Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome Read online

  Makers of Ancient Strategy

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  Makers of

  Ancient Strategy

  From the

  Persian Wars to the

  Fall of Rome

  Edited and Introduced by

  Victor Davis Hanson

  Princeton University Press

  Princeton and Oxford

  Copyright © 2010 by

  Princeton University Press

  Published by Princeton University Press,

  41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

  In the United Kingdom:

  Princeton University Press,

  6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

  All Rights Reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Makers of ancient strategy : from the Persian wars to the

  fall of Rome / edited and Introduced by Victor Davis Hanson.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-691-13790-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  1. Military art and science—History—To 500.

  2. Military history, Ancient.

  I. Hanson, Victor Davis.

  U29.M26 2010

  355.409’014—dc22

  2009034732

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  This book has been composed in Dante MT Std

  Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

  press.princeton.edu

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Contents

  List of Contributors vii

  Introduction: Makers of Ancient Strategy 1

  From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome

  Victor Davis Hanson

  1. From Persia with Love 11

  Propaganda and Imperial Overreach in the Greco-Persian Wars

  Tom Holland

  2. Pericles, Thucydides, and the Defense of Empire 31

  Donald Kagan

  3. Why Fortifications Endure 58

  A Case Study of the Walls of Athens during the Classical Period

  David L. Berkey

  4. Epaminondas the Theban and the Doctrine of

  Preemptive War 93

  Victor Davis Hanson

  5. Alexander the Great, Nation Building, and the

  Creation and Maintenance of Empire 118

  Ian Worthington

  6. Urban Warfare in the Classical Greek World 138

  John W. I. Lee

  7. Counterinsurgency and the Enemies of Rome 163

  Susan Mattern

  8. Slave Wars of Greece and Rome 185

  Barry Strauss

  9. Julius Caesar and the General as State 206

  Adrian Goldsworthy

  10. Holding the Line 227

  Frontier Defense and the Later Roman Empire

  Peter J. Heather

  Acknowledgments 247

  Index 249

  vi Contents

  Contributors

  Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in

  Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution,

  Stanford University, and emeritus professor of Classics at California

  State University, Fresno. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Dis-

  tinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches

  courses in military history and classical culture. He is the author

  of many books, including A War Like No Other: How the Athenians

  and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (Random House, 2005);

  Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

  (Doubleday, 2001); The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Pres-

  ent Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny (Free Press,

  1999); Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience (Routledge, 1993);

  The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (Knopf,

  1989); Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western

  Civilization (Free Press, 1995); and Warfare and Agriculture in Classical

  Greece (University of California Press, 1983).

  David L. Berkey is assistant professor in the Department of History

  at California State University, Fresno. He received his doctorate in

  Classics and ancient history in 2001 from Yale University and his

  bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in international

  studies in 1989.

  Adrian Goldsworthy was educated at St. John’s College, Oxford, and is

  currently Visiting Fellow at Newcastle University. His doctoral thesis

  was published in the Oxford monographs series under the title The

  Roman Army at War, 100 bc–ad 200. He was a Junior Research Fellow

  at Cardiff University and subsequently an assistant professor in the

  University of Notre Dame’s London program. He now writes full

  time. His most recent books include Caesar: The Life of a Colossus

  (Yale University Press, 2006) and How Rome Fell: The Death of a Super-

  power (Yale University Press, 2009).

  Peter J. Heather is professor of medieval European history at King’s

  College, London. He was born in Londonderry, Northern Ireland,

  and educated at Maidstone Grammar School and New College, Ox-

  ford. He was awarded a postdoctoral degree by the History Faculty

  of Oxford University. He has since taught at University College,

  London, Yale University, and Worcester College, Oxford.

  Tom Holland is the author of three highly praised works of history.

  The first, Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic,

  won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History and was short-listed for

  the Samuel Johnson Prize. His book on the Greco-Persian wars,

  Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West, won

  the Anglo- Hellenic League’s Runciman Award in 2006. His latest

  book, The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise

  of the West, was published in the spring of 2009. He has adapted

  Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Virgil for the BBC. He is cur-

  rently working on a translation of Herodotus for Penguin Classics.

  In 2007 he was awarded the 2007 Classical Association prize, given

  to “the individual who has done most to promote the study of the

  language, literature and civilisation of Ancient Greece and Rome.”

  Donald Kagan is Sterling Professor of Classics and History at Yale Uni-

  versity. He has won teaching awards at Cornel University and at Yale,

  and was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2002. He was

  named the Jefferson Lecturer by the National Endowment for the Hu-

  manities in 2004. Among his publications are a four-volume history of

  the Peloponnesian War, Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy,

  and On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace. He is also co-

  author of The Western Heritage and The Heritage of World Civilizations.

  John W. I. Lee is associate professor of history at the University of Cali-

  fornia, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. in history from Cornell

  University.
He is the author of A Greek Army on the March: Soldiers and

  viii Contributors

  Survival in Xenophon’s Anabasis (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

  He has also published on women in ancient Greek armies, on the

  Persian army in Herodotus, and on ancient soldiers’ memoirs. Lee is

  currently working on a new book that examines warfare and culture

  in the eastern Aegean and along the west coast of Anatolia, from the

  Ionian Revolt (499–494 BC) to the fourth century BC.

  Susan Mattern is professor of history at the University of Georgia.

  Her most recent book is Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing (Johns

  Hopkins University Press, 2008), a study of the medical practice of

  the ancient physician Galen, based on his stories about his patients.

  She is also the author of Rome and the Enemy: Imperial Strategy in the

  Principate (University of California Press, 1999; now in paperback)

  and co-author of The Ancient Mediterranean World from the Stone Age

  to a.d. 600 (Oxford University Press, 2004). She is now working on a

  biography of Galen.

  Barry Strauss is professor of Classics and history and chair of the His-

  tory Department at Cornell University, as well as director of the

  Program on Freedom and Free Societies. He is the author of six

  books, including The Battle of Salamis, named one of the best books

  of 2004 by the Washington Post, and The Trojan War: A New History,

  a main selection of the History Book Club. His most recent book,

  The Spartacus War, appeared in March 2009. He is series editor of

  Princeton History of the Ancient World and serves on the editorial

  boards of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, Historically

  Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society, and the International

  Journal of the Classical Tradition. He is the recipient of the Heinrich

  Schliemann Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies

  at Athens, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship

  for University Teachers, and Cornell’s Clark Award for Excellence

  in Teaching.

  Ian Worthington is Frederick A. Middlebush Professor of History at

  the University of Missouri. Previously he taught for ten years in

  the Classics Department at the University of New England and the

  Contributors ix

  University of Tasmania, Australia. He is author or editor of fourteen

  books and more than eighty articles. His most recent publications

  include the biographies Alexander the Great: Man and God (Pearson,

  2004) and Philip II of Macedonia (Yale University Press, 2008), and

  the Blackwell Companion to Greek Rhetoric (Oxford University Press,

  2006). He is currently writing a book on Demosthenes, editing the

  Blackwell Companion to Ancient Macedonia, and serving as editor-in-

  chief of Brill’s New Jacoby. In 2005 he won the Chancellor’s Award

  for Outstanding Research and Creativity in the Humanities and in

  2007 the Student-Athlete Advisory Council Most Inspiring Professor

  Award, both at the University of Missouri.

  x Contributors

  Makers of Ancient Strategy

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  Introduction: Makers of Ancient Strategy

  From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome

  Victor Davis Hanson

  Makers of Strategy

  Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, edited by

  Peter Paret, appeared as a 941-page volume comprising twenty-eight

  essays, with topics ranging from the sixteenth century to the 1980s. The

  work was published by Princeton University Press in 1986, as the cold

  war was drawing to a close. Paret’s massive anthology itself updated

  and expanded upon the classic inaugural Princeton volume of twenty

  essays, Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to

  Hitler, edited by Edward M. Earle. The smaller, earlier book had ap-

  peared more than forty years before the second, in 1943, in the midst of

  the Second World War. It focused on individual military theorists and

  generals; hence the personalized title, “Makers.”

  Although the theme of both books remained the relevance of the

  past to military challenges of the present, the 1986 sequel dealt more

  with American concerns. Its chapters were built not so much around

  individuals as on larger strategic themes and historical periods. Al-

  though both the editors and the authors of these two books by intent

  did not always explicitly connect their contributions to the ordeals of

  their times, the Second World War and the cold war are unavoidable

  presences in the background. Both books cautioned against assuming

  that the radical changes in war making of their respective ages were

  signs that the nature of conflict had also changed.

  On the contrary, the two works served as reminders that the history of

  both the immediate and more distant past deals with the same concerns

  and dangers as exist in the tumultuous present. The study of military

  history schools us in lessons that are surprisingly apt to contemporary

  dilemmas, even though they may be largely unknown or forgotten—and

  al the more so as radical y evolving technology fools many into thinking

  that war itself is reinvented with the novel tools of each age.

  Why the Ancient World?

  In what might be thought of as a prequel to those two works, Makers

  of Ancient Strategy resembles in its approach (not to mention its smaller

  size) the earlier 1943 volume edited by Earle. The ten essays in Makers

  of Ancient Strategy frequently focus on individual leaders, strategists,

  and generals, among them Xerxes, Pericles, Epaminondas, Alexander,

  Spartacus, and Caesar. The historical parameters, however, have ex-

  panded in the opposite direction to encompass a millennium of history

  (roughly from 500 BC to AD 500) that, even at its most recent, in the late

  Roman Empire, is at least 1,500 years from the present. As a point of

  modern departure, this third work on the makers of strategy appears

  not merely in the second generation of industrial war, as was true of

  the 1943 publication, or in a third era of high-tech precision weapons

  of the nuclear age, as in 1986, but during so-called fourth-generational

  warfare. The late twentieth century ushered in a baffling time, char-

  acterized by instant globalized communications, asymmetrical tactics,

  and new manifestations of terrorism, with war technology in the form

  of drones, night-vision goggles, enhanced bodily protection, and com-

  puter-guided weapons systems housed from beneath the earth to outer

  space. Nevertheless, the theme of all three volumes remains constant:

  the study of history, not recent understanding of technological innova-

  tion, remains the better guide to the nature of contemporary warfare

  As the formal lines between conventional war and terrorism blur,

  and as high technology accelerates the pace and dangers of conflict,

  it has become popular to suggest that war itself has been remade into

  something never before witnessed by earlier generations. Just as no

  previous era had to deal with terrorists’ communiqués posted on the

  Internet and instantly accessible to hund
reds of millions of viewers,

  so supposedly we must now conceive of wholly new doctrines and

  2 Introduction

  paradigms to counteract such tactics. But as the ten essays in this book

  show, human nature, which drives conflict, is unchanging. Since war

  is and will always be conducted by men and women, who reason—or

  react emotionally—in somewhat expected ways, there is a certain pre-

  dictability to war.

  Makers of Ancient Strategy not only reminds us that the more things

  change, the more they remain the same, it also argues that the classi-

  cal worlds of Greece and Rome offer a unique utility in understanding

  war of any era. The ancient historians and observers were empirical.

  They often wrote about what they saw and thought, without worry-

  ing about contemporary popular opinion and without much concern

  either that their observations could be at odds with prevailing theories

  or intellectual trends. So there was an honesty of thought and a clarity

  of expression not always found in military discussions in the present.

  We also know a great deal about warfare in the ancient Western

  world. The Greek and Roman writers who created the discipline of

  history defined it largely as the study of wars, as the works of Herodo-

  tus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, and Livy attest. And while much

  of ancient history has been lost, enough still survives to allow a fairly

  complete account of a thousand years of fighting in the Greek and Ro-

  man worlds. Indeed, we know much more about the battle of Delion

  (424 BC) or Adrianople (AD 378) than about Poitiers (732) or Ashdown

  (871). The experience of Greece and Rome also forms the common her-

  itage of modern Europe and the United States, and in a way that is less

  true of the venerable traditions of ancient Africa, the Americas, and

  Asia. In that sense, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western prob-

  lems of unification, civil war, expansion abroad, colonization, nation

  building, and counterinsurgency all have clear and well-documented

  precedents in both Greek and Roman culture.

  Makers of Ancient Strategy explores the most ancient examples of

  our heritage to frame questions of the most recent manifestations of

  Western warfare. The Greeks were the first to argue that human na-

  ture was fixed and, as the historian Thucydides predicted, were confi-

  dent that the history of their own experiences would still be relevant

  to subsequent generations, even our own postmodern one in the new