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The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece

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Victor Davis Hanson is by trade apparently both a California viniculturist and an academic scholar of classical Greek history. So John Keegan says in his introduction to this new edition of an established minor classic. The improbable combination of such disparate occupations has shaped his conception of ancient Greek warfare: he argues that the ritualistic hoplite battle formalized during the "golden period" of Greek antiquity was inextricably linked to the nature of Greek agriculture. To avoid devastating loss of food (particularly wine) production and desolation of invaluable land, the seemingly ceaseless wars between Greek city states and their various shifting alliances had to be short, rapidly decisive, and--necessarily as a result--brutally sanguineous. Greeks deliberately fought according to a set of mutually acknowledged rules that limited wartime injury to the participating infantrymen themselves, and kept intact the soil and farms from which they came.

In his book Hanson takes us step by step through the violent clash of opposing Greek armies and reveals in remarkably technical detail just what was involved. Perhaps even more important, he recreates the personal experience of individual participants during such a battle. Following in the footsteps of many modern (post-World War II) historians who are more interested in the private soldier than the commanding general, he gives us a gritty sense of what it was like for Greek farmer soldiers to undergo combat in traditional phalanx formation. (Consequently, Steven Pressfield acknowleges that Hanson was one of the sources he referred to when writing his engrossing "Gates of Fire", a fictional treatment of the famous Battle of Thermopylae.)

In this sense there is a firm connection between ancient and modern warfare: ultimately it was--and is--fought by men who must deal with their own personal fears of wounding, dismemberment, and death. This has not changed, and so long as there is still a human element to war, will not change. But Hanson takes a step beyond simple individual motivation; and in the closing pages of the book he discusses the implications of modern total warfare, where the ritualized, bloody (but still carefully limited) battle of ancient Greece has given way to the usually uncontrolled, all-destructive (rather than fundamentally conserving) combat of today. It makes for thoughtful, stimulating reading.

(Those who find this subject matter interesting might find other Hanson books worth looking at. His more recent "Soul of Battle" devotes its first third to a discussion of war between Thebes and Sparta. "The Wars of the Ancient Greeks" is one volume of a slick series of popular histories which have John Keegan as their editor; aimed at the uninitiated general public, this title nonetheless is a good introduction to warfare in classical Greece.)

This is my second time through the book and it is still an excellent read and provides an engrossing account of the orgins of how warfare in the Greek world was waged and its impact throughout history. On that note I must disagree with George Delke Sr. that the Greeks were not the inventors of this type of warfare and that the Assryians were good at it (if they were the Greeks wouldn't have slaughtered them as often as they did).

Dr. Hanson makes a thorough and thoughful analysis of the Greek hoplites and the way they fought. From the hoplight to the their commander no stone is left unturned. But while the main emphasis on the book itself is the hoplight and Greek warfare in general there is much more to it than just that. The Greek hoplights were not successful because of their bravery or for their numbers, the Assyrians were brave and they outnumbered the Greeks in all their battles, then why was it the hoplight armies were so successful against the Assyrians. It was because of their orginization and their training (this is why I disagreed with the previous reveiwer). This then is the underlying theme to the book, not the heroics of one man but the performance of the whole.

The Greek structure of warfare will go on to conquer almost the whole ancient world under the hands of men like Alexander the Great, Scipio Africanus, Julius Ceasar, and the other great Roman generals of the ancient world. But the traditions of Greek warfare would go on to influence the later nations of the European world and from there the whole of the Western World.

Using a plethora of sources from ancient authors, battles, archeology, and others the author has managed to write an excellent resource that is original, readable, enthralling, and most importantly is its credibility. This is a must have for any student of military history, both professional and layperson alike.

Dr. Hanson, a leading classical scholar, provides an excellent examination of how warfare among the Greek city-states was conducted. He places particular emphasis on how the individual soldier fought. On the one hand, combat in the front line must have been awful; on the other hand, because the armies were made up of men who had known each other for years, unit cohesion must have been very high. While thoroughly researched, Hanson does not fall back on academic jargon, and his points are easily understood by the nonspecialist. As he demonstrates, the method of warfare, while often fatal to the soldiers, left property and noncombatants unharmed. Unfortunately, later in the wars between Athens and Sparta a more complete, and thus destructive manner of warfare developed. This is an excellent book for anyone interested either in classical Greece or the history of warfare.

Hanson writes a vivid, realistic description of the horror of hoplite combat. He gives the reader an in-depth armchairview of agrarian city-state warfare. There is much to be learned from this book about battle with edged weapons.

There is also much to be learned about the birth of modern military ethos. The East's mystical model for warfare (e.g. bushido and the like) concentrated on the "inner warrior." The West concentrated on the most pragmatically efficient methods of dealing death and destruction on a large scale.

When the citizen-militia of Athens met the the elite professional warriors of Persia at Marathon, it was not just a battle of the few against the many. It was a test of a pragmatic method of warmaking against a traditionalist method. The Persians, who from their youth learned three things, "to ride the horse, draw the bow, and speak the truth," were severely outclassed by a war machine that discounted the individual but turned the group into a relentless killing machine.

When first I read this book, I heartily disagreed with Hansen's thesis, but a study of the wars of the last decade bear out his conclusions.

This is an extraordinarily exacting but readable study of hoplite warfare. The author demonstrates an impressive command of both primary and secondary sources, but his pen is light and his style engaging. His attention to the fate of the "everyman" within the phalanx provides a rich perspective from which to examine, ultimately, the whole of the Greek way of fighting war. This book surely well deserves the praise it has earned.

Perhaps the only element lacking in this book is even a modest set of illustrations, such as reproductions of vase paintings or simple diagrams. Too much about the hoplite armor and the array of hoplites within the phalanx is left to the imagination by a book otherwise intended to appeal to non-classicists (or, at least, to amateur classicists). Other than the cover art, there is not a single illustration in the second edition. The next edition would be greatly improved by an attempt to incorporate representative illustrations.

I have purchased about forty books that deal with warfare in antiquity in the past year. Almost all of them have proven to be utterly infuriating and completely useless. You can garner from the Internet every iota of information that you can from just about all the books offered on ancient warfare. Most deal more with societal effects, cultural developments and histories of civilizations than they do with battlefield strategies, tactics and how men actually used their weapons in the thick of combat. These books are, for the most part, completely useless and should be avoided.

Except this one.

The Western War of War is a triumph of analysis in both the microscopic makeup of a hoplite army and the experiences they underwent during a battle. In my research I have found THIS BOOK alone to be a gem, an unparalleled necessity to discern what Greek warfare was truly like. The author pulls quotes from Herodotus, Homer, Xenophon and others to illustrate his excellent insights into the entire process of hoplite fighting. If you buy this book you will learn what kind of men donned the aspis shield and bronze cuirass; what it was like to use the ash or cornel wood spear and the xyphos sword; what an army did from the moment they rose to the seconds before the clash; the spacing and makeup of troops; the infurating conflict and the confusion of battle; what it smelled, tasted, sounded and felt like to be lost in the miasma of two phalanxes grinding against one another. On top of this you will read about examples of ancient battles and how they illustrate Mr. Hanson's insights further.

The only gripe anyone could have with this book is that there are no pictures to go along wit the text, but the descriptions are so in-depth that no visuals are needed, the author's words paint a vivid picture worthy of a novel. You will not be disappointed by the lack of pictures or diagrams, this book conveys its subject perfectly.

Go used if you can (as always), but don't shy away from having to pay retail. Most bookstores carry it (which is where I found it) but it's totally worth the wait to buy online. If you are writing a book/screenplay on the subject, doing research for a paper, or are in ANY WAY interested in hoplite warfare YOU MUST PURCHASE THIS BOOK! It is as indispensable of a necessity on the topic as Herodotus, Homer or Xenophon.

In this early work Victor Hanson Davies (VHD) explains what has become his central thesis in military history: The origins and growth of Western military superiority in the art of war. According to VHD we owe much of our military greatness in the West to the legacy of the Greeks who made war their past-time. The Greek hoplite developed the close order formation of phalanx warfare, a hallmark of what has become the disciplined nature of how Wetsern society wages war. This method broke away from the earlier heroic tradition of fighting where battle was often a series of individualized combats between warrior champions. The Greeks went one step further by taking the warrior and making him into a hoplite. By doing so they created the most effective fighting techniques known to classical man. VHD always enjoys being controversial, and many of his ideas may be perceived as being biased and pro-Western, but his grasp of history and antiquity in particular can't be denied. Even the politically correct, the ones most likely to be offended by these views, will have a difficult time denying some of the facts presented.

Greek hoplite warfare was both destructive and limited in scope. It seems the Greeks wished it to be so. By making war so horrific in the short term they ensured that only those directly involved would be harmed. This was how the Greek City State thought war should be resolved. By mutual agreement, at a set place and time. It was a brutal, yet logical method which over time developed a style of close-combat unmatched by other cultures. Over time the Greek Polis was gradually eroded, and with Philip and Alexander of Macedon the eventual dream of a united Greece was finally realized. With that came the means to export this lethal style of war abroad for more productive purposes.

The book goes to great lengths to describe the various aspects of hoplie warfare in great detail. Constant referebce are made to the writers and philosophers of Classical Greece who fought in many of the battles themselves. VHD provides an anatomy of Greek hoplite warfare, describing each part of the panoply which the individual wore into battle. In fact this book gives you as close a feel for what those intense, sweaty, violent and bloody conflicts must have been like, without actually being there! From those small enclosed valleys in Greece has evolved our deadly tradition of Western war. The paradox that VHD points out is that the very means that created this tradition could well destroy itself today. Modern technology combined with the stand-up battle tradition is a deadly combination, one that can not be played with in the Atomic age. If nothing else we should learn from the legacy of the Classical Greeks what our own true lethality is.

Big fan of Hanson's writings, but if you read just one of his books, it shouldn't be this one. Despite its intriguing title, this was Hanson's second book (1989), and it shows: it's dense and scholarly, apparently having been written before Hanson mastered the art of writing compelling and illuminating books for a mass audience. The fact that this was issued by the University of California press should tip you off to the nature of the writing herein.

I would instead recommend these later books by the same author, which are much more readable, and cover much of the same material:The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny and Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power

The other reviews on this book have covered more than I could say. This book, for me at least, led to an eye opening "paradigm shift" in European military history prior to WWI. What I saw in this book was the beginnings of cultural obsession with limited warfare for limited gains (as opposed to the later conepts of total war) which dominated western Europe for millenia. Hence, the Western historians' fascination with "decisive" battles which, ultimately, led not to any decisive change in political or cultural institutions (after all, did Waterloo really change French institutions that much?).

Immediately after reading this book, I read "The Devil's Horseman", a history of the Mongol "Invasion" (it was actually a reconnaisance in force) of Europe. I was struck by the baffelment of the Europeans when, after defeat at the hands of the Mongols, they were not offered some sort of terms of surrender. It struck me, after reading Dr. Hansen's work, that the ancient Greeks had passed on much more to Western society than philosophy, trigonometry, or democracy; they had also passed on an idea of limited warfare for concessions rather than absolute destruction of the enemy and the removal of his capacity to resist.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in military history; it is well written (although dry at times), and will provide a new viewpoint from which to consider when reading new books or re-reading old favorites. For the insight alone, it is well worth the investment.

Victor Davis Hanson has recently emerged as a particularly right wing columnist at the National Review. However, anyone familiar with his writing there should be aware he is a far better historian than pundit, at least when it comes to Ancient Greece. His basic thesis is that the ancient Greeks evolved a unique form of warfare, focused on a single, short and bloody clash between two armies of citizens. This warfare arose from the circumstances of their society. The typical soldier was an independent small farmer who supplied his own arms and fought as part of a body of amateur citizen soldiers to defend his land and city-state. Generals were chosen from among the citizens and led from the front, sharing risks equally. Conflicts had to end quickly so the farmers could get back to their fields. Consequently, the Greeks developed a style of warfare that emphasized equal risk among soldiers, strength and courage over skill and maneuver, and seeking a decisive battle even at a high cost to their own side. When the Greeks came into contact with less determined cultures, they scored devastating victories. This kind of warfare became the standard for Western armies up into modern times. Hanson further argues that the reliance on citizen soldiers and the emphasis on equality produced a society of democratic, free speaking, free thinking men and ultimately accounted for men such as Socrates and Thuycidides. When small farms started to die out and states began to rely more on professional soldiers, Greek democracy and intellectual life declined as well.
Hanson's work suffers from two flaws, one minor and one major. The minor flaw is that he puts most of his effort into reconstructing Greek warfare and relatively little in demonstrating how that style of warfare dominated Western armies. The focus, as the subtitle suggests is on the Greeks. John Keegan's "A History of Warfare" does a much more thorough job of developing and supporting this thesis (Keegan relied heavily and explicitly on Hanson's work when discussing Greek warfare and wrote the introduction to "The Western Way of War.") Hanson's sentimentality is a far more serious flaw. A farmer himself, he deeply admires the small independent farmers who made up the backbone of Greek armies and society. Consequently he tends to disparage later military developments. For him, the clash of amateur citizen soldiers, with generals leading from the front, is the ideal form of battle. He mocks as cowards and fools Hellenistic era military theorists who shied away from frontal assaults, encouraged generals not to expose themselves to danger and preferred professional soldiers to citizen amateurs. Here he makes selective use of the evidence. By his own account, the professional soldiers of Sparta were regarded as superior and other Greeks feared to face them in battle. Likewise, Xenophon, who had served as a common soldier and was elected an officer by his fellow soldiers, was one of the military theorists who argued against generals risking themselves in battle. Hanson is so fond of the amateur citizen soldier that he seemingly cannot bear to acknowledge that other forms of warfare might be more effective.
Why should anyone in the general public be interested in a book on ancient Greek warfare? The current crisis provides a strong reason. Hanson shows how the Greek way of warfare was integrated into their society and government. A body of citizens decided elections and battle alike as equals. The shift away from amateur citizen soldiers paralleled the shift away from democracy and toward autocratic government. In our current war we are depending heavily on a professional military, rather than citizen soldiers. In previous wars the bulk of troops came from ordinary citizens. Now military service is no longer part of citizenship. As in the time of the Ancient Greeks, there are practical reasons today for relying on professionals. However, there are social costs to such a change. President Clinton's disputes with the military are only the most obvious examples. Hanson reminds us that we cannot easily separate how a society fights wars from how it is governed. There is a sense in his sentimentality. For that alone, his book is worth reading.