Ambush Read online

  This book, as with my previous works, is aimed at a general audience of intelligence professionals, military historians and classicists. Since the book was not written for a professional audience of Greek and Latin scholars, Greek technical terms have been kept to a minimum and have been transliterated. I have used the more familiar Latin spellings rather than the Greek more popular among classicists today, and thus: Polybius, not Polybios. I have written the narrative for the general reader, but the footnotes should provide both the ancient sources and the modern works upon which my research is based.

  A word is needed on the mechanics of translation and citation. The line numbers in the book will be to the Greek text. The only exception to this rule is on the few occasions when I have use Robert Fagles’ translation. While this is not a word-for-word rendition of the poem, its poetic qualities recommend it to general readers with no knowledge of Greek. When using this translation I have given Fagles’ line numbers in the text and footnoted the Greek line numbers since they are substantially different. All translations are given proper attribution, and my debt to the many great scholars who came before me will be obvious from the size of the bibliography. I hope this small contribution to the history of Greek warfare will help to highlight some interesting, but frequently overlooked, incidents that involved deadly fighting on the part of many courageous Greeks. They, too, deserve to have their story told. I have stopped the narrative at the coming of the Romans for purely selfish reasons; I am leaving the Romans for another book.

  Introduction

  The Odysseus Syndrome

  THERE ARE TWO IMAGES of warfare that have dominated Greek history. One is the figure of Achilles, the Homeric hero skilled in face-to-face combat to the death. He is a warrior who is outraged by deception on the battlefield. The alternative model, yet equally Greek and also taken from Homeric epic, is Odysseus, ‘the man of twists and turns’ and the hero of the Odyssey.1 To him, winning by stealth, surprise or even deceit was his foremost skill.2

  While there are certainly exceptions to these paradigms, these polar opposites have been used in every discussion of intelligence and ambush in ancient Greek warfare. Homer introduced these twin models himself, and the tension between these rival approaches continues, not only in the study of Greek warfare but all of Western warfare as well. The debate over the respective virtues of bravery and trickery raged in antiquity as one side supported its views with moral posturing about honesty and fairness, while the other side pointed out that alternative methods offered a more economic and easier avenue to victory.3

  Greek warfare always consisted of many varieties of fighting, and yet an inordinate amount of attention has been given to the hoplite phalanx, as if this were the only mode of warfare used by the Greeks. The use of spies, intelligence gathering, ambushing and surprise attacks were a part of Greek warfare as well, and while they were not the supreme method of defeating an enemy, such tactics always found their place when the correct motive, terrain or opportunity presented itself. Acknowledging the use of these stratagems does not discredit the conventions governing set-piece battles of the major mainland poleis; it merely completes the picture of the fighting life of the Greeks.

  While everyone agrees that a system of limited warfare prevailed among the major poleis as an ideal in the Classical era, the origin of such rules and the frequency of observance are still hotly debated.4 There have always been codes of honour and unwritten rules that have affected military operations. While Alexander the Great’s refusal to launch a surprise nocturnal attack on Darius III’s Persian army at Gaugamela may be an example of a general choosing to conform to the old ethos of Achilles, it is also true that the Greeks recognised two types of fighting. One type was the polemos, i.e. agonal warfare fought by the rules; the other was polemos akeryktos or aspondos, which meant war without herald or without truce. In the latter form of warfare any kind of ferocity or trickery was possible.5 We are not suggesting cynically that belligerents always resorted to any means to win, but the element of surprise was never entirely absent. In their study of Greek Diplomacy, Adcock and Mosley were correct when they wrote: ‘Although surprise attacks were made it was the habit of the Greeks to make a formal declaration of war.’6 What the authors are commenting on, however, is the idea of strategic surprise. My topic in this book is rather tactical ambush that can be achieved in an appropriate situation once the war has been declared.

  This prejudice against any fighting that did not involve hand-to-hand combat to the death between heavily armed spearmen certainly is not a modern invention. The Greeks themselves expressed the idea. They glorified physical prowess, courage, readiness to die rather than yield even to overwhelming odds. In the Classical era hoplite warfare, the clash of two massed and disciplined phalanxes on level ground was certainly the way to glory and it received the most praise. Brasidas, for example, recommended it as the only way of testing one’s courage.7 Hoplite warfare was not, however, universally praised. The Persian, Mardonius, saw it as senseless8 and Herodotus refers to it as ‘suicidal madness’.9 Although Greek literature is replete with disdain for peltasts, slingers, javelin men and archers who killed men from afar, these weapons continued to be used alongside of, or in place of, hoplite armour. The prejudice came about because missiles were for common folk or auxiliaries who could not afford hoplite armour. The poor were, therefore, accused of lacking the courage for direct combat. We will see, however, that ambushing requires courage too, and that in most cases it involves hand-to-hand combat at close quarters. Thucydides may lament the loss of good men to javelins,10 but having them dead in hoplite combat is no less a disadvantage in the end. Thucydides comments bitterly that arrows do not discriminate between brave men and cowards.11 They kill, nevertheless, and in the end, unless we are discussing a Pyrrhic victory, the winner is the side with the lower mortality rate.

  The existence of a sense of ‘fair play’ in Greek warfare was thus a controversial idea even in ancient times.12 The hoplite ideal was just that – an ideal. Letting the opposing army gather and having a battle on the plain between the full forces of each side, almost as if by appointment, probably originates in the same thought process we see in Roman writers. They believed that the desired state of mind in the defeated could only be achieved by such ‘a fair and open’ battle.13 As Herodian writes: ‘You will … prove to Rome and the world … that you did not violate a truce unjustly by trickery or deceit but that you won by superior force of arms.’14

  Something of the same spirit is revealed by Alexander as reported by Quintus Curtius Rufus.15 Parmenion ‘gave it as his opinion that surprise was better than open battle. In the dead of night the foe could be overwhelmed.’ Alexander replied:

  The craft which you recommend to me is that of petty robbers and thieves; for their sole device is to deceive. I will not suffer my glory always to be impaired by the absence of Darius, or by confined places, or by deceit by night. I am determined to attack openly by daylight; I prefer to regret my fortune rather than be ashamed of my victory.16

  This attitude has been picked up by modern writers and used as an argument in favour of not only a ‘Greek Way of War’ but also, by extension, a ‘Western Way of War’. Such commentators characteristically prove their case by taking selective quotations from Greek writers; they seem loathe to recognise any evidence that ascribes sneaky behaviour to the Greeks. This is a prejudice that has recently been described by Patrick Porter as ‘military orientalism’.17 This skewed approach is based on a stereotype that portrays the Greeks as ‘us’ (read Western and civilised), i.e. people who do not stoop to such behaviour, as opposed to ‘them’, the ‘other’ (easterners, barbarians or savages) who used such tactics because they are culturally or genetically disposed to being cowards, cheaters or back-stabbers. There are numerous examples of this prejudice in military writings. To give just a few examples, M. R. Davie writes: ‘The essence of savage warfare is treachery and ambush. Primitive military tactics consist of stratagem and surprise
in attack.’18 Similarly, the French officer Ardant du Picq in his military classic Battle Studies states: ‘War between savage tribes, between Arabs even today, is a war of ambush by small groups of men of which each one, at the moment of surprise, chooses not his adversary, but his victim, and is an assassin.’19

  Indeed, he felt that Arabs were not capable of ‘chivalrous warfare’, only ‘night surprise and sack of a camp’.20 Oman writes of the Franks: ‘To win by ambushes, night attacks and surprises seem despicable to the Frankish mind.’21

  Americans during and after the American Revolution showed the same Western prejudice. During the War of Independence, Francis Marion was the laughing stock of the regular troops when he presented the guerrilla unit he had recruited to General Gates. The British, however, soon realised the strength of Marion’s troops and they denounced him as a ‘criminal’ and blamed him for his ‘ungentlemanlike’ methods of fighting. Yet not long after, James Fenimore Cooper in The Deerslayer (chapter 3) discusses ambushes on the American frontier and claims that while white men could not ambush women and children in war it was a signal virtue in an Indian.22 He conveniently forgets the Americans during their own revolution fighting with surprise attacks and ambushes as a motley collection of guerrilla frontiersmen. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence itself brands natives as barbarians and describes their warfare as ‘the undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions’.23

  European texts on colonial warfare were replete with generalisations about ‘Orientals’, and freely used terms like ‘savages’, ‘natives’ and ‘coloured peoples’, interchangeably.24 Alfred Ditte, in his Observations sur les Guerres dans les Colonies, writes:

  Savage wars are waged by alien cultures operating by different rules. Savages are easily impressed by bold and immediate procedure. Because Asiatics were unable to fight in more limited, conventional ways, and were readily coerced by shows of vigour, it was necessary to abandon norms of restraint to subdue them. The linkage is direct between a society’s mode of war and its degree of civilisation.25

  These examples of ‘Orientalism’ are not out-dated aberrations of an earlier age, and they continue to affect the writing of Greek history. Victor Davis Hanson in his 1989 work, The Western Way of War, describes non-hoplite soldiers as: ‘Guerrilla and loosely organised irregular forces, the neo-terrorists who for centuries have been despised [italics mine] by Western governments and identified with the ill-equipped, landless poor.’26 He then goes on to assume that we all share this attitude. He claims: ‘There is in all of us a repugnance, is there not, for hit-and-run tactics, for skirmishing and ambush?’27 He describes this revulsion as a ‘burdensome legacy of the West that battle under any other guise except head to head confrontation is unpalatable’ and then he proceeds to blame this attitude on the Greeks. Hanson indicts the Greeks for developing in us a distaste for the terrorist, the guerrilla or the irregular warrior who chooses to wage war differently, and is unwilling to die on the battlefield in order to kill his enemy. Such stereotypes of East and West never hold up to scrutiny for long. They are not useful in research and should by now be a thing of the past.28 Yet as recently as 2004, H. John Poole wrote: ‘Since the Crusades, Westerners have noticed how differently those who live East of Constantinople [italics mine] fight … Eastern adversaries routinely avoid set-piece battles.’29

  The same cultural stereotypes are seen again in John Keegan’s History of Warfare. He argues that ‘Oriental’ warfare is ‘different and apart from European warfare’. It was characterised by traits peculiar to itself, foremost among these were ‘evasion, delay and indirectness’.30 If this generalisation were true, how would we then explain Attila, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane? Christopher Coker similarly generalises that Westerners historically preferred direct battle fought without guile to smash the enemy, whereas the ‘Islamic’ way of war was based on deceit.31 Paul Bracken in his chapter ‘Is there an Eastern way of war?’ claims Eastern warfare was ‘embodied by the stealthy archer’, unlike the archetypal Western swordsman ‘charging forward, seeking a decisive showdown, eager to administer the blow that will obliterate the enemy’.32 Robert Cassidy sees the Eastern way of war as unorthodox, asymmetrical, indirect and rooted in perfidy.33 H. John Poole writes about the ‘Eastern thought process’ which caused them to fight indirectly and use trickery.34 William Lind speaks of the Oriental propensity for trickery and deception.35 One need only look at the American Marine Corps’s Small Wars Manual which urges the study of natives’ ‘racial characteristics’.36 All of these interpretations have one thing in common. They completely ignore the long Western tradition of Western commanders using deception, ambush and indirect methods.37 This includes ignoring such tactics among the Greeks. Walter Kaegi had already pointed out this lack of interest in ambush and surprise attack among historians already in 1981.38

  The debate over the relationship of culture and warfare has been masterfully outlined by Patrick Porter in his book, Military Orientalism, where he correctly observes that war is a medium through which we have traditionally judged the calibre of our own and other civilisations.39 Armed conflict has become an expression of identity as well as a means to an end.40 John Keegan calls war ‘culture by other means’.41 Many have come to believe that how people fight reflects who they are.42 The issue, however, is not that simple, and the relationship of culture to warfare is still a contested, ambiguous and politicised concept.43 The legacy of the nineteenth-century, imperialist mind-set, and the attitudes that go with it, distort twenty-first-century scholarship and they affect the classics because the debate always begins with the Greeks. We hear the strains of these attitudes in W. K. Pritchett’s The Greek State at War when he claims that the ancients, both Greeks and Romans, were: ‘far removed from such malpractices as plotting mischief against their friends with the purpose of aggrandising their own power, and that they would not even consent to get the better of their enemies by fraud’.44

  Many still believe the Greeks regarded no success as brilliant or secure unless they crushed the spirit of their adversaries in open battle, and that the Romans felt the same way.45 There is no lack of quotations from ancient sources supporting this view. Both the Greeks and Romans themselves often claimed that only a hand-to-hand battle at close quarters was truly decisive, and that it was a sign of poor generalship to do anything except openly during warfare.46 The truth is, however, that they would take a victory any way they could get it. While warfare without trickery is a nice ideal, fighting without using surprise to one’s advantage simply does not represent the military history of Greece.

  In short, there has been a tendency to lump the Greeks and Romans together, and quote liberally from Roman authors whose propaganda tried to tar and feather their enemies with charges of ‘bad faith’ when irregular tactics were used successfully against them. It was these same Roman writers and their Greek admirers, such as Polybius, who gave us this legacy of moralising propaganda and it has been picked up by Western defenders of empire ever since.47 It is important not to fetishise certain Greek military tactics while ignoring the rest of the evidence.48 The fact is that the Greeks constantly used irregular tactics, and they had few moral qualms about it. They were realists, not hypocrites, and the Classical Greeks certainly did not will this attitude to us. By showing how well and how often the Greeks used surprise in their tactics, and ambushed their enemies, we see that Western civilisation did not begin with a pure and untainted method of warfare that was somehow corrupted with time. In the same way there is no genetic propensity for sneakiness on the part of ‘easterners’ (whoever these turn out to be). Rather everyone’s fighting formations are a reflection of their political and economic systems and all armies use regular formations or irregular forces as the situation requires. There is much to be done in the way of research on many periods of history to add a corrective to the stereotypes that have persisted over the centuries among historians. This is merely an attempt to give a more accurate portrait of how the Greeks
fought.

  Maps

  MAP 1 Ancient Greece

  MAP 2 Sphacteria

  MAP 3 Central Greece and the Chalcidice

  MAP 4 Northern Greece

  MAP 5 The Athenian attack on Syracuse

  MAP 6 Central Greece