War and Society in the Greek World

Dr John Rich, Graham Shipley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000158809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The role of warfare is central to our understanding of the ancient Greek world. In this book and the companion work, War and Society in the Roman World, the wider social context of war is explored. This volume examines its impact on Greek society from Homeric times to the age of Alexander and his successors and discusses the significance of the causes and profits of war, the links between war, piracy and slavery, and trade, and the ideology of warfare in literature and sculpture.

1

Introduction: The limits of war

Graham Shipley

‘It’s going to be a mental warfare out there’

(Martina Navratilova, before the ladies’ singles final, Wimbledon, July 1991)

War is often said to have been central to Greek society. As well as introducing some of the themes running through this volume of papers presented at seminars in the universities of Leicester and Nottingham during 1988–90, this paper aims to suggest, via a brief examination of the real scope and nature of Greek warlike activity as presented in ancient and modern writers, that its importance and effects in ‘real’ terms have been exaggerated. At the same time, however, it follows from this that war in ancient Greece was (and is) presented as more important than it ‘actually’ was for a variety of ideological reasons; when these are laid bare, Greek society is better understood.¹

For modern historians, the issue of war is sometimes posed in terms of the need to understand it in order to help future statesmen prevent it. As Michael Howard puts it, ‘war is only a particular kind of social conflict … the problem is the control of social conflict as such; not simply of war’ (1984, 11–12; emphases original). It is possible to doubt, however, whether many historians have in fact treated war in the wider social context Howard advocates; on an earlier page (ibid. 7) he observes that historians as a profession have tended to take the history of war for granted, focusing instead on the political techniques used to prevent it.

As ancient historians, we cannot prevent the wars we study; what, then, should be our aim? Some may regard it as a hallmark of western ‘civilization’ that intellectual pursuits can be carried out in a pure, disinterested spirit; but in reality no historian can be, or should be, wholly disinterested. There is a sense in which ancient society can be a test-bed for more widely applicable models of social interaction; and in the case of warfare, we can study it with the hope of understanding better the role played by war in human societies. Equally, since Greece and Rome are often used, and all too often misleadingly, as comparanda for other periods and places, it is important to question the received understanding of those societies.

Greek warfare then and now

War, warfare, wartime

To begin at the beginning: there is a need to define terms. To talk about ancient war as if it was the same as modern war – either implicitly, by refusing to define war at all and using the word as if we knew what it meant (as some writers still seem to do), or explicitly, by defining ancient war in similar terms to modern war – would be to privilege the ancient world, making it magically distant and immune from criticism. We would disable ourselves from making a rigorous examination of ancient concepts of war, thus legitimizing the socially sanctioned ideology of the times. The ancient experience of war would be made ‘safe’; we would be treating it as if it was just like the modern experience of war and could tell us nothing new about the nature of human conflict in general.

The usual Greek word for violent inter-communal conflict is polemos, correctly rendered in English, depending on the context, as ‘war’, ‘warfare’, or ‘wartime’. A brief examination of the use of polemos by classical authors reveals differences between its connotations and those of ‘war’. In early authors polemos is mostly a general term – simply, as it were, ‘fighting’ – apparently without a strong implication of a bounded segment of time; phrases such as ‘the Median war’ or ‘the Ionian war’ occur occasionally in Thucydides (ho Mēdikos polemos, 1. 90; ho Ionikos polemos, 8. 11), but seem to become regular only in the fourth century. A specific war is usually called simply ‘the such-and-suches’, a neuter plural adjective (sc. ‘things’ or ‘affairs’). Thus we see, for example, ‘the Trojan affairs’ (ta Trōïka; e.g. Thuc. 1. 3), or ‘the Median affairs’ (ta Medika; e.g. Herodotos, 1. 1). References to wars in the plural form, polemoi, are also rare (they are most common in Homer, where the word rather means ‘fighting’).

Singular events?

To refer, therefore, to ‘the Lelantine war’ or ‘the Persian wars’, as we so readily do, may be to impose surreptitiously the modern usage according to which we regularly speak of a war; a definite event, so to speak. It seems possible, indeed, that our habit of giving ‘war’ a capital W – a distinction ancient authors had no way of making – distances wars even further from generalness, emphasizing the specialness of these ‘events’. The Peloponnesian war looks like a particular occurrence of a general social phenomenon; the name makes the reader think, consciously or unconsciously, of other wars. The Peloponnesian War, on the other hand, is a singular event with a name unique to itself, an event that was just waiting to happen; an almost human character in the historical drama, whose individuality cannot be dissolved and whose story is subject to explanation only in its own terms.

I suspect that Greek writers did not (originally, and for the most part) see wars as this kind of event. For Herodotos the ‘Median things’ were surely far more than just a series of battles. Our usual renderings of the titles of ancient books perpetuate this conceptual elision. Despite the title of the Penguin Classics version, Thucydides did not write a History of the Peloponnesian War, but a Histories (historiai). In fact, no author before Strabo and Diodoros appears to have referred to what we call the Peloponnesian war as ho Peloponnesiakos polemos.¹ Works by late authors, too, such as Appian’s Syriaka and Mithridatika (assuming they were so titled by the author or his contemporaries), become books about wars: The Syrian Wars, The Mithridatic Wars, and so on. It may even be that polemos, let alone polemoi, did not feature in the title of any classical historian’s work (in contrast to the Romans; one immediately thinks of Caesar’s De bello Gallico, Sallust’s Bellum Jugurthinum, and so on).

Nor should we imagine that the names we give ancient wars are in any sense ‘correct’. When we refer to the Peloponnesian war, we are of course seeing it from the point of view of those who fought against the Peloponnesians. This does not necessarily betray a preference for Athens; the war has long been known by that name, even by the earlier generations of English scholars for whom Sparta was the ideal state. It does, however, leave us predisposed to see the war only from the point of view of the Athenians who wrote about it. From Sparta’s point of view we could just as well refer to the ‘Athenian war(s)’, as Cartledge does in his history of classical Sparta (1979). Strict even-handedness, in fact, would dictate ‘Spartan-Athenian’ (which is no harder to say than ‘Peloponnesian’). Similarly, should we not attempt to see the wars of 490 and 480–479 BC as Greco-Persian, rather than Persian, wars? It is reasonable to reply that established proper names lose their original semantic connotations; who but a historian immediately thinks of hellenization when someone mentions the hellenistic period? As with period names, historians will undoubtedly continue to use the old names (as the contributors to this volume do) because they are generally recognized and can be helpful in singling out particular conflicts (see below, however, on the dangers of treating wars as watertight compartments of time). Nevertheless, though convenience is all very well, we should consciously deconstruct such names even as we continue to use them.

Beginnings and ends

We often regard a war as a definite, and on the whole short, period of time with a beginning and end, two moments between which a particular state of being is supposed to pertain; but we also think of the same war in different ways. We speak of the second world war as an event, but exactly when did it begin and end? Did it cease to be a purely European war only when Japan and America joined in? Or was it a world war from the moment in 1939 when the British government, speaking ‘on behalf of’ the British empire, deemed that a state of war existed between the United Kingdom and Germany? That might well be the view of citizens of the British commonwealth, who are often irritated to hear that Britain (with Greece) ‘stood alone’ in 1940; alone, that is to say, but for half the population of the globe.

Declarations of war should not deceive; they are for public consumption. Nothing objectively changes at the moment when war is declared, or officially halted; war may effectively have begun before it is declared, or may not begin until months later, as in the case of the ‘phoney war’ (phoney only to the British!) of 1939–40. The act of declaring war is primarily a legal, ceremonial, and ideological statement.

Even in the case of antiquity, we are hard put to it to find firm beginnings and ends to ‘wars’ in a way that would explain anything. Given that the Greeks seem to have had a less strong concept than we do of wars as particular episodes, our use of the term to denote such an episode may not always be the only possible use.

Temporal boundaries within wars are not exactly unproblematic either. Within the second world war, people speak of separate wars: the desert war, the Japanese war. Some episodes defy strict definition; was the ‘battle of the Atlantic’ (the struggle, over several years, between the merchant convoys of the western powers and their navies on the one side, and the German ships and U-boats on the other) a battle or a war? It all depends how you view it. Similarly with the Peloponnesian war. Thucydides certainly means us to regard the various episodes of warfare between 431 and 403 as a unity and as distinct from what came before and after. We do not necessarily have to agree with him, however; and although we habitually refer to the Peloponnesian war, we often subdivide it into phases such as the Archidamian war and the Ionian war, with a gap in between containing the peace of Nikias and the Sicilian expedition.¹ More importantly, however, we also habitually refer to a ‘first Peloponnesian war’ in the 450s. Why not, then, refer to 431–404 as the second Peloponnesian war? Or, for that matter, to the Peloponnesian war(s) of c.459–403?

This is not a flippant point. I mean to show that we do an injustice to the past if we straitjacket events into discrete episodes without recognizing that there are alternatives, and that our choice of dates is itself a statement.

A special state of being

Beginnings and ends of wars are often marked by rituals. Greek wars, to be legitimate, had to be ‘heralded’; the Romans had spears cast into enemy territory and opened the temple of Janus. Even what the sociologists call ‘primitive’ warfare might have a definite end; Sillitoe describes ‘primitive’ war (i.e. all war before the era of explosive weapons) as ‘a state of hostility which may be peacefully settled at some stage’ (in Kuper and Kuper (eds) 1989, 890). To this extent we are certainly entitled to believe that the Greeks could think of ‘a war’ as a certain episode in time. But did the Athenians after 431 think of themselves as being continuously ‘at war’ with the Spartans, particularly during the close season for hoplites, in the same way that the British people undoubtedly thought of themselves as being ‘at war’ with Hitler for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year between 1939 and 1945? Did they conceive of a special state of being, governing all other activities? Did the ‘government’ take special powers to control the population? Were normal civic rights suspended for the duration? Such all-pervading connotations of ‘war’ are more appropriate to the world of the modern nation state.

Strict limits cannot be imposed on brute reality. Even today our definition of when a war is not a war is not well worked-out. Was there a Falklands war in 1982? Many people now say so; but when did it begin? Was it officially recognized as such? Britain never declared war; indeed, states don’t do that any more, chiefly perhaps because of the United Nations charter and the desire not to incur a charge of aggression. To avoid calling the episode a war can now, perhaps, be seen as a strategy for deflecting criticism at home and abroad; at the same time, the British public were not discouraged from seeing the episode as a war, thus enabling all the emotive language of jingoism to be mobilized in support of the British government’s actions.

Definitions of the events called ‘wars’ are relative, and the choice of a particular one carries ideological baggage with it. This will be as true of the Greeks as of modern people; and it is no less true of the nature of civic existence in wartime than of the chronological delimitation of a particular war.

Wars and states

Dictionary-writers often require wars to be waged by states; the Concise Oxford Dictionary (Allen (ed.) 1990) gives the primary sense of ‘war’ as ‘armed hostilities between esp. nations’. The archetypal modern war thus involves two states. Garlan (1966, 23) even says, ‘By definition, so to speak, it [war] excludes all hostile relations before the formation of states.’ Such a definition, strictly applied, would obscure the points of contact between state wars and other kinds, and Garlan himself goes on to discuss ‘prejudicial war’ (such as Homeric war) as a species of war. In practice we do not use ‘war’ in the narrow sense, or we would not speak, as we do without any metaphorical intent, of guerrilla wars, the war against terrorism, class war, and so on. (Pure metaphors such as ‘the war of the sexes’ are another thing altogether; as are jocular appellations like the ‘cod war’, referring to a dispute between Britain and Iceland over fishing rights, which, though not without violent incidents, was chiefly a ‘war of words’.) In speaking of antiquity, too, we use ‘war’ (as Roman writers used bellum, perhaps more readily than Greek writers used polemos) to denote violent episodes not involving two states, such as Pompey’s war against the pirates, the Bellum Catilinarium, or the Bellum Servile.

Warfare clearly transcends the nation state; there were wars long before the modern states system existed. What is important is to merge the concept of wars into that of social violence in general, and even dissolve the boundaries between particular episodes of peace and war. We need a concept of war that can include not only wars as disparate in size and nature as the so-called Falklands war, the Gulf war of 1991, the Cold War, and the second world war, but also wars of independence, guerrilla wars, terrorist campaigns, and the raids of the Border Reavers.

It may be useful to consider warfare as one part of a larger spectrum of organized societal violence. At a given time in a given place, the prevailing level of violence could, in principle, be measured against such a scale. Peaks of activity, or episodes of a particular form (inter- rather than merely intra-communal) or scale (regional rather than local in their impact), would then represent wars. Of course, exactly where we draw the line beyond which we consider an episode to be a war is an ideological question; not all cases will be easy ones (was the Falklands war more than local?), and the dividing lines will be different in different value-systems.

The remainder of the spectrum might be composed of other forms of organized violence, such as those listed above. Many of the studies in this and the accompanying volume deal with such non-orthodox forms of warlike activity, such as piracy (Alastar Jackson, David Braund), banditry (Keith Hopwood), and colonization (Tracey Rihll).

Causes

Accepting, then, that there are episodes that we can usefully, if loosely, class as wars, that to speak of wars is not to divide them absolutely from other forms of violence, and t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: The limits of war
• 2 War in the Hebrew Bible
• 3 Hoplites and Homer: Warfare, hero cult, and the ideology of the polis
• 4 War and raids for booty in the world of Odysseus
• 5 War, slavery, and settlement in early Greece
• 6 Asia unmanned: Images of victory in classical Athens
• 7 Farming and fighting in ancient Greece
• 8 Warfare, wealth, and the crisis of Spartiate society
• 9 Warfare, economy, and democracy in classical Athens
• 10 Alexander and the Macedonian invasion of Asia: Aspects of the historiography of war and empire in antiquity
• 11 The glorious dead: Commemoration of the fallen and portrayal of victory in the late classical and hellenistic world
• Index