This book examines the developments in warfare in Greece from the Late Bronze Age (c. 1600 BC) to the end of the classical period (c. 323 BC). It is by no means exhaustive in coverage, since the quality and quantity of ancient material varies considerably, but it has tried where possible to adopt a wide-ranging and thematic approach. One central observation is that organised violence between Greek communities manifested itself in a variety of ways. The ancient Greeks, by land and by sea, conducted raids, ambushes and police actions; they embarked on campaigns of intimidation, conquest and annihilation. Some wars...

What is war? How does one go about attempting to define something as varied, as brutal and as wasteful as war? In broad terms, the condition of war can be characterised as organised violence produced by rival groups, communities or states. It is a bloody and terrible human activity that is imbued with suffering and accompanied by a riot of emotional responses and traumas. War is also culturally defined. The conduct, objectives and outcomes of wars are subject to the expectations and value-systems of their participants and organisers. Both sides in a conflict may have similar outlooks on what wars...

Greeks in later periods looked back into the past and saw an age of heroes. As early as the beginning of the seventh century BC, the farmer-poet Hesiod described:

A god-like race of hero-men who are called demi-gods, the race before our own, throughout the boundless earth. Grim war and dread battle destroyed a part of them, some in the land of Cadmus at seven-gated Thebes when they fought for the flocks of Oedipus, and some, when it had brought them in ships over the great sea gulf to Troy for rich-haired Helen’s sake: there death’s end enshrouded a part...

During the reign of the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus I (664–610 BC), a group of Greek marauders, equipped, so the story goes, as hoplites in bronze armour, landed on the Egyptian coast (Hdt. 2.152). Psammetichus, recalling an oracle that ‘bronze men’ from the sea would help him against his enemies, recruited them, and after having used them to good effect, rewarded them for their services with land near Pelusium (2.154). Their descendants, and other Greeks attracted by the rewards of service, continued to be enrolled in the armies of the Pharaohs throughout the sixth century (Kaplan 2003). Thanks to soldierly...

It is often argued that the farmers of the phalanx ensured that ideological constraints were placed on hoplite warfare. The primacy of land in their ideology of protecting theoikos(the homestead) promoted battle, involving the clash of opposing phalanxes, as their main mode of conflict resolution (Hanson 1995, 221–89). Stephen Mitchell (1996, 97–8), for example, argues that most hoplite battles were fought for control of farmland, rather than waged in the mountain passes between city-states, because this was where farmer-hoplites derived the most motivation for combat. In such a view, the ethos of hoplite warfare was defensive,...

While 200,000 Greek and Persian soldiers were facing one another at Plataea, Mardonius, the Persian commander, sent a herald to the Spartans with the message:

Your reputation led us to expect that you would issue us a challenge … but as you have sent none, we will ourselves make it: why should we not fight with equal numbers on both sides, you as champions of Greece and us as champions of Asia? Then, if it seems a good thing that the rest should fight as well, let them do so after we have finished; otherwise, let it be settled between...

This tale of an ill-starred raid on Egypt is false: it is a deliberate lie told by Odysseus, posing as the unnamed son of Castor, to hide his identity, but it is also, of course, part of the fantastic narrative of Homeric epic. Nevertheless, it has been thought to represent the character of naval expeditions prior to the classical period.¹ The reasons for this supposition seem clear. Although it is an obvious fabrication, Homer evidently expected the audience to believe that it could be a plausible enough cover story for a man like Odysseus to use, and it may, therefore,...

The construction of defences in stone implies the perception of significant threat (real or imagined) and a social organisation capable of collective construction. The emergence of strong fortifications in Greece dates to the Mycenaean period, when kings ruled over centralised bureaucracies that oversaw the economic, military and religious activities of their communities. Mycenaean towns and palaces, such as Tiryns, Orchomenus and Gla, occupied naturally strong defensive positions that were further enhanced by circuits of ‘cyclopean’ walls. Mycenae itself had walls that averaged 5 metres in thickness, constructed of huge, but often closely fitting stones weighing up to 10 tonnes. In...

War, for all the human suffering that it engenders, can be analysed in economic terms. War has an economic impact on states that undertake it, whether they are successful or not. Indeed, their success or failure can sometimes be explained in terms of how well their economic structures allow them to conduct the type of war upon which they have embarked. Economic motivations can play a part in the reasons for waging war and on the course campaigns take. Economic resources are consumed by war, but they are often acquired through its prosecution.

Farming was at the root of much...

The experiences and traumas of war have often been explained, perhaps even comprehended, through recourse to the divine and the supernatural. As the saying goes, there are no atheists in a foxhole. So what did the Greeks believe was the contribution of their gods to war? How did communities prepare for and come to terms with war through their methods of communication with the divine and use of rituals? This chapter will be concerned with understanding how the religious values of the Greeks influenced their conduct of wars, campaigns and battles.

The Greeks believed their gods to have been actively...

According to Herodotus (1.82.7), after the semi-legendary Battle of the Champions, ‘Othryades, the lone survivor of the three hundred, was ashamed, it is said, to return to Sparta after all the men of his company had perished, and so killed himself there at Thyrea.’ The suicide of this Spartan warrior seems to have been an instance of what might be described as ‘survivor syndrome’, where a man, because of the intense trauma of combat and strong emotional connection with his comrades, feels deep personal angst at having outlived them. Combat trauma has been a recent theme in some studies of...

Any study of Greek warfare reveals but a fraction of the vast array of human experience of war. It is a vast and complex subject that often daunts even the expert and defies categorisation and reduction. The material, epigraphic, iconographic and literary sources are sometimes complementary, but often they are frustratingly contradictory. This is not just because they are incomplete – only a fraction of what the Greeks themselves had to hand survives for the modern investigator – but because, in antiquity, people had different views and interpretations of how and why war took the forms that it did. State...