History of Warfare: The Wars of the Ancient Greeks

Cassell History of Warfare

by Victor Davis Hanson

The Ancient Greeks--who believed war was the most important thing humans do--bequeathed to the West an incomparable military legacy that still influences the structure of armies and doctrine. Passing through a full millennium of war that begins with the rise of the city-state, this colorful portrait of Greek culture explains why their unique approach to fighting was so successful and so relentless. Scrutinize its role at the very heart of classical life, agrarian duels, the emergence of Athenian and Spartan power, the development of war as a specialized science, and the collapse of Greek warfare after Alexander the Great. From Peloponnesia in the 5th century BC to the Hellenisation of the western world, it's an unforgettable tale of battle.

Genres: History, Ancient History, War, Nonfiction, Military History, Military Fiction, Greece

224 pages, Paperback

First published May 28, 2002

About the author

Victor Davis Hanson was educated at the University of California, Santa Cruz (BA, Classics, 1975), the American School of Classical Studies (1978-79) and received his Ph.D. in Classics from Stanford University in 1980. He lives and works with his family on their forty-acre tree and vine farm near Selma, California, where he was born in 1953.

Reviews

[Josho Brouwers · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a very general introduction to ancient Greek warfare that will only be of interest to those who are completely unfamiliar with the topic. Hanson's first chapter deals with "Early Greek fighting", here dated 1400 to 750 BC, and is clearly out of his depth when dealing with Mycenaean and "Dark-Age" warfare. His treatment of Homeric warfare borrows liberally from Hans van Wees's seminal treatments of the topic.

Predictably, the second chapter, which focuses on the period between 750 and 450 BC, is entitled, "The rise of the city-state and the invention of Western warfare". He gets to repeat a lot of material that he has gone over time and again with the same lack of source criticism that has marked much of his other work. The other chapters are more or less rote summaries of major military events: the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars plus some later developments (chapter 3), the Macedonian war-machine (chapter 4), and finally Alexander and the successors (chapter 5). The conclusion, entitled "The Hellenic legacy", retreats yet more of the same tiresome material that was already treated extensively in his The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece and is completely superfluous.

The glossary is too basic to be useful. The suggestions for further reading tend to be good, even if the reader is not generally pointed in the direction of works that disagree heavily with Hanson's own notions, though his recommendation of the "excellent articles" in A.B. Lloyd's Battle In Antiquity is commendable.

[Rick Brindle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book that does exactly what it says on the tin. From 1400BC through to Alexander and beyond, this book gives a great insight into how the Greeks fought, and their impact on modern warfare. Many modern parallels are drawn, and the analysis of Alexander is interesting and unusual, flying in the face of popular opinion, but still balanced. An excellent, very informative read.

[Jeni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good overview; really liked it.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book we find out something quite intriguing--how the author pays to keep his farm in operation and at the same time lament the passing of the yeoman farmers of the Greek classical age while at the same time dishing out unpleasant contemporary prophecy about the similar demise of our own independent family farmers.  This volume finds the author in a somewhat gloomy mood about Greek warfare [1] and able to give a great deal of insight about the changes in Greek warfare over the period from Mycenaean Greece to the close of the Hellenistic period.  These changes are notable and worthwhile, not least because they demonstrate increasing violence in the heart of the West and its rulers and provide some supporting evidence to various biblical understandings, although the author shows no interest whatsoever in biblical history or morality.  Even so, this book is an example of an accessible popular book of military history that may not burnish the author's reputation in the eyes of his fellow classicists, but certainly helped make him a household name among those of us in the misfit world of scholarly military history.

This book is a glossy and compact volume of just over 200 pages, part of the Smithsonian History of Warfare, edited by noted "Face of Battle" military historian John Keegan.  The book itself begins with a helpful map list and a list of Greek wars that took place over the (more than a) millennium of history covered in his volume.  The author introduces the Greek military legacy by pointing out the historical parallels between contemporary efforts at building Western-style militaries and the original of the species.  The author talks about early Greek fighting in a relatively short chapter (1) that spans the history from 1400-750 and includes the fragmentary information we know from Homer and from archaeological research about the fighting of that time.  Considerably more time is spent looking at the rise of the city state and the invention of hoplite warfare (2).  AFter this the author looks at the history and ramifications of the series of wars fought between 490 and 362 that included the Persian Wars, first and second Peloponnesian Wars, and the wars of the brief Theban hegemony (3).  The author then writes about the military revolution wrought by Philip of Macedon during his lifetime that ultimately doomed the independent Greek poleis (4) before concluding with a discussion of Alexander the Great's destruction of Persia and the bloody warfare of the Hellenistic period (5) before ending with a downbeat discussion of the Hellenic legacy and various closing material including a glossary, appendix of notable Greek warriors, suggestions for further reading, statistics of the casualties of ancient battles, and index and photo credits.

There are a few things to say about this book that are notable.  For one, this book appears to be a very worthy textbook for undergraduate (or maybe even graduate) coursework on Greek warfare.  It is gorgeous, filled with worthwhile maps and photos, and gives a broad overview of Greek warfare along with some great suggestions for further reading through the subtle use of classical citations.  The author clearly has something to say about the changing warfare of the Greeks and his own preference for hoplite warfare fought by conservative agrarians, whether he is speaking about Greek warfare or our own.  The author's comparison of our own age with the rising inequality and declining civic virtue of the Hellenistic age is notable and concerning.  The book as a whole is accessible and it manages to shine a light on aspects of Greek military history that are seldom noted by those who are not very well read in the classics or in Greek history as a whole.  By and large, this is a book to celebrate, even if it has a melancholy approach to making Greek military history relevant to today's readers.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

[GoldGato · Rating 4 out of 5]

When reading the many myths of ancient Greece, one factor always stands out...constant battle. From Minoan to Mycenaean to Achaean to Dorian to Spartan to Macedonian, each tribe fought, fought, fought, fought. The Greeks felt that war, not culture or art, best symbolized civilization. This volume starts with the legendary wars of Troy and ends with the domination of Alexander the Great.

Well laid-out, with each chapter corresponding to a specific era, the reader never loses interest nor does the author get too wordy. Major battles get plated diagrams of troop activity and the Classical Greek phalanx is well-explained for its influence on medieval pikemen.

Recommended to anyone studying or just plain interested in the city-states and their armour plates.

Book Season = Summer (before the harvest)

[Jeffry · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Hanson ... he edits here. Kind of a Greek war 101.

[Victor Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this read immensely, and only came to it after watching, then reading 300 and its sequel. I knew this stuff happened, but what surprised me in going down this rabbit hole was just how accurate the books are. Aside from the outlandish (and completely visually stunning and engaging) visual aesthetic, these books/movies stay true to historical fact, as best we know it, down to a remarkable degree of detail. Also, I'm glad I finally got around to reading my doppelganger! I've known about Victor Davis Hanson ever since the first time I ever googled myself after the invention of, well, Google. It's about time I got around to him!

This book disturbed me on a deeper level than I expected. I wasn't disturbed by the rampant violence, I already knew about that. What got me is just how quickly history moves. We all know how fast our history moves. I mean we've had penicillin and the polio vaccine and airplanes and women's rights and the internet all come on in pretty quick succession recently, just to name a few. But we also suffer from historical amnesia, the tendency to remember (both literally and culturally) the detail and the importance of events in proportion to their temporal proximity to us. In other words, it's intuitive for me to feel like 1945 and 1975 were totally different worlds, but what about 395 BCE and 365 BCE? My intuition says "Nah, just a roll of the dice, that was Ancient Greece or Rome or something". But read this book, and you'll be schooled... This short period saw the "birth of western warfare" (authors words), the absolute routing of the Persian army and navy, the invention of Greek naval battle, the destruction of Athens (the city), and the establishment of the Athenian naval empire. Imagine being alive then. Imagine how fast history seemed to move in this one human generation... Then came the Peloponnesian wars, then came Alexander the Great, et cetera. I was left with a shattered, hollow kind of feeling. Like it's not just that "my" history operates on a scale of decades and "their" history moves on a scale of centuries. Maybe in fact all history moves at the same kind of pace and level of detail, and if that's true, then just imagine how many "bubbles" both geographical and temporal--like "the Aegean of the late fourth century" bubble--have roiled in this incredibly vast cauldron from prehistory to present? It's disturbing.

Three books have ruined history for me: Guns, Germs, and Steel, The 48 Laws of Power, and The Better Angels of Our Nature. Because these "flyover" books cast all of history in very specific way, and talk about long-term trends. They're about the "temperature" of the cauldron, it's size and shape and substance, which minimizes the importance of the minute detail of individual bubbles. It's a strain to carry both "levels" of paradigms simultaneously, to enjoy reading about "the Aegean of the late fourth century" as it's own little bubble of history, with Steven Pinker's voice constantly echoing in my head about homicides and battle deaths per hundred thousand, or Jared Diamond's about the barley crop and division of labor in the Mediterranean. Nonetheless, I overcame the challenge and enjoyed this book immensely, and came away with a better understanding and appreciation for the profound developments of this place and time. To conclude with the author's words:

I leave the reader with the paradox that in the modern age, the western manner of fighting bequeathed to us from the Greeks is so destructive and so lethal that we have essentially reached an impasse. Few non-westerners wish to meet our armies in battle ... But the state of technology and escalation is now such that any inter-western conflict would have the opposite result of its original Hellenic intent--abject slaughter on both sides would result, rather than quick resolution. Whereas the polis Greeks discovered shock battle as a glorious method of saving lives and confining conflict to an hour's worth of heroics between armoured infantry, their successors in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds sought to unleash the entire power of their culture to destroy one another in a horrendous moment--and twentieth-century man has at last realized just that moment.

[Luka Novak · Rating 1 out of 5]

Davis Hanson is one of those scholars who develop an idea they see as earth shattering and then view everything through its lens. in this case the idea is that ideal way of Greek war was a citizen militia composed of farmers who bought their own equipment, marched to war based on consensus among similar citizen farmers who ran their polis through assembly, fought a short, single day battle and marched home to work their farms once again. Anything that doesn't fit that image is bad, unGreek, distasteful and either tyranny or mob rule. Earlier period is rejected because elites monopolised the power, later is rejected because mob took the power. In his view power has to be held by citizen farmers of certain means, not too rich and not too poor. it shouldn't be concentrated in the hands of aristocracy nor diluted in the hands of landless poor. And of course heavy hoplite infantryman in phalanx fighting similar warrior on the other side is the only way to fight. None of that light infantry or slingers rabble. also none of the aristocratic cavalry either. and most certainly no navy!

Most of this book is VDS ranting how Greeks failed to live up to this idea and ideal, starting with Peloponnesian War that introduced the nasty and corrupting concepts of all season warfare, mercenaries, light troops, raiding, sieges. And of course need to find means to finance all that and that was done through another nasty mean, the taxes. And to top all that Athens were relying on navy. Navy! You can almost hear him hiss when he describes how filthy, low born sailors recruited from the dregs of society and city's poor demanded same political rights as upstanding citizen farmers.

And all of that culminates in chapter on Alexander's war which is basically just page after page of ranting how many people his army killed (on or off battlefield) and enslaved, how many cities were sacked and how much loot that brought in. Thankfully he managed to include couple of pages describing how Macedonians fought, what their army was composed off and how his conquests were done and which battles he fought but that seems more like an afterthought.

Overall he is laser focused on proper way to fight wars "the western way of war" relying on maximum application of military force and seeking decisive battle so war ends quickly, civilian oversight and civilian and military living not in isolation from each other and that idea has merit. But he also ignores (deliberately?) long list of examples where western world deliberately chose the opposite. But this idea is perhaps something that should be covered elsewhere, sufficient to say he tries to apply to Greek world in one size fits all solution. Sadly this means this book is more of a vessel to get that idea across in simplified manner to reach wider audience than overview of how Greeks fought. So if you are expecting to learn a lot about hoplite equipment and tactics you will be disappointed. It is there but buried under so much preaching and selling his idea(l) that you'll need to work to separate the two.

Too bad because this could have been a nice, if short, introduction to Greek warfare.

[Gerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

One in a twenty-one-volume series, The Cassell History of Warfare, this covers, in 228 pages, the wars of the ancient Greeks (hence its title) from 1250 (Troy) to 146 (hello, Rome) B.C. The first five hundred years doesn’t get that much coverage, much of it being Greece’s “Dark Age,” Dorian invasions and all. It’s when we get to the “Classical” and “Hellenistic” periods where Dr. Hanson gets to his main points.

It’s during these periods when war “progresses” from “a quasi-ritualized warfare in which fighting was frequent but did not seem to imperil the cultural, economic and political renaissance of the Hellenic city state” (p. 52) through the full-scale warfare between alliances (the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars), culminating in wars and battles of whole-scale slaughter and enslavement starring Philip II, Alexander the Great, and a host of would-be Successors. Warfare has been in the latter stage since then (witness Hiroshima and Nagasaki), although the spate of recent rebel actions and internal struggles indicates a lessening of scope.

Dr. Hanson is not a fan of Alexander. His boy wonder is a far cry from the mostly noble representations of him in literature past (and the 2004 movie).

There is no examination of any of the battles themselves, but Marathon, Platea, and Gaugamela are pictured as representations of the stages of progress. Wars were also expensive; there are many examples of costs.

Worth the read; we seem to have inherited more from Ancient Greece than just epic poetry and classical art.

[Andrew Ives · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a heavy-going, high-brow academic book chronicling the evolution of Ancient Greek warfare, stategike and taktike since the dawn of intrahellenic, almost gentlemanly and honourable, fisticuffs up until the Roman era where the usual result of battles was 'total war' mass slaughter. Interesting though this may be, the book itself is rather hard work to read through with full attention, combining dense academic text, long chapters and plenty of unfamiliar historic or Greek words to waylay the newcomer. Maps are printed in such a way with tiny text for places and army divisions, this book would really benefit from being printed about 50% larger, ideally in hardback. Such a quality product warrants it too, as this is very well-written, intelligent, impeccably proofread and edited, with occasional maps and photos of quality too. I'd venture to say this is the best American book I've ever read, on any subject. However, it isn't particularly accessible and won't be for everyone, probably only appealing to aficionados of the subject, Greece or its history. I found the last page or two particularly insightful. 4.25/5

[Ella Grunt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book packs a huge wallop of historical fact and perspective in a small, nicely illustrated package. Its sure to fire anyone up about Ancient Greece, and it has a great thesis regarding Western warfare. This book is great to tear apart over a long weekend, its fairly brief, and worth re reading every decade or so. Very clearly and concisely written!

[Sara Laor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent overview. I never realized how warlike the ancient Greeks were. We choose to talk about theater, poetry, architecture and democracy -- but there was a bellicose foundation to all.

[Rocky · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much to learn.

This is a very good place to start.

[PG · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book!

[Tres Herndon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned a lot, which may mean nothing to some. If you're already conversant with Greek warfare, you won't learn much, except VDH's opinions. I would argue that they are worth the price of admission. I never expected him to compare Alex the Great to Hitler, but he did in a convincing way.

As to learn, I learned about Greek combat in the old times and in the Dark Ages, how things changed in the classic hoplite era, and how they changed again in the Hellenistic era. This era is most relevant now because, as the author says, if we in the West prosecuted war as Alexander did we probably would not be alive to write about it.

But then again, because we are so timid in war now, such as in Libya, our ancestors would not recognize us, and would not respect us, because our new way yields only death, not results.

The Greek way of war is important to know now as it was long ago. I highly recommend this book.

[Juliew. · Rating 4 out of 5]

An account of the wars of the ancient greeks starts with the collapse of Mycenaean greece and ends with the Roman conquest.The first chapter covers early greek fighting and includes Mycenaean warfare and tactics,armour, and the palace systems of the times.It also discusses the Homeric battlefield.Other highlights for me in the chapters were hoplite battle gear,tactics,the so-called nomima or rules of battle and background on Sparta.

The battles covered are too numerous to discuss here but mentioned are Thermopylae,Salamis,Peloponnesian,Chaeronea,Granicus and Gaugamela.Each being discussed over a few pages if not less.The book shows the progression and advancement of warfare throughout.It was not only educational but seemed well researched with the exception of a few conclusions.I would recommend it for the warfare enthusiast.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned a lot about the Greeks, including how much we just don't know. The ancient Greeks are like Sherlock Holmes, someone adds an "element" to the character in a film, and then 100 years later we think that element of the character is a true known fact.

The author writes quite a bit about what the Greeks' military history says about their changing moral values, which is a valuable aspect of the book.

[Alain · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have the time to read only two books on the nature of war, then you read this one and Keegan's "The face of battle".

This is concision, analysis, description and writing at its best. Most of Hanson's other books are repetitions of this one, with a bit more detail.

[Colin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, but too short.

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extremely strong book analyzing the development and execution of military strategy and tactics in the Athenian and Spartan cultures. It should be a core work in anyones study of military culture.

[Wanja · Rating 5 out of 5]

...pa i Grci se tukli!

[Yago de Artaza Paramo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very concise account of the military development of the Greek city-state.