in sieges links it to siege warfare. Most camp followers were women, and just a few of them, all Macedonian or Epirote, were in charge of armies, even if they left operations to a male lieutenant.
The chapters touching on politics begin with Chapter 26 by Sheila Ager on several phenomena that these rules did not always either prevent or recognize, the “Piracy, Brigandage, and Terrorism” of her title, for all of which Greek literature supplies examples from Homer onwards. She draws discrete parallels with modern events, while always mindful of tendentious vocabulary, whether ancient or modern. Last in this part of the volume is Chapter 27 by Gordon Shrimpton on “Civil War: Forgetting as the Path to Reconciliation,” for which he provides a range of examples of stasis, showing how this term applies both to civil wars and to the disagreements and rivalries leading up to it, mainly by the use of elaborate examples from the history of Athens and Corcyra.
Finally, Part VII on “Warfare in Art and Literature” includes two chapters on visual material and two on literary texts. The first, Chapter 28 “The Iconography of War” by Olga Palagia, deals with the iconography of historical battles in Greek art. She provides a survey from the Persian Wars down through the battle of Pydna some 300 years later. Next, Lawrence Tritle, in Chapter 29, writes on “War Monuments and Memorials,” with sections on battlefield memorials, battlefield graveyards, military cemeteries, military inscriptions, and heroic military sculpture. All these forms of expression extolled “civic virtue,” and thus civic responsibility. José Vela Tejada finds the same civic propaganda in Chapter 30 “War in Greek Poetry,” beginning with Homer, who inaugurates the enduring theme of the “beautiful death” suffered in exchange for imperishable glory. Archaic poets add a civic motive for this sort of death. Some plays deprecate civic martyrdom, but only some, and none of these works, Vela Tejada warns, should be termed pacifist. Civic propaganda, a Greek invention, was never subjected to thorough Greek criticism. “War and Propaganda,” in turn, is the title of the last chapter in this volume, Chapter 31. In it, Sabine Müller analyzes the propaganda propounded by Greek assemblies and officials, and later by Macedonian kings, and finds several themes that have lasted until our own times: protecting the homeland, liberating the oppressed, exacting revenge, safeguarding the peace, and fighting in a just cause. All might be accompanied by claims of divine support, even of predestined victory, a conclusion linking this chapter to Naiden’s Chapter 24 on religion and warfare, which describes the rituals used to make these claims.
The editors wish to thank both the contributors and the team of Todd Green and Andrew Minton at Wiley for their patience as we assembled and prepared the 31 chapters in this book. Waldemar Heckel conceived this volume and recruited nearly all the contributors;F.S. Naiden recruited the others and joined Heckel in editing it; and Erin Garvin and John Vanderspoel did the indispensable work of line editing and compiling the index and bibliography.
Notes
1 1 For the Greeks as unique and seminal, see Chapter 4 in this volume. A critique of sundry views that Greece is the point of origin for later historical phenomena: Goody 2008, 26–67.
2 2 E.g. Liv. 29.1.1–11, 36.11.3–4. A contrast with Romans: 34.3.3–6. The next step in the argument: service in the Greek East renders Romans “lax,” as in Wheeler 1996.
3 3 Thirty-one chapters vs. 25 in the Oxford Handbook edited by B. Campbell and L. Tritle, and vs. 9 and parts of 6 others in the Cambridge History edited by P. Sabin, H. van Wees, and M. Whitby. In addition, chs. 2–5 of the former, and 1–3 of the latter, cover ancient military history in general, rather than Greece alone. Both devote more space to Rome than to Greece, granting that the Cambridge History does so in the course of two volumes.
4 4 See Wheeler 2011; for a similar view, but restricted to the Archaic Period, see Chapter 6 in this volume. Like other disputes in Classics, this one has roots in the ancient Greek sources, such as the account given by Herodotus 1.1–4 of the origin of the Persian Wars, and the account given by Thucydides of the origin of the Peloponnesian War, esp. 1.4–5.
5 5 For Greece as the first “slave society,” as opposed to ancient societies with an economically secondary slave populations, see Finley 1980, ch. 3. Perhaps the best known of the scholars agreeing with Finley: Patterson 1982, App. 3, omitting slavery in the ancient Near East, including the Old Testament. Finley himself may be described as an ex-Marxist, or, as Ernst Badian once said to F. S. Naiden, “an anti-anti-Marxist.” See both Naiden 2014 and Shaw 2014, along with Naiden 2017b. The Stalinist view of Greek slavery assimilated it to diverse Near Eastern systems of servitude.
6 6 Rüstow and Köchly 1852; Bauer 1893; Delbrück 1900; Kromayer and Veith 1928. Pritchett 1971–1991, at vols. 1 and 2 (1971, 1974), is wider ranging, but unsystematic; it does mark the first attempt to include topics outside the ambit of military equipment, operations, and organization.
7 7 Th. 7.78.2. “City on the move”: Rostovtzeff 1941, 1.146.
CHAPTER 1 Bronze Age and Early Greek Wars
Johannes Heinrichs
This survey begins with the final Mycenaean period, around 1200. For the preceding Mycenaean phases evidence is lacking, and in the yet-older Minoan period, though a part of the Greek mythological tradition, a non-Greek language was spoken and written (an Aegean substrate, in Linear A script, not yet deciphered). Written in Linear B script (expressing the Greek language) they seemingly belong to fourteenth-century strata, but for both linguistic and paleographic reasons must be coeval with the tablets from Pylos (from c. 1220/1200). The geographic theater is restricted to the south west Peloponnese (Pylos) and central Crete (Knossos). Tablets from further residences such as Mycenae or Thebes (the Kadmeía) do not shed light on military aspects.
Defense of the Mycenaean Kingdom of Pylos (c. 1220/1200)
Epigraphic evidence1—reasonably coherent, albeit demanding interpretation—comes from an archive unearthed at the site of the palace of Pylos. It comprises sun-dried clay tablets covered with lines of script, written in vowels, syllabic units, and ideograms to record stored objects and services due to the palace. Another archive is lost; it was possibly housed in the adjacent residence, probably of the kingdom’s highest military official, the ra-wa-ke-ta (lawagétas, i.e. commander: hagetas, of the army: lawos).2 When no longer needed, the clay tablets were regularly brought outside to decay; only the last set survived in the form of ceramics when the palace went up in flames. There must have been information on a threat emanating from the sea: defense posts were organized along the Messenian south west coast. Approximately in the middle, some way off the Bay of Pylos/Navarino, the palace of the king (wa-na-ka: wánax) was situated.
The actual spot of an attack was not clear.3 So the whole coast had to be guarded by small “commands” of watchers (o-ka: orché = arche), stationed at ten places, recorded on five tablets,4 each containing two records.5 The first starts with a headline for the whole series, the following entries are of a uniform type: “Thus watchers are guarding the coast. Command of Mareus: (4 personal names). At (place name) men from (2 place names): (ideogram for) MAN 50.” In this case, the o-ka consisted of one officer and four troops, assigned to watch the sea and,