The First Clash (26 page)

Greek warfare was much simpler than that fought by the Persians. Two armed bodies of men would form into a solid phalanx of bristling spears and then advance at the double and collide with one another on an open plain.
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Here, they stabbed, pushed, screamed, and kicked until one side gave way. Every hoplite went into battle carrying a large round shield
(hoplon)
that covered his left side as well as the right side of the man to his left. According to Thucydides, this caused a phalanx to move at an oblique angle as it advanced, as each man covered as much of the right side of his body as he could behind his neighbor’s shield. These densely packed hoplites could not maneuver easily, so an engagement soon resembled a rugby scrum, the difference being that each side was trying to kill the other.

Moreover, the men of the Greek phalanx had no respect for light troops, which made up the bulk of the Persian army. As Euripides commented in one of his plays:

Although every man who could afford the full hoplite panoply was expected to so equip himself, many peasants could not afford such an expensive purchase. It is unlikely that these peasants and urban poor were denied a chance to aid their city in time of war. In many cases, they probably played a critical role, but being despised by those of higher social standing (the hoplite class), they rarely received their due. In this regard, the Spartans at the Battle of Plataea brought seven helots for every hoplite, all of whom were armed and apparently joined in the battle. Herodotus, unfortunately, did not consider their accomplishments worthy of recording. It can be assumed, however, that thirty-five thousand or more armed helots accomplished quite a lot that has been lost to us.

Still, the core of any Greek city’s army was the phalanx, which came into existence for only one reason: to fight decisive, pitched battles. Unfortunately, as with almost everything else in ancient military history, one finds that there is no general agreement on how they did this. The debate currently breaks down into only two schools of thought, the orthodox and the heretical.
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The orthodox school maintains a traditional picture of the phalanx consisting of a dense formation of interlocked shields with typically eight or more ranks pushing one another forward in a tight mass. The heretics claim that this is an impossible way of fighting, as the crush of men would have made it impossible for individual hoplites to wield their weapons. They argue that instead of the compact mass, the phalanx fought in an open order like the Roman maniple, where every hoplite was given enough space to engage in individual combat. However, the heretics are substituting their imaginations for an overwhelming body of literature and archaeological evidence that supports the traditional view.

None of this should suppose that the phalanx did not sometimes fight in open order. The purpose of the phalanx push—the
othismos
—was to break open an opposing phalanx, and one can suppose that such an act could easily lead to individual fighting as one or both phalanxes began to lose cohesion. In fact, the center of the Greek phalanx at Marathon almost
broke under the pressure of facing overwhelming numbers and had to resort to individual combat for a time. However, when phalanxes engaged each other, individual combat in the Homeric tradition was the exception rather than the rule. The simple truth is that all of the time available for training a citizen army was spent on collective training as part of a phalanx, to make this formation as invincible as possible. Except for the Spartans, most Greeks did not have the time required to also hone individual fighting skills to a degree that would have made it practical to attempt it on the battlefield against an unbroken enemy.
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In summary, hoplite warfare amounted to a brief brutal encounter that put a heavy toll on the courage and discipline of the individual. Any moral weakness within the phalanx would destroy its cohesion and make it easy prey for the enemy. For this reason, those suspected of showing any sign of cowardice were severely punished. The Spartans, for instance, required a coward (trembler) to wear a beard on only one side of his face so that everyone knew he was only half a man.

THE WESTERN WAY OF WAR

V
ictor Davis Hanson and his supporters view the development of the phalanx and its employment as a shock instrument as the beginning of the “Western way of war.” He has theorized that the Western way of war has been far superior to the war-making ethos of any other culture and society for the last twenty-five hundred years and marks the Battle of Marathon as the first example of this superiority. Others, rallying around the standard of Professor John Lynn, say that the historical record is so fractured that no enduring influence is possible over time.
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It would be unforgivably neglectful to write a book on Marathon and fail to weigh in on this debate.

When I first read Hanson’s writings on the topic, I was not entirely convinced. After all, how could the Western way of war be declared superior to all others when it was bested by the Mongols and the armies of Islam, to name just two groups that have been more than a match for Western armies over the centuries? However, after years of reflection on the matter, I have become a convert and now stand in the minority of historians who find themselves in general if not complete agreement with Hanson.
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I should also admit that I enter this discussion with some trepidation, as it has become a rather uncivil battlefield itself. One former West Point history professor, Robert Bateman, has even gone so far as to refer to Hanson as the “devil” and called his work “a pile of poorly constructed, deliberately misleading intellectually dishonest feces.”
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According to Hanson, the Western way of war rests on five principles that first manifested themselves at Marathon:

It is hard to quibble with this analysis, because for the most part these principles have held up in every military conflict through most of the last twenty-five hundred years of history. Unfortunately, there are a number of places where the historical continuity appears to have been broken or where Western armies were decidedly inferior to those of other societies, such as against the Mongols or in the early decades of the Arab conquests. Hanson recognizes these gaps but never really confronts them or their implications in his writing. He believes that for every setback in battle Western armies suffered, he could list a hundred examples where the reverse was true, and therefore in the “big picture” rare counterexamples are mostly irrelevant. That, of course, is one of the problems with writing “big history” or creating a sweeping context in which to place twenty-five hundred years of warfare. There are always dozens of instances where the big picture is not correct in every particular or circumstance. However, that does not mean the theory is wrong on a macroscale. Although the comparison is not exact, I liken this to a person saying that quantum physics has proven Isaac Newton wrong in many particulars. This may be so, but Newton’s theories still explain almost everything observable to the human eye: Apples do still fall to earth when dropped.
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Likewise, I could hand a betting man a list of a hundred major battles between Western armies and those of other civilizations and tell him to pick the winners. Even if he did not know one whit of military history, he would win most of his bets by blindly checking off the Western side of each pair. If he was to use the same approach for wars and not just battles, he would get rich even quicker. For even when defeated in battle, Western states have shown a remarkable ability to absorb horrendous losses and in a short period of time reconstitute their armies and reenter the fray.

Lynn defines Hanson’s Western way of war (and I believe Hanson would accept this assessment) as follows: “In its mature form … [the] Western Way of War theory asserts a unique and continuous military culture that is dependent for much of its character on a societal and political culture that is equally unique and continuous. The conjunction of the two supposedly created the singular lethality of Western culture at war in comparison to the other traditions that grew up in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In short, it made the Europeans the ‘most deadly soldiers in the history of civilization.’ ”
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Hanson might qualify that statement by adding that they were the deadliest “on the battlefield,” as many cultures proved just as adept as the West at the mass slaughter of innocents.

Lynn counters this argument with “claims that a Western way of warfare extended with integrity for 2,500 years speaks more of fantasy than fact.”
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He presents numerous examples of this continuity being broken, starting with the differences between the Roman Empire and classical Greece. From there, he lays out how difficult cultural transmission would have been in the Dark Ages and through the Middle Ages. However, to me this line of argument misses some key points. First, Lynn agrees with Hanson that the way a society’s military fights reflects its culture, as it is adapted to the particular circumstances of the moment. The question should therefore be, is there a Western culture and has it had continuity over the last twenty-five hundred years? For if there is a distinct Western culture that has given rise to a particular societal framework, then by extension there must be a Western way of war that grew up alongside it. Simply put, the answer again has to be yes. Rome may have been different, but the Romans looked back to Greece for many aspects of their civilization, including for their early military system. The same holds true for every Western historical epoch since then, which have all looked back on Greco-Roman antecedents for guidance and direction. How, then, does one argue that Western art, philosophy, and literature can trace their roots back to Greece and Rome, but Western military institutions are not permitted to do so?

In truth, any society, nation, or civilization is at its root a collection of its stories. Military institutions have always glorified their past, and they devote considerable time reflecting back on both their own accomplishments and those of others. On a basic level, soldiers spend countless hours regaling one another with “war stories.” This is how units pass on the traditions and ethos of their organization from one generation of soldiers to the next. It is a process that has remained unbroken for thousands of years.
It is fair to say that many older Goths who had crushed a Roman army at Adrianople told stories to new warriors about what it was like to see and fight legionnaires in the field. Many of these Goths, in turn, participated in the sack of Rome itself in AD 410, while their sons stood side by side with the Romans when they fought Attila’s Huns at the Battle of Chalons in AD 451. Over generations, traditions were built on the backs of these stories and the millions of others that came after them. This, indeed, is how cultures are built over the ages. It is how our Western military culture was built and maintained over two thousand years.
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These stories are passed on in many ways, and they can obviously be distorted in the telling. Despite this, central themes persist over time and form the basis of our distinct Western civilization and culture just as other stories in other places form the basis of other civilizations. As a point of observation, in 2003 the author had the privilege of traveling with the American army that invaded Iraq. Those soldiers knew little about Marathon, but they were maintaining a tradition set back in 490 BC—seek out the enemy and engage him in a decisive battle of annihilation. Moreover, even as this book is being written, 150,000 Americans are fighting in the lands that make up a substantial part of the narrative of this book. Of that number, a conservative estimate would allow that well over half of them have seen the movie
300
, which presents a new version of the Greek-Persian war of 480 BC. Whatever its historical inaccuracies,
300
has allowed the story of the Battle of Thermopylae to enter into the consciousness of a new generation of soldiers.

Furthermore, professional soldiers are often voracious consumers of military history. Even during the Middle Ages, those leaders who knew how to read had almost all perused Vegetius’s fifth-century work
The Military Institutions of the Romans
, looking for hints on how they could mimic Roman arms. Interestingly, Renaissance commanders, looking for ways to reform their armies in the wake of the gunpowder revolution, continued to turn to Vegetius for guidance. Even today, Vegetius’s work remains in print, and a fair number of professional soldiers have taken the time to read it.
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Moreover, Thucydides’ history,
The Peloponnesian War
, written almost twenty-five hundred years ago, remains on the reading lists provided by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps and is taught in the war colleges of all our services.