Episode 8.1 - Ancient Greek Military Strategy

Hi, my name is Clayton Mills. Welcome to ‘A Short Walk through our Long History’ - a podcast where we look at the events of history, and try to see how those events shaped our modern world.

Welcome to Episode 8.1 - A side trip to look at ancient Greek military strategy and weapons. Specifically hoplites and triremes. I’ve mentioned that ancient Greece wasn’t that large of a place, and they weren’t as populous as some of the other larger empires that they fought against, but they were still somehow able to defeat many of their enemies. Eventually, under Alexander the Great, they will conquer the largest area of land, and create the largest empire, that the world had ever seen, to that point, but we’re not there yet.

Today, I want to take a look at the technology, training, culture, and tactics that allowed Greece to be so successful militarily.

Different countries throughout history have had different advantages over their neighbors, and it’s often these advantages that determine which country ends up being the strongest. For example, Ancient Egypt had the advantage of a steady supply of water and good fertile soil, because of the Nile river. This meant that they usually had plenty of food and water, which meant they could develop a pretty large population. Food and population stability also creates wealth, so the Egyptians could afford a large army.

It often gets overlooked in history just how expensive it is to have an army. Navies are even more costly. And now there’s air forces, and space forces, and man, it’s really expensive! The US budget for just defense spending last year (2021) was over $750 Billion. With $750 billion in cash, you could buy ALL the real estate in Greece. The US spent that in one year on just the military. Unfortunately, none of that was used to destroy our federal government, which really seems to be the biggest threat that the US faces right now. I mean, our own government is a bigger threat to our liberties and way of life than any other foreign government. It’s not like Mexico is massing a huge army on our southern border, planning to invade.

A huge group of drug dealers and human traffickers, maybe. Maybe they are invading, but it seems like our government is paying them to come. Let’s pay the invaders! That seems like a good strategy to keep them from trying to come in illegally. Yeh, we need some way to defend ourselves from our own government.

Amies were expensive back in the ancient world as well, and to keep an army in the field, you had to feed them, move them with carts and horses, provide some of the equipment for them, and then pay them. This all costs a lot of money. This was also why there was so much looting and pillaging when an army captured a city. It was a way that the soldiers got paid. Soldiers could make a lot of money in a good looting. This helped with their usually meager pay. In fact, many soldiers took the job not because they got a bit of steady pay from the government, but because they might have the chance to loot Athens, or Sardis, or some wealthy city, whose army they had just defeated. It could make you pretty rich, at least by the standards of the day.

But back to my point, which was that if you wanted to have a good army, it helped to have a sizable population, decent food supply, and enough money to pay for an army. But once you had an army, you kind of had to take them out and fight someone every so often, or the army would get restless and start fighting the local government. So you had to have an army, but you also had to take them out from time to time and let them destroy your neighbors.

Another advantage that countries had, besides a good army, were their natural resources. For example, in Mesopotamia, there’s not a ready supply of tin or copper, which is what you need to make bronze weapons. Every bronze-age empire in Mesopotamia had to go up into the hills to the northeast of the Tigris river, and try to capture the land where there were copper and tin mines. So there was a resource constraint they had to overcome.

So let’s look at the Greek natural advantages. Greece had a relatively stable growing season, and reliable water supplies. They didn’t have a whole lot of farmland, because it was hilly and rocky, but they could grow olives, grapes, and other things besides farm crops. Then, they have almost infinite coastline, so they have all these great harbors for ships. With their ships, they would sail across the Aegean and then eventually the whole Mediterranean to trade what they had for things like wheat and other grains. They were expert sailors and fishermen, so they were very at home on the water, unlike some other cultures. The Egyptians, for example, almost never sailed out in the open waters of the Mediterranean, but instead kept to the calm waters of the Nile.

The Greek coastline also meant that they could do a lot of fishing. So, if you like fresh fish cooked in olive oil, ancient Greece would have been a good place for you.

They also had decent land for raising sheep and goats. The rocky, mountainous land was difficult to travel in, which meant that smaller city-states tended to the be the norm in Greece, rather than one big empire, even though they were all bound together by the same culture, language, gods, and often by treaties to support other city-states. The mountainous terrain made it difficult to move armies around, so the Greeks were somewhat protected from neighboring tribes. The Greeks had a lot of ships, so they could use the coastline and the sea to transport armies, which helped them be more mobile than some of their land-bound neighbors. Also, Greece had its own supplies of copper, tin, and zinc, which meant they could make their own bronze weapons.

So despite being relatively small in terms of population, Greece had some advantages over Persia, Egypt, Assyria, and some of the other ancient empires.

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But now we get to the part that I think is interesting enough to make an extra episode about it. Greek weapons and strategy, which was really one of their best advantages. The bit about geography was just background, but it helps explain why the Greeks fought in the way that they did.

Your average Greek soldier was not a professional soldier, but was only a soldier part-time, during the ‘campaigning’ season, or when there was an outside threat. The rest of the time, they were middle-class land owners, shop keepers, fishermen, or something like that. I say middle-class, because to be a soldier you had to provide your own armor, helmet, shield, sword, and spear. That took a bit of cash, so your subsistence farmer might not have been able to do that.

So all this stuff was made of bronze. Bronze is made by taking copper, melting it, and mixing in tin, zinc, arsenic, or some other things. Good bronze is much stronger than just copper, and it holds a better edge on a sword. You hit a copper sword with a bronze sword, and the copper sword is going to just bend, or at least have a big dent in it. So having good bronze weapons is an advantage over those who don’t have them. This is of course why this era is called the Bronze Age. It is followed by the Iron Age, because once people figured out that they could make even stronger weapons with Iron (really, it was a type of steel), then those countries had an advantage over the peons who were still using bronze. Classical Greece exists at the end of the Bronze Age, and just before the beginning of the Iron Age. The Greeks had good bronze, and had become very adept at making bronze things, including the weapons and armor for their soldiers.

A Greek foot soldier was called a hoplite, and there were also soldiers who were archers, and calvary as well. Let’s take a look at what foot soldier’s equipment, because it’s the Greek foot soldiers who really made the big difference in these famous battles. I wish I could show you a picture, but hey, this is podcast. Just google hoplite, and you can see a lot of pictures. They were pretty cool looking.

So a soldier would have a helmet made of bronze, usually with a big crest on the top, made with horsehair. I honestly don’t know why they added the horsehair crest, but it was a really common feature of helmets in the ancient world. I guess they just thought it looked cool? It does look cool, but it doesn’t seem to be helpful in any other way.

The soldier also had a breastplate of bronze, that also covered their back. These were heavy, at least 50 pounds. Then they also had a large, round shield. Their shields were a bit bigger than Captain America’s shield, and instead of vibranium, they were made of just plain old bronze. The shield was big enough to cover them from their shoulder to down below their hips. But they were also heavy.

Soldiers also often had greaves, which are like tall bronze socks, that covered their shins. They wore leather gauntlets on their forearms as well.

Some Greek soldiers had a form of armor called linothorax, which was a kind of tunic made of linen. Doesn’t sound very sturdy, does it? Here you go, here’s a nice loose t-shirt for armor. That should work. But apparently, they had a way of gluing together layers of linen, to make a sort of flexible, breathable cloth armor, that was much lighter and cooler than bronze. Some people have recently tried to recreate this type of armor, and found that with several layers glued together, linen could indeed stop an arrow, or stop a sword from penetrating, which I find kind of amazing. It’s the ancient Greek equivalent of Kevlar.

For weapons, the hoplites usually carried a short sword, and a long spear. The spear usually wasn’t a throwing spear, they held on to it and basically stabbed people from a bit of a distance. More on that in a minute.

The Greek soldiers fought in a unit known as a phalanx. The basic idea of a phalanx had been developed by the Sumerians, but the Greeks improved it. They used a phalanx that was essentially a big square. In a phalanx, the soldiers all fought as a unit, not as a mob of individuals just chopping at whomever they find next, like you see in the big battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings or other movies. The soldiers lined up shoulder to shoulder, with their shield on their left arm. The Shields protected themselves, and the soldier to their left. With their right arm, they held their spear. So the front line of the phalanx was a long line of shields, with spears sticking out of it. The next line of soldiers, just behind the front line, also held up their shields, and would use them to push on the front line. The Greeks used an 8 line phalanx, so they had 8 lines of soldiers. The lines behind the front line would also point their spears out the front of the formation, so if an enemy got past the first set of spear points, they would meet more spear points. So there was a lot of spear stabbing going on.

If the spears got dropped or broken, or the enemy was too close, they would use their swords. The front line could also fall back through the second line, to change who was up front, and relieve the soldiers who where at the front, as they tired.

It was a powerful formation, and if an enemy, like the Persians, used simple line sof soldiers, or let the soldiers run loose like a mob, the phalanx would basically crush the enemy line. Think of it as a solid brick of soldiers, pushing its way through a loose crowd.

In the Battle of Marathon, the Greeks and the Persians both lined up in long lines across from each other, then started marching towards each other. The Greeks had intentionally thinned out the center of their line, and set full phalanxes on their left and right flanks.

The Persians, who were much more lightly armored, had a different strategy for battle. The Persians would unload an enormous volley of arrows, you know, ‘darken the sky with our arrows,’ that stuff, then follow with a cavalry charge that would often break the enemy lines. Then the foot soldiers would come in and defeat the enemy, often just by sheer numbers.

The Greek general at Marathon, Miltiades, had actually fought under the command of King Darius of Persia for a while, so he knew the Persian strategy. He also knew that the cavalry was not with the Persian army, so he marched his troops out quickly, before the Persians expected them. The Persian cavalry was away, on their way to Athens itself, hoping to perhaps take the unguarded city.

The Persian and Greek lines closed in on each other. According to Herodotus, the Greeks covered the last 400 meters or so at a run, still in formation, which was an unusual tactic for them. The Persian archers were firing away, but their arrows didn’t do much damage against the Greek armor. The Greeks phalanx formation had a system of holding up their shields, which created a sort of shield umbrella, so the arrows weren’t effective.

The lines crashed into each other, and the hand-to-hand fighting began. The Persians pushed forward in the center, where their best troops were, and the Greek center gave way, but then the thick Greek phalanxes on the flanks began to push the Persian lines in onto themselves. The Persian lines collapsed, and their soldiers began to run for the boats. The Greeks caught and killed many of them. The stories say that the Greeks only lost about 190 men, while killing 6400 Persians. This might be a bit of an exaggeration, but even so, it’s clear that it was a very lopsided battle, and a huge victory for the Greeks. The Persians that survived got on their boats and sailed back to Ionia, or what is now Turkey. The Greek armor and their phalanx strategy had beaten the lighter, more mobile Persians.

The battle of Marathon turned back Darius, but Xerxes came back to Greece with a LOT more men. But again, the Greeks had the advantage of their terrain. When Xerxes’ army met the Greeks, the Greek soldiers were defending a narrow mountain pass near the town of Thermopolyae. The Greeks basically plugged the pass with a phalanx, and no matter how many troops Xerxes threw at them, they would not budge.

It wasn’t until the Persians snuck around to attack the Greeks from behind that they were able to make any progress. And as I said last episode, Leonidas sent most of the Greeks home, and stayed behind with the rest of the Spartans, and 700 other Greeks, to face the Persians. The Spartans believed that the only way to return home was to return victorious. Spartans weren’t much for retreating.

Let’s take a bit of time here to talk about the military culture of Sparta. It was a unique thing in the ancient world. I said a bit ago that most soldiers were farmers, shopkeepers, etc. Not the Spartans. They were the first place in the world that had a class of full-time, professional soldiers, and they took it very seriously. The Spartans saw themselves as descendants of Hercules, or Heracles, if you like the Greek pronunciation better. If you were a male citizen, you were a soldier. If you were born a boy who was a citizen of Sparta, you were basically trained to be a soldier your entire life. This was for the citizens of Sparta - Sparta had a lot of slaves who did most of the actual work. Spartan women, who were married to a male citizen, were the ones who ran the households, ran the businesses, and kept watch on what the slaves were doing.

The men and boys were often off at camp, training. So by they time they were old enough to be part of the army, the boys had had years of training, and knew what was expected of them. The end result of all of this was that the Spartans were excellent warriors. They were in great shape, they were trained to work as a unit, They understood battle tactics and strategy, and they all shared the belief that to die on the field of battle was the ultimate honor.

Supposedly, when a Spartan man left for a battle, his wife would hand him his shield, and say, ‘with it, or on it.’ Which meant, either return victoriously or return dead. Now of course this is probably not what happened, but it does accurately depict something about Spartan culture. Either win, or die. And the Spartans usually won. Or they died fighting, like at Thermopolyae.

So while the Spartans had the best army of the ancient world, the Athenians were more focused on their navy. Unlike Sparta, which was inland, Athens was right on the coast. Part of what made Athens a great city was its substantial trade with other cities all across the Mediterranean. So the Athenians knew how to sail, even in the choppy, unpredictable waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

The Greeks created the first battleship of the ancient world - the trireme. The trireme was a long wooden ship, with a long pointed spike out in the front, just at the waterline. This spike was designed to crash into the opposing ship, and poke a hole in it at the waterline, so it would take on water, which would make the ship sink. Or in another tactic, they would drive the prow of the boat through the enemy’s oars on one side, which basically rendered the other boat unusable. They also had their version of the Marines - most triremes had a group of hoplites on board who would jump onto the enemy boat, and engage in hand to hand combat. They would then take over or destroy the enemy boat.

The trireme had three rows of rowers, top, middle, and lower. There were as many as 30 on each row, on each side. For the math challenged, that’s 180 rowers on a boat. They could get up to about 8 miles per hour, which is a lot for a rowboat. Also, they were big and heavy, so a big boat going 8 miles an hour with its long metal covered prow, crashing into another boat, would cause a lot of damage. So naval battles were a huge mess - boats crashing into one another, hoplites boarding enemy vessels, fires, sinking, and lots and lots of drowning, because apparently most sailors did not know how to swim. Which seems odd to me, but that’s how it is described by the historians. So, lots of drowning.

The Athenians invested a lot in their navy. The Triremes could be used both for battle, and for ferrying armies of hoplites to other places along the coast. Also, the Greeks, being regular sailors, knew their coast.

If you take a short look at Greece on a map, you’ll see that it’s an almost endless series of small islands, coastal peninsulas and inlets, and irregular coastline. Add into that rocks, shoals, narrow places, and tricky winds, and it’s easy to see how an enemy navy could have a hard time.

Some of Darius’s soldiers were destroyed on boats that sank during a storm before Marathon. Some of Xerxes’ soldiers were drowned when their boat-bridge across the Hellespont collapsed. After that, Xerxes had some soldiers ‘flog’ the sea, and throw chains in it, to say it had been imprisoned by its master, Xerxes. As far as anyone can tell, the sea basically ignored Xerxes and went on being the sea, as it always had. The Persians rebuilt the bridge, got their army across, and kept going, of course, until they got to Thermopolyae and the Spartans, where they had a bit of a pause, as I said earlier.

But their real defeat was at the hands of the Greek navy at Salamis. I mentioned this in the last episode. The Greeks, who knew the area, lured the Persian navy into a narrow straight between the island of Salamis and the mainland. The Greeks were able to maneuver, and they split the Persian navy in two. They also killed Xerxes’ brother Ariabignes, who was one of the admirals of the fleet, which added to the Persian’s confusion.

It’s worth pointing out that the Persian navy was actually a very good navy, filled with skilled sailors, and excellent vessels. They weren’t just a bunch of land-lubbing yahoos. In fact, many of the Greek crews were actually brand-new, and so were some of their ships. The Persians had all the advantages, except for the advantage of knowing the terrain, so to speak. But the Greeks weren’t afraid to face the Persians on the sea, and they won a monumental battle.

So, like the battle of Marathon before it, the battle of Salamis was a great Greek victory, and the Persians again retreated. This time, they didn’t come back. But pretty soon, Alexander and some more Greek phalanxes would be again fighting with the Persians. We’ll get to that soon.

Next episode: We go back to our historical flow, and we will talk about Athenian democracy, and the beginning of the Golden age of Greece.