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A Cultural History. (Mnemosyne, Supplements 409) Roel Konijnendijk, Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History. (Mnemosyne, Supplements 409). Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2018. Pp. viii + 261. $120.00. ISBN 978-90- 04-35536-1 (hardback). Scholarly othismos over the character of hoplite battle and Classical Greek warfare continues. A recent head-on clash of opposing views, essentially a dialogue of the deaf, resolved nothing.1 The work here reviewed, a University of London D.Phil. thesis (2015), directed by Hans van Wees (readers: Peter Krentz, Simon Hornblower), purports, in a radical reassessment, to raise a tropaion over traditionalist views (“hoplite orthodoxy”). Only tirones and the naïve will be deceived. Students of the controversies can divine the direction of the arguments before opening the book. Dazzling is a true believer’s devotion to the absolute correctness of revisionist views disseminated as “gospel” (e.g., pp. 3, 22–23, 109, 154, 216). Just as in the Roman strategy debate, where deniers often boast of “victory,” here, too, strident criticisms of revisionist views are either ignored or cherry-picked.2 A more biased propagation of one school’s “spin” on controversial issues can hardly be imagined. Indeed, publication in a series edited by the Doktorvater should raise eyebrows. Konijnendijk (hereafter “K”) envisions a wargamer’s fantasy, a Clausewitzian “absoluter Krieg” without checks on violence. Rather than a free-for-all beginning in the 5th c. from the collapse of conventional norms under the threat of non-Greek actors and the expansion of major powers’ strategic aims, 5th– 4th c. tactical developments (for K) aimed at enhancing the means to greater violence, as slaughter of the enemy is sup- posed the chief goal of Greek warfare (pp. 2, 224–26). Hence K (unwittingly) returns to Eli Sagan’s “lust to annihilate” devoid of its Freudian base.3 Curiously, K’s emphasis on slaughter as the telos follows his earlier rejection (pp. 11–12) of 19th-c. German scholars, allegedly under Clausewitz’s influence (only Delbrück is cited), seeking to re-concile Greek developments with Clausewitz’s emphasis on annihilation of the enemy. For K (pp. 3, 38), tactics—strategy is ignored—exists in isolation with its own “culture” distinct from larger political, social, intellectual, religious, and economic contexts. No need to treat institutions or ideology, since the revisionists have already clarified all such issues (p.3).4 K’s radical form of “drums and trumpets” military history 1 D. Kagan/G. Viggiano, eds., Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Classical Greece (Princeton 2013); cf. my review in The Historian 77.2 (2015) 393–94. All dates here are B.C., unless otherwise noted. 2 E.g., unknown is E.L. Wheeler, “Greece: Mad Hatters and March Hares,” in L. Brice/J. Roberts, eds., Recent Directions in the Military History of the Ancient World (Claremont 2011) 53–104 with bibliography. 3 E. Sagan, The Lust to Annihilate: A Psychoanalytic Study of Violence in Ancient Greek Culture (New York 1979). 4 Besides Krentz and van Wees, other favored revisionists are: J. Dayton, The Athletes of War: An Evaluation of the Agonistic Elements of Greek Warfare (Toronto 2005); F. Echeverría, “Taktikè technè: The Neglected Element in Classical ‘Hoplite’ Battles,” AncSoc 41 (2011) 45–82; on Dayton cf. Wheeler (supra n.2) 80 n.96: remarks also applicable to Echeverría. K’s laudatio (p.23) of the 2011 paper need not be shared. AHBOR 9 (2019) 35–45. Wheeler on Konijnendijk, Classical Greek Tactics: a cultural history flies in the face of all we thought we knew about both war and society and war as a product of its cultural milieu, not to mention the Greek view that war is part of politics (Pl. Prt. 322b–c; Arist. Eth.Nic. 1.2, 1094a26–b11). Clausewitz, whose war as a continuation of politics had Hellenic roots, and the Greeks (but apparently not K) knew that the “absoluter Krieg” did not occur in practice. Killing had to have a larger purpose. Further, K would deny (e.g., p. 224) Greeks any expected standards of conduct: an “all’s fair” mentality without restraints on behavior. From a broader historical perspective, however, war has been a normative phenomenon with circumscriptions of conduct, even if not always observed. Nevertheless, deeper knowledge of military history and even actual military experience must not intrude on K’s imaged tactical Greek culture.5 K the academic Lehnstuhlfeldherr knows best, although Polybius (12.25g.1–2) would disagree about the value of an historian’s personal military experience. The work consists of six chapters and a conclusion: (1) a “Prussian” model of hoplite battle, (2) training and discipline, (3) where and when to fight, (4) deployment, (5) battle tactics, (6) the rout and the tropaion. Ch. 1, a selective survey of bibliography (1852 to the present) includes Germanophone work to the 1920s (Köchly/Rüstow, Droysen, Bauer, E. Lammert, Delbrück, Beloch, Kromayer), British 1911–57 (Grundy, Adcock), and American from 1970 (Anderson, Pritchett, Hanson, Ober). Important French work of structuralists and Annalistes in the 1960s and 1970s is deemed irrelevant; no mention of Italians and others. Thankfully, since 1989 an epiphany of revisionists (Cawkwell, Krentz, van Wees, Rawlings, Dayton, Echeverría) has demonstrated the true path to enlightenment.6 Pre-revisionist views of hoplite warfare (regardless of language or date) are lumped into a supposed “Prussian” model:7 formal pitched hoplite battles with observance of a ritualistic code defined Greek warfare; such battles, usually a direct clash of rival phalanges formed in rectangular units eight files deep with the commander located on the right flank, occurred in an open plain and involved little or no cavalry and light infantry; possession of the battlefield and the opponent’s dead determined victory; abandonment of “the rules” began with the Persian Wars (or the Peloponnesian War: Grundy) and Epaminondas’ victory at Leuctra, the end of an era, foreshadowed Philip II’s reforms. In portraying the early “Prussians” as presentists applying contemporary practices to the Greek, K ignores a long tradition from the Renaissance into the Napoleonic era: efforts to find practical utility in ancient military texts and from actual experience to analyze them (cf. Delbrück’s Sachkritik). Dubious contentions (e.g., pp. 3, 11–12, 15) of “Prussian” selective manipulation of the sources but the revisionists’ “truth” reflect a believer’s faith in an unassailable new “gospel.” More importantly, K forsakes an accurate 5 Note (p.7) K’s ridicule of Johannes Kromayer’s assertion that personal military experience matters. 6 Cf. the detailed and more balanced (although predominantly Anglophone) survey in Kagan/Viggiano (supra n.1: 1–56), which begins with Grote. 7 It is conceded (pp.7 n.5, 17, 18) that Adolf Bauer was Austrian and J.K. Anderson, characterized as more “Prussian” that the real Prussians, was an Oxford educated Scot with an American job. K’s knowledge (p.7) of real Prussians is imperfect: Delbrück’s Geschichte der Kriegskunst… is in four volumes, not three. Page 36 Wheeler on Konijnendijk, Classical Greek Tactics: a cultural history status quaestionis in preference for erecting his “Prussian model” as a straw man to be repeatedly pummeled and dismembered in succeeding chapters. For example, the Peloponnesian War’s generation of a “military revolution” has been questioned since at least Lonis (1979), but (as indicated above) French bibliography is largely absent.8 Other supposed dogmata of the “Prussian” model are also incorrectly portrayed as absolutes, as will be shown. For the uninitiated some clarification of K’s method and approach would be useful. Different definitions of Greek warfare distinguish the “Prussians” from the revisionists. “Prussians” emphasize major field battles between rival hoplite phalanges, in which the hoplite ethos, stressing arête in an open trial of strength (amply attested in literary sources), prevails, although such battles in the 5th and 4th c. are relatively rare in comparison to raids and smaller scale operations. Hoplite practices are assumed the product of primarily minor border wars with limited aims between mainland Greek poleis. In contrast, revisionists, preferring an anthropologically generic to an historical view, characterize Greek warfare as all violent acts of armed forces regardless of size, location, and context. Hence indiscriminate citations of skirmishes, raids (including naval operations), and minor battles disprove the “Prussian” traits of large-scale hoplite battles and any protocols in Greek warfare.9 Honor, agon, and a “fair fight” have no role. K’s rare responses with special pleadings to both “Prussian” compartmentalization of types of battle and criticisms of the revisionists’ disregard of scale fail to rebut objections to revisionist views (pp. 32 with n.121, 105). Revisionists also assert continuity of practices from Homer into the 4th c. Cavalry and light infantry, for revisionists omnipresent and the new “queens of the battlefield” (despite the sources’ frequent silence), should replace the “Prussian” hoplite-centric warfare (pp. 97, 105–6). But the phalanx did not appear simultaneously in all parts of the Greek world and in some parts not at all. Geography and socio-economic structures favored cavalry and light infantry (but not hoplites) in some areas (e.g., Thessaly, Aetolia, and Boeotia to some extent).10 Revisionist generalizations disregard local 8 R. Lonis, Guerre et religion en Grèce à l’époque classique (Paris 1979) 17–21, 283–94, 318. K’s negative view of military revolutions (p.36) seems inspired (but unacknowledged) by this reviewer’s position (“Land Battles,” in P. Sabin et al., eds., The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare [Cambridge 2007] I, 187); likewise on the same page (CHGRW I, 187) this reviewer is made to appear as an advocate of face-of-battle studies, of which he has been a critic for thirty years.
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