The First Clash (24 page)

But could Athens afford 14,000 Hoplites? The answer is yes. During this time, a hoplite was expected to supply, at his own expense, his armor and weapons. This cost was not insignificant and was a strong limiting factor in the size of the armies of many Greek cities. However, a number of factors would have made it easier for many Athenians to afford the hoplite panoply. Foremost among these were the land reforms of Pisistratus. By breaking up the nobles’ large estates, he had provided thousands of the poor and landless with enough property to produce a surplus of food for sale in the city. This surplus was sufficient for thousands of yeoman farmers to purchase armor and join the privileged ranks of hoplites.
⁸
As Attica transitioned its fields from grain to olives, the surplus created by trading would have been even greater. Revenues from an olive-based trade would also have enabled a number of city and coastal dwellers to enter the hoplite class. Furthermore, although the Athenians discovered the richest veins in the Laurion silver mines a few years later, the mines still produced sufficient silver for the government to subsidize some hoplites if necessary. While there is no record of the state giving or loaning cash to purchase armor, there is substantial evidence of numerous loans for farming and other business activities, which amounts to the same thing. It would be odd indeed if a city that had been almost constantly at war for two decades did not do all within its power to increase the size of its main fighting force.

These constant wars had led to at least three battles that Athens won decisively. Although it is hard to estimate the total numbers of enemy casualties, we know that seven hundred Thebans were captured in one battle, and consequently one may safely assume that twice that number were killed. Moreover, the Athenians had beaten Chalcis’s army so severely that the city immediately withdrew from the war. As Athens no longer rated Chalcis a threat, it must have demobilized most of its military establishment—that is, turned over its armor and weapons. Megara, a city about the same size as Chalcis, was able to field three thousand hoplites in 480 BC, so that is probably a fair estimate of the size of Chalcis’s army. Finally, one thousand Argive hoplites and an unknown number of Aeginetans were killed in battle against the Athenians in the year before Marathon. A conservative guess is that over the years, Athens easily collected enough armor from its enemies to outfit approximately eight thousand hoplites. From this, it would seem that the normally expensive hoplite panoply was probably available in Athens at drastically reduced prices.
⁹

However, this is not the end of Athens’s mobilization. As the Battle of Marathon was fought after the harvest, the rest of the male population of Attica was also available for military duty. These were mostly the
thetes
class of poorer citizens and often used as light troops.
¹⁰
Herodotus does not mention these light troops as being present at Marathon, but it is unlikely they would have remained behind, particularly as an even lower class—slaves—did fight in the battle. Like the contemporary accounts of medieval battles, which habitually left out the contributions of peasants and foot soldiers in favor of the deeds of the heavy cavalry (knights), Herodotus probably did not believe the participation of these citizens of any account. Yet any reasonable reconstruction of the events of the battle requires their presence and active participation in critical roles.

Although slaves were normally forbidden from participation in combat, they were present at every major battle, and in emergencies they could be freed and permitted to fight in the ranks.
¹¹
Under any circumstances, slaves would have been present to prepare food, rescue wounded men, serve as attendants, and most important act as baggage carriers and caretakers for the hoplites’ armor.
¹²
However, if Athens ever faced an emergency, Marathon was it. It is likely that in this crisis the Athenians would have released at least a portion of their slaves for combat duties, and evidence for this exists. Pausanias states that during his travels he saw the common grave of the Plataeans and “servants” killed at Marathon.
¹³
There is no way to know the number of slaves and recently freedmen who
traveled with the army, but several thousand would seem a reasonable estimate.

So in practical terms, Athens could field a fighting force at least numerically equal to what the Persians were capable of throwing at Greece in 491 BC. Most important, the core of the Athenian army consisted of nine thousand heavily armored hoplites. The key point that deserves emphasis is that this was a veteran force. In recent years, it had humbled Thebes, Chalcis, and Aegina and faced down a Spartan army, which in itself was no mean achievement. For almost twenty years Athens had been a nation in arms, surrounded by enemies waiting to pounce—the Israel of its age. One should not underestimate the confidence this would have given the average Athenian hoplite. Furthermore, the Athenian army’s high level of training allowed its leaders to plan a maneuver even the Spartans would have found difficult, if not impossible—one that would make them victorious at Marathon.

The Athenian victory was indeed stunning. However, any reasonable assessment makes it clear that as long as Athens stood on the strategic defensive, the deck was not as stacked against it as is typically assumed.

PERSIAN WARFARE

M
esopotamia was more than the “cradle of civilization.” It was also the “cradle of war.” From the moment humans first settled into organized communities, civilization and warfare have found themselves inextricably entwined. Along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, great empires rose and fell based on the fortunes of battle and the tides of war. Unfortunately, most of the tales of these three millennia of unrelenting carnage have disappeared into the mists of history. But despite all that has vanished, the story of one empire still reaches across the chasm of three thousand years as the embodiment of what can be built through a policy of blood and iron and maintained through war and savage cruelty—Assyria.
¹

Even at the zenith of its power, with all of the great Mesopotamian states under its dominion, Assyria remained continuously at war either against new threats on its expanding frontiers or putting down revolts among the restless people within its empire. Between 900 and 650 BC, the height of Assyrian power, the empire engaged in no fewer than 108 conflicts as well as innumerable punitive expeditions against neighboring peoples and to punish for internal revolts.
²
Their brutal method of warfare is best described by their own words. King Sennacherib (704–681 BC) describes a battle with the Elamites in 691 BC:

When Cyrus began his campaigns of conquests, he did not have anything approaching the financial or material resources required to build a professional organized force along the Assyrian model. Rather, he had the
kara
, which loosely translated meant the warriors of his tribe, his friends, and any other warriors his kin were able to gather. However, soon after Persia absorbed the Median Empire, Cyrus immediately reorganized the
kara
along the lines of the professional Median army (called the
spada
). By integrating the Persian
kara
into the Median
spada
and adopting most of the Medes’ battle methods, the Persians became the inheritors of all the Assyrians had learned of warfare.

Cyrus’s new
spada
consisted of cavalry, horse archers, foot archers, and infantry. This appears to be the same organization that the Median king Cyaxares had copied from the Assyrians, who were the first to organize regiments based on their specific arms.
⁴
Moreover, by taking advantage of Assyria’s experience and knowledge in terms of how to take a fortified city, the Persians built and maintained a superb siege train for use in any prolonged campaign. Although not mentioned in Herodotus’s account, this siege expertise and technology was instrumental in crushing the Ionian revolt, as it made short work of the Ionian walls. This army sufficed to conquer a sprawling empire, but after having seen firsthand the combat power of the Greek phalanx, no later Persian army was complete without a formidable core of Greek mercenaries.

For victory in battle, the Persians relied on archery, from both foot archers and those on horseback, and their excellent cavalry. The infantry was less important and generally found its most worthwhile employment
in finishing off an enemy force already decimated by the archers and scattered by the cavalry. As their approach to war did not require it, the Persians never built a truly effective heavy infantry force. Some would immediately object and claim that Persia’s elite ten-thousand-man Immortals fit this bill.
⁵
However, this force wore only light protection and was never able to stand toe-to-toe with heavily armored hoplites. Herodotus describes the Persian Immortals as follows:

Herodotus further tells us that this “elite” Persian force tended to make campaigning as easy as possible on itself:

Herodotus further relates that the Persians armed their cavalry like the infantry, except that some wore bronze helmets. According to Xenophon, they also carried two javelins. Other elements of the Persian army fought with their traditional equipment and weaponry.

The Persian army, weighed down with baggage, moved slowly, and it did not march or fight at night.
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When it eventually did come up against a foe, it relied on the coordinated action of its combined arms, centered on massed archery, to inflict sufficient losses to shatter an enemy’s cohesion. The infantry would form on the center, with the cavalry on each flank. Once arranged, the infantry would stick their shields into the ground to create a field-expedient palisade, behind which the mass of archers would shield themselves. As the archers pinned down the enemy force and thinned its ranks, the cavalry would start moving off in a series of flanking
or encircling movements. As long as the enemy remained unbroken, the cavalry would keep its distance and join the foot archers in pouring arrows into the enemy formation. Periodically, masses of more heavily armored knights would charge in and discharge a volley of javelins. This would continue until their opponents could stand it no longer and their lines began to waver.

This was the signal for the heavily protected Persian shock cavalry, armed with spears and swords, to close with the enemy. While unbroken infantry could hold off cavalry indefinitely, once an infantry formation began wavering, it was useless. A thousand pounds of charging flesh with a screaming rider wielding a deadly spear or sword was a terrifying sight. Under such an attack, a decimated line that was already stepping back always broke. At this point, the infantry, which had remained standing at the wicker palisade to protect the archers from a sudden rush, started forward. Armed with their
akenakes
(short swords) and short spears, they delivered the coup de grâce.

This army comprised a hodgepodge of national identities, fighting styles, and equipment that made it impossible for Persia to forge a fully integrated fighting force—one trained on the same weapons, doctrine, and tactics. Throughout the two hundred years of the Achaemenid dynasty, the Medes and Persians remained the army’s fighting nucleus, with tenuous support provided by a relatively unsophisticated mob. If this Persian core faltered, the army was in serious trouble regardless of its size. As Persia’s enemies on the Asian plains were themselves relatively unsophisticated, the Persians were under no disadvantage on any Central Asian battlefield. In Asia, the elite Persian core was the decisive instrument of war. However, when it faced Greek hoplites, it foundered. This is most easily explained by Persia’s inability to develop first-class heavy infantry. Armed only with short swords and spears, they were unable to outrange the longer spears of a Greek phalanx. Moreover, the Persians never anticipated having to fight a close battle against organized infantry, as they expected their archers would break up enemy formations long before they could close for a hand-to-hand fight. Arrows were particularly ineffective if the enemy sprinted through the kill zone and closed rapidly—the Athenian tactic at Marathon. Arrows never made much of an impression on a phalanx that maintained its order and discipline. It is instructive, in this regard, to take note of the Spartans at the Battle of Plataea in 480 BC. Here the Spartans stood motionless under showers of arrows, while their
leaders made repeated animal sacrifices in the hopes of eventually getting good omens.