indispensable as attendants and porters, but prone to desert, valuable as rowers, and occasionally as soldiers, but prone to rebel, easy to replace by taking captives, but only if the would-be captor was not captured and enslaved himself. Slave labor was thus both an asset and a potential liability, as especially illustrated by the Peloponnesian War. The same was true of agricultural land, as described in Chapter 22 “Agriculture and Greek Warfare” by Jeanne Reames and Anne Haverkost. This chapter shows how wars fought to obtain agricultural land gave way to devastating farms and fields as a military aim, a change culminating in the Peloponnesian War, which again is central. Then, in the Hellenistic period, belligerents increasingly relied on farmers’ markets to feed larger armies operating farther from home. Instead of providing a socioeconomic basis for armies, as in the work of Victor Davis Hanson, agriculture alternately provided an asset and a target.
Like Part V, Part VI has two sections, the first devoted to the social and psychological context of warfare, and the second to the political and legal. In Chapter 23 on “Battle Trauma in Ancient Greece,” Lawrence Tritle narrows the focus of his previous work on suffering in battle and considers psychological trauma, as reported in Herodotus and other sources. The disorientation, or even hallucinations, that Tritle discovers overlap with the military epiphanies reported by F.S. Naiden in Chapter 24 “Religion and Warfare,” which covers epiphanies as well as sacrifice, divination, and post-battle supplication, games, and the erection of trophies. This chapter describes all the religious rites that would commonly occur during a campaign. The following piece, Elizabeth Carney’s Chapter 25 “Women and War in the Greek World,” might appear in any of several parts of this book: the abuse of women captives links