One of the most important developments in Greek warfare during this period was its evolution as the exclusive province of regularly trained, professional armies.
Date: 336-30 b. c.e.
Category: Wars and battles; science and technology
Military Achievement The most successful professional armies in Greece consisted of tactically integrated forces derived from a variety of sources. This change in the style of Greek warfare favored large political units with access to significant material resources. Only those cities able to submerge their political identities within a federal system of some sort were able to survive independently. No such attempt worked very well, or for very long, in the classical Greek city-states, such as Athens and Sparta, which were rendered impotent and irrelevant as political players.
The rise of Macedonian king and conqueror Alexander the Great (356323 b. c.e.) and the reign of his successor kingdoms in the east were the culmination of significant long-term changes in the financing and organization of armies and in the waging of war in the Greek world. The Greek city-states, or poleis—chiefly Athens, Sparta, and Thebes—had been engaged during the fifth and fourth centuries b. c.e. in a series of bitter struggles for the establishment and preservation of political hegemony on the Greek mainland. The series of indecisive and mutually destructive conflicts was not so much the result of attempts to establish domination over each other as it was to dominate the countless smaller cities in the areas between and adjacent to them. For the individual city-states, armed conflict discouraged interlopers from interfering in their ancestral relationships with neighbors. These relationships among supposed protectorates provided regular causes of specific conflict among the major Greek city-states. As might be expected, no such hegemony was ever lasting or even stable.
Athens, for example, had been the most successful of these city-states for the longest period of time because it possessed the largest fleet of ships
Milestones
Dionysius I of Syracuse sponsors catapult research.
Philip II of Macedon defeats united Greek army at Chaer-onea.
Alexander defeats main army of Darius III at Issus. Alexander the Great begins Siege of Tyre.
Alexander defeats main army of Darius III at Gaugamela. Romans defeat main army of Philip V at Cynoscephalae.
And was therefore both easily able and politically willing to isolate and punish recalcitrant members of its alliance. In fact, Athens initially gained this position of power as the leading naval power in an alliance against an outside force, the Persians. After the Persian threat had receded, Athens failed to give up its leadership position, preferring instead to maintain the leadership of the alliance for its own benefit. This one exception notwithstanding, no single city-state possessed sufficient military power to enforce political compliance for very long. The military forces of the Greek city-states were, in most cases, constituted primarily of citizen soldiers whose interest in wars tended to be relatively short-lived and philosophically defensive. The financing of wars was a duty that fell to those who could afford it. No conflict could therefore be sustained without some short-term prospect of financial return. Absent some extraordinary event, the natural limiting factor in warfare of the fifth and fourth centuries b. c.e. was the cost-benefit ratio, which prevented any real change in the status quo.
Persian subsidies had financed the creation of competing naval forces intended to undermine Athenian supremacy in the seas adjacent to their own borders. The apparent result was a round-robin of competing hegemonies. The substantive result was an overall increase in the human cost of war, even as the financial costs were underwritten by the Persians. Persian gold was available only to some, however, and it suited the Persians to keep the Greeks fighting each other. Agrowing supply of mercenaries willing to fight for hire met the military demand. The desperate competition for new sources of cash led one previously unimportant city to seize the treasury of Apollo’s Oracle at Delphi and, with that gold, to finance a well-equipped mercenary army that threatened to unbalance the status quo in Greece. The inability of the traditional Greek power brokers to overcome their historically particularist concerns provided a political opportunity for Philip II of Macedonia (382-336 b. c.e.) to intervene decisively. Philip’s outside intervention alarmed the Greeks sufficiently that they picked a fight with Philip in 338 b. c.e. This last gasp of classical Greece proved futile when Philip dealt the Greeks a shocking defeat at the Battle of Chaeronea in that year.
In the process ofconquering Greece, Philip forever changed its political formula. He did so at the head of a new kind of army, a permanent professional army whose leadership was derived, not from one city, but from a more broadly conceived federal structure that included newly consolidated areas of Thrace and Greece outside Macedonia. He called his aristocratic corps of leaders his Companions, and they acted as senior officers in his government and as elite cavalry in warfare. As such, they were enormously powerful. An inner circle of Philip’s Companions formed a council of state without whose support neither Philip nor his charismatic son, Alexander the Great, could have moved.
Perhaps more important to the success of Philip’s army was the bullion dug from the ground in newly consolidated areas around Macedonia. This financial advantage allowed Philip to invest in engines of war that his disunited neighbors could not afford. No longer was it possible to wage war effectively within the context of homogenous citizen militias. The political organs of the classical city-states were mirror images of their military structures. A fundamentally new approach to waging war required the creation of a new, more inclusive, political model: a fundamental anathema to the political citizen of the classical city-states of Greece. The cities of Greece, reflecting a fossilized model of military organization, were therefore destined to sink into political obscurity.
Philip’s new styles of government and war cost a great deal of money to sustain. He began to look eastward, toward the Persian kingdom whose inherent military weaknesses were made obvious by its hiring of Greek mercenaries for its own army. Philip’s last military act was to send the lead elements of an invasion force to Persia in 336 b. c.e. He fell to an assassin’s blade a few months later. In 334 b. c.e. his son, Alexander the Great, moved across into Persian territory with about 50,000 men, at the core of which was the 15,000-man Macedonian phalanx. In three major battles over the course of four years, Alexander smashed the Persian army with a combination of his father’s flexible military organization and his own prominent and effective personal leadership, as well as good luck. He took key cities that preferred to hold out against him by siege, usually with terrible consequences for the inhabitants. Other cities more wisely yielded. Alexander employed all the best and latest technologies of artillery and siege engines developed up to that point. The Persians, fighting a defensive war with outdated technology and tactics that depended on numbers, were no match for Alexander’s flexible tactics and relentless advances. Whereas civilized Greeks went home in the winter, Alexander did not stop until his army mutinied in 325 b. c.e.
After Alexander died, perhaps from poison, in 323 b. c.e., the leaders among his Companions fell to bickering over his empire. The ensuing period from the death of Alexander in 323 b. c.e. to the death of the final Hellenistic ruler in 30 b. c.e. is commonly termed the Hellenistic period, the cultural hallmarks of which endured until the spread of Islam a thousand years later. The period is associated with the greatest mathematical and engineering advances made before the European Renaissance, although few of these theories were ever applied practically. The exceptions were those with obvious military applications. Alexander’s successors were not content merely to rule their respective kingdoms, and they engaged in frequent attacks on each other’s possessions. Their conflicts were financed by the enormous reserves of gold and silver the Persian kings had amassed in the preceding period. The Hellenistic period is thus especially noted for systematic research and trials in various sciences of war. In fact, all the most successful designs and techniques of warfare that developed before the early modern period were perfected during this three-hundred-year period. For example, Egyptian rulers Ptolemy Soter (367-283 b. c.e.), Ptolemy Philadelphus (r. c. 283-246 b. c.e.), and their descendants sponsored research in ballistics for their catapults. Many types of elaborate warships were designed and deployed by the various players whose possessions bor-deredthe Mediterranean Sea. Archimedes of Syracuse (287-212 b. c.e.), arguably the greatest mathematician in antiquity, is renowned for, among other things, the ingenious antisiege engines he developed as the Romans surrounded his home city in 212. Despite these advances, however, infantry armament remained relatively moribund and continued to depend on the essential principles laid down by Philip II and Alexander the Great in the fourth century b. c.e.
Weapons, Uniforms, and Armor The Macedonian pike was the signature weapon of the Macedonian infantry. A 20-foot pike also known as a sarissa, it evolved from the shorter spear carried by traditional Greek hop-lites, or infantry. The longer pike was useful in projecting contact between forces to a point farther forward of the advancing formation. Naturally this advantage was somewhat nullified if both formations were similarly equipped. The infantrymen advanced in a body called a phalanx. The formation was deeper than the traditional line of hoplites and depended essentially on pinning an enemy formation in advance of some other form of attack, usually by cavalry. Such a formation was practically invulnerable on even ground. The most surprising and distinctly Macedonian innovation might be that of training. There is little evidence to suggest that any of the Greeks before Philip II, with the exception of the Spartans, regularly trained in the art of moving as a formation.
The traditional Greek cavalry units were never decisive as offensive weapons, and few Greek cities placed any emphasis on their maintenance or deployment. Weapons carried by these earlier cavalries were usually restricted to various types of throwing javelins, giving the cavalry a limited role in any sustained action. An exception seems to be the Thessalian cavalry, famous among the Greeks throughout the classical period. No great success can be credited to the Thessalian cavalry by itself, however. It is perhaps no accident that the success of the Macedonian infantry came as a result of its integration with the Thessalian cavalry. The new Macedonian cavalry seemed to feature the use of lances rather than throwing javelins. Tactically, the cavalry was used to attack underdefended flanks of a formation already pressured by an advancing phalanx of pikemen or to exploit openings in enemy formations, created either during the infantry confrontation itself or after clumsy attempts by the opposing force to move laterally. Cavalry tactics were decisive in Alexander the Great’s battles with the main Persian army. This sort of action reaffirms the essential maxim of Greek infantry warfare, that success—and survival—depends on the integrity of the formation.
Alexander routinely deployed auxiliary squadrons of lightly armed spearmen and archers in fast-moving columns alongside the cavalry. These units were particularly effective in his later campaigns in Central Asia, which took him on narrow tracks over mountains. Lightly armed troops had always been a part of Greek warfare, but their association with cavalry units was an innovation of Alexander.
The Indians were arguably the first to employ elephants in battle, primarily as moving platforms from which to launch projectiles, and Alexander first encountered elephants in his march to India. Although Alexander himself did not employ elephants actively, his successors routinely did so, with mixed results. In addition to the larger Indian elephants, the Hellenistic rulers used the smaller, now nearly extinct, African elephant, not as a platform, but as a weapon and a shock tactic against infantry formations. Pyrrhus of Epirus (r. 297-272 b. c.e.) brought these elephants to Italy and used them against the Romans, who had never seen them before. At Heraclea in 280 b. c.e., Pyrrhus’s elephants drove off the Roman cavalry, whose horses also apparently had not seen elephants previously. In another confrontation at Ausculum in the following year, Pyrrhus deployed elephants successfully as a tactical substitute for Macedonian cavalry. However, after their rough introduction to elephants, the Romans had little trouble with them again. For their own part, the Romans rarely used elephants except for ceremony and ritual slaughter.
Although there are possible antecedents in the Near East, it is generally assumed that catapult technology was decisively advanced around 400 b. c.e., by the dictator Dionysius the Elder (r. 405-367 b. c.e.) in his defense of Sicily against the Carthaginians. One early design was the gastraphetes, or belly bow, a powerful bow that required a mechanical device to cock. The operator would lean forward with his abdomen, pinning the weapon against the ground to force a slide backward. These designs were essentially oversized bows designed to launch oversized arrows. By the time of Philip II sixty years later, these catapult designs had been advanced along two lines: one for stones that launched overhead and one for projectiles fired along a track. The latter design was adapted both for regular bolts and for round projectiles made of lead. The most effective of these were powered by torsion created by wrapped bundles of human hair or animal sinew. Alexander brought these weapons on his advance into Persian territory, and they proved decisive in his early sieges along the Mediterranean coastline. In the Roman period, artillery design rested upon that already developed by the Greeks and was lost as a science until the Middle Ages.
The advances made in artillery naturally revolutionized siege warfare. It became possible to sweep battlements clear while attempts were made to undermine city walls. Alexander built rolling towers on which teams armed with various forms of artillery could be deployed against defenders stationed on or near city walls. Similarly, towers and covering sheds could now more effectively shield engineers working against the wall itself. Although similar structures of various sorts had been used previously by many, including the
Athenians, it was not until the development of effective artillery for covering fire that the advantage swung decisively to attackers in siege warfare.
The warships developed during the Hellenistic period were not revolutionary but were, rather, ambitious adaptations made on proven designs. The adaptations generally seemed to increase both the number of rowers and the overall size of the ships. Many of these designs were impressive as engineering feats even if they were usually failures as advancements in warships. The most effective offensive ship remained the trireme, which had been developed in Corinth around the year 500 b. c.e. The trireme was 117 feet long and featured 170 rowers arranged in three tiers per side, a detachable ram of bronze on the front, and a platform from which a detachment of fifteen marines was prepared to attempt boarding of hostile vessels. Two sails could be erected to enhance speed downwind, although these were routinely put aside in battle conditions. A reconstructed trireme exists as a flagged vessel in the modern Greek navy, and teams of college students have tested its capabilities. There is only sketchy information on the exact configurations of the various Hellenistic models mentioned in ancient sources, but there is a consensus that however impressive was their appearance, their great size rendered them generally ineffective.
All these ships were vulnerable to any serious wave action and as many warships were lost in rough waters as were lost in battle. The sheer expense of building and maintaining a serious naval capacity was a limiting factor preventing most cities from accumulating more than a few ships, suitable for controlling piracy. However, the mere existence of a decentralized naval capacity gave many smaller cities on the islands and coasts a bargaining potential that tended to prevent their absorption by their more ambitious neighbors. In essence, these cities loaned or provided ships in return for their protection or independence. It is on this basis that the Romans made their first treaty with the Greek Neapolitans of Italy in 326 b. c.e. One might also argue that a complex of such diplomatic arrangements was a key factor in Rome’s first war with Carthage, known as the First Punic War (264-241 b. c.e.), wherein most of the conflict took place at sea. During the long, drawn-out war, both sides lost many hundreds of ships, many to weather. The Carthaginians capitulated essentially because their economy was ruined by competition in shipbuilding.
Military Organization The most characteristic element of the Hellenistic armies was a core phalanx of ten to thirty thousand pikemen, usually but not necessarily Macedonian, armed and trained in the Macedonian style. This core phalanx was augmented by attached units of various sizes devoted to specialty weapons or beasts, such as bows, slings, cavalry, and elephants. The phalanx was a permanent professional force; the auxiliary units, entirely allied or mercenary, were called upon in campaigns as needed. The amassing of military forces large enough to be credible threats to similarly configured rivals was an expensive proposition that militated against integrated training. Likewise, the resulting short nature of Hellenistic campaigns prevented the sort of successful integrated tactics that are associated with Alexander’s long and extremely profitable campaign to conquer and subdue Persia. One of the most debilitating qualities of such armies was the fickle loyalty of mercenaries.
The Hellenistic organization differs both from the classical and Roman military organizations in ways that correspond with the differing political models of each culture. In the case of the classical organization, armies were recruited from citizen ranks of individual communities, and their armament corresponded to their economic class. War was essentially the privilege of those who could afford to equip themselves. The Hellenistic model freed the army from the constraints of a city construct but chained it anew to the finances of a few powerful kings. The later Roman system overcame the limitations ofHellenistic armies by inventing more inclusive political models that fostered the creation of very large armies without having to rely on mercenaries. The Romans did use auxiliary specialty units provided by allies, but these units never represented a numerical majority of the Roman army, whereas they were always the preponderant proportion of Hellenistic armies.
Doctrine, Strategy, and Tactics Two types of warfare evolved significantly in the Hellenistic period. There were the innovations made in set-piece battle warfare and those made in the techniques of siege warfare. The second of these was largely a function of technology and finance. From the time of Alexander forward, no city could reasonably risk outlasting a well-equipped besieging army. The innovations in set-piece battles were, however, a function of tactics and training. In general, the most successful examples of Hellenistic warfare featured the functional flexibility of well-trained and tactically integrated infantry and cavalry forces deployed against opponents without these advantages. This clear distinction is evident in Alexander’s battles against the main Persian army at Issus and Gaugamela.
In 333 b. c.e. Alexander faced the main army of the Persians commanded by King Darius III himself. The battle took place at Issus, where Asia Minor joins the Levantine coast, and a river divided the two forces. Darius, commanding a numerical advantage in troops, took an early lead with a cavalry advance from his left against Alexander’s Thessalian cavalry on Alexander’s right. The disciplined Thessalians held while Alexander’s cavalry crossed through the weak left of the Persian infantry and wheeled against the Persian center. The right side of the Macedonian phalanx crossed over, and the battle was essentially won in that moment, despite Persian success on their own right side of the battle. The Persians could not counter the combined attack.
Two years later, Alexander and Darius faced each other again, this time at Gaugamela, east of the northern Tigris River. Here, once again, Darius seized the initiative with an attempt to stretch his own lines in a flanking move to Alexander’s right and with a simultaneous chariot charge through Alexander’s center. The chariot attack was easily nullified by lightly armed troops stationed in Alexander’s front ranks, thereby frustrating Darius’s diversion from his own flanking attempt. Alexander immediately exploited obvious gaps appearing in the Persian center as the Persian infantry attempted to extend to their own left. Alexander charged through that gap, cutting the Persian army in half. The advantage was won because the Persians were unable to make a simple lateral movement in formation.
The Macedonian generals dividing Alexander’s empire styled themselves kings and continued to rely on the physical elements of army deployments developed by Philip and Alexander. All continued to rely on Macedonian-style phalanxes as the literal centerpieces of their armies. They augmented these forces from a variety of sources and employed specialist mercenary attachments, as did Alexander.
In most armies of the Hellenistic period, elephants were added. However, Alexander’s true military advantages had come from his tactical integration of forces with deliberate flexibility. Nevertheless, the Hellenistic monarchs, to their ultimate peril, increasingly ignored these principles. One can see this clearly in the Battle of Raphia in 217 b. c.e. between the Hellenistic kings Ptolemy Philopator (r. 221-205 b. c.e.) and Antiochus the Great (242-187 b. c.e.). Here, the armies, each including a large number of elephants, were more or less evenly matched. Both kings placed their phalanxes in the center of the lines. From the centers outward, various allied, specialist, and mercenary contingents, then cavalry, then elephants were deployed. Antiochus’s elephants, stationed on his own right, charged Ptolemy’s elephants directly opposite, successfully driving them off and leaving Ptolemy’s cavalry holding the left. Antiochus sent his cavalry against Ptolemy’s cavalry, then his mercenaries and allies against Ptolemy’s. Although Antiochus was initially successful, he never committed his phalanx. Instead, intent upon chasing Ptolemy’s left side from the field, he failed to notice that Ptolemy’s right had prevailed against his own left, leaving his own phalanx dangerously vulnerable. The ensuing destruction was inevitable; all Antiochus got for this expense was the elephants he captured from Ptolemy. Both sides brought elaborate professional armies to the field; neither side understood integrated tactics.
This fundamental failure of integration was the critical factor in the ultimate demise of the once-dominant Macedonian armies. The Romans later learned the same lessons as had the Macedonians, but the Romans continued to apply those lessons to changing circumstances. The first two major confrontations between the two powers were Cynoscephalae and Pydna. In the Battle of Cynoscephalae (197 b. c.e.) the Roman and the Macedonian armies were marching in the same direction on either side of a series of ridges; the two armies were in contact and skirmishing intermittently. The Macedonian king Philip V (238-179 b. c.e.) attempted to seize the initiative by mounting the heights between the armies. Here, the decisive moment came when the Roman right reacted quickly to the Macedonian move and destroyed the Macedonian left side before the formation was fully deployed. The Romans wheeled immediately behind the Macedonian right and destroyed it as well, despite its success against the Roman left.
At Pydna in 168 b. c.e., Philip V’s son Perseus (c. 212-c. 165 b. c.e.) faced the Romans in a similar contest. Here the Macedonians managed to deploy first but were unable to advance in good order over the uneven ground. The smaller detached Roman units, in contrast, were able to advance easily and sliced through the ragged Macedonian formations. They easily smashed the Macedonian left side and destroyed the entire Macedonian army shortly thereafter. In both of these battles, the Romans demonstrated clearly their superior tactical flexibility in the face of changing battlefield exigencies and against obvious advantages in training. Subsequent contests between Romans and Greeks tended to reaffirm these principles. Greek hegemony in the east existed after Pydna only on Roman sufferance.
Ancient Sources Information on Alexander the Great comes primarily from the ancient authors Arrian, Curtius Rufus, Diodorus Siculus, and
Plutarch. Arrian, a Greek citizen of Rome, served in the Roman government (c. 120-130 b. c.e.) and wrote in his retirement. His highly detailed and most reliable accounts of Alexander’s military campaigns are believed to have come from the campaign notebooks of Alexander’s general and friend, Ptolemy Soter, who later became king of Egpyt. Curtius Rufus lived and wrote in the first century c. e.; Diodorus Siculus lived and wrote in the first century b. c.e. and compiled a world history from the earliest times to the reign of Roman emperor Julius Caesar. Only the latter part of his work survives, however, covering Greek history in the fourth and third century b. c.e.
Plutarch (c. 50-125 c. e.), a Greek, is considered the greatest biographer of antiquity. He lived during the early days of the Roman Empire, and his work Bioiparalleloi (c. 105-115; Parallel Lives, 1579) compares and contrasts various pairs of Greek and Roman leaders. In this work, Alexander the Great is paired with Julius Caesar. Plutarch also provides biographies of some of Alexander’s successors, including the colorful Demetrius the City Besieger. Polybius (c. 200-c. 118 b. c.e.) covers some of the Hellenistic conflicts in the years up through the Romans’ arrival, as does Diodorus Siculus. Surviving chapters from the Roman writer Livy (59 b. c.e.-17 c. e.) also cover some of this conflict. Several ancient treatises on catapult technology by the authors Ctesibus, Hero of Alexandria, and Philon have survived and are available in English translations.
Further Reading
Anglim, Simon, et al. Fighting Techniques of the Ancient World, 3000 B. C.-A. D. 500: Equipment, Combat Skills, and Tactics. London: Green-hill Books, 2002.
Billows, Richard A. Antigonos the One-Eyed and the Creation of the Hellenistic State. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Bosworth, A. B. Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Buckler, John. Phillip IIand the Sacred War. New York: E. J. Brill, 1989.
Chaniotis, Angelos. War in the Hellenistic World: A Social and Cultural History. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005.
Green, Peter. Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Gruen, Erich S. The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Morrison, J. S. Greek and Roman Oared Warships. Oxford, England: Oxbow Books, 1996.
Shipley, Graham. The Greek World After Alexander, 323-30 B. C. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Spence, I. G. Historical Dictionary of Ancient Greek Warfare. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2002.
Randall S. Howarth
See also: Alexander the Great; Alexander the Great’s Empire; Antiochus the Great; Archimedes; Athens; Chaeronea, Battle of; Cynoscephalae, Battle of; Diadochi, Wars of the; Diodorus Siculus; Dionysius the Elder; Gau-gamela, Battle; Greco-Persian Wars; Hellenistic Greece; Issus, Battle of; Military History of Athens; Phalanx; Philip II of Macedonia; Philip V; Polybius; Ptolemy Soter; Pyrrhus; Technology; Trireme; Warfare Before Alexander; Weapons.
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