Dan Snow's History Hit - Warfare in Ancient Greece

Episode Date: March 17, 2024

How did warfare work in Ancient Greece? The weapons and armour of the Greek hoplite are legendary, as are the warrior cultures of city-states like Sparta. But how would a Greek battle have played out on the ground?Dan is joined by Roel Konijnendijk, Darby Fellow in Ancient History at the University of Oxford and an expert in warfare in the Greek world. Roel explains how a Greek army operated, and takes us through some of the most decisive pitched battles of the period.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. We're going to do a deep dive into ancient Greek warfare, specifically the warfare that you might have seen portrayed in the movies like 300, this classical era, 5th, 4th century BC Athenian warfare, in which reasonably heavy armed infantry known as hoplites fought at close quarters with both foreign enemies and other Greek competitors. These are the soldiers using the weapons and tactics that were able to see off the Persians in both 490 at the Battle of Marathon, where they landed very near the city of Athens, but also 480 and 479 when a mighty Persian invasion force marched down through northern Greece into central Greece. They

defeated a small Greek Spartan-led army at Thermopylae. They were defeated at sea in a naval battle at Salamis, and then they were crushed in a great land battle at Plataea in 479. But this is also the kind of war which you see described in Thucydides, the father of history, as he talks about the Peloponnesian War, the great war for Greek hegemony between Athens and her allies and Sparta and its allies. Talking me through this kind of fighting is Ruel Kunainen-Dyke. He's a Derby Fellow in Ancient History at Lincoln College at the University of Oxford.

He specialises in classical Greek warfare, military thought. He is a superb scholar and communicator. You're going to love him. So we're going to talk about how Greek warfare worked. We're going to look into certain battles like the Battle of Thermopylae, the Battle of Nemea and others. And we're going to talk about how the way in which the Greeks made war was also rooted in the culture of different Greek cities like Sparta and Athens. Enjoy. Ruel, thanks so much for coming cleared the tower. Ruel, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. It's my pleasure to be here. Thanks very much for having me.

Tell me about this people on the edge of the known world who don't just stand up to the king of kings, the lord of Asia, the ruler of the Persian Empire, the most massive empire in history at that point. They actually defeat him. They actually humiliate his troops on the battlefield. What is it about Greek infantrymen? What was their secret sauce? What's going on? Well, it's actually hard to answer. The secret sauce has been identified variously through time, I think. A lot of people like to put a lot of emphasis on their heavy equipment. One of the things they do is, the wealthier of the Greeks, they fight as heavy infantry. So they have big shields, they carry armor and helmets on their heads, and they have

long spears for close combat. I think rather than focusing on the specifics of that equipment, it's more important to recognize that they really specialize in close combat. That's what they do. So they want to reduce every fight to a battle between people at close range. And the Persians have a sort of much more mixed way of war. They tried to fight sort of at people at close range. And the Persians have a much more mixed way of war. They tried to fight at range for a time. They tried to bring in other arms. They like to rely on cavalry and archers and things like that. And the Greeks stumped them by getting right up in

their faces almost immediately and presenting them with a challenge that they're just not equipped to overcome. Yeah, that's so interesting, isn't it? But there's a sort of social thing here. I mean, you know, the Comanches, these extraordinary warriors in what is now Texas and points west, they're high status warriors, they're elite warriors, they would fight from the saddle. They would fight a kind of war of ambush, attack, retreat, opportunism. And I guess that's true of other cultures. There's nothing settled about the idea that your richest, most high status men will fight shoulder to shoulder in a sweaty line of battle. That in itself is potentially unusual, isn't it? Yeah, but it doesn't last very long either. I mean, by the time we're talking about the

4th century BC, most elite Greeks also fight on horseback. I mean, there's just a switch towards that. As more and more people can afford the heavy armor, the elite obviously tries to distinguish itself in a different way. So there is a period in which this heavy hoplite armor, this heavy infantry equipment is the form of elite warfare. And that is very prestigious. And that is what this kind of way of war comes from. But then as soon as that becomes well established, the elite starts to distinguish itself again by fighting on horseback. There's a very strong move towards that throughout the classical period. Interesting. And that's why we get now the children of the elite helicopter gunship pilots and things like that. So perhaps we always see that. So talk to me about this hoplite period,

though. That's the word for these heavily armed Greek infantrymen. And you can see from the beautiful vases of the period, their armor is that terrible word, iconic, but their armor is very distinctive, isn't it? It is. Although a lot of the iconic armor that we get, the Corinthian helmet, the thing that encloses your entire face with the big plume, the big round shields and these sort of muscle cuirasses and things like that, a lot of that stuff is quite early. Like I said, this is a period when this hoplite armor in the sixth century, for instance, is like the prestige object, like all the elites want it and they dedicate it at temples and they, you know, some of them get buried with it because they want to show off that they have this or that

they've captured this off the enemy. But by the time we're talking about the Persian wars and afterwards, this has to some extent become democratized. So this way of fighting is now something that a large section of the population can afford to do. But the way they can afford that is by not having all that super expensive and glamorous equipment, but having much simpler versions of it. So they tend to not have the body armor at all, or they have a simpler linen cuirass or something that's made out of organic fabrics. They have much simpler helmets, some of them just like a bronze cone shaped sort of type that becomes very common in this period. So their weaponry becomes a lot less like that iconic picture because it becomes

more affordable, essentially. There's a way to adapt to the demands of this kind of fighting that allow more people to take part in it, which is obviously great for the city-states, but that means that the iconic items of equipment kind of go out of style. You mentioned bronze though, and I know you said earlier you don't want to focus too much on the equipment itself, but is there something about the Greeks having access to Cyprus, those copper mines? They're able to produce bronze. Did that give them an edge? Do they have better, sharper, more durable edges to their spears and their swords? Do they have more resilient armour than some of the other troops they might come across

in the Balkans and across into Anatolia? Well, no, not really. Because bronze, of course, at this point is no longer the material from which you make edged weapons. For the most part, these are going to be made of iron. So they make armor with it because it's really nice and shiny. And especially the Spartans, for instance, which we'll talk about later, they enforce the idea that you have to have a shield covered in bronze because it's really intimidating. It flashes in the sun and you can polish it to a high shine. But bronze is not unique to the Greeks because while they have access to copper, along with the rest of the Eastern Mediterranean, in order to make bronze, you have to mix it with tin. And tin is only available in the

ancient world from two places, Cornwall and Afghanistan. And so if you're going to try and make bronze, you have to import the tin anyway. And that's something that all of the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean have in common. So nobody has a sort of singular, unique, monopolized access to tin, therefore not bronze either. I love it. So iron, which is very, very commonplace everywhere, and is actually doing the killing, and yet they're bringing in the bronze so they look good and shiny. I love that. Yeah, there's a huge focus on that sort of the prestige side of it. It's not practical. It's not necessarily sort of the best material that you could get,

although it has its benefits. But there's this huge emphasis on just looking really good while you're doing it, essentially. I love that. So these hoplites, we've got these heavily armed Greek infantrymen. Tell me how they fight. Tell me how the hoplite relates to phalanx, that other word people might recognise. Yeah, so the hoplite relates to phalanx, that other word people might recognise.

Yeah, so the hoplite fundamentally, as I said, it's a masked warrior, right? So they all get together in similar equipment and they all fight together in this big mass, which emerges around the time of the Persian Wars, as far as we can tell. So they start to get these big numbers together and say, look, we would be very effective if we fight in a homogenous formation. So if we're all the same, rather than being a mixed formation with light arm troops and cavalry sort of mingling in and trying to see where they might have an opportunity to strike at the enemy. Instead, they say, okay, no, all of you guys go to the side, you know, go away. We here in the center, we will hold the spine, you know,

we'll be the backbone of your army with just these heavy infantrymen. And then as they sort of develop that way of fighting, they start to deploy in regular ranks and files, which is kind of just a way to stay organized, to make sure that the line is orderly and tight, that it is closed, right? There's no gaps in it. There's no irregularity. And that's a really important feature of it. But once they're deployed, actually, and this is something that people often forget when they think about the phalanx, they think of this as being sort of highly sophisticated and disciplined formation. But actually, the hallmark of phalanx, they think of this as being sort of highly sophisticated and disciplined formation. But actually, the hallmark of phalanx warfare is an incredible level of aggression. As I've said before, these Greeks, they want to reduce the fight to close combat. They want to get right up in their enemy's face because that is intimidating. It's scary. And a lot of other peoples around the

Mediterranean don't really know how to cope with that. And so they find that it's very effective to once you've lined all your guys up in ranks and files, and once they're ready to go, to actually basically scream your rage and run at the enemy. And that is how hoplites broadly, how they fight, how they encounter each other in battle. So they advance as slowly and orderly as they can. And then when they get to within maybe a few hundred meters from each other, they raise the war cry and they run at each other in an attempt to essentially overcome their own fear, but also instill fear in the enemy. So that's different from what I thought this sort of, if you look to move more than a thousand years ahead to the kind of Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings,

where you've got these tightly packed shield walls, quite static warfare, a warfare of pushing, of finding gaps in the enemy shield wall with shorter out weapons. It sounds to me like that's the kind of that mad chaotic dash. You'd lose a bit of cohesion there. It would become a little bit more one-on-one at that point. Or are they managing to keep their lines quite tight? They try. But most of them, obviously, because as you say,

when you run forward, you will lose some cohesion. They try to stay orderly, but for the most part, they just fall into something less like a shield wall and more like a mob of warriors. So this becomes one of the big questions they have to face is how do we keep order? How do we make sure that we actually fight in the way that we also deploy? But that's a big question. They don't necessarily all reach a good answer to that. The Spartans are the ones who stand out by figuring out how best to do this. But in the Greek world, this kind of shield wall, this more static

shield wall is an older formation. This is something that we still see around the time of the Persian Wars. But then it kind of disappears because they realize that aggressive use of this heavy infantry is more effective than kind of waiting and seeing what the enemy is going to do. Because especially against the Persians, of course, if you're just going to stand there, they're going to whittle you down. You know, they have more archers, they have more mobility, thanks to their cavalry, they're going to get around you. So if you stand there and take it, they will let you have it essentially. Whereas if you move aggressively into close combat range, you might have a chance. So for the most part, for the Greeks, this is actually a development, a progression towards a more aggressive use of this heavy infantry. But then you create the problem, as you rightly point out, that you then lose order and you have to fight in a way that is less cohesive and perhaps less reliable in the sense of the cohesion of its front ranks and the tightness of its shield wall than you would be if you took a more defensive stance. How interesting. I didn't realize that. And so the Battle of Marathon, 490, so the people will remember as the first significant Persian attempt to snuff out the

Greeks and particularly Athens in this case. The Athenians are very aggressive at that battle. They're outnumbered, but they're very aggressive, aren't they, at that battle? Is that what's going on here? They're moving forward quite hard and fast, closing with the Persians in a way that's quite surprising to them. No, that's exactly it. So Marathon is one of the great examples where, according to Herodotus, the ancient source for this battle, he says that this was the first time that they ran into battle. Now, people don't really believe that necessarily, but it shows that there was something significant about this. And later sources refer to people who sort of hark back to the ancient days of marathon.

They'll say, we were the ones who ran at marathon. They don't say we fought at marathon. They say we ran at marathon. So there's this understanding that the run into battle was one of the things that really set that battle apart. And for the Persians, obviously, you know, who are described as thinking, these Greeks are mad. Like, what are they doing? You know, they have no archers, they have no cavalry, they just come charging at us. They thought it would be easy, but it turned out they actually had no answer to that. It's so interesting. People listening to this with a broad interest in military history will be thinking about those

old basic tenets, isn't it? The speed of advance, your ability to strike, and then the range that strike takes place, and then what defensive armor or capabilities you have as well. It's all part of this kind of matrix is always shifting, isn't it? So the Athenians work out that if you run hard at an enemy, strike hard, you will, unlike perhaps the German blitzkrieg, you will demoralise them, you will strike fear into them and possibly be able to overturn numbers that are not in your favour. Yeah, so there's a paralysing element to seizing the initiative, right? At that point, the enemy's reacting to you. And so against the Persians in particular, who just have a very sophisticated way of war and obviously have

conquered a world empire with it, one of the ways to try and stop them from overwhelming you with their superior tactical mobility is to essentially just give them no option to sell them. This is what you're paying attention to right here. Look into my face. And then forcing them to say, you don't have the troops, you don't have the units to be able to maneuver around

because they're already engaged. And you don't have the time to think about what might be a good solution to this problem because you're essentially busy fighting for your life. And that is one of the ways in which the Greeks figured out you could actually face a Persian army and overcome it. And as we know, generals tend to focus on the point of crisis. So yeah, they could have uncommitted reserves, and they could have all sorts of clever little options, but they're going to be drawn in by the immediate crisis of the Greeks crashing into their army in two or three different places.

And so at the Battle of Plataea, which is the big decisive land battle of the Persian Wars in 479, on the one hand, the Persians are drawn into broken ground, which really helps the Greeks because it means that they can't manoeuvre so easily. But also when that fight actually develops between the Spartans and the Immortals, we know that the Persian cavalry must be there somewhere, but they're just not reported at all. There's no record of them getting involved in this fight once it starts, once it devolves into close combat. And so this seems to be exactly what you're saying. It seems to be the idea that they are no longer able to identify or don't have the opportunity to identify a moment where they can make a difference. They're just kind of stuck fighting these guys hand to hand now. And again, sorry to make dodgy historical comparisons, but you know,

just as the French army become paralysed in 1940 with a situation that was possibly savable, as these German thrusts are just striking them incredibly hard at particular points of the line. It seems to kind of freeze the French ability and the British ability to kind of respond to that, because you're dealing with the crisis at hand. Yeah, and the idea of the French had more tanks than the Germans, but they still weren't able to deploy that effectively. And then, you know, the result is well known. Like, you know, everyone's got a strategy until someone punched them in the face. So the Greeks developing this strategy was punching people repeatedly hard in the face. There is a school of thought that says, you know, when you did then engage these Asiatic

forces, be they from Anatolia or elsewhere, the Greek hoplite did enjoy an advantage on that individual level. Do you believe that? Or is it just this mass? Is it this kind of slightly larger effect of everyone just arriving at the same time with aggression? So Herodotus does say on a few occasions that the Greeks had slightly longer spears and they had shields where their enemies didn't. So there are some local advantages, no doubt, to be had, but it really depends on the context. There were a lot of people in the Persian army, Greeks, but also many other peoples from the Near East, from the Eastern Mediterranean, who were just as well equipped as the Greeks. So there's really not a division between sort

of light-armed Persians and heavily armed Greeks. I mean, that is just the moderns, or not even a modern fantasy. That's something the Greeks already started to say, but only after the Persian Wars. There's a very interesting shift in arts that some people have noticed where initially the Persians are depicted wearing quite heavy armor, wearing big shields and spears. And then over time, as the Greeks win these battles, the Persians start to be depicted as a sort of weird, soft, squishy, pajama wearing guys who only have like maybe a sword or a bow. So they are sort of stripped of their actual status as heavy infantry because they keep losing these battles. So the Greeks kind of start to establish this stereotype that they're poorly equipped. But as far as we can tell, even from their own accounts, that's really not always

the case. It may be true in some cases or in some ways, but you certainly can't say, oh, the Persians didn't know how to fight people who fight as heavy infantry because they had conquered a huge part of the world where people fought in similar ways to the Greeks. And they had conquered parts of the Greek world. When the Ionians rebelled in the 490s, the Persians repeatedly fight them and win. So it's not like they can't beat Greeks in combat. That's absolutely among their many capabilities. It just so happens that when they come into Greece, they end up fighting enemies where, you know, maybe in conditions or in circumstances where they're not able to deploy their trump cards, or they may fight, and this is a controversial point, but they may be facing larger numbers than their own. And as a result of that, they are overwhelmed.

Yeah, certainly at Plataea that you mentioned, you know, a huge coalition force of Greeks taking the battle to the hated Persian invaders at that point. So we've got actually a slightly more anarchic, but incredibly aggressive avalanche of well-armed Greeks charging towards the enemy at this point. What do the Spartans do then to perfect that way of warfare? Well, so it's very interesting that we don't know in the sense that we don't have a description of Spartans in battle between the Persian Wars and the battles of the Peloponnesian War. There's like a 60 year period between the two. And we have no good accounts of Spartans in battle. It's just when we see them again 60 years later, they suddenly fight very differently. And the Greeks themselves marvel at this. So the accounts that we received from that period, they're like, oh, what are the Spartans doing? They've done something. They've reformed the way that their army works in a way that makes them much more effective in pitched battle, but also in a way that makes the other Greeks think, what is going on here? We didn't prepare for this, essentially. Where the others are still

charging aggressively into battle. The Spartans have developed a much more detailed officer hierarchy. So their army is split up into smaller units, which means that they are much better able to convey orders, even when a battle is already going on. And they have developed a way to march in step, which previously they don't do and no other Greeks really have ever managed to do. They have these flute players which play music that gives a rhythm, and then they march slowly into battle to that rhythm. The other Greeks, of course, as I said, they charge into battle. They need to overcome their own fear, and they think this also helps intimidate the enemy. But the Spartans have developed this level of unit organization and discipline where they just slowly advance as if they have become parts of a single unified block,

as if they've become part of a machine. And the other Greeks find this absolutely terrifying. They cannot duplicate it. They cannot replicate that method. And when they face Spartans in this period, increasingly, they don't even fight. When the Spartans come at them, they just run away. And that's just, well, because some people that may be listening thinking, okay, well, they're playing music and marching in step. This does not sound like the scariest thing I've ever seen. But for those people, perhaps they're familiar with the 18th century, the American Revolutionary War, that kind of thing, think about those musket drills. Unless you do them all together at the same time, you're standing shoulder to shoulder with people, you've got razor sharp steel bayonet on the end of your musket, you're going to stab someone, you're going to stab your mate. So doing

things exactly in tandem, what does that allow you to do? It allows you to be absolutely shoulder to shoulder? To bring overwhelming force to bear on a patch of ground? Because you can get three Spartans into one metre squared, for example, and then they can deploy their weapons without slicing each other's bits off. And is that the key? That's part of it. Although they're not that close together. I mean, presumably about one Spartan per square metre, but even so, it is a cohesive force. And the way that the Spartans also try to amplify that is by introducing something like a uniform. So they're all wearing these same red garments, these red tunics in battle. They all carry these shields that have this bronze facing. So they look, according to

contemporary sources, like a wall, a single mass of red and bronze. So they don't just sort of march at you slowly with this sort of determined and unfazed appearance, but they also appear to be like a single mass, whereas everybody else obviously buying their own equipment and carrying with them what they can afford is going to look much more like a motley crew. So the Spartans come across as not just a bunch of people who have come together to fight this battle, but as if their phalanx is just a wall that comes rolling at you. And it's around this time, actually, that the word phalanx is actually reintroduced to describe a battle line. Because a phalanx, initially, it means like a roller or a

stack. It's something that identifies a group of men as something more than the sum of its parts, essentially. And so, as this phalanx is grinding towards you, shields almost touching, so very hard for you to penetrate it. How are they deploying their weapons to kill any enemy or wound any enemy that have made the poor decision to stand and fight? Yeah, so their main offensive weapon is a long spear. And there's obviously lots of debate about how long these things are because wood decays, so it's very hard to retain a spear over a long period of time. The estimates range from anywhere between two meters and perhaps a little bit more than three, which is quite long. And also

their rear balance, which means basically you're gripping them very close towards the rear where there's a heavy butt spike, which means that you have a lot of reach out the front without it becoming very heavy. So it's a spear that has quite a lot of reach in close combat. So you're using that presumably over the shields to try and poke at whoever comes close enough to you. And that's the main way that they attack their enemies. And so sometimes fighting is actually described to be at spear range, which means these lines, when they encounter each other, seem to halt. Like there's a little bit of no man's land in between, but not so much that you can't reach each other because the spears are very long. And all sides, I mean, the Spartans don't have any special weaponry. They have very short swords, but otherwise their weaponry is basically identical to that of other

Greeks. So it's not like they have any kind of special advantage there. It's just they're just poking each other over these shield walls until one side or the other is showing perhaps some gaps in the line due to casualties or due to people starting to get scared and running away. And that's when one side or the other seizes the opportunity to surge forward. The uniformity becomes a very important weapon in that kind of linear battle, because any weak spot in a line is catastrophic because it's like a dam bursting. So the fact that you've got everyone armed with the right kit, the same shields, the same whatever, you will find the weak spot in the enemy line. You aren't armed as uniformly as that. And then that's when the route can begin, the collapse yeah although i mean they're all using the same

shields as well so in that sense uniformity is more a matter of color and intimidation than it is of the equipment because all the greeks are carrying essentially the same shields and in fact these are not mass produced so there's a lot of variation on both sides but there is this sense of orderliness so the gree Greeks are obsessed with order in battle, right? As I said, they deploy themselves in ranks and files, because it's a very important sense to their own cohesion, to their own confidence in their ability to fight. And so there are occasions when an army tries to deploy for battle, and for some reason, they can't manage it. There's too much disorder in the ranks, you know, people are sort of jostling each other, or they're not here

yet. So they're not filling in the gaps, etc. And so the commanders just say, sorry, guys, there's not going to be a battle today. So they just withdraw and cancel the whole thing because they realize that without order, if you can't establish a baseline of order, you have no hope. And so one of the edges that the Spartans have is that they're able to get into a semblance of battle order very quickly and that that battle order is very reliable, very sturdy. You listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking about ancient Greek warfare. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history.

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by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And of course, in military history, we're very, you don't focus as much on the battles that never get fought, right? But they're the best kind of battles. And so if the Spartans are turning up day after day and people are basically running away, well, that might not make for a great yarn in Thucydides, but that's the real business of hegemony. Yes. And in fact, I mean, they obviously get a lot

of advantage from the fact that people are scared of them. They rarely have to prove themselves. I mean, whatever reputation they may have had in close combat is barely relevant because people just generally don't stand and test them. For the most part, they win their battles and keep their hegemony because nobody really wants to test them on their supposed superiority. And again, another thing that when we watch Hollywood and we watch TV documentaries, all of these battles seem to be taking place on a nice rugby pitch, a nice pre-prepared, rolled, leveled football pitch. And actually, I think ground is just so important, right? Because in real life, particularly in a pre-industrial farming landscape, there are dips and there

are boulders and there are bogs and there are gullies and there are... It's very difficult, I guess, to maintain a kind of cohesive line. And if you've got officers responding to that and pushing men into different positions, then that gives the Spartans a huge advantage. When you look at Greece today, you can see what the landscape looks like. There's not a lot of flat fields there. So the idea that they're fighting in this sort of almost neutral, like a perfectly flat space is complete fantasy. In fact, most of these Greek battles explicitly, one side or the other, tries to make use of some kind of terrain advantage. They obviously want to fight downhill. They obviously want to fight in a space

where they don't have to worry about their flanks, for instance. So there's loads of ways in which they try to use the terrain to their advantage. But also when they advance, I mean, there's all these kinds of occasions where they have to run into, you know, not just sort of ditches and trees and houses and things, but also things like field walls, which can be incredibly obstructive in a period before, you know, muskets when this can become a huge fortified line. These kinds of things get in their way. And obviously being able to cope with that quickly and being able to get in and out of formation quickly is going to give them an edge. One interesting thing you said a few minutes ago was that the other Greeks couldn't replicate that Spartan training, uniformity, tactical control by subalterns, small units. Now why not? Why not? They're all from the same linguistic and cultural tradition.

What is going on with Sparta? That's an excellent question. I mean, I have tried to answer this, but not everybody agrees with me on this. The idea is that it takes training. You need to prepare to do this. You need to take time out to kind of drill yourself in these kinds of units in order to understand how these formations are supposed to work and how you can react to orders and how you can then stay in formation when you advance. And the fact is that firstly, Greek armies are all militias, including the Spartan one. I mean, there's no standing Spartan army that doesn't exist. So all of these guys are only called up when war breaks out, when something happens, when there's a conflict or when the campaign is being planned or decided

on by the assembly or whoever else. That is when they say, okay, we need this many men, call them up. And they come because the campaign's already happening. So they have no time to prepare. They've never worked together in this way unless they fought a campaign before, right? It's all learning by doing. So there's no time for non-Spartans to get together and say, right, this is how we're going to practice this. It's been hypothesized. People say, oh, there's always going to be the summer exercises or the reservist exercises, but actually there's no evidence. We don't know of anything like that. So the other hoplites don't have this kind of preparation. But the other part is, and this is a very important sort of cultural element,

is that Greeks resist the idea of being told what to do fundamentally. They have a big problem with someone shouting at them and telling them, this is how you're going to do it. You have to follow my orders. You have to follow my orders. You have to listen to me. A lot of Greeks actually feel like it is their right as a free citizen not to be told what to do, but rather to only be encouraged, persuaded, and to do what they want to do out of free will, out of their own willingness to contribute to a sort of greater good or a common goal. And so a lot of them have this instinctive resistance

against somebody shouting at them like a drill sergeant or something like that and telling them, now you get information, you stand over there and you only move when I tell you to. The Spartans have this big difference in their upbringing where they have been taught to obey their entire lives. This is basically what they think is the best way to be a good citizen, is to respect your elders and do everything you're told to do. And so for the Spartans, this idea of fighting in a battle in a very disciplined formation with a tight hierarchy of officers is very natural. That's how they grow up to live. But for the other Greeks, this is culturally distasteful, right? You don't want that to happen because you are better than that. You

are a free person. You owe it to your community and your community owes it to you to exercise free will. Brilliant. And as part of that training that you mentioned, we get these extraordinary initiations and childhood trainings that has become the stuff of legend. I know it's quite contested, but what do you make of some of these Spartans that declared war on the helot populations, their neighboring populations in the Peloponnese each year so that young men could go out and kill them without ramifications. How much do you place on those traditions? That's been sort of disputed a lot in recent years. So scholarship has moved away from the idea that Sparta is basically an army camp that is constantly at war with its own enslaved

population. There is a lot more understanding now of Spartans as, in a lot of ways, very similar to other Greeks. I mean, they live the lives of leisured Greeks everywhere, where they have enslaved people to essentially do the farm work, which they only manage. And as a result of the produce that comes off their land, they are able to live a life of leisure and contribute to their community. In that sense, Spartan citizens are no different from leisure class citizens elsewhere in the Greek world. citizens are no different from leisure class citizens elsewhere in the Greek world. It's just that the Spartans have adopted within their citizen body a fairly rigid structure of education, of moral upbringing, and of the enforcement of certain ways of behavior, which are intended perhaps less to make them very effective against the helot population, which is in any case rarely in rebellion. So the idea that they're constantly afraid this is going to happen is, I think, quite overstated. But actually, it means that there is much less

friction within Spartan society. I mean, most of these rules that you hear about in other Greek states as well, when it comes to austerity measures, when it comes to regulating elite behavior within symposia, within drinking parties, within funerals, rites, and things like that, within marriages, within inheritance, the purpose of that is to stifle competition among the elite, which then prevents civil war, essentially. This is what a lot of Greek cities are concerned with, and rightly so. Most other Greek cities have occasional, fairly frequent civil wars among themselves where different factions within the population are trying to seize control and change the constitution. The Spartans managed to avoid this for a very long period of time. This is what people admire

in the Spartans is that they have a very stable state. They have a very stable community, which doesn't seem to suffer the same kind of civil war or tyrannies that occur in other Greek states. And a lot of the peculiarities of their way of life can be explained that way. And for instance, what I mentioned just now, this idea of Spartans being very obedient and being trained from childhood to be obedient to their elders and obedient to the magistrates of their community, this is obviously a way to stifle dissent. This is obviously a way to indoctrinate them

that the continuity of Sparta as it is, is more important than any single individual Spartan's life or desires or ambitions. And so we could mention there, just in passing, because we've talked a lot in the abstract, we can mention a few particular battles. Speaking of Spartans sacrificing themselves for their greater good, the famous Battle of Thermopylae,

when the Spartans unusually lose, they get wiped out, and yet achieve a kind of immortality because of their resistance to the Persian steamroller coming down into northern Greece. With your new lens on things, how do you interpret that battle and the Spartans' prowess there? Well, so it's very difficult because obviously all of the source material that we have for Thermopylae is already kind of embracing the idea that the Spartans did something truly legendary there. And so it's very hard to get behind that and see if there's anything that we

can be confident of. But it seems to me, obviously, this is a crushing defeat. And this is the greatest defeat ever suffered by mainland Greeks against the Persians. So it's really dramatic. And immediately afterwards, all of the allies that are still in the fight against Persia are basically looking to Sparta to say, look, are you going to send your whole army now instead of just a couple of guys? Are you actually going to commit to this fight? Because we are doing a lot of losing over here. You've just showed us a sign that you're not going to do any better. How are we going to fix this?

And they kind of need to find a way to turn this story of their first initial sort of commitment to this fight, which ended in total disaster. They need to find some way to turn this into a good story, right? They need to find some way to say, look, we actually did our bit as leader of the allies. And the way they hit upon, obviously, is to say, well, these actually did our bit as leader of the allies. And the way they hit upon, obviously, is to say, well, these guys did fight to the death. You know, we did commit, we did sacrifice our king and a whole bunch of other people to this great cause. So in a way, we did more than all of you, I think you'll find. And as a result of that, we are worthy to be your leaders. But why they actually did that, I mean, that is actually quite obscure. And even the ancient

sources themselves aren't entirely clear why Leonidas decided to fight to the death. Most of them agree that he just wanted the glory, essentially, but also that he wanted to make some kind of statements as to what it meant to be a Spartan when you're assigned to a certain station. And that is where, obviously, a lot of the myth-making comes from, that the Spartans believe that they should never retreat and they should never abandon a position and they should die rather than submit to the enemy. That spirit obviously

exists within Sparta, especially when it comes to warfare. It also exists elsewhere in the Greek world. It's very Homeric. It's the idea that you should die a good death in battle rather than run away and live to fight another day. That's a very common Greek value. The Spartans obviously being a society of Greeks, they have instilled that in their children from childhood, that you must fight nobly for your community and that you must choose an honorable death over an ignominious survival. Rules against retreating from battle exists in Athens just as much as they do in Sparta. But in this case, the Spartans, because they choose to live up to those ideals, instead of just kind of paying lip service to them, because in practice,

you're not really going to fight to the death. Because they actually live up to this, they end up establishing this story that this is what Spartans will always do. This is what Spartans do as a matter of principle, which really intimidates others, which really makes other people think, oh, wow, these guys really put their money where their mouth is. Whereas most of us are just kind of talking the talk, but when it comes down to it, in practice, actually, the Spartans also on occasion later on will just retreat from battle or when they're defeated, they won't fight to the death. They will just go home. And then they have to enact their rules against cowardice.

And they have to say, oh, we need to punish these people who walked away from battle. And they just choose not to. Because just like all the other Greeks, in effect, the Spartans are just paying lip service to an ideal that they all share. They don't want to live up to it. Leonidas is the great exception of the one guy who actually did live up to an ideal in a way that all the Greeks still talked about. Yeah, it sounds like the Royal Navy in the 18th century, they shoot poor old Admiral Bing for being insufficiently aggressive in the face of the enemy. But there's plenty of other occasions in which an admiral chooses that retreating is a

wiser decision. So we've got the myth is a powerful thing on the battlefield. The Spartans certainly are masters of the myth. But actually, if we whiz forward almost 100 years, the lesser known but very interesting battle of Nemea, which shows, I mean, you've got to give it to the Athenians. I mean, no matter how often they lose the Spartans, they keep coming back for more. I mean, they're optimists. So you get a coalition of Greek states, don't you, the Athenians. I mean, no matter how often they lose the Spartans, they keep coming back for more. I mean, they're optimists. So you get a coalition of Greek states, don't you? The Athenians, Argives, and there's some Thebans there. And they do fight a big, huge set-piece battle against the Spartans. I think this is kind of an interesting one, right? Could you tell us about the course of this battle? Yeah, absolutely. So this is a war of revenge, right? I mean, the Spartans have won

the Peloponnesian War, and with apologies to Douglas Adams, this this made a lot of people very angry and has been generally regarded as a bad move. And so all the other Greeks are kind of now in a coalition to try and stop them from abusing the rest of the Greek world as their supreme leader, essentially. So this is a war in which a lot of these states that have grudges against Sparta are coming together and trying to get some repayment for the things that they've suffered. So they're all getting together for the big campaign at the start of this war. And these are huge coalition armies. These are the largest hoplite forces that have been seen since the Persian Wars, actually. So these are enormous armies, tens of thousands of hoplites on both sides. And they're all getting together

for a big showdown at this stream called the Nemea, which is near Corinth. And this is a battle in which basically all of the major players in the Greek world are represented. And this is an attempt by the coalition of Athens, Argos, Corinth, and Boeotia, so the region that Thebes is in, to try and see if they can overcome Sparta by sheer weight of numbers or if they all get together. So they all get together on this battlefield and they know that this battle is happening. But again, we talked about this, the idea that the battlefield is never a flat space. This has obviously got a stream bed in the middle of it. It's also completely overgrown. So when the two sides deploy for battle, for a long time, the Spartans don't realize that

their enemies are advancing. So they're kind of wandering around thinking what's going to happen today. Then they suddenly hear the Allies singing the war song and they realize, oh no, it's happening. It's happening right now. This is one of those moments when the Spartans sort of get information really quickly, manage to prepare themselves, get ready for battle, and then the big showdown happens. In this battle, you see the Spartans, in a way, you see the other side not running away from the Spartans. And so the Spartans are actually forced

to put their money where their mouth is. And it turns out that the Spartans do deliver, right? It seems that there's quite a depth handling of these small units that you've talked about. The Spartans are able to make decisions on the battlefield, to wheel, turn, attack in different places. Talk to me about that. Yeah, so this is a feature of Greek battle. Essentially, when you go into battle, you deploy all your hoplites more or less in a long line. You put them in a certain depth, which is one of the main tactical decisions, is how deep are we going to make our formation? In this case, the Allies have the numerical advantage, so they get to deploy quite deep,

which helps with morale, essentially. It keeps the people in front in the fight. So you have this long block, it's a long rectangle of warriors, essentially. And as they advance into battle, the problem that these rectangles have is that, because their shield's on the left-hand side, as they're advancing, they're advancing slightly diagonally. They're sort of creeping to the right as they go, which is not really intentional, although we're told in this battle it actually is intentional, on the part of the Boeotians who are on the right end of the allied line. So they're creeping towards the right, hoping that on that side they can outflank their enemies.

So there are a bunch of Spartan allies on that side who are not very willing to fight anyway. Nobody likes the Spartans very much. So there are a bunch of Spartan allies on that side who are not very willing to fight anyway. Nobody likes the Spartans very much. And so they're hoping that that way they can turn the enemy line and essentially break it on that side. But the Spartans on the other end of the line, opposite them, essentially, realize that this is happening. And they say, OK, if you want to go against the left end of our line, so the Boeotians on the right of the allies are moving against the Achaeans on the left of the Spartan line. If that's how you're going to try and win this fight, we'll do you one better. We don't need those people. We can fight this battle ourselves.

So instead of trying to save that end of the line, they actually sacrifice it pretty much. They decide to lead off even further to their own right to try and encircle the enemy left. So essentially they are doing the same thing that the Boeotians are doing. They're leading off to the right to extend as far as possible past the enemy line and then wheel inward. But they get to do this with the whole army. So they basically just pass the order along the lines through their allies to sort of follow along to the right. So they're sacrificing their entire left wing to saying, we don't need you guys. I mean, it's quite brutal, really. It's quite a brutal calculation. When you think about it, they're basically telling their allies, whatever happens to you, we don't care. We are here to win this fight. That's how we're going to do it. So they advance further to the right and then start

to envelop the enemy. It's the Athenians who are over against them. The Athenians are basically immediately encircled. And so they don't put up much of a fight. They do fight, but we're told that only about eight Spartans die in this battle. So it wasn't for very long, let's put it that way. They're almost immediately broken. And many of the Athenians are killed because they're essentially already encircled before the fight even starts. So this is really a bad day for them. But at that point, the allied Greeks, so the Athenians, Boeotians and that whole army, they've been victorious all along the line, right? So all of the Spartan allies have broken and fled because, as I said, they're not really in it with a great deal of spirit. So they don't want to fight there for the Spartans, for the cause of the Spartans. So they break easily. And the Spartans know this,

and the Spartans don't care. All of these guys have broken. The allies have chased them for a bit, which is a very strong feature. A common feature of Greek battle is when the enemy starts running, you chase them and kill as many as you can. So only eight Spartans die in this battle, but like 1100 of their allies. So it's a massacre on that end of the line. Hundreds are killed from each of these different cities that contribute, but they chase them for a bit. And then when the enemy gets away, when they find safety in their camp or whatever, or when the troops get exhausted, they'll just turn around and say, well, that was a job well done. Let's head back to the camp. So they're marching back over the battlefield, but the Spartans are still there. The Spartans have won where they fought. And instead of just chasing

after the Athenians and going and chasing them to the camp as the Athenian allies are doing, instead they decide to stop and wheel to the left. So they're bringing their entire formation around to go sort of sideways into the rest of the allied army that's still there. And instead of finding that army ready to fight, I mean, that army has been off chasing the parts of the Spartan alliance that they've conquered. And they're now coming back in disorder, thinking the battle's already won. They're not ready for this fight. They don't realize they have another fight coming. And the Spartans essentially, you know, taking advantage, no doubt, of this overgrown battlefield where they can't be spotted very easily from a distance. They're advancing sideways across this battlefield and

crashing into each of these allied forces one at a time. So what actually happens is that these allies, they thought they won the battle. They thought they were done for the day. They're kind of cheering each other on saying, hey, look at how great we did. And suddenly from the right hand side where they don't have their shields or from the unshielded side as they're advancing back towards their camp, suddenly thousands of them are killed in this battle, an absolute massacre on the side of the Allies, and a huge knockout blow. This entire campaign at this point just has to be aborted because they're just done. It's so interesting. Maintaining your cohesion in victory is so difficult in this pre-modern world, isn't it? It's hard enough anywhere, presumably. But I'm thinking about the Battle of Naseby as well, endless battles, the Civil War, when Prince Rupert's cavalry would charge off, send the troops opposite him flying, but then his troops would play no further part in the battle because

their horses would be blown, they'd be off looting and having a great old time. And it's people like Oliver Cromwell that are able to defeat the enemy in front of them, but then maintain that unit and use it again subsequently battle. That seems time and again to be a war-winning technique. If the Spartans are so great, how come eventually they do get toppled in one of the great upset stories of ancient Greek history? The Thebans come out of nowhere and end up defeating the Spartans. What do they do? Do they learn from the Spartans or have they come up with new techniques? Yeah, it's quite easy to think of this as the Thebans learning from, for instance, the experience at this battle at the Nemea.

So they were obviously on the right-hand side and they don't get away with it. The Spartans do eventually catch them on their own retreat and drive them off. So they realize something's gone terribly wrong. And one of the things they realize, I mean, they're very confident that their traditional tactic of deploying in a very deep formation, that that is very good for them, that has worked for them pretty reliably. But the problem is that if they go against the enemy where the enemy is weak, then victory on that side is guaranteed, but it doesn't seem to matter, right? At the Nemea, they win at their end of the battle, but they lose the battle overall because the Spartans are still

operating, right? The Spartans are still functioning and they're holding together. So they realize that if you want to fight a Spartan army, you do actually have to confront the Spartans themselves. Everything else almost doesn't matter because the allies are not very reliable anyway, but the Spartans know this too. And the Spartans choose not to rely on their allies. So you have to overcome the Spartans themselves. Otherwise, you're never going to win these battles.

And so this is what the Thebans come up with. They realize that next time they have to fight the Spartans at the Battle of Leuctra in 371, they decide that instead of doing this thing they did at the Nemea, where they fought on the right hand side and the Spartans fought on the right hand side, and so they kind of missed each other, right? They're operating on opposite ends of the battle line. Instead, the Thebans decide to deploy on the left of their own line, which has been fairly commonly done in Greek warfare. It's not as new as some people make it out to be, because what you're doing then, essentially, you're choosing to put your strongest over against the enemy's strongest troops.

Instead of saying, I'm going to pit you where you're weak so that you have to respond to me, they're saying, I'm going to confront you where you're strong, and then we'll see who wins this. Essentially, you're duking it out on an even level. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. then we'll see who wins this. Essentially, you're best of friends. Murder, rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts.

And so that's what the Thebans decide to do. But then they also deploy in their very deep formation. In fact, they make it deeper than ever. So they have this huge hoplite column of like 50 shields deep, which is practically unheard of in Greek warfare, although formations do seem to get deeper and deeper over time. So you have this huge block of hoplites, which is essentially by virtue of its depth, practically unbreakable. They can't get away for one thing. You have to drive off people through their own ranks. Well, those ranks are not exactly going to let them do that. But they also have this huge morale boost. They know their friends are at their back.

There's so many of their friends at their back. There's no way they could lose locally, right? There's no way that they could fail to overcome the people directly in front of them. So the Thebans deploy this very deep, very confident block of hoplites directly against the Spartans. And then there's another lesson they apply there, which they learned from a previous battle that happened a few years earlier, a small sort of local battle at Tegaira, where they learned that in the fighting, when you confront these Spartans head on, if you can knock out their commanding officers, then this strength that the Spartans

have, that their obedience, they follow orders, they follow their leaders, and they're willing to listen to these orders even after the battle has started. When you take out those leaders, that becomes a weakness. They don't know what to do if they don't get orders. They become quite an inert mass. And so at that point, you can actually get them to do things that a Spartan theoretically shouldn't be willing to do. At Tegira, for instance, they decide in a panic to open their lines to the Thebans, who then sort of infiltrate their formation. Thinking the Thebans are trying to run away, they open their formation and the Thebans use it to infiltrate and slaughter them. At a later battle, when the commanders are

killed of a Spartan force, the remaining Spartan officers essentially decide to agree on a truce and walk away. These kinds of things that you feel like are sort of unspartan and really not a smart thing to do, you can achieve that if you take out the commander. And so the Thebans learn this lesson and it's expressed very beautifully in this simile from a later author. He says, you know, that the general of the Thebans, a man named Epaminondas, explained to them, he picked up a snake from the ground, it's sort of slithering around in the rocks. And he grabbed this and said, look, if you crush the head of the snake, the rest is not a threat. And that's how they explain it look, if you crush the head of the snake, the rest is not a threat. And that's how they explain it. Basically, you crush the head of the snake. So you go directly

at the king. At Luktra, the commander of the Spartan army is a king named Cleombrotus. He himself had an axe to grind against the Thebans. He had to prove himself because it was thought that he had previously pursued this war in lackluster fashion. People thought that he wasn't really committed. He didn't really mean to win. So he now has a point to prove. He wants to show that he's eager and willing to fight the Thebans. So they have him where they want him. They go directly at him. They kill him or they incapacitate him. He's mortally wounded and carried away. And then some of the officers that remain, the most senior officers in the Spartan army, and when they are killed, and when the Royal Guard is starting to waver, the rest of the army sees this happening and just sort of says, well, if they're not in the fight,

we're gone, we're out of here. So by taking out the command, you're both breaking their morale, you're both attacking their morale, but also preventing them from doing any of that fancy stuff they do at the Nemea. You're basically making it so that they become an inert mass of hoplites that's just not sure what to do. And at that point, you're fighting them one-on-one and their hoplite is as good as yours. It do. And at that point, you're fighting them one-on-one, and their hoplite is as good as yours. It's a dice roll, but at least a dice roll where your chances are basically even. That's a great way of putting it.

Thank you so much. And we've had people on the podcast before talking about if the great commanders can find the locus of enemy power, you know, where it's concentrated. Like Alexander the Great, who would come and topple the Thebans in turn. Battle of Gargamelot. Find the kind of central nervous system of the enemy and try and kill it. So that's so interesting. That's what the Thebans did. I did not know that. Thank you very much, Ruel. And we should say the Thebans didn't get to enjoy their brief period of hegemony for long,

did they? Because unfortunately in the north, a new power was arising and that was the Macedonians, Philip and his son Alexander. So such a rapid turnover of hegemonic powers in ancient Greece. No, absolutely. So there's the big battle of Carinhea, where the Thebans and the Athenians together try to fight and stop Philip of Macedon, and it ends in complete disaster. The casualty rate for that battle is absolutely horrendous. And in particular, the Thebans, their elite unit, the Sacred Band, is completely wiped out to a man. Which kind of, again, comes back to what we were saying about the Battle of Thermopylae, is that this idea that Greeks don't normally fight to the death, but they all share this ideal.

I mean, sometimes they do. Sometimes they do actually live up to the kind of ideal that they espouse and do what Leonidas did at Thermopylae. They do fight to the death. At the Battle of the Nemea, we're told that the Thespians do this. They do this quite regularly. There's a small town in Boeotia that tends to have a bit of a knack for fighting to the death. At the Battle of the Nemea, we're told that the Thespians do this. They do this quite regularly. This is a small town in Boeotia that tends to have a bit of a knack for fighting to the death. But in this battle at Caranea, it's the Theban sacred band that does this. Every single one of them, we're told, is killed by the troops of Philip and Alexander. Crikey. And the Macedonians, that is a different story. And maybe one day we'll get you back in the pod to talk all about that because they are masters of the phalanx, but also masters on horseback as well. So perhaps that's part of their secret.

Ruel, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate that. It's been my great pleasure. Thank you very much. you