Recent decades have seen the publication of both a Cambridge History (2007) and an Oxford Handbook (2013) of ancient Mediterranean warfare, and the editors of this new Blackwell Companion are quite wrong to claim that there have been no handbooks exclusively devoted to Greek warfare (1). Even if we confine ourselves to anglophone scholarship, both Louis Rawlings’ The Ancient Greeks at War (Manchester 2007) and Matthew Sears’ Understanding Greek Warfare (London 2019) fit the bill. What contribution does this new reference work make to such a well-served field? The editors’ main answer is scope: across 31 chapters, the Companion provides detailed studies of various aspects that other surveys have neglected. It moves gradually from overviews of campaigns and detailed studies of specific military units to chapters about broader diachronic themes like generalship, military intelligence, propaganda, the role of women or the reflection of war in poetry. Another strength is the systematic inclusion of Macedonian warfare under the Greek umbrella. The conventional boundary between the Classical and Hellenistic periods is regularly crossed, providing a more integrated narrative of evolving theatres and methods of war.
The volume opens with five chapters of historical overview. The inclusion is odd; these chapters do not have room to be comprehensive, and readers are unlikely to come to this companion for an outline of a history of Greek wars. Sabine Müller (on conflict and coexistence with Achaemenid Persia) and Melanie Jonasch (on Sicilian Greek warfare) handle the task in commendable fashion, but Johannes Heinrichs’ chapter on the Mycenaean to late Archaic period is much too short and strangely reliant on written sources. Edward Anson’s thoroughly traditional survey of the Hellenistic period (down to 165 BC) is the only one to contain detailed reconstructions of battles.
Later chapters fall into a sensible set of subcategories, of which ‘War with Non-Greeks’ is unprecedented and rich with evidence that is too often ignored in such handbooks. Large sections on ‘Technical and Economic Context’ and ‘Social and Political Context’ demonstrate how widely the editors have cast their net. Most contributions offer a good introduction to the nature, source base and source problems of their subject. Especially useful are David Whitehead on sieges; Mauricio Álvarez on military camps; Stephen O’Connor on logistics; Peter Hunt on the roles of the enslaved; Elizabeth Carney on women and war; and Sheila Ager on piracy and terror tactics. F.S. Naiden’s chapter on military organization is an important inclusion, and admirably sensitive to historical context, but unfortunately full of minor errors: hoplites were not named after their shield (see John Lazenby and David Whitehead, ‘The Myth of the Hoplite’s Hoplon’, CQ 46.1 (1996), 27–33); the ouragos is not a file-closer but a supernumerary officer (see my Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History (Leiden 2018), 184); there were only seven boeotarchs at Leuctra, not 11; Xenophon’s officer hierarchy for the Athenian cavalry (Eq. mag. 2.2–3) is a recommendation, not a reality; the Arcadian eparitoi, not the Thousand of Argos, were the largest picked unit in classical Greece; Naiden’s calculation of officer ratios in the Macedonian army counts its lower-ranking officers twice, while his calculation for Athens counts the lochagoi twice. Similar preventable errors regrettably occur in other chapters.
Given the scale of the project, the editors should be forgiven for leaving certain aspects out of consideration. Yet the conscious omission of central topics like naval warfare and mercenaries (3) is odd, and the editors’ argument that these topics have already been well covered elsewhere does not seem adequate for a companion volume. There is no chapter on light-armed troops either, and, surprisingly, nothing on hoplite battle. If much recent scholarship has been unreasonably obsessed with hoplites and their fighting style, this volume has surely overcorrected. Fernando Echeverría’s chapter on the modern concept of ‘hoplite warfare’ is a thoughtful historiographical study, but it offers no account of Greek infantry armament or battle tactics. As a result of this absence, the companion is wholly silent on many controversies in the field, from the othismos debate to the contested notion of agonal warfare. It has tried to offer a broad view of the topic, which is laudable; but its flight from the centre has left a significant gap.
Parts of the volume even suggest a certain indifference to the latest developments in scholarship. Several contributors take for granted the existence of a fully developed hoplite phalanx in the Archaic period (19, 370, 398–401), the fixation on ritualized pitched battle before the Peloponnesian War (31, 43, 155, 244) and the ubiquity of military training for Greek militias (44, 153, 332). All these notions have been repeatedly challenged since the late 1990s. Hunt is admirably frank about his loyalty to older views on the nature of helotage and cites the scholars arguing otherwise (273), but not so Frances Pownall when she cites Leuctra as a case of ‘novel military strategy’ (40), Jonasch when she dates the Athenian alliance with Egesta to 454/3 BC (67), Heinrichs when he assumes there were large numbers of mercenaries left unemployed by the end of the Peloponnesian War (266) or Jeanne Reames and Ann Haverkost when they assert that the Spartan conquest of a neighbouring community was unique in the Archaic period (297). The casual manner in which these claims are made gives the false impression that they are uncontroversial and misrepresents the state of the field.
Indeed, the consolidated bibliography lacks a mass of scholarly work published in the last five to ten years. Undoubtedly this is largely due to the long gestation period of any multi-authored volume. But the dated reference pool undermines the value of the companion. Some chapters are particularly affected. Silke Müth’s contribution on fortifications may have been written too early to incorporate Oliver Hülden’s Das griechische Befestigungswesen der archaischen Zeit (Vienna 2020), which seeks to disprove many of the optimistic datings on which her study is based. Lawrence Tritle’s unpleasantly tetchy chapter on battle trauma likens Jean-Christophe Couvenhes’ criticism to embracing pseudo-science (302) but does not mention the more recent methodological critiques by Jason Crowley and Owen Rees. Ironically, several contributors seem unaware of the important work that other contributors have been doing. Álvarez’s section on merchants (152–53) ignores O’Connor’s view that these were not attached to armies to sell food (and Reames and Haverkost repeat his points on the grain supply of armies without reference to his work, 295). Michael B. Charles’ view on the desirability of hoplites as mercenaries in Persian service (176) goes against Jeffrey Rop’s deconstruction of this theory in Greek Military Service in the Ancient Near East, 401–330 BC (Cambridge 2019) and his demonstration in the immediately preceding chapter (160–69) that Greeks mostly served the Persians as naval or amphibious forces. In terms of other key scholarship, Tritle’s chapter on monuments and commemoration does not cite Giorgia Proietti’s many publications on the subject, Naiden’s section on supplication and sanctuaries (325) misses Sonya Nevin’s Military Leaders and Sacred Space in Classical Greek Warfare (London 2017), and so on.
The overall impression is of a volume that contains much good and useful scholarship, but that is also dated in key ways, extremely limited in its coverage of the Archaic period, not always reliable and sometimes regressive. Its main and undeniable merit is in broadening the scope of the subject and providing points of access to numerous fields of research.
