EXE´RCITUS
EXE´RCITUS (
στρατός),
army.
Greek
The earliest notices which we possess of the military art among the
Greeks are those contained in the Homeric poems. The unsettled state of
society in the first ages of Greece led to the early and general
cultivation of the art of arms, which were habitually worn for defence,
even when aggressive warfare was not intended (
Thuc.
1.6). But the Homeric poems contain an exhibition of combined
military operations in their earliest stage. Warlike undertakings before
the time described in them can have been little else than predatory
inroads (
βοηλασίαι,
Il. 11.672). A collection of warriors
exhibiting less of organisation and discipline than we see depicted in
the Grecian troops before Troy, would hardly deserve the name of an
army. The organisation which we see there, such as it was, arose, not
from any studied, formative system, but naturally out of the imperfect
constitution of society in that age. Every freeman in those times was of
course a soldier; but when all the members of a family were not needed
to go upon an expedition under the command of their chieftain or king,
those who were to go seem to have been selected by lot (
Il. 24.400). As the confederated states,
which are represented as taking part in the Trojan war, are united by
scarcely any other bond than their participation in a common object, the
different bodies of troops, led by their respective chieftains, are
[p. 1.767]far from being united by a common discipline
under the command-in-chief of Agamemnon. A common epithet for allies is
“called from afar” (
τηλεκλειτοί, Il. 5.491, 6.111). Each body obeys its own
leader, and follows him to the conflict, or remains inactive, according
as he chooses to mingle in the fight or not. Authority and obedience are
regulated much more by the nature of the circumstances, or by the
relative personal distinction of the chieftains, than by any law of
military discipline. Gifts (
δῶρα) were
given to them at the end of service; and such may be considered as the
beginning of pay being given to soldiers (
Il.
17.225). Agamemnon sometimes urges the chieftains to engage,
not by commands, but by taunts (
Il.
4.338 ff., 368 ff.). Accordingly, nothing like the tactics or
strategy of a regularly disciplined army is to be traced in the Homeric
descriptions of battles. Each chieftain with his body of troops acts for
himself, without reference to the movements of the rest, except as these
furnish occasion for a vigorous attack, or, when hard pressed, call for
assistance from the common feeling of brotherhood in arms. The wide
interval which in the Homeric age separated the noble or chieftain from
the common freeman, appears in as marked a manner in military as in
civil affairs. The former is distinguished by that superior skill and
prowess in the use of his arms, which would naturally result from the
constant practice of warlike exercises, for which his station gave him
the leisure and the means. A single hero is able to put to flight a
whole troop of common soldiers. The account of a battle consists almost
entirely of descriptions of the single combats of the chiefs on both
sides; and the fortune of the day, when not overruled by the
intervention of the gods, is decided by the individual valour of these
heroes. While the mass of the common soldiers were on foot, the chiefs
rode in chariots [
CURRUS],
which usually contained two, one to drive (
ἡνίοχος) and one to fight (
παραιβάτης). In these they advanced against the
antagonists whom they singled out for encounter, sometimes hurling their
spears from their chariots, but more commonly alighting, as they drew
near, and fighting on foot, making use of the chariot for pursuit or
flight. The Greeks did not, like the ancient Britons and several nations
of the East, use the chariot itself as an instrument of warfare. Cavalry
was unknown at that time to the Greeks, and horsemanship but very rarely
practised; the
ἱππῆες of Homer are the
chieftains who ride in chariots. These chiefs are drawn up in the front
of the battle array (
Il. 4.297,
505,
πρόμαχοι,
προμάχεσθαι); and frequently the foot-soldiers seem to
have done nothing but watch the single combats of their leaders, forming
in two opposite, parallel lines, between which the more important single
combats are fought. How they got the chariots out of the way when the
foot-soldiers came to close quarters (as in
Il.
4.427 ff.) is not described.
Though so little account is usually made of the common soldiers (
πρυλέες,
Il. 11.49,
12.77), Homer occasionally lays considerable stress on their
orderly and compact array; the Atreidae are honourably distinguished by
the epithet
κοσμήτορε λαῶν (
Il. 1.15). Nestor and Menestheus were also
skilled in marshalling an army (
Il.
2.553,
4.293 ff.). The troops
were naturally drawn up in separate bodies according to their different
nations. It would appear to be rather a restoration of the old
arrangement than a new classification, when Nestor (
Il. 2.362) recommends Agamemnon to draw
the troops up by tribes and phratries. Arranged in these natural
divisions, the foot-soldiers were drawn up in densely compacted bodies
(
πυκιναὶ φάλαγγες)--shield close
to shield, helmet to helmet, man to man (
Il.
13.130,
16.212 ff.). In
these masses, though not usually commencing the attack, they frequently
offer a powerful resistance, even to distinguished heroes (as Hector,
Il. 13.145 ff., comp. 17.267, 354
ff., 13.339), the dense array of their spears forming a barrier not
easily broken through. The signal for advance or retreat was not given
by instruments of any kind, but by the voice of the leader. A loud voice
was consequently an important matter, and the epithet
βοὴν ἀγαθὸς is common. The soldiers
advanced and engaged in battle with loud shouting (
ἀλαλητός,
Il. 4.436,
14.393). The trumpet, however, was not absolutely unknown
(
Il. 18.219). Respecting the
armour, offensive and defensive, see
ARMA No engines for besieging are found. There were in the
army, besides the hoplites, light-armed troops, archers and slingers
(
Il. 13.767).
Under the king or chieftain who commands his separate contingent we
commonly find subordinate chiefs, who command smaller divisions. It is
difficult to say whether it is altogether accidental or not, that these
are frequently five in number. Thus the Myrmidons of Achilles are
divided into five
στίχες, each of 500
men. Five chiefs command the Boeotians; and the whole Trojan army is
formed in five divisions, each under three leaders. (
Il. 4.295 ff., 16.171-197, 2.494, 495,
12.87-104.) The term
φάλαγξ is applied
either to the whole army (as
Il. 6.6), or
to these smaller divisions and subdivisions, which are also called
στίχες and
πύργοι (
Il. 11.90,
4.333).
When an enemy was slain, it was the universal practice to stop and strip
off his arms, which were carefully preserved by the victor as trophies.
The division of the booty generally was arranged by the leader of the
troop, for whom a portion was set aside as an honorary present (
γέρας,
Il. 1.118,
368,
392). The recovery of the
dead bodies of the slain was in the Homeric age, as in all later times,
a point of the greatest importance, and frequently either led to a
fierce contest (
Il. 16.756 ff.), or was
effected by the payment of a heavy ransom (
Il.
24.502). (Köpke,
Krieqswesen der Griechen in
heroischen Zeitalter; Wachsmuth,
Hellen.
Alterthumsk. vol. 2.110; Grote,
History of
Greece, vol. ii. p. 106; Buchholz,
Die Homerischen
Realien, 2.1, 303-331.)
After the heroic age considerable impulse was given to the cultivation of
the military art by the conquests of the Thessalians (the first Grecian
people, apparently, that employed cavalry, to the use of which their
conquests were probably in great part owing) and Dorians, among the
latter of whom the art of warfare was earliest reduced to system. The
distinction of heavy and light armed foot-soldiers of course
[p. 1.768]took its rise with the beginnings of military
service, the poorer class being unable to provide themselves with the
more efficient, but more costly weapons of those who were better off
than themselves. Political considerations tended to make the distinction
more marked and systematic. The system of military castes was indeed
unknown among the Greeks, though something answering the same purpose
existed in the earliest times, when the nobles and their more immediate
dependents and retainers, having greater leisure for the cultivation of
skill in the use of arms and greater means for procuring them, were
separated in that respect by a wide interval from the lower class; while
conversely, military superiority was the most direct means of securing
political supremacy. Hence, as soon as the distinction between the
nobles (the privileged class) and the commonalty (demus) was
established, it became the object of the former to prevent the latter
from placing themselves on a par with them in military strength, and so
the use of the full armour of the heavy-armed, infantry was reserved by
the former for themselves; and when, in times of distress, it was found
necessary to entrust the demus with full armour, the result was not
uncommonly a revolution (as was in some degree the case at Mytilene,
Thuc. 3.27). But in the democracies this
distinction as regards the kinds of service depended merely upon the
greater or less ability of the citizens to procure arms. In the Greek
commonwealths all those who enjoyed the privileges of citizens or
freemen were held bound to serve as soldiers when called upon, and were
provided with arms and trained in military exercises as a matter of
course. The modern system of standing armies was foreign to Greek
habits, and would have been dangerous to the liberties of the different
commonwealths, though something of the kind may be seen in the
body-guards, usually of mercenary troops, kept by tyrants. The
mercenaries in the pay of Alexander of Pherae formed a considerable
army. Practically too, from the continuity of the warlike operations in
which they were engaged, the armies of Philip and Alexander of Macedon,
and their successors, became standing armies. The thousand
λογάδες at Argos (
Thuc.
5.67;
Diod. 12.75), the sacred
band at Thebes (
Plut. Pel. 18), and the
Arcadian
ἐπάριτοι (EPARITI) were not considerable enough to be
called armies. The employment of mercenary troops might have led to the
use of standing armies, had it not been that the use of them
characterised the decline of the Grecian states, so that the
circumstances which led to their employment also rendered it impossible
to provide the resources for their maintenance, except when they were
immediately needed. Still, as in the case of the Scythian bowmen at
Athens, individual corps of mercenaries might be regularly maintained.
Slaves were but rarely trusted with arms; and when it was the case, they
were usually manumitted. The Greek armies accordingly were national
armies, resembling rather the militia than the regular armies of modern
times. Their smallness in comparison with modern armies must be noticed.
The largest Greek armies we know of as having operated in Hellas proper
were, at Plataea, 38,700 hoplites and 69,500
ψιλοί (
Hdt. 9.28 ff.); in the
first invasion of Attica by the Lacedaemonians, 70,000 (
Plut. Per. 33); in the invasion of Laconia
by Epaminondas, 70,000 (Plut.
de Glor. Ath. 2). At
Mantineia, in 362 B.C., 33,000 Thebans fought
against 23,000 Lacedaemonians, according to Diodorus (
15.84).
In all the states of Greece, in the earliest as in later times, the
general type of their military organisation was the
phalanx, a body of troops in close array with a long
spear as their principal weapon. It was among the Dorians, and
especially among the Spartans, that this type was most rigidly adhered
to. See Tyrtaeus
passim, who insists on the
especial duties of fighting
ἐν
προμάχοισι, and each keeping his place in the phalanx. The
strength of their military array consisted in the heavy-armed infantry
(
ὁπλῖται). They attached
comparatively small importance to their cavalry, which was always
inferior (
Xen. Hell. 6.4, §
10). Indeed, the Thessalians and Boeotians were the only Greek people
who distinguished themselves much for their cavalry; scarcely any other
states had territories adapted for the evolutions of cavalry. The
Spartan army, as described by Xenophon, was probably in all its main
features the same that it was in the time of Lycurgus. The institutions
of that lawgiver converted the body of Spartan citizens into a kind of
military brotherhood, whose almost sole occupation was the practice of
warlike and athletic exercises. The whole life of a Spartan was little
else than either the preparation for or the practice of war. The result
was, that in the strictness of their discipline, the precision and
facility with which they performed their military evolutions, and the
skill and power with which they used their weapons, the Spartans were
unrivalled among the Greeks, so that they seemed like real masters of
the art of war (
τεχνίτας τῶν
πολεμικῶν), while in comparison with them other Greeks
appeared mere tyros (
αὐτοσχεδιαστὰς τῶν
στρατιωτικῶν, Xen.
Rep. Laced. 13.5;
ἄκροι τεχνῖται καὶ σοφισταὶ τῶν
πολεμικῶν,
Plut. Pel. 23). The heavy-armed infantry
of the Spartan armies was composed partly of genuine Spartan citizens,
partly of Perioeci (e. g.
Thuc. 4.8; comp.
Grote,