Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (32 page)

surrendering foes might hesitate to do so if they feared surprise attack

from another direction. The lack of communications and control in ur-

ban fighting meant that commanders had less opportunity to appeal to

the limiting rituals, such as truces, that moderated field battles. Fight-

ing at night or in bad weather exacerbated the effects of topography

and poor control. The nature of the combatants as much as the nature

of the terrain contributed to the brutality of city fighting. Opposing

factions in civil strife were implacably hostile; at Corcyra, infamously,

citizens set fire to their own city in an attempt to drive out rivals.86

Troops defending a city against external invasion, too, knew they were

fighting not just for their own lives but also for their families and for the

very existence of their home. For their part, attackers who gained ac-

cess to a city after a long siege or a bloody assault were primed to inflict

as much revenge or “payback” as possible on any inhabitant, armed or

not.87 All these factors made Greeks wary of fighting in cities.

There are nonetheless a few indications that Greek commanders

understood how to conduct urban warfare when they had to. The

Plataeans certainly were quick to take advantage of their city’s topogra-

phy to entrap the Theban invaders. In Piraeus during 404–403, since the

democrats did not have enough men to hold the entire circuit wal sur-

rounding the harbor, they deliberately concentrated on the Mounichia

hil , a strong point that could be approached only through the town’s

street grid. By deploying on Mounichia’s slopes, the democratic leader

Thrasyboulos maximized the defensive potential of the urban landscape

and exploited his preponderance in light troops to offset the oligarchs’

strength in hoplites.88 Epaminondas, one of the masterminds of the

Theban uprising of 379, was likewise wel aware of the complexities of

street fighting. Recognizing that the urban terrain of central Sparta was

Urban Warfare 153

not good for pitched battle between phalanxes, he avoided direct assaults

on the city center in both 370–369 and 362.89 At Syracuse in the 350s, the

general Dion made attempts to overcome the fragmentation of urban

fighting. He divided his troops into separate commands and grouped

them in columns, so that he could attack at several places at once.90

In the later classical era, urban warfare did receive some attention in

the writings of Aeneas Tacticus. Aeneas, who perhaps hailed from the

town of Stymphalos in the Peloponnesus and possibly served as a gen-

eral of the Arcadian League, was active in the first half of the fourth

century BC. Although today his work is largely unknown outside the

specialist circles of Greek history, Aeneas might be called the world’s

first strategist of urban war.91

Aeneas penned several treatises, of which only one has survived,

the
Poliorkêtika
, composed around 355–350 BC.92 Though its title is often

rendered as
Siegecraft
, the
Poliorkêtika
is in fact a guide to protecting

a threatened city from internal treachery, surprise assaults, and fickle

mercenaries. It is an extraordinary collection of advice, anecdotes, and

observations, containing everything from practical tips (“when saw-

ing through a cross-bar pour oil on it, to make the task quicker and

quieter”) to astute psychological insight (“In parts of the city which the

enemy can easily . . . attack . . . [station] those with the largest stake

in the community and thus the greatest incentive not to succumb to

self-indulgence”).93

Aeneas stresses many of the same aspects of the urban battleground

that we have already examined. He underlines the importance of the

agora and other strategic spots.94 He offers procedures to help cities

guard against surprise assaults and internal plots. A city’s troops, he

writes, must be wel organized and forceful y led; the hiring and disci-

pline of mercenaries must be careful y regulated. Moreover, Aeneas ad-

vocates al sorts of remarkably modern-sounding methods for keeping

an urban population under control: registering or confiscating weapons,

issuing identity tokens, interrogating merchants and hotel guests, for-

bidding communal dinners, and so on. Even processions and religious

festivals must be watched, he adds, lest they become occasions for vio-

lent revolution. Mutual scrutiny of everyone’s actions, he emphasizes,

wil deprive plotters of any opportunity to carry out their plans.

154 Lee

Now, Aeneas was clearly familiar with classical Greece’s long his-

tory of city fights. He refers to the clashes at Plataea, Sparta, and Argos

as examples of how to defend urban terrain. And he does offer some

techniques for fighting inside the walls, including a stratagem to

lure enemy troops into open gates and then entrap them.95 Even so,

Aeneas’s true goal was not to describe how to win a city fight but to

forestall urban warfare before it broke out, through tight security at

the gates and in the marketplace, active defense of city walls, and strict

supervision of potentially rebellious elements. In a sense, he simply

perpetuated the traditional classical emphasis on a wall-based defen-

sive strategy.

There was irony to Aeneas’s stance, for just as he was completing his

handbook, a new era of Greek military technology was arising. Large

torsion-powered bolt-shooters and stone throwers would give new

dominance to the attackers of cities. Within a few years of the appear-

ance of the
Poliorkêtika
, Philip of Macedon would use his siege engines

to take the once impregnable city of Amphipolis. By sticking to the old

emphasis on city walls, Aeneas and his fellow Greeks played right into

the offensive capabilities of the powerful new siege machinery. Perhaps

if he had written a few years later, Aeneas might have offered a differ-

ent approach, one that did not try to meet attackers at the walls but

instead drew them into the city, where they could be surrounded and

destroyed, just as the Plataeans had annihilated the Thebans in 431.

Lessons Learned

Spears and swords, mud brick houses, women with roof tiles. At first

glance it seems hard to imagine how stories from twenty-five centuries

ago could shed any light on modern urban warfare, in which high-tech

Western armies confront RPG-armed irregulars in sprawling concrete

conurbations. Outside the experiences of divided cities such as Notium

and Syracuse, there is little in the history of classical city fighting di-

rectly comparable with modern urban counterinsurgency. Yet place

Plataea side by side with Mogadishu in 1993, where an outnumbered

American assault force was bewildered by a maze of unfamiliar streets,

and it is clear some things have not changed.96

Urban Warfare 155

Perhaps the first lesson that emerges from examining Greek ur-

ban war is the importance of good intelligence and local knowledge.

Without understanding urban topography—not only in the physical

sense, but also in the wider sense of the economic and social rela-

tionships that link neighborhoods and people—modern soldiers will

remain as lost in the mud and darkness as were the Thebans at Plat-

aea. For Western armies operating abroad in cities, low-tech, low-cost

solutions, such as having sufficient interpreters or providing all troops

with basic foreign language training, will enable better access to local

knowledge than expensive jet fighters or other high-tech gadgetry can

ever provide.

Furthermore, the classical experience helps contextualize the ven-

geance and factionalism that mark modern urban war. The sectarian hos-

tility that characterizes many of today’s urban conflicts does not seem

so aberrational when placed against the backdrop of civil strife in places

like Corcyra. The classical Greek city was very much a family and tribal

affair. Civil strife was the vessel into which al its antagonisms—class,

politics, personal differences—could pour.97 Bitter factional hatreds,

mass slaughter, choosing suicide over surrender—these were the inevi-

table corol aries of
stasis
, not the property of one ideology, place, or

time. As Thucydides recognized long ago, the details may change, but

people’s responses wil remain similar.98

Too, the ability of Greek cities to mobilize the entirety of the pop-

ulation for urban war presents a lesson for modern Western armies

used to assuming a strong distinction between military and civilian

personnel. From the classical perspective, an armed populace looks

like a more normal state of affairs than does a professional volunteer

military isolated from the rest of a society. The Greeks, it is true, pre-

ferred to think of hoplite battle as strictly for male citizens. In urban

combat, though, this ideology broke down, and every male and female

inhabitant could take part in the fight. Women’s use of roof tiles in

ancient city fights reminds us how successfully irregular combatants

can employ urban terrain to neutralize the technological advantages

of conventional forces.

The histories of urban combat at Athens and Thebes, moreover,

show that foreign troops and garrisons, however useful they may be

156 Lee

for propping up a sympathetic regime, provide a focal point for lo-

cal opposition. Sometimes military forces in a city cause more harm

than benefit. One wonders, for example, what would have happened

in Athens in 508–507 if the oligarchic party had not called in Spartan

assistance. Perhaps they would have held on to power, and Athenian

radical democracy would have been stillborn. Here Aeneas Tacticus’s

warnings about the dangers of mercenaries provide additional food

for thought. While classical authors sometimes overstated the evils of

hired soldiery, there was truth to their complaints. Arrogant, violent,

or careless mercenaries could inflame popular resentment and cause

uprisings. These days, unregulated and overaggressive private military

contractors such as Blackwater threaten the success of Western armies

and hinder the accomplishment of strategic goals.

If a city is to be taken or retained, the Greek experience shows that

holding just one central point, whether acropolis or Green Zone, is in-

sufficient. Urban war requires controlling markets, streets, and houses.

Even better, as Aeneas Tacticus recognized, is to achieve victory by

using repression, surveillance, and mutual responsibility to forestall re-

bellion or invasion before it occurs. Aeneas, of course, did not have to

deal with world opinion, but in that difference lies perhaps the great-

est lesson that Greek urban combat has to teach us. The excesses and

atrocities of Corcyra, Thebes, and Syracuse underline the dangers of

letting troops get out of control, of succumbing to the psychology of

“payback,” and of fighting with no higher purpose than the seizure or

maintenance of power. Modern Western democratic armies are not

just military forces. They embody the public reputation and values of

their nations, and are sustainable abroad only to the degree that they

retain majority support back home. As deceptive and dishonorable as

the enemy may be, the officers and soldiers of modern democracies

must always remember their moral and ethical obligations, whether on

the urban battlefield or anywhere else.

Further Reading

Readers wanting to learn more about ancient urban war might start with Aeneas Tacti-

cus; for a translation and commentary see Whitehead,
Aineias the Tactician
(1990). For

Thucydides and Herodotus, the excellent Landmark editions of Strassler,
The Landmark

Urban Warfare 157

Thucydides
(1996) and
The Landmark Herodotus
(2007), may be consulted. Ober, “Hop-

lites and Obstacles” (1991), and Lee, “Urban Combat at Olynthos” (2001), analyze the

mechanics of ancient city fighting. Lintott (1982) offers an overview of civil strife (
sta-

sis
) in the classical city. For more about classical Greek armies, see Sabin, van Wees,

and Whitby,
The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare
(2007). Ashworth,
War

and the City
(1991), Desch,
Soldiers in Cities
(2001), and Dufour,
La guerre, la ville et le soldat
(2002), provide long-term perspectives on the history of urban warfare. For urban

combat in the modern global context, see Kaldor, “New and Old Wars” (2007), and

Thornton,
Asymmetric Warfare
(2007).

Bibliography

Antal, John, and Bradley Gericke, eds.
City Fights: Selected Histories of Urban Combat from

World War II to Vietnam.
New York: Presidio Press, 2003.

Ashworth, J. G.
War and the City
. London: Routledge, 1991.