Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (20 page)

Why Fortifications Endure 91

J. Ober’s
Fortress Attica
is a superb catalogue of the system of forts and towers

built on the borders of Attica in the fourth century as part of a more flexible

policy of response that replaced hoplite exclusivity. M. Munn,
The Defense of At-

tica
, has questioned some of Ober’s interpretations of these forts, but his helpful

ancillary volume is really more complementary than revisionist, and likewise

emphasizes the Greeks’ emphasis on border defense during the fourth century

B.C., often in preference to open hoplite battles.

73 See Y. Garlan (
CAH
2 6.678–92), who points to an increase in the use of mercenary

soldiers and also the professionalism of military operations (679):

For even though the final outcome was still frequently determined by pitched

battles in open country, henceforth they constituted only one element in a strat-

egy which was more complex than it had been in the past, being both differenti-

ated and progressive, aimed at establishing control not only over useful territory

but also over walled cities and increasingly well-fortified frontier zones. Hence

more sophisticated and varied tactics were evolved, requiring the combined use

of specialized forces (integrated on the model of the human body) and based on

a professional concept of military leadership and prowess.

74 Aristotle,
Politics,
1330b–1331, trans. and ed. Ernest Barker, in
The Politics of Aristotle
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946).

75 David Whitehead,
Aineias the Tactician: How to Survive Under Siege. A Historical

Commentary, with Translation and Introduction,
2nd ed. (London: Bristol Classical Press,

2001). See his remarks in the Introduction, 25–33.

76 E. W. Marsden,
Greek and Roman Artillery: Historical Development
(Oxford: Claren-

don Press, 1969); A. W. McNicoll,
Hellenistic Fortifications from the Aegean to the Euphrates

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

77 Edward Wong and David S. Cloud, “U.S. Erects Baghdad Wall to Keep Sects

Apart,”
New York Times
, April 21, 2007.

78 Alissa J. Rubin, Stephen Farrell, and Erica Goode, “As Fears Ease, Baghdad Sees

Walls Tumble,”
New York Times
, October 9, 2008.

79 Note that in the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein protected his troops in the field

by enormous sand bunkers, and in the second Iraq War (2003) used canals of burning

petroleum to cover Baghdad with protective smoke. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in-

vading Egyptian commandos employed water cannons to knock down towering sand

fortifications that the Israelis had constructed to block attack from the Suez Canal. The

recent Russian invasion and occupation of Georgia was followed almost immediately

by the erection of walls surrounding annexed territories in Ossetia.

92 Berkey

4. Epaminondas the Theban and the

Doctrine of Preemptive War

Victor Davis Hanson

The sixteenth-century French Renaissance essayist Michel de

Montaigne once compared what he thought were the three great

captains of antiquity. He strangely concluded that the now rather ob-

scure Epaminondas the Theban (d. 362 BC), not Alexander the Great or

Julius Caesar, was the most preeminent because of his character, the

ethical nature of his military career, and the lasting consequences of

his victories.

Montaigne, a keen student of classical antiquity, was hardly eccen-

tric in judging an obscure liberator of serfs in the southwestern Pelo-

ponnese superior to two imperialists who had respectively conquered

much of the Persian Empire and Western Europe. Instead, he simply

reflected the general sentiment of the Greeks and Romans themselves,

who put a high premium on military brilliance in service to political

idealism. For example, the Roman statesman Cicero, archfoe of Julius

Caesar and Marc Antony, three centuries after the Theban general’s

death saw a kindred defender of republican liberty in Epaminondas,

and similarly dubbed him
princeps Graecia
—“first man of Greece.”

The lost fourth-century BC historian Ephorus, a contemporary of the

Theban hegemony, who wrote in the shadow of the autocrat Philip

II, in hagiographic fashion considered Epaminondas the greatest of
all

Greeks, a military genius who fought for a cause other than personal

aggrandizement.1

But while the ancients saw the Theban destruction of Spartan power

and liberation of the Messenian helots as one of the landmark moral

events in their collective memory, we know little today about the ca-

reer of the Theban general and statesman Epaminondas, and even less

about his accomplishments, strategic thinking, and controversial doc-

trines of preemption and democratization. His present-day obscurity is

partly a result of the fragmentary nature of the extant sources, but it

is also a reflection of the ancient and modern emphasis on Athens and

Sparta and the general reputation of the Thebans for backwardness.2

Yet in little more than two years (371–369 BC), Epaminondas humili-

ated the Spartan military state, something neither the Persians nor the

Athenians had ever accomplished in protracted wars. He freed many

of the hundred thousand Messenian helots, fostered democracy for

tens of thousands of Greeks, helped to found new fortified and au-

tonomous cities, and waged a brilliant preemptory military campaign

against the Spartan Empire—events eerily relevant nearly 2,400 years

later to what followed from the terrorist attack on the United States on

September 11, 2001.

Fourth-Century Boeotia

We usually associate ancient Greek democracy with the fifth- century

Athens of Pericles—its enormous fleet, energized landless poor, mari-

time empire, and the brilliant cultural achievements of Pericles’ con-

temporaries, such as Aristophanes, Euripides, Pheidias, Socrates,

Sophocles, and Thucydides. In contrast, the later emergence of fourth-

century Theban democratic hegemony is often ignored and less well

understood, despite its unusual nature and political weight. Boeotian

democratic culture certainly did not produce either a Thucydides or

a Euripides. And it did not, as most elsewhere in the case of ancient

democracies, reflect the influence of the landless naval crowd, pejo-

ratively called the
ochlos
, or seek to redistribute income or enforce a

radical egalitarianism on its citizenry that transcended mere political

equality. Rather, the Boeotian democratic movement was likely more

limited to expanding political participation and championed by con-

servative hoplite farmers. Similarly, in terms of empire, Theban re-

formist democrats seemed to have questioned the entire existing polis

order of hundreds of autonomous city-states rather than creating, in

94 Hanson

characteristic imperial fashion, an exploitive empire of subservient sub-

ject cities abroad.3

If the defeat of Persia in 479 proved the catalyst for the rise of the

Athenian imperium, the Greek allied victory over Athens in 404 in

turn helped usher in the gradual ascension of Thebes. After the con-

clusion of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), the former victorious

allies, Thebes and Sparta, quickly turned on each other in squabbles

over booty, the treatment of defeated Athens, and respective spheres of

influence. Indeed, for most of the ensuing half-century (403–362), the

two rivals were in a near-constant state of conflict marked by pitched

battles, frequent Spartan invasions of Boeotia, and brief armistices.

Contemporaries largely viewed their early struggle as a sometimes lop-

sided contest between a traditionally superior Spartan phalanx and an

upstart Theban infantry hitherto considered formidable, but hardly an

instrument capable of projecting Theban power beyond the confines

of a cultural Boeotian backwater with a questionable history.4

The on-again, off-again decades-long struggles, however, took a radi-

cally different turn in 379 BC. In that year a remarkable group of Theban

democrats overthrew the ruling oligarchs under Leontiades, who was

propped up by Spartan overseers. In place of oligarchy, the reformers

instituted a Boeotian confederate democracy freed from outside influ-

ence and bent on ensuring a permanent end to Spartan meddling in the

affairs of the Greek city-states. Not only did the ongoing war between

the two rivals now assume a new ideological dimension, democracy

versus oligarchy, but the conflict was energized by this new group of

Theban firebrands, who were not quite doctrinaire in accepting tradi-

tional notions of a balance of power between the city-states. Instead,

led most notably by Pelopidas and, later, Epaminondas, Theban demo-

crats came to the fore determined to eliminate permanently the source

of the Spartan threat.

In reaction, for much of the next eight years the Spartans were

bent on revenge for their own expulsion from Boeotia. King Agesilaus

rightly feared that the new Boeotian democracy under Epaminon-

das was no longer just a rival polis but rather a unique revolutionary

agent of change that could eventually threaten Sparta’s own interests

in the Peloponnese, as well as refashion altogether the traditional

The Doctrine of Preemptive War
95

autonomous network of small individual city-states into larger and far

more hostile democratic blocs and confederations. As a result of these

apprehensions, between 379 and 375, on at least four occasions Spartan

kings invaded, or attempted to invade, Boeotia to dismantle its new

democratic Boeotian confederation.5

Aside from occasional military alliances with Athens, the Boeotians

turned to a variety of both passive and active strategies to blunt these

serial Spartan offensives. At various times they resorted to erecting an

extensive wooden stockade around their most fertile farmland. Some-

times they harassed the invaders with both light-armed and mounted

patrols. On rarer occasions they managed to draw them into skirmishes

and small pitched battles, such as the surprisingly successful engage-

ment at Tegyra in 375.

This Theban democratic and Spartan oligarchic rivalry initially

played out in limited fashion, according to traditional Greek protocols

of annual invasions in which the invader tried to harm the agricultural

infrastructure of the invaded state. While King Agesilaus, the archi-

tect of the Theban invasions, almost succeeded for a season or two in

bringing near famine to Thebes, and had established forts in a number

of Boeotian cities—Plataea, Orchomenos, Tanagra, and Thespiae—the

Spartans in their nearly decade-long efforts failed to end Theban demo-

cratic control of Boeotia. These years of serial and inconclusive fight-

ing in Boeotia explain not only Epaminondas’s later radical decision to

meet the Spartans in pitched battle at Leuctra but also his subsequent,

even larger gamble to attack Sparta itself. At some point in this decade,

Epaminondas apparently saw there would be no end to the normal

pattern of serial invasion and battle other than an end to Sparta as the

Greeks had known it for the prior 300 years.6

The Invasion of Winter and Spring 370–369

The pulse of this long war of attrition changed radically a second time

sometime in midsummer 371, when the Spartans broke the general ar-

mistice of 375 and once again invaded Boeotia. But this time, under

the leadership of the Theban general Epaminondas, the outnumbered

Boeotian army at last chose to engage decisively the Spartan invaders

96 Hanson

in a dramatic pitched battle amid the rolling hills of Leuctra, not far

from Thebes itself. There, in brilliant fashion, the Boeotian army nearly

wrecked the invading force, killed the Spartan king Kleombrotos and

about 400 of his elite 700 Spartan hoplites, as well as hundreds more of

allied Peloponnesians, and sent the scattered survivors back home in

shame and defeat, at once redefining the strategic balance of the Greek

city-states and presaging a permanent end to what had been nearly an-

nual Spartan invasions in the north.7

Most prior decisive victories in Greek hoplite battle—First Coronea

(447), Delion (424), or First Mantineia (418)—had led to a regional ces-

sation of major fighting for a few years. But the win at Leuctra, despite

its decisive nature, soon led to a resurgence of, not an end to, The-

ban–Spartan hostilities, and proved to be a precursor of a vast reorder-

ing of the Peloponnese. If the Sicilian expedition of 415–413, in which

some 40,000 imperial Athenian soldiers and allies were lost, captured,

or killed, ended the dream of an expanding Athenian empire, the loss

of about 1,000 Peloponnesians and the humiliation of the legendary

Spartan military prowess at Leuctra had a similar effect of ending the