Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (29 page)

founded only eight cities.

20 See further A. B. Bosworth, “Philip II and Upper Macedonia,”
CQ
2 21 (1971): 93–105.

21 Justin 12.5.13 says that Alexander founded twelve cities in Bactria and Sogdiana, but

he does not name them.

22 See Arrian 4.1.3–4 on the potential of Alexander Eschate (Alexandria-on-the-

Jaxartes, the modern Leninabad) as security against future Scythian attacks.

23 Much has been written on this topic, but for excellent arguments against the

unity of mankind, see Ernst Badian, “Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind,”

136 Worthington

Historia
7 (1958): 425–44, and A. B. Bosworth, “Alexander and the Iranians,”
JHS
100

(1980): 1–21, citing previous bibliography.

24 See Bosworth,
Conquest and Empire
, 271–73.

25 Plutarch
On the
Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander
338d.

26 Metz
Epitome
70.

27 Plutarch
On the
Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander
329b. On what Hellenism con-

stituted, bound up with speaking Greek, see Herodotus 8.1442 and Thucydides 2.68.5,

with J. M. Hall,
Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture
(Chicago: University of Chi-

cago Press, 2002), 189–98.

28 See Ernst Badian, “Alexander the Great and the Scientific Exploration of the Ori-

ental Part of His Empire,”
Ancient Society
22 (1991): 127–38.

29 Plutarch
On the
Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander
328b.

30 See, e.g., Herodotus 3.32.4 on Cambyses marrying his sister; Strabo 15.3.20 on sons

marrying their mothers. See A. M. Schwarts, “The Old Eastern Iranian World View

According to the Avesta,” in
Cambridge
History of Iran
, ed. I. Gershevitch, vol. 2 (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 656.

31 Sacrificing elderly parents: Herodotus 1.126; using corpses: Herodotus 4.64.1–65.

32 Onesicritus,
FGrH
134 F 5 (Strabo 11.11.3)

33 See C. B. Welles, “Alexander’s Historical Achievement,”
G&R
2 12 (1965): 216–28;

quotation at 228.

34 Cf. Arrian 7.19.6.

35 Cf. Bosworth, “Alexander and the Iranians,” 6.

Alexander the Great and Empire 137

6. Urban Warfare in the Classical Greek World

John W. I. Lee

On a rainy, almost moonless night in early summer 431 BC, a The-

ban assault force of three hundred men entered the small town

of Plataea in central Greece. They were let in by a Plataean, part of an

oligarchic faction hoping to seize power with Theban support. In the

sodden darkness the Thebans hurried to Plataea’s marketplace. There

they issued a proclamation: Plataea was occupied, and the sensible

thing to do was to accept the fact. Plataea and Thebes, after all, had

once been allies; they could be so again. At first the Plataeans, panicked

at the enemy presence in the heart of town, agreed to terms. Soon,

though, they realized how few Thebans there were. Digging passages

through the earthen walls of their houses and placing wagons in the

streets as barricades, the Plataeans surrounded the invaders. In the pre-

dawn twilight, they struck. Plataean soldiers rushed down the streets,

while women and slaves threw stones and tiles from the rooftops. The

surprised Thebans withstood several onslaughts but at last broke and

fled, with the Plataeans in pursuit. Unfamiliar with the twisting streets

of the town, hindered by mud and darkness, the Thebans scattered in

desperation. One group, thinking it had found an exit, stumbled into

a warehouse by the city wall, only to be trapped there. A few men

made it to the gates; others were cut down in the streets. By daybreak

it was all over. One hundred twenty Theban corpses lay scattered in the

streets and houses of Plataea. The Plataeans took 180 prisoners; fearing

further Theban treachery, they executed all of them.

Thanks to the Athenian writer Thucydides, the vicious fight at Plat-

aea has passed into history as the opening act of the Peloponnesian War

(431–404 BC) between the rival alliances of Athens and Sparta.1 Thucy-

dides’ narrative skill has made the assault on Plataea one of the most

famous episodes of the war. Yet the larger phenomenon Plataea repre-

sents— pitched battle within city walls—remains relatively neglected in

classical Greek warfare studies.2 Instead, scholars have tended to focus

on set-piece battles fought on open fields between armies of heavily

armored spearmen, or hoplites. As well, studies of Greek fortifications

and sieges have concentrated on siege engineering and on the struggle

for city walls, rather than on fighting within cities themselves.

Urban combat, however, was hardly uncommon in classical Greece.

Indeed, during the period from about 500 to 300 BC, the preeminent

cities of Hellas, including Argos, Athens, Corinth, Sparta, and Thebes,

all witnessed major battles within their city limits. Some of the most

desperate and most decisive clashes of classical antiquity were urban

ones. Athenian democracy was born out of a popular urban revolution

against oligarchs and their Spartan supporters in 508–507 BC. After the

Peloponnesian War, when a junta of Thirty Tyrants usurped power,

democracy was restored only after a civil war that saw intense combat

in Athens’s port of Piraeus. It was through an urban uprising in 379 BC

that the Thebans broke free of Spartan domination and embarked on

their short-lived hegemony over Greece. During that period, Theban

forces would attack Sparta twice, in 370–369 and 362, the second time

penetrating almost to the center of town. Alexander of Macedon, in

turn, would subdue the Thebans in brutal street fighting before razing

their city in 335 BC.

The western and eastern regions of the classical world also experi-

enced intra-urban war. The opening clash of the Ionian Rebellion of

499–494, which would ultimately lead to the Greco-Persian Wars and

the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis, saw Ionian Greeks

and their Athenian allies sack the Persian provincial capital of Sardis.3

The mercenaries of Cyrus, whose story Xenophon tells in his
Anabasis
,

engaged in urban combat during their retreat from Mesopotamia to

Byzantium in 401–400 BC.4 In Sicily, Syracuse and other cities witnessed

repeated episodes of urban warfare from the 460s down to the 350s.5

In the twenty-five centuries since Plataea, the urban battleground

has always to some extent remained on the minds of strategists and

Urban Warfare 139

field commanders.6 Despite the carnage of modern city fights in places

such as Stalingrad, Berlin, Hue, Mogadishu, and Grozny, however, ur-

ban war in the past few decades has often faded into the background

of military consciousness. Just as the ancient Greeks privileged the

decisive hoplite clash, many modern soldiers have preferred to think

about and prepare for conventional battle between massed armies on

open ground. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century,

though, urban warfare has again become a pressing concern. The on-

going U.S. involvement in Iraq, where Western armed forces trained

and equipped for open battle were slow to adapt to the challenges of

fighting in and occupying urban terrain, has been a decisive factor in a

renewed appreciation of urban warfare. In a world of instantaneous

televised communications, insurgents and terrorists have come to real-

ize not only the tactical advantages but also the propaganda value of

drawing Western conventional armies into cities, where they inevita-

bly kill innocent civilians. But it is not only a question of Iraq. About

half the world’s population lives in cities, and the pace of global ur-

banization shows no sign of letting up.7 The problems of fighting in

built-up areas will continue to exercise military thinkers as the century

progresses.

Armies and cities, of course, have changed radical y between Plataea

and Fallujah. Yet despite the many differences in topography, technol-

ogy, and culture that separate antiquity and the twenty-first century,

studying classical Greek city fighting not only sheds light on the history

of war in antiquity, it also offers a fresh perspective on the present.

This chapter provides an introduction to the practices and ideologies

of urban warfare in the classical Greek world. We start by looking at

the various types of classical urban clashes. From there we move to

investigate the ancient city as a battleground, and to evaluate the ca-

pabilities of classical armies for urban operations. Putting terrain and

troops together will permit us to understand the nature of ancient

city fighting and to assess the place of urban warfare in classical Greek

military thought. Finally, we put the classical experience into broader

historical context to see what lessons it may hold for today’s strategists

and battlefield commanders.

140 Lee

Types of Urban Combat

Classical literary sources preserve numerous episodes of sieges and as-

saults on city walls. They also describe assassinations, riots, and low-

level gang warfare inside cities. These phenomena merit study in their

own right, but here we will focus on large-scale armed clashes inside

city walls, where the combatants’ behavior was shaped by settlement

topography, not by fortifications. Within these limits, ancient texts fur-

nish dozens of accounts of city combat. Many of these accounts are

quite brief, but they permit us to distinguish several basic patterns of

urban struggle.

First, an attacking army might breach a city’s walls by assault, siege

engineering, or treachery, only to face continued resistance in streets,

houses, and public spaces. These were among the bitterest sorts of

city fight, often resulting in the complete annihilation of the defend-

ing force. Plataea in 431 and Thebes in 335 are just two examples of

this pattern. Not every successful siege or assault progressed to intra-

urban fighting. Sometimes, especially when surprised, defending forces

simply collapsed.8 Even so, urban combat during the capture of cities

likely occurred more often than classical texts might suggest. The city

of Olynthos in northern Greece, taken by Philip II of Macedon in sum-

mer 348, provides an instructive case in point. Although the literary

sources record only that certain wealthy Olynthians betrayed their fel-

low citizens to Philip, excavations in the ruins of Olynthos have uncov-

ered hundreds of lead sling bullets, arrowheads, and other weapons.

The distribution and context of these artifacts indicate that the Mace-

donians had to subdue Olynthos house by house.9 Future archaeologi-

cal investigation may someday reveal further instances of otherwise

unrecorded urban fighting of the classical period.

A second cause of urban combat was
stasis
, or civil strife, between

factions in a city.10 Such strife could spring from competition between

powerful families, from class-based hostility, or from the involvement

of outside interests. During the Peloponnesian War, antagonism be-

tween pro-Athenian and pro-Spartan factions was responsible for in-

ternecine bloodshed in cities throughout the Greek world. Corcyra

Urban Warfare 141

in northwestern Greece, site of the most notorious of these
staseis
,

underwent two years of civil strife that began with intensive urban

combat and culminated in the total annihilation of the losers and their

families.11 In other cities, factional clashes began with massacres in the

marketplace.12 Defeated factions that managed to escape often returned

to try their luck again, leading to renewed urban war.

Urban combat could also result when rebels or insurgents attempted

to eject foreign occupiers from their city. In 335 BC, for example, the

Thebans rose up against a Macedonian garrison stationed in their city.13

At other times the presence of a foreign garrison in support of a city’s

ruling faction could lead to an urban revolt intended to expel both the

foreigners and those who collaborated with them. The Athenian revo-

lution of 508–507 and the Theban uprising of 379 exemplify this sort of

situation. In both these cases, victorious insurgents allowed enemy gar-

risons to leave under a truce. Urban insurrections of this sort, although

not unknown in the classical world, would become more common in

the Hellenistic period (323–30 BC), when foreign garrisons were more

widely employed.

Invasion or civil strife occasional y resulted in opposing armies or

factions, neither in complete control of a city, confronting each other

within its bounds. So it was in the opening stages of the civil war at

Corcyra, where oligarchs and democrats held separate districts of town

and spent several days engaged in running street battles.14 While the