Our first picture of Greeks at war is provided by the Iliad, in which Homer tells us that arms and armor are made of bronze. In fact, one of the reasons why the fights were over so quickly was that the soldiers were weighed down by all that bronze. They wear greaves, which cover the lower part of their legs; a breastplate; and a helmet with a crest of horsehair. Warriors fight with an oxhide shield and a pair of throwing spears or a single thrusting spear. At close quarters, they use their swords, frequently described as “silver-studded.”

Homeric warfare is highly ritualistic. Warriors are conveyed to the battlefield in chariots driven by a trusted companion. Then, warriors dismount and do battle on foot, one-on-one. The chariot usually remains stationary while the warrior fights, ready to convey him elsewhere if he’s wounded or goes in search of another worthy opponent of similar rank. As the ancient history professor Hans van Wees notes, one in six battlefield confrontations involve opponents who agree to fight with one another. And once a hero has found a warrior of suitable rank, he issues a challenge, and then he and his opponent reveal their pedigrees. Before fighting, warriors hurl insults at one another to gain a kind of psychological edge. Usually, the fight is over very quickly. One of the warriors throws a spear, it misses, and the other moves in for the kill with a counter-throw. Only 18 of the 300 engagements that are described in the Iliad involve more than a single blow. And then, death occurs instantaneously. If a warrior falls to the ground wounded but is not killed outright, however, he generally offers the victor a ransom in the hope that his life will be spared.

Homer’s description of what Achilles calls “blood and slaughter and the choking groan of men” is unsurpassed in its treatment of the brutality of the battlefield. But how realistic is it? Sir Moses Finley wrote about fighting in the Iliad: “The confusion is indescribable. No one commands or give orders. Men enter the battle and leave at their own pleasure.” He’s right, of course, so if something like the Homeric style of fighting ever did take place, what we read in the Iliad is a fantastical version. One‐to‐one combat dominates the poem, but it’s not the only kind of fighting that takes place. Occasionally, we see fighting between bands of warriors, about 50 in number. This brings Homeric warfare closer to the Classical style of waging war, with its emphasis on hoplites: heavily armed soldiers who fight in battle formation in phalanxes.
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Hoplite warfare was the dominant form of warfare throughout the Greek world from perhaps the first half of the 7th century BC to the latter half of the 4th century BC – named for the big round bronze shield over a wooden core known as a hoplon, which an infantryman carried. Every Greek polis, or city‐state, required all its male citizens to serve in the military when called upon to do so. Serving either in the army or the navy wasn’t just seen as a duty, however, it was also a privilege.

Interstate wars – wars between Greek states – were ubiquitous in the Archaic and Classical periods. The reason why most of these wars were fought seems to be due to no other cause than it’s springtime and testosterone is in the air. A particularly common cause of such wars, as the ancient history professor Simon Hornblower noted, is phthonos, meaning “grudge” or “resentment.” Imagining these wars as modern total wars would miss the mark, however. These were very much a cultural exercise with rules of conduct. War had to be officially declared and a ritual challenge was to precede every battle. There was to be no preemptive attacks, and the armies were to be comprised predominantly of hoplites, not slingers or archers. Also, non-combatants were not to be targeted.

The hoplite was someone who could afford hoplite armor, along with the rest of his equipment: a shield, a helmet, a breastplate, greaves, a sword, and two spears. It’s estimated that hoplites constituted between 20 and 40 percent of the citizen body of any Greek polis. It was these soldiers that came to dominate warfare on land, not cavalry or archers or men armed with slings – hence the importance of the middle class, as we
might anachronistically call them, because only they could afford to purchase hoplite armor. This middle class army bred a sense of egalitarianism, as well as of camaraderie. Whether you stood in a phalanx or a rectangular formation, as a hoplite, your safety was dependent on the men beside you and required an equal effort by all. Both experiences, in a nutshell, promoted democracy.
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Fighting in a hoplite battle was exhausting. Your shield alone weighed 16 pounds and was three feet in diameter. When the two opposing armies came in contact with each other, it was like two heavy trucks, or perhaps even tanks, crashing into one another head‐on. Moreover, once the general had given the order to engage, the army was pretty much on its own. You certainly wouldn’t be able to hear any orders being given while wearing a bronze helmet and with people screaming everywhere.

A lot of the battle was about pushing and shoving – the men in the ranks behind pushing the men in the ranks ahead forward. If you fell, you were likely to be crushed underfoot by your own side. It was also about stabbing with your spear, less about slicing and slashing. It’s estimated that the average battle probably lasted barely an hour, most no more than half an hour. The human body can’t last long under these punishing conditions.

The objective of most hoplite battles was merely to secure a tactical victory. It wasn’t to render the enemy incapable of returning for another bout of hostilities the next year. Rarely was a defeated army pursued, other than off the field of battle. That’s why most battles ended with the erection of a trophy by the victorious side. This generally took the form of a tree trunk decorated with abandoned shields and other spoils left behind by the enemy, a purely temporary structure, although permanent trophies were sometimes erected later. Our word trophy comes from the Greek word tropaion, which is connected with the verb trepo, meaning “turn,” since the trophy was erected at the spot where the victors caused the enemy to turn and flee.

The campaigning season began in the spring and generally ended in the fall. In other words, it was a seasonal activity. Things changed greatly during the Greco-Persian Wars and later during the Peloponnesian War, when something akin to our notion of total war evolved. But even during these periods of life‐or‐death struggles, the scale and intensity of engagement eased off during the winter.
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Battles didn’t only take place on land. The Athenians from the 480s BC onward were primarily a naval power. Their fleet was
manned primarily by the free poor who could not afford hoplite arms. This signaled the political rise of those previously excluded from military service, and hence the move toward radical democracy in Athens, since the security of the state depended on its rowers – the poor. The percentage who served as rowers was probably between 40 percent to 55 percent of the citizen body.

Athenian ships are called triremes, financed by wealthy Athenians called trierarchs. Once a trierarch has been selected, it’s up to him to devote as much money as he likes to maintain the condition of his trireme. They’re among the most beautiful and swiftest ships ever built. They’re extremely light and can do a complete U‐turn in less than two ships’ length. With three tiers on which the rowers sat, the top tier was reserved for the men with the most skill and strength because the oars were the highest out of the water. When the rowing master gave the order to the men to put their backs into it, a trireme could reach a top speed of 9 to 10 knots.

At top speed, rowers would ram an enemy ship’s broadside, smashing into its hull with the bronze prow, with which every trireme was fitted. Another tactic was to sail close alongside the enemy ship and snap all its oars in two before the enemy had time to raise them out of the water. Their ship quickly tilted over and became a sitting duck. Then, the 30 Athenian hoplites, who also served on board, clambered onto the enemy ship and laid into the defenseless rowers on the top tier, while those in the lower two tiers drowned as their ship sank.
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The Peloponnesian War took a very heavy
toll on morality. One of the main reasons for this is because it was so protracted. It lasted, off and on, for a quarter of a century – from 431 BC to 404 BC. Things may be relatively civilized to begin with, but the longer hostilities last, the more brutal they become. The horrors of war are frequently highlighted by the Greek tragedians, the prime example being Euripides’s Trojan Women, produced in 415 BC. War also occurs prominently in Aristophanes’s comedies, such as Acharnians, produced in 425 BC, and Lysistrata, produced in 411 BC.

An important development in this period was the use of light‐armed troops to attack hoplites, as well as surprise attacks often carried out under the cover of darkness. As the ancient history professor Josiah Ober points out, in the 4th century BC, basically all rules of engagement were thrown out of the window. One of the main reasons was that combatants were increasingly becoming mercenaries, who felt no allegiance to the city‐state as a political unit and saw no reason to refrain from using extreme measures to achieve their ends. A profound consequence of their rise, therefore, was the severing of ties between military service and citizenship and an erosion of the previously indissoluble relationship between citizen and city‐state.
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Major changes in warfare occurred in the time of Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great. The infantry still fought in phalanxes but carried spears that were almost 20 feet in length. They had little body armor and tiny shields. Light‐armed troops with missiles, heavy-armed cavalry, and infantry were now integrated into a much more complex style of fighting, making the outcome of a battle dependent on a unity of forces. Battles also lasted much longer than they ever had before – several hours in length, in fact.

The battles that Alexander fought had a very different objective from those that were customarily fought between fellow Greeks. Instead of leaving his vanquished enemy to retreat, Alexander pursued it with all possible force to annihilate it altogether. The American military historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson writes, ominously, “under the Macedonians, the West, at last, applied its full scientific and rational arsenal to the battlefield as part of a larger effort to destroy a culture rather than defeat an enemy.” I would modify that statement, at least as far as Alexander was concerned. Battles for him were primarily about territorial conquest – a more modest aim, but nonetheless largely a new concept in the Greek‐speaking world. No Greek-state, previous to the rise of Macedon, had done anything comparable to Alexander. But now, the whole world was up for grabs. Empires were the way to go for those with military ambitions.
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The Romans began to regard Greece as their sphere of interest around 200 BC. The Greeks put up a decent fight against them for about 50 years, but in the end, they were no match for the Roman legions. When Corinth fell to the Romans in 146 BC, there was no more resistance on the Greek mainland. The final battle, which saw Egypt, the last part of Alexander’s empire, fall under Roman control was fought at Actium off the coast of western Greece in 31 BC. It was hardly a battle at all, since Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, ordered her fleet to turn tail, and Mark Antony, her allie and paramour, followed. And that – as far as Greek warfare was concerned – was decidedly that. Although, on the bright side, the Greek-speaking world was destined to enjoy peace under Roman rule for the next 500 years.

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Book Sources:

• “The Western Way of War” by Victor Davis Hanson
• “The Ancient Greeks at War” by Louis Rawlings
• “Understanding Greek Warfare” by Matthew A. Sears
• “Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities” by Hans van Wees