The Carthaginian Mask of Command: Leadership in a Multinational Army

Warfare has traditionally been studied, as a rule, from the viewpoint of the commander with regard to such matters as strategy, tactics, and organisation. In the light of John Keegan’s pioneering work in such books as The Face of Battle and The Mask of Command such an approach seems fundamentally flawed. Even to see the commander’s role as inevitably being primarily focused on strategy, tactics, etc. is to ignore the fact that different societies expect different things of their leaders and military command can therefore widely differ in nature from society to society.

In practice, commanders have two broad areas of responsibility: ‘function related’, which mainly concern administration, and ‘output related’, which involve the army’s basic raison d’être: to defeat the enemy in battle at minimum cost to itself. ‘Output related’ responsibilities themselves require two sets of skills, those of generalship and leadership. The former are essentially technical in nature and concern such things as intelligence gathering, tactics, and putting those tactics into practice. Leadership is a more difficult concept to define which involves exploiting the psychological factors governing the behaviour of troops to encourage them to fight more effectively.

It is interesting that Polybius, a second-century BC Greek historian, in evaluating Hannibal as his commander, regards his leadership as far more important than his generalship, thinking it his supreme achievement to have actually kept his polyglot army together as an efficient fighting force:

‘For sixteen years he waged ceaseless war in Italy, and throughout that time he never released his army from service in the field, but, like a good pilot, kept those numbers under his control and free from disaffection towards himself or one another. He succeeded in this despite the fact that he was employing troops who belonged not only to different countries but to different races. He had with him Africans, Spaniards, Ligurians, Celts, Phoenicians, Italians, and Greeks, men who had nothing naturally in common, neither their laws, their customs, their language, nor in any other respect. None the less the skill of their commander was such that he could impose the authority of a single voice and a single will even upon men of such totally diverse origins.’ (9.19.3-5)

 This passage is highly significant as it largely flies in the face of modern military historiography, which has tended to emphasis the skills of generalship rather than those of leadership. This tendency is understandable as military history has generally been seen as most useful as an education for young officers and the principles of strategy and tactics are relatively straightforward.

Commanders have thus been evaluated primarily with regard to these easily understood principles. The problem with such an approach is that it assumes that the ‘rules of war’ and the commander’s role throughout history are unchanging. This is not the case. Armies are a reflection of the societies from which they issue and fight for their objectives and according to their values. As societies differ so too do armies, and the commander’s role varies in accordance with this fact.

Carthage, a powerful commercial city on the North African coast, seems to have been something of an anomaly in Antiquity in that her army was not essentially based on her citizen body; by the late third century BC there was no real citizen militia except for a small force of cavalry supplied by the aristocracy. Instead, the Carthaginian army, led by an officer corps of Carthaginian aristocrats, was made up of allied levies augmented by foreign mercenaries. This polyglot force was of many races: Libyans and Liby-Phoenicians from Carthage’s hinterland, Numidians, Moors, Balearics, Iberians, Celtiberians, Celts, Greeks, and Italians of various types.

Such an army, essentially fighting for booty, would have had no real commitment to the army, though in theory defeated generals could be crucified. The generals were evidently not trusted as, though elected for a specific campaign rather than a restricted time period, their role was a purely military one with no civil powers whatsoever. This peculiar limitation of powers may have been unique in the Classical world.

To a large extent then, the army was isolated from Carthage and became a society in its own right with a rather special link between the general and troops. In fact, by the time of the Second Punic War, in the late third century BC, the Barcid family, of which Hannibal is the most well-known member, had effectively become an imperial dynasty leading Carthage’s army in Spain.

In practice it seems that the citizen’s assembly in Carthage merely ratified the army’s choice as general, if Diodorus Siculus (25.12.1) and Polybius (3.13.3-4) are to be trusted in their accounts of the successions of Hasdrubal and Hannibal respectively. This may not always have been the case but the soldiers’ choice was certainly an important feature in the First Punic War, when they were so impressed by the generalship of the Spartan mercenary Xanthippus that the generals gave way to the soldiers’ demands for him to lead them into battle (Polyb. 1.22.4-5). In Carthage’s subsequent war with her former mercenaries and Libyan subjects the joint commanders of Carthage’s own army, Hamilcar and Hanno, quarrelled and the army was allowed to reject one of the two (Polyb. 1.82.5.12); Hanno was rejected and Hamilcar, Hannibal’s father, led his men to victory.

Such an arrangement as developed would certainly have made sense as the army would be picking a tried soldier who had served with them as a junior officer and in whose abilities they would have had confidence. This would have allowed an impressive esprit de corps to develop, focused on the mystique of the commanders who virtually became a hereditary monarchy in Spain with political power in Carthage, based on and justified by their military authority and success.

However, to command effectively, commanders cannot solely rely upon their hierarchical link with their men. Rather they must know how to speak directly to them, especially at times of crisis, such as the eve of battle. This is what Keegan identifies s ‘The Imperative of Prescription’, one of the most important duties of any commander. The failure to fulfil this can lead to a distinct lack of morale among the men, as the ‘chateau generalship’ of the First World War clearly showed. Troop morale was described by Montgomery as ‘the single most important factor in war’ and while as a rule the Carthaginian commander would have been a significant enough focus for the soldiers’ loyalty to bind them together, this was not necessarily so at times of crisis.

Prior to his account of the Battle of Cannae in late Summer, 216 BC, Polybius has Aemilius Paulus, the Roman commander, declare to his men that he has no real to exhort or address them before battle as they are already fully commented as they are fighting for their homes and families, but that:

‘For those who in some countries serve for hire or for those who are about to fight for their neighbours by the terms of an alliance, the moment of greatest peril is during the battle itself but the result makes little difference to them, and in such a case exhortation is necessary.’ (3.109.6)

 Whether Paulus ever said such a thing is debatable; the speeches before Cannae have been described as full of commonplaces and unlikely to go back to a genuine record. Nevertheless, what is significant is that Polybius deems such a sentiment worthy of inclusion and favours a citizen militia as being more highly motivated than an army consisting of hired troops, as he points out elsewhere in his Histories, when he contrasts the military system of Carthage with that of Rome (6.52.).

An examination of the early books of Polybius seems to support the claim attributed to Paulus, as exhortation is far more frequently referred to in a Carthaginian context than a Roman one. Polybius refers to exhortations by Carthaginian officers several times in his account of the First Punic War (1.27.1, 32.8, 44.1, 45.2-4, 49.10) but never mentions any Roman exhortations. Furthermore, Polybius only refers to two instances of exhortation by Romans in the Second Punic War prior to the battle of Cannae (3.64, 109), one of which, being that of the elder Scipio at the Trebia, is definitely unhistorical, and the other, being Paulus’ speech prior to Cannae, is fraught with problems, whereas he mentions Hannibal exhorting his offers or men at least eight times (3.34.7-9, 43.11, 44.4-13, 54.1-3, 63, 71.8, 71.10-11, 111). It would seem that exhortation was one of the most important duties of Carthaginian commanders and its frequency was a hallmark of their leadership style.

Of course, the question must then be asked of how this was done. The first obvious problem is one of scale. Apparently Hannibal had over 50,000 troops at Cannae, yet he is presented as addressing the entire army at once. If this was the case it seems unlikely that he could have been heard by the bulk of the army. To take some modern examples, Benjamin Franklin was able to prove to his own satisfaction that a certain travelling preacher, reputed to have addressed crowds of 25,000, could have actually addressed up to 30,000 at once, but Lincoln was badly heard at Gettysburg, addressing 15,000. Gladstone was regularly heard by crowds of 5,000, but that was indoors. In practice it seems that it would not have been feasible to address gatherings larger than 5,000 unless a natural amphitheatre was used. This may well have been done – Philip V of Macedon addressed his men in Corinth’s amphitheatre at one point (5.25.4-5). It would seem to have been more common to ride along the line of battle or among the army addressing units of troops, as was done by Ptolemy and Antiochus at the Battle of Raphia in 217 and by Scipio Africanus at Zama in 202 (5.83.1-2, 15.10.1). It is worth noting that even doing this, Philopoemen had difficulty being heard at the Battle of Mantinea because of the reaction of his men:

‘Such was their ardour and zeal that they responded to his address with what was almost a transport of enthusiasm, exhorting him to lead them on and be of good heart.’ (11.12.2)

 Another major problem for Carthaginian commanders would have been that the army, being multinational in character, lacked a common tongue. Such problems weren’t unique to Carthaginian armies, as Persian armies had been polyglot in character too, as was Alexander’s army after the conquest of Persia.

Interpreters could be used to address armies, as they were at Raphai (5.83.7), and Hannibal did have interpreters with him (e.g. 3.44.5), but there is no record of him using them to address his army. Hannibal’s own knowledge of languages other than Punic and Greek is uncertain, though Zonaras claims he knew several languages, including Latin (8.24). At Zama, having arranged for the Ligurians, Celts, Balearics, and Moors, as well as the Carthaginians themselves, to be addressed by their own leaders (Polyb. 15.11.4-5), he apparently addressed the troops he had brought from Italy himself, imploring them to ‘remember their comradeship of seventeen years’ (15.11.6). He may well have addressed them in Punic rather than in their own languages or through an interpreter, as this seems to have been a lingua franca, to some extent, among veterans in Carthaginian armies; in the mercenary army that rose against Carthage after the First Punic War, a Celt named Autaritas became very influential due to his command of Punic, a language which all the mercenaries were familiar with to some degree (1.80.5-7).

Assuming the army was not addressed as a whole, Hannibal would have been able to appeal to each national grouping on different grounds. It was not unusual to exhort different parts of armies in different ways; for instance, at Raphia both Ptolemy and Antiochus spent more time addressing their phalanxes than any other part of their armies, as these were seen as the most important part (5.83.2). Such an approach made sense in forces as diverse as Successor or Carthaginian armies as the various contingents had their own very different reasons for fighting. Livy effectively describes how Hannibal and his officers did this at Zama, where:

‘In an army composed of men who shared neither language, customs, laws, weapons, dress, appearance, nor even a common reason for serving , the best means of arousing the fighting spirit was no simple matter; hopes and fears, to suit the case, had to be danged before their eyes.’ (30.33)

Different appeals were made to each grouping: booty as well as cash was offered to the auxiliaries; the Celts were inspired by their hatred of the Romans; the Ligurians were reminded of the riches of the plains of Italy; Moors and Numidians were threatened by the prospect of being ruled by the pro-Roman Masinissa; and the Carthaginians were urged to think of what they had to lose. In Polybius’ account the various national contingents are also described as being addressed in different ways.

To conclude, the commander’s role in any army is not limited merely to the traditional tasks of generalship, nor are these inherently his most important tasks. In the polyglot army of Carthage the leader’s skills were more important for commanders such as Hannibal than were the more technical skills of the general, though it must of course be borne in mind that the two were not necessarily mutually exclusive and exclusive and could often overlap.

Being chosen by the army for their ability, Carthaginian commanders had enough influence to bind the diverse elements under their command into an effective fighting force personally loyal to them, if not to the distant paymaster that was Carthage. However, at times of crisis, such as on the eve of a battle, that esprit de corps might not be enough to convince the troops to risk their lives, and so it would fall to their commander to speak to them and rouse their spirits. Despite the many obstacles to doing this effectively in such a large multiracial force, Hannibal proved so adept at this that Polybius considered the fact that he kept his army together in hostile territory for so long to have his supreme achievement.

-- Limerick, August 1997.

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My first ever paper, this is another piece discovered recently in the parental shed, originally given as a talk to the Classical Association of Ireland's annual conference, which that year was held in Mary Immaculate College in Limerick. Some of this I still think holds up well, but other bits rather channel Keegan a bit too much.

If you've liked this, before I wrap up, then I suspect there's a high chance you'll also like Darkness Over Cannae. Don't take my word for it. Take a look.

Classic Comics: Thoughts from 1997

Most people think they know what comics are: “crude, poorly drawn, semiliterate, cheap, disposable kiddie fare” in the words of Scott McCloud in his groundbreaking 1993 work Understanding Comics. Recognising this to be a ridiculously narrow, not to mention subjective, definition, McCloud set out to discredit it. Starting from Will Eisner’s description of comics as “sequential art”, McCloud eventually reached a far more precise and comprehensive definition of comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”

Having seen McCloud demonstrate how things as diverse as the Bayeux Tapestry and the Stations of the Cross can thus be regarded as comics, I began to consider whether or not the classical world might have contributed to the artform. When I was fortunate enough to meet McCloud in 1994, he persuaded me that there were probably plenty of examples of comics in classical art and a course in Roman relief sculpture later that year convinced me of this. 

In this article I shall not attempt a comprehensive survey of such examples, as, space restrictions aside, I am hardly qualified to do so. Instead, I shall focus on a very small number of art works that clearly illustrate that the principles of comics were quite evident in Greek art.

Narrative was a vital element in ancient art and by the middle of the seventh century BC Attic vase painters were painting pictures that often continued around vases, separated by bands of decoration. Having an oblong shape, the pictures lent themselves to subjects such as processions, races, and hunts, as, being essentially narrow friezes, they required many figures to fill them. Though these friezes did not always have a chronological element they certainly sometimes did, an excellent example of this being found on the Francois vase, painted by Kleitias around 570BC.

Along with more conventional subjects such as the procession of guests at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis and the funeral games of Patroklos, the vase also illustrates the story of the pursuit of Troilos. The frieze extends halfway around the vase and shows a number of distinct scenes, clearly separate from each other in both time and place, on a continuous background. At the far left is a fountain house where a girl stands waiting for her hydra to fill. Next are the figures of Hermes, Thetis, and Troilos. After is Priam receiving the bad news in sorrow, and finally two of Troilos’ brothers can be seen setting out from the city gates to avenge his death. Assuming that the frieze is “read” in this way, its sequential nature is clear.

Greek art was clearly not “photographic” in nature, in that it was not taken for granted that a single image should represent a single moment. A good example of this is evident on the neck of a mid-seventh-century Attic amphora found in Eleusis. It features an illustration of Odysseus and his men blinding the Cyclops Polyphemos. In the Odyssey the story is clearly related: Odysseus plied Polyphemos with alcohol, the Cyclops then fell asleep, and Odysseus blinded him. Here, however, the Cyclops is depicted sitting up, with one hand trying to push away the heated stake wielded by Odysseus, while clutching his wine cup with the other. Clearly the wine cup, which really belongs to an earlier part of the story, is depicted in order to hint that the Cyclops is drunk rather than still drinking.

Perhaps the most well-known “non-photographic” image in Greek art is a scene showing Achilles and Ajax playing some form of board game on an Attic black-figure amphora made and painted by Exekias between 540 and 530 BC. 

This vase features “speech balloons”, perhaps the most distinctive element of modern comics, a device which through attempting to represent sound in a scene also introduces the concept of time. 

Extracts from Understanding Comics, explaining how in comics speech bubbles can subvert otherwise 'photographic' images.

Achilles says “four” and Ajax responds “three”, possibly referring to dice scores. It is not clear whether Ajax is responding to Achilles, Achilles is responding to Ajax, or both men are speaking at once; what is certain is that this image does not represent a single moment, but rather the length of time it takes the two men to speak.

The two heroes are labelled above their heads: Achilles is on the left, with Ajax on the right.

One black-figure vase, Boston 08.292, is a perfect example of Greek comics. This vase features what McCloud calls an “action to action” transition, probably the most common type of “panel to panel” progression in comics. One side of the vase shows a man in a vineyard courting a young boy. When the vase is turned around, however, the young boy is jumping to embrace the man. Though the background remains continuous, the pictures are clearly intended to represent the same couple, with one scene obviously following the other.

Greek vase painting, therefore, clearly provides examples of what would now be termed comics, but there are also examples to be found in architectural sculpture.

The low-relief metopes on temples offered an obvious opportunity to tell a story in pictures, but it is difficult to tell how often this opportunity was taken. The Parthenon metopes, for instance, seem to have been put in place in such a way that sequence was largely irrelevant, whereas the metopes on the temple of Zeus at Olympia, dating from the second quarter of the fifth century BC, may have been intended to tell a story.

The twelve metopes there represent the twelve labours of Herakles, and are ordered in such a way that Herakles is evidently older in the twelfth metope than the first. The final metope depicts the cleansing of the Augean stables, two places later than conventionally related, with the acquisition of the apples of the Hesperides and the capturing of Cerberus being brought forward to the tenth and eleventh places. This might suggest that the metopes are merely showing scenes for Herakles’ life in no particular order, but as the traditional order postdates the building of the temple at Olympia this seems an unsafe conclusion; it seems more likely that this collection may represent the first attempt to assemble the twelve episodes into one story.

Atlas offering the apples of the Hesperides to Heracles, with Athene watching.

The continuous frieze common to temples built in the Ionic order, however, can be seen to demonstrate principles of comics with remarkable subtlety. The Parthenon offers an excellent example of this.

The Parthenon’s Ionic frieze was about 160 metres long and showed an idealised version of the Panathenaic procession. Though the frieze was continuous and therefore seemed to be one image, there was clearly chronological progression in it. 

The western end, the first to be seen by people coming from the Propylaea, featured horsemen gathering for the procession, which begins at the south-west corner. Continuing along the northern side the procession had many elements –  horsemen,musicians, etc – before reaching the eastern end. Here it culminated with the gods looking on as a group of people held a peoplos, which would have been presented to the sacred olive-wood statue of Athene on the Acropolis. The south side of the frieze, which was not as visible as the other three sides, also had an eastwards direction converging at this scene.

The Parthenon frieze, assembled as one text, read from right to left and top to bottom.

Clearly this was sequential art, the appearance of which would have been heightened by the bright colours in which it was painted. 

The fact that it would have also been seen through gaps between columns would also have given it an added element of timing – the columns would have acted as “gutters” or panel divisions.

Overall, therefore, I think it can be plainly seen that the principles that make comics what they are were quite evident in Classical Art. Though I’ve only dealt with Greek art up to the mid-fifth century BC, the traditions of sequential art continued throughout the Hellenistic period as can be seen in the Telephus frieze surrounding the altar of Zeus at Pergamon and thrived in the Roman world, with Trajan’s column being but the most obvious example.

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Originally published in UCD Classical Society Journal, 1996/1997, and tweaked here merely to amend the most clunky of sentences. I found this in the shed today, and was amused to see how my writing had changed. Glad, too. Mind, it has been a very long time. 

The Map is Not the Territory: Herodotus and the Myth of Hoplite Battle

Another piece from the archives -- April 2003, believe it or not -- where it's just been gathering dust...

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There was an article in the New York Times last week, examining the books which have had the greatest impact of late in the White House. Last Autumn Dick Cheney read An Autumn of War by Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian, whom he later invited to dinner. Cheney told his aides that Hanson’s writings reflected his philosophy. In An Autumn of War Hanson wrote approvingly of the ancient Greek view of war as ‘terrible but innate to civilization — and not always unjust or amoral if it is waged for good causes to destroy evil and save the innocent.’ He asserted that we were in an ‘outright bloody war against tyranny, intolerance and theocracy,’ and he called for going to war ‘hard, long, without guilt, apology or respite until our enemies are no more.’[1]

Hanson has long argued that the ‘Hoplite Battle’ was the central military act in ancient Greece. This ‘Hoplite Battle’ was a swift and decisive clash of well-armed social equals, fighting and willing to die in defence of their lands. These social equals, Hanson believes, relied not on ruse or cunning for victory, instead depending on their own courage, discipline, and martial skill. E.M. Walker, writing in the first edition of the Cambridge Ancient History elegantly explained that ‘To the Greeks a battle was in the nature of a duel; it was an agon, in which honour was satisfied and the pursuit ceased when the enemy acknowledged defeat by asking for a truce for the burial of his dead.’ Such battles were almost inevitably ritualistic, as W.R. Connor argues in his 1988 article on the symbolism of early Greek land warfare.

This model of hoplite battle generated by believers in a Greek way of war is well-known and generally accepted. 

The opposing armies would deploy on a plain, typically agricultural land at the edge of the invaded territory. Often organised by tribal regiments, arrayed in a line with the best men stationed in the front and rear ranks, the heavy infantry would be protected on the flanks by light infantry and cavalry. Omens would be taken, and sacrificial animals slaughtered in a ritual shedding of blood. Commanders would address their men, and the signal for battle would be given. Both armies would advance, covering the last hundred or so yards at a run. It seems unlikely that the two armies collided at full tilt, but when they met a giant melee of pushing and stabbing would begin. Men must have fallen, whether dead or wounded, or simply because they lost their footing due to pressure from behind. As men fell, gaps would have appeared in the front lines, which enemy hoplites sought to enlarge; eventually the pushing – the othismos – would enable one army to penetrate the enemy line. This breaching of the line, the pararrhexis – was a sure sign of defeat, and the army whose line had been broken would turn and run. The victorious army would generally not pursue for long, instead opting to make the battlefield its own; they stripped the armour from the enemy dead and gathered their own dead for burial. A victory marker, called a tropaion, would be erected at the spot where the enemy line had been broken and the enemy had turned and fled. The defeated army, having regrouped, would send a herald to request a truce to enable them to retrieve their dead: this request was an admission of defeat; indicating that the outcome of the battle had been accepted

The basic origins of this thesis are clear enough. In a famous speech he attributes to the Persian Mardonius,[2] Herodotus describes the Greek Way of War, noting that:

‘When they have declared war against each other, they come down to the fairest and most level ground that they can find and there they fight, so that the victors come not off without great harm; and of the vanquished I say not so much as a word, for they are utterly destroyed.’ (Hdt. 7.9)

This passage from Herodotus is generally taken at face value and reinforced by passages from Thucydides,[3] Demosthenes,[4] and particularly Polybius [5] in order to gain an insight into the ‘Greek Way of War’.

The problem with these passages is that they all highly rhetorical; they are hardly sober reflections on the nature of contemporary warfare. The core passage from Herodotus is exceptionally complex, loaded with problems and ambiguities. Remember at all times that this speech surely does not represent anything Mardonius said; rather these words have been put into his mouth by the Greek Herodotus. Why? In the first place its main function is to show the heroism of the free Greeks, who are willing to die to defend their homeland; unlike, in this respect they stand in sharp contrast to the Persians, who like to fight their wars without unnecessary casualties. The Greek willingness to sustain casualties horrifies Mardonius; yet modern calculations suggest that in most Greek battles the defeated army would suffer perhaps 14 or 15 per cent losses, with the victor losing only one man in twenty. It is also odd to see a Persian being surprised at the Greek desire for decisive battle, since earlier in his account Herodotus shows the Persians as deeply exasperated by the Scythian refusal to face them in the open field; the Scythian scorched earth policy so infuriated the Persians that Darius supposedly wrote to the Scythian king to ask him to face the Persians in the open field (Hdt. 4.126). The historicity of this letter may be questionable, but of more interest is the fact that when it suited his purposes, Herodotus was quite capable of presenting the Persians as devotees of decisive battle.

It’s also odd that Herodotus represents Mardonius as seeing the Greeks as tactically inept and not inclined to use terrain to their advantage; think what happened at Thermopylae, one of history’s finest examples of the tactical use of terrain (Hdt. 7.201-228; Diod. 11.6-10). Is Herodotus simply saying that the Persians misunderstood the Greek capacity for flexibility in warfare?

Consider the passages from Demosthenes (9.47-52) and Polybius (13.3.2-7): both men are harking back to a Golden Age of Hoplite Warfare that may never have existed. Polybius appears to be talking about the Lelantine War, more than five centuries before his own day. And Demosthenes is praising the honourable methods of the old Spartan enemies, despite the fact that in the funeral speech ascribed to him by Thucydides, Pericles scorned those very Spartans for their reliance on stratagems and ruses! (Thuc. 2.39.1) The rhetorical content of both passages renders them automatically suspect. Even the passage from Thucydides (4.126.5-6), who at least knew what he was talking about, is not entirely safe. After all, it purports to represent what Brasidas said to inspire a force of troops who were relatively new to hoplite warfare, as they were feeling threatened by ‘savage’ Illyrians. It is hardly surprising that he would laud their method of warfare.

We need to keep these issues in mind, as when presented with a picture as compelling as that drawn by Hanson, it is all too easy to forget that this is a ‘model’ or an ‘ideal type’. It is a tool to enable us to gain understanding of Greek battle, synthesizing features which are common to many, but by no means all, Greek battles in an attempt to manufacture a mental construct which never ‘really’ existed. This does not mean that the model is useless, simply that we have to be careful how we apply it. There’s a school of ‘pop psychology’ called Neuro-Linguistic Programming, one of the central principles of which is that ‘The map is not the territory’. Regardless of the merits or otherwise of NLP, when it comes to Greek Warfare we should make a point of keeping in mind this distinction between maps and territories.

Consider firstly the claim that the ‘Hoplite Battle’ was the central act of Greek warfare. This claim simply doesn’t bear serious scrutiny. It is, frankly, disingenuous to speak of ‘Greek warfare’ and ‘hoplite warfare’ as if the two were synonymous. In Thessaly, for instance, cavalry was the dominant military arm; this is hardly surprising when one envisages the Thessalian landscape’s plains and gently rolling hills (Plat., Leg. 1.625d); there appear to have been Thessalian hoplites, but they were less significant than the cavalry (Xen., Hell. 6.1.8-9). The ‘primitive’ Greeks in the mountains of western Greece, such as the Acharnanians, Aetolians, and Ozolian Locrians, fought as lightly-armed missile troops, specialising in skirmishes and ambushes (Thuc. 1.5, 3.94, 97-8). The Cretans and Rhodians were famous for their skills with the bow and sling, respectively. The Greeks of the island poleis may have been more inclined to naval rather than land warfare – after all, who were they going to fight? The Sicilian Greeks appear to have relied far more on their cavalry than on their hoplites; Thucydides’ account of the early stages of Athens’ doomed Sicilian expedition indicates that the Syracusan hoplites were inexperienced and ineffective, unlike their potent cavalry and missile troops.

It could be countered that although these states were all Greek, none of them was truly a mainstream Greek society. What of the Greeks in the ‘hoplite heartland’ of the Peloponnese, Central Greece, and Euboea? For states such as Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Corinth, Argos, Plataea, and so forth, warfare generally meant hoplite warfare. But in some respects the very term ‘hoplite warfare’ seems meaningless. In the first place, as Louis Rawlings has argued, hoplite warfare did not solely consist of battles. Hoplites could on occasion fight as marines, and could serve a police function or perform garrison duties, as well as participating in raids and reprisals – effectively acts of guerrilla warfare.

In addition to this, the Hanson thesis assumes that Greek warfare followed an uninterrupted learning curve, where two centuries or more of ‘pure’ hoplite warfare came to an end with the Persian Wars, after which hoplite battle became more and more sophisticated over the course of the Peloponnesian Wars and the Theban Hegemony. Such an assumption is unwarranted, and is lacking in evidence, as there is hardly any evidence for how battles were fought before Marathon, and what little evidence there is appears to contradict Hanson’s idea. Furthermore, this thesis ignores cultural differences between various Greek states and assumes that all hoplite armies fought in an essentially identical fashion, which was not the case.

Consider the Athenian army, which appears to have been officially mobilised very rarely before the late sixth century. Scythian archers were a common subject on Athenian vase paintings in this period; curiously, on some vases they are shown as operating in association with the regular infantry, shooting from between the hoplites of the front ranks. They are reminiscent of the archers in the Iliad, relying on their comrades’ shields for protection (Hom., Il. 4.112-4, 8.266-72). It might seem unsafe to rely on Vase illustrations as evidence for Athenian warfare during the ‘Golden Age of Hoplite Battle’, but this notion of missile troops being deployed amongst the hoplites seems to have been a Spartan practice during the seventh century. Several passages from Tyrtaeus testify to the importance of missile troops in early Spartan warfare, notably when he exhorts them as follows:

‘And you, light-armed, squatting under a shield here and there, must throw great rocks and hurl smooth javelins while you stand close to the heavy armed.’ (Tyrt. Fr. 11.35-8)

Lest we be tempted to argue that missile troops were integrated into the Spartan army only in its early history, it is worth contemplating Herodotus’ somewhat cryptic statement that each Spartan at the battle of Plataea was accompanied by seven helots, while a single helot accompanied each hoplite of the perioikoi. These helots were equipped as light-armed missile troops, and were reportedly ‘in attendance’ on the hoplites, which probably indicates that they were not deployed simply on the flanks (Hdt. 9.10.1, 9.29.1). This is irreconcilable with the notion of hoplite battle as a battle of equals, with the disdain supposedly felt by hoplites for the use of missiles in battle, and with the basic notion of hoplite tactics being based on solid lines of heavily armed infantrymen.

Thucydides makes Pericles scorn the Spartans for their reliance on trickery, and their tactics at Thermopylae seem to defy everything that the model of ‘Hoplite Battle’ takes for granted. Herodotus claims that the Spartan hoplites at Thermopylae turned and pretended to flee, only to turn back and strike the Persians who had broken ranks and fallen into disorder in attempting to press their apparent advantage (Hdt. 7.211.3). Such a stratagem looks decidedly unGreek, foreshadowing the famous ‘Parthian Shot’ or even Mongol tactics. It might not be surprising that the Spartans should have been capable of such a manoeuvre, though, considering the fact that unlike the free citizen militias so feted by Hanson, they were in effect professional soldiers who engaged in a life-long training programme. Even the Athenian phalanx at Marathon, however, appears to have exhibited a degree of flexibility unimaginable for the phalanxes we read of in the pages of Thucydides and Xenophon; or at least unimaginable for their phalanxes as seen through the prism of our model of ‘hoplite battle’ (Hdt. 6.113).

If the Spartans and Athenians offer exceptions to the model of ‘Hoplite Battle’, the Thebans stand out in blatant defiance of it. The hoplite infantry was indeed the dominant military arm in Boeotia, but the aristocratic cavalry played a crucial role in Boeotian battles, notably the Boeotian victory over Athens at Delium in 424 (Thuc. 4.90-6). The Boeotian cavalry pursued the defeated Athenians until nightfall; this murderous pursuit cost the Athenians dearly and was hardly in accordance with the spirit of ‘Hoplite Battle’ (4.96.8, 101.2). What’s more, the cavalry had been instrumental in the Boeotian victory, rather than just its aftermath. The Boeotian left wing had been under pressure from the Athenian right, so Pagondas sent two cavalry squadrons to support the beleaguered infantry. The cavalry rode behind a hill, staying out of sight, and appeared in such a way as to surprise the Athenians who broke and fled, thinking that a new army had arrived (4.96.5-6). Such reliance on surprise might seem contrary to the openness so characteristic of conventional model of ‘Hoplite Battle’, but it was clearly not regarded as dishonourable among the Boeotians: it seems clear that the Boeotian victory over Athens at Coronea in 446 was regarded as a heroic victory (3.62.5, 67.3, 4.92.6), despite being an ambush rather than a set-piece battle (1.113.2).

The notion of the ambush at Coronea being a decisive battle – and it surely was decisive – is an interesting one, as it forces the question of what Greeks thought of when they spoke of battle. When Greeks spoke of battle, did they automatically mean the set-piece hoplite battle as envisaged by Hanson, and apparently as indicated by Herodotus in his Mardonius speech? Hanson argues, following Pritchett, that the existence of an extensive vocabulary devoted purely to set-piece hoplite battles demonstrates the centrality of shock battle to Greek culture. The careful delineation of the set-piece battle's various stages and areas of the battlefield might support this thesis, but while this certainly might indicate how important shock battle was to the Greeks, it might equally mean nothing more than that that unlike other forms of military engagement, the pitched battle between hoplites had easily distinguished components. After all, the fact that an activity has its own jargon hardly indicates how important it was to the wider culture.

Such pitched battles were known as ‘drawn-ups,’ as ‘battles by agreement,’ as ‘battles in the plain,’ and as battles that were ‘just and open.’ The problem with this analysis is that with the exception of parataxis – ‘drawn-up’ – these terms are quite rare in our sources. This perhaps suggesting that the pitched battle was a far less frequent occurrence than modern writers would like to admit. There is no doubt, for instance, that the battle of Coronea in 446, as mentioned already, was a fully-credited battle, but it would be hard to use any of the terms Pritchett and Hanson cite to describe it. Or look at the battles of Sphacteria in 425 or Amphipolis in 421 – both battles were notable for the asymmetry of the opposing sides’ losses – for example, seven of Brasidas’ men fell at Amphipolis, as against 600 or so of Cleon’s – this asymmetry is attributed by Thucydides to neither battle being a pitched or drawn up battle (Thuc, 4.38.5, 5.11.2). But even the term parataxis was not used exclusively to refer to hoplite battles. Xenophon uses the term for cavalry formations (Hell. 4.3.5, 7.5.23), and Polybius uses it not specifically for Greek infantry encounters, but also for battles between Romans and Gauls (2.18.2, 2.26.8), Romans and Gauls and Etruscans together (2.20.2, 4), and Macedonian phalangites against Illyrians (2.70.6).

Other terms for battle are frustratingly vague, and are never applied in a manner exclusive to the pitched hoplite battle. The Homeric term ponos, used by Herodotus on occasion, really just means ‘toil’ or ‘struggle’ (Hom., Il. 6.77; Hdt. 6.114, 7.224.1), and the verb symballein, conveying the sense of ‘coming together’ is used to refer to battle in a vague sense by both Homer and Herodotus (Hom., Il. 3.70, 20.55; Hdt. 1.77, 1.82, 7.210.2). Kindunos, meaning ‘danger’ or ‘risk’, is used frequently by Polybius (1.33.4, 34.9, 2.28.9, 3.84.15), but again has no specific application to hoplite warfare, and even agon, which basically means ‘contest’, is usually applied to battles in a largely metaphorical way, whether by Phormio addressing his men (Th.2.89.8) or Polybius describing the battles of the Trebia or Cannae (3.71.5, 116.2).

The term mache is indiscrimately applied to battles of all sorts by Greek writers. It implies virtually nothing about the nature of the fighting which took place. Homer uses it constantly for mass fighting, but also occasionally for single combat (Il. 7.263, 11.255, 11.542). Herodotus describes pitched battles such as Marathon and Plataea as machai (6.117.1, 9.69.1), but also uses the term to mean simply a style of warfare, as practised by the Lydian cavalry, the Sagartians, or even the Greeks, in the Mardonius speech (1.79, 7.85.2, 7.9.1). Thucydides uses the term in a broad sense for the encounters at Sphacteria (4.39.1), Delium (4.93.2, 95.2, 101.1, 101.3), Amphipolis (5.11.2, 12.2), and Mantinea (5.74.1, 75.1, 75.4). This is particularly striking, when we remember that he specifically said that neither Sphacteria nor Amphipolis was a pitched battle; it might seem odd that he does not apply any more precise term than mache to describe Mantinea, say. Xenophon also uses this vague, generalised word when he writes of such classic set-piece encounters as the Nemea River, second Coronea, Leuctra, and second Mantinea (Hell. 4.2.23, 4.3.16, 6.4.8, 7.5.27); but also uses it in the famous ‘Tearless Battle’ of 368 (Hell. 7.1.32), even though this was not even a battle; no fighting took place, only the slaughter of fleeing Argives and Arcadians.

Where does this leave us? The ‘hoplite battle’ is to some extent a chimera; set piece battles took place on a surprisingly infrequent basis. Interstate warfare was indeed a commonplace of Greek life, but when we read that a battle took place, we should not automatically assume that it was a pitched battle between two similarly armed and trained groups of hoplites. Ancient rhetoric has led modern writers to ignore the evidence, and instead to force the facts that we have to fit a flawed and generalised theory. Herodotus’ celebrated description of the Greek way of war, although it is very useful for studying the ideology of what set-piece battles did take place, does not provide us with a microscope to scrutinise all ancient battle accounts. Rather, it is a distorting mirror, warping the way we study Greek warfare. Without Herodotus to lead us astray we might not have been tempted to assume a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model of Greek warfare, and would have recognised that there was no ‘Greek Way of War’. Greece in the Archaic and Classical periods is best viewed as a military matrix, throwing up many variants on how heavily-armed infantry could be used in battle, with or without the assistance of cavalry, missile troops, or even ships.

University of Warwick, April 2003.

---

[1] Kakutani, Michiko, ‘Critic’s Notebook; How Books Have Shaped U.S. Policy’, New York Times, April 5, 2003, Late Edition – Final, Section D, Page 7, Column 5.

[2] Yet wars the Greeks do wage, and, as I learn, most senselessly they do it, in their wrongheadedness and folly. When they have declared war against each other, they come down to the fairest and most level ground that they can find and there they fight, so that the victors come not off without great harm; and of the vanquished I say not so much as a word, for they are utterly destroyed. Yet speaking as they do the same language, they should end this dispute by the means of herald and messengers, and by any means other than fighting; or if needs must that they war against each other, they should discover each where the strongest defence lies, and there make his essay. (Hdt. 7.9.2)

[3] Now as for these Illyrians, for those who have had no experience of them, the menace of their attack has terror; for their number is indeed dreadful to behold and the loudness of their battle-cry is intolerable, and the idle brandishing of their arms has a threatening effect. But for hand-to-hand fighting, if their opponents but endure such threats, they are not the men they seem; for having no regular order, they would not be ashamed to abandon any position when hard pressed; and since flight and attack are considered equally honourable with them, their courage cannot be put to the test. Besides, a mode of fighting in which everyone is his own master will provide a man the best excuse for saving himself becomingly. They think, too, that it is a less risky game to try to frighten you from a safe distance than to meet you hand to hand; otherwise they would not have taken this course in preference to that. And so you clearly see that all that was at first formidable about them is but little in reality, startling merely to eye and ear. If you withstand all this in the first onrush, and then, whenever opportunity offers, withdraw again in orderly array, you will the sooner reach safety, and will hereafter know that mobs like these, if an adversary but sustain their first onset, merely make a flourish of valour with threats from afar in menace of attack, but if one yields to them, they are right upon his heels, quick enough to display their courage when all is safe. (Thuc.4.126.5-6)

[4] But for my own part, while practically all the arts have made a great advance and we are living today in a very different world from the old one, I consider that nothing has been more developed and improved than the art of war. For in the first place I am informed that in those days the Lacedaemonians, like everyone else, would spend the four or five months of the summer “season” in invading and laying waste the enemy’s territory with heavy infantry and levies of citizens, and would then retire home again; and they were so old-fashioned, or rather such good citizens, that they never used money to buy an advantage from anyone, but their fighting was of the fair and open kind. But now you must surely see that most disasters are due to traitors, and none are the result of a regular pitched battle. On the other hand you hear of Philip marching unchecked, not because he leads a phalanx of heavy infantry, but because he is accompanied by skirmishers, cavalry, archers, mercenaries, and similar troops. When, relying on this force, he attacks some people that is at variance with itself, and when through distrust no one goes forth to fight for his country, then he brings up his artillery and lays siege.  I need hardly tell you that he makes no difference between summer and winter and has no season set apart for inaction. […] For so far as a campaign is concerned, provided, men of Athens, we are willing to do what is necessary, we have many advantages, such as the nature of his territory, much of which may be harried and devastated, and countless others; but for a pitched battle [agōn] he is in better training than we are. (Dem. 9.47-52)

[5] The ancients, as we know, were far removed from such malpractices. For so far were they from plotting mischief against their friends with the purpose of aggrandizing their own power, that they would not even consent to get the better of their enemies by fraud, regarding no success as brilliant or secure unless they crushed the spirit of their adversaries in open battle. For this reason they entered into a convention among themselves to use against each other neither secret missiles nor those discharged from a distance, and considered that it was only a hand-to-hand battle at close quarters that was truly decisive. Hence they preceded war by a declaration, and when they intended to do battle gave notice of the fact and of the spot to which they would proceed and array their army. But at the present they say it is a sign of poor generalship to do anything openly in war. Some slight traces, however, of the ancient principles of warfare survive among the Romans. For they make declaration of war, they very seldom use ambuscades, and they fight hand-to-hand at close quarters. (Polyb. 13.3.2-7)

A note on New Testament authorship...

About a month or so back, I got into a discussion about the authorship of New Testament texts, with me being told quite firmly that it was only in the late second century that the canonical Gospels first became associated with the evangelists to whom they're traditionally attributed. As you can imagine, I responded with equal firmness that this most certainly wasn't the case, and, well, after a short gallop through the data I was asked to sum up what I'd said in writing and to say why I thought this mattered. In the end, I thought it best to outline the whole case with the summary tagged on at the end as a kind of précis. Like so.

Early Associations With Authors

Irenaeus of Lyons, writing around 180, is the first extant author who can be said beyond reasonable doubt to identify the four canonical Gospels: he speaks of the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, Mark, and John, and criticises those groups that use only one of these Gospels to the exclusion of the others. It’s telling that he does not present his association of these Gospels with these authors as a novelty; rather, this is something he expects his audience to take for granted, as an established fact.

If the original form of the Muratorian Canon can be dated to 170 or so, we can recognise a slightly earlier instance of an author associating the four Gospels with their conventional authors, but leaving aside how the text of the Canon is incomplete, the dating is far from safe.

More interesting is Justin Martyr’s Apology, dating to 150 or so and recording how Christians of his era would attend Mass where ‘the memoirs of the Apostles or the writings of the prophets are read’; Justin obviously says nothing more specific, given his audience, but he appears to be testifying here to how Christians of the mid-second century regarded the Gospels as the apostles’ personal accounts of their time with Jesus. This was around the time, of course, when Marcion was proposing a limited but real Biblical canon composed only of a carefully-pruned Luke and the Pauline letters.

Earlier still, in the first decades of the century we have Papias, fragments of whose texts survive in the writings of Irenaeus and Eusebius; Irenaeus describes him as a pupil of John and peer of Polycarp, as well as the author of the five-volume The Sayings of the Lord Explained. This was still extant in Eusebius’ day, and Eusebius quotes from it to clarify that it was ‘the Presbyter John’ who Papias knew, rather than the Apostle John. He quotes Papias as quoting said Presbyter John:

‘Mark, who had been Peter’s interpreter, wrote down carefully, but not in order, all that he remembered of the Lord’s sayings and doings. For he had not heard the Lord or been one of His followers, but later, as I said, one of Peter’s. Peter used to adapt his teachings to the occasion, without making a systematic arrangement of the Lord’s sayings, so that Mark was quite justified in writing down some things just as he remembered them. For he had one purpose only – to leave out nothing that he had heard, and to make no misstatement about it.’

Traditions do not come from nowhere, after all, so it’s hardly surprising that Papias, writing no later than 130, would have believed what he did on the basis of what a teacher of an earlier generation would have told him. Nor should we be surprised that prominent Christians in Asia Minor should have been so familiar with a Roman text like Mark: communications were remarkably fast in the Empire, and we shouldn’t think of Christian communities, any more than any other ancient communities, as isolated backwaters.

Eusebius also quotes Papias as saying of Matthew that, ‘Matthew compiled the Sayings in the Aramaic language, and everyone translated them as well as he could.’ It seems that in the early second century it was thought that Matthew had written a kind of Aramaic proto-Matthew, which had been translated into the Matthew that we have. My suspicion, as I’ve said before, is that proto-Matthew was mapped onto Mark, possibly with some further admixture of sources -- notably the commonly hypothesised 'Q' -- to give us the document we know as Matthew.

We have, then, real evidence that in the early second century Mark was regarded as the author of Mark, with this apparently having been believed in the late first century when Presbyter John would have taught Papias; There are, of course, plenty who dismiss the Papias tradition, but I have never seen a case for doing so that didn’t entail methods that were at least a tad circular.

Pseudonymous Authorship

To associate the New Testament documents, other than a central core of Pauline letters, directly with their traditional authors is often seen as the height of naivety; scholarly orthodoxy points instead to a scenario where texts arose within communities as expressions of their faith, being merely linked with prominent early Christians as a kind of communal imprimatur, whether said documents were Gospel narratives like John or letters like 2 Timothy.

The first problem with this is that this orthodoxy simply isn’t supported by much solid evidence; it is, rather, little more than a nineteenth-century hypothesis derived primarily from the belief that the New Testament documents were so late in authorship that they could no longer be regarded as written by their traditional authors, which in turn posed the problem of why early Christians venerated books they knew weren’t written by the traditional authors. That’s not to say that this is in itself a bad hypothesis, merely that people tend to forget that this is merely a theory, and one singularly lacking in supportive evidence.

In fact, not merely is there a lack of evidence to support the theory, there are serious arguments against its plausibility.

Origen and Eusebius noted that there were question marks over the authorship of 2 and 3 John, James, and Jude, but give no indication that anybody had ever so disputed the traditional authorship of the Gospels or the Pauline letters, say; neither is there any evidence of any of the Gospels having alternative names, like, the Gospel of the Antiochenes or the Gospel of the Ephesians. Indeed, I struggle to think of any post-Homeric books in Classical antiquity that could be described as having arisen from communities rather than being written by individuals.

In Forgery and Counter-Forgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics, Bart Ehrman argues that pseudonymous authorship was by no means a respectable tradition in antiquity, and that forgery was regularly condemned as such by people who had the tools they needed to identify it as such; we might think of how the first-century Thrasyllus collected a Platonic canon, including as an appendix a collection of texts he believed to be spurious accretions falsely attributed to Plato in subsequent centuries, or how the aforementioned Muratorian Canon dismisses as forgeries intended to further Marcion's Gnostic version of Christianity the supposedly Pauline letters 'to the Laodiceans' and 'to the Alexandrians'. The ancients, it should be remembered, had brains ever bit as good as ours. If Ehrman is right – and he might well be –  it seems unlikely that early Christians would have given a special place to books they knew to be falsely attributed.

This in turn invites another question, though: if early Christians – and their opponents – could have identified forged Biblical texts as forgeries, and yet didn’t do so, might this have been simply because from the first they knew and trusted their provenance?

Anonymity

Much tends to be made of the fact that the Gospels are anonymous books; clearly then, it is regularly held, authorship was subsequently ascribed to them and was done so on questionable grounds. Given the conventions of ancient literature, I find this bizarre: the plays of Euripides and Sophocles are no less anonymous than the Gospels, Plato hardly identifies himself as the author of every Platonic dialogue, and Aristotle certainly doesn’t identify himself as the author of the works ascribed to him, yet we don’t routinely cast aspersions on these on the grounds of their authors’ anonymity. And if the author of Matthew, say, speaks of Matthew in the third person, what of it? Julius Caesar and Thucydides did much the same thing.

Scrolls tended to have tags attached to them, necessary labels in collections of more than a few scrolls. We know that early Christianity originally developed within a Jewish context, so it seems that at least the larger Christian communities must have had collections of Old Testament scrolls which they would have supplemented by Paul’s letters and other documents. These scrolls must have been labelled – doing otherwise would have been like having a library of spineless books. When a community acquired or wrote its first Gospel they could presumably have labelled it ‘Gospel’ but once they came into possession of a second Gospel, it would have been important to label the two Gospels differently, the obvious way of doing so being by reference to their authors.

There is no reason to assume, then, that the Gospels were ever anonymous in any meaningful sense.

Does this matter?

As a general rule, the earlier the source, the more historically valuable it is, and it’s clear that the early Christians believed the historical reality of the faith an issue of paramount importance. Paul, famously, in 1 Corinthians 15 stresses that if the Resurrection isn’t real, then Christianity is a waste of time, but does so only after reeling off a list of witnesses to that Resurrection, most of these being, he wrote, still alive; his point, surely, was that these could be consulted on the accuracy of what he preached. Luke 1:2 makes a point of saying that he and others had learned the story of Christ from ‘those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word’, and John 1:14 seems to imply that the original audience of John included people who had witnessed the risen Christ, as indeed does the comment at John 21:24 that ‘we’ – his community or closest companions within that community  –  ‘know that [John’s] testimony is true’, something that had previously been noted at John 19:35.

In other words, the early Christians clearly thought it mattered that the Gospels should be regarded as having an essentially historical character. And if it mattered for them, should it matter any less for us? 

In the first place, we should have a serious vested interest in truth in general, and the truth of the Gospels in particular. In practical terms too, many people I know who have abandoned their faith have done so because they had come to regard the Gospels as little more than fairy tales written down long after the events they purport to describe. It wasn’t just that they didn’t believe in miracles and exorcisms and so forth, but that they suspected that the Church didn’t do so either or at least didn’t do so consistently; a Gospel read metaphorically was for them a pointless Gospel. The general historicity of the Gospel accounts really matters, and if we play this down we continue to drive people away.

It is perhaps worth noting that the Second Vatican Council explicitly assigned the Gospels’ authorship to the apostles ‘themselves and apostolic men’, such that it seems the Council affirmed Matthew and John as the actual authors of the Gospels assigned to them, even if John essentially dictated his Gospel while Matthew’s contribution to his Gospel may have taken the form of a lost Aramaic proto-Matthew.

I’m not inclined to worry too much about the question of whether Galilean fishermen could ever have written documents as polished – or indeed as Greek – as John or 1 Peter, or indeed about whether they could write at all. John 18:15, for starters, states that ‘the beloved disciple’ was known to the high priest, which suggests that he was rather better connected, and thus perhaps rather better educated, than the average fisherman.

As for the average fisherman, he might in any case have at least occasionally had a level of education to match that of a carpenter or builder, at least one such person being described in the Gospels as talking in Aramaic, reading in Hebrew, and possibly even chatting in Greek, given Jesus’ reported conversation with the Syrophoenician woman of Mark 7:26. As for Matthew, well, given he appears to have been not just a tax collector –  indeed, a customs official –  but a wealthy man able to put on a banquet for a large crowd at a moment’s notice, according to Luke 5:27, I don’t think we should be too sceptical about the prospect of his having been literate.

In any case, after a couple of decades of living in Asia Minor or Rome, it’d hardly be that strange for the likes of Peter or John to have mastered Greek, and it may also have been that they relied on others to polish their writing –  1 Peter 5:12, for example, makes clear that the letter itself was written by one Silvanus, just as Romans 16:22 reveals that Paul’s masterwork was in fact penned by one Tertius – before signing off on the finished product.

(Ghostwriting and approaches analogous to modern speechwriting could go some way to explaining stylistic differences to letters attributed to the same author, of course; I'm not entirely convinced, for instance, that many people, reading Lumen Fidei and Evangelii Gaudium would automatically assume they'd both ostensibly come from the same man.)

In any case, the assumption that people must have lacked literary talent because they smelled of fish always bothers me; it smacks of the sort of snobbishness that tries to assign Shakespeare’s plays to the likes of the Earl of Oxford. Talent isn’t confined to the wealthy, after all, and given a chance, people can shine.

From a specifically Catholic stance, it is worth remembering too that the Council taught that God inspired the Bible’s human authors to consign ‘to writing everything and only those things which He wanted,’ such that ‘everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred authors must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit’. In interpreting Scripture, then, we are called upon to do two things, both being clearly mandated as necessary by the Council: we must read with an eye to the human authorship of texts, noting literary forms and customary styles and conventions, and we must read with an eye to the divine authorship of texts, noting the unity of Scripture, the tradition of the Church, and the harmony that exists within elements of the faith.  

To do otherwise is to read the Bible outside the Church.

In short, then...

Anonymity within texts was common in antiquity, but given how scrolls would typically be labelled for ease of identification, this didn’t mean texts were at any point anonymous in any practical sense. There is no evidence that anybody other than the four traditional authors were ever identified as the authors of the Gospels, and Patristic sources indicate that the Gospels had been identified as written by their traditional authors as early as the late first and certainly in the early second century.

Contrary to scholarly convention in New Testament studies, it was not common in antiquity for texts to be falsely attributed to someone and then venerated by people who knew they weren’t written by their purported authors; forgeries tended to be regarded as such, and spurious texts were treated with suspicion. The belief that New Testament books were honoured as Johannine, Matthean, or whatever, on the basis of having arisen from communities centred around the likes of John and Matthew, was never really more than a hypothesis intended to resolve problems raised by, among other things, the late date at which said books were believed to have been written. Of course, this lateness has itself not been proven, and is all too often treated as a premise, rather than an uncertain conclusion. These theories have calcified into scholarly orthodoxies, but we should always remember that they are just theories, and theories based on precious little evidence at that.

Does this matter? I believe it does, primarily because the authorship of the Gospels is a matter of truth, and truth should be something in which we're all invested. I don’t think it’s good enough to brush this off as though it doesn’t matter.

That’s not the only reason, though: from the first, Christians have believed the basic historicity of the Gospel narratives to be important, especially for apologetic and evangelical purposes; the earlier a text is, the more likely its sources are to have witnessed the events it describes, and the more ‘historical’ we should recognise it as being.  As such, if we really care about sharing the Good News, we should hope that the New Testament documents are early and linked with people who witnessed the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, so that we can share that fact with people. It’s hard for most people to accept spiritual truth unless they’re first convinced of historical truth. 

Armageddon on the Aufidus: Locating the Battle of Cannae

For the historian of ancient warfare, there can be few tasks as frustrating – or as tempting – as trying to locate the sites of ancient battles. Our sources rarely say much about topography, what they say is usually vague or contradictory, and, to make matters worse, two thousand years of earthquakes,  floods, and common-or-garden erosion is generally enough to transform any landscape, especially when assisted by the twin forces of farming and construction. 

Despite these difficulties, military historians over the years have relentlessly sought the locations of the major battles of Antiquity, notable the great clashes of the Second Punic War, Rome’s infamous life-and-death struggle with Carthage at the end of the third century BC. Predictably enough, considering the spell it’s cast on tacticians and military historians over the years, the quest to locate the battle of Cannae has been an unashamed free-for-all. Offhand, I can think of about a dozen different theories of where the battle took place.

Just to put this into context, in the summer of 216 BC the Carthaginian general Hannibal was marauding around Italy with an army of around 50,000 men.  Having been decisively thrashed by him in their three previous encounters, the Romans concentrated on building up their army to a total strength – perhaps, this is debated – of 86,000 men. Hannibal seized the grain stores at Cannae, near Canusium, and the Romans under their consuls Paullus and Varro moved closer, evidently planning to give battle soon. They set up camp by the river Aufidus, across the river from Hannibal’s camp. Hannibal crossed the river and made camp, the next day offering battle to the Romans, who declined. 

The following day the Romans under Varro crossed the river to challenge Hannibal, and Hannibal led his men across the river to face them. Despite being massively outnumbered, Hannibal was able to outflank the Romans and surround them, killing 50,000 men in a manoeuvre – the ‘double envelopment’ – which has been a model to generals ever since.

At the south-western end of the citadel at Cannae there’s a small modern monument, a simple column bearing an inscription from Livy, with a magnificent view of what you might assume is the battlefield. You can see it here, a broad flat plain with the river Ofanto – the ancient Aufidus - shown running across the centre of the shot, rendered clearly visible by the trees and bushes that line its banks. The town in the background is San Ferdinando, which some historians have identified as the site of Hannibal’s camp before the battle. It all looks very straightforward – and if you ask in the museum, or at the small tourist office at the train station, you’ll be told that it is. Unfortunately, as with virtually everything that we touch in the field of ancient history, matters aren’t anywhere near so simple.

Back in the late sixteenth century it seems to have been normal to assume the battle took place on the south-eastern bank of the river. If you ever visit the hall of maps in the Vatican Museum and seek out the map of this area  by the Dominican friar Ignazio Danti you’ll see that not only has Danzi seen fit to mark the site of the battle of Cannae on the southern bank of the river, with the two main camps on the northern bank, but he’s painted both armies deployed for battle with the opposing commanders clearly identified. He does a similar thing with other maps in the series, showing, say, the opposing camps before the Battle of Lake Trasimene, and Caesar about to cross the Rubicon.

If you look at a satellite image of the region round the hill of Cannae, with the river Ofanto – the ancient Aufidus – running in a more or less north-easterly direction from the bottom left corner, you can just about make out the hill of Cannae in the very centre of the shot.

What positive information can we gather from the sources? Well, Polybius 3.113 clearly states that the Roman right wing – the citizen cavalry were positioned by the river, faced by the Carthaginian left wing – the Celtic and Spanish horse. Further, Polybius 3.114 and Livy 22.46 tell us that the Romans faced south, the Carthaginians north. We needn’t be too dogmatic about what Polybius meant when he wrote ‘north’ and ‘south’ here. It can be taken as read, I think, that he meant ‘roughly north’ and ‘roughly south’; it seems unlikely that either Hannibal or the Roman commanders were using compasses to deploy their armies. 

What’s more, both armies had to cross the Aufidus to do battle, since most of their men were camped on the far side of the river; Polybius 3.113 states this unambiguously, while Polybius 3.110 indicates that they must have crossed from west to east, since only a third of the Roman forces were encamped on the eastern side of the river.

It can be helpful to see how people have read the data and attempted to locate the battle over the years. The turquoise box on this black-and-white satellite shot marks the area generally identified as the site of the battle of Cannae up to the early nineteenth century, and still generally pointed to as the battlefield by locals in Barletta and thereabouts. 

Obviously, I've enhanced the course of the river; the hill of Cannae should still be clear in the centre. The problem with the obvious identification is that it’s based simply on the assumption that this is a good, handy, flat space that would have been an obvious spot for a fight. Quite right, but unfortunately the sources rule out this location, at least if we take them at face value.

It seems pretty clear, from the aforementioned passages, that the battle must have been fought on the right bank of the river, with the two armies deployed more-or-less at a right angle to it, the Romans facing roughly south, the Carthaginians roughly north. Some nineteenth-century writers attempted to place the battle to the southwest of the hill of Cannae, notably Hesselbarth in his 1874 Göttingen dissertation and Thomas Arnold in 1886. Unfortunately, a cursory inspection of the area – represented with an orange box – ought to have ruled out such ideas – the ground they identified as the site of the battle is rugged and hilly, unsuitable for an infantry battle, let alone a battle involving the use of about 15,000 horses and some fairly sophisticated cavalry manoeuvres.

Attention returned once more to the left bank of the Aufidus, with the American Theodore Dodge placing the battle almost parallel to the river, close to the coast, as represented by the pink box; Dodge wasn’t working so much on the basis of the evidence as he was using what’s termed "inherent military probability". This is the idea that soldiers of whatever era will do what makes military sense, and that bearing in mind certain principles of warfare we can establish what historical generals are likely to have done. Although it ignores the fact that war’s a cultural activity – it varies in aims and methods between cultures – it is a useful tool. However, it’s a tool far too easily abused, as in this case; there’s not a jot of evidence to support Dodge, and plenty of it to refute his theory.

Konrad Lehmann and Hans Delbrück hypothesised that the battle was fought on the river’s left bank, a couple of miles west of the hill of Cannae, as represented by the green box, but Lehmann has the Romans facing roughly north and the Carthaginians roughly south, in direct contradiction of the sources, while Delbrück had the Romans facing roughly east and the Carthaginans roughly west. Again, their theories, however ingenious, lacked any real basis in our evidence. 

De Sanctis, at least, in placing the battlefield on the left bank as shown by the yellow box, with the Romans facing north-east and the Carthaginians facing south-west, had an explanation. Polybius, he believed, thought of Italy as a triangle with its base in the Alps and bisected by the Apennines; the Aufidus thus must have, in Polybius’ mind, flowed in a south-easterly direction; since the Aufidus in fact flows north east, all Polybius’ directions must be corrected – a Roman force facing roughly southeast, for Polybius, would in fact have been facing northeast, with its right flank on the river. 

It’s a clever idea but it doesn’t really follow that Polybius if envisaged Italy as a triangle he must have assumed that all rivers flowing into the Adriatic flowed south-east; besides, considering that Polybius explicitly speaks of the Aufidus having an east bank, it would seem that he believed the river to have flowed from south to north. De Sanctis’ theory, though ingenious, doesn’t hold up.

In 1912, Johannes Kromayer proposed that the battlefield was in fact on the river’s right bank, downstream from the hill of Cannae, on a front over four kilometres wide, with the Romans facing south-west-south and the Carthaginians north-east-north, the Roman right flank and the Carthaginian left flank both resting on the river. The red box here represents Kromayer's theory. Over time this theory gained more and more ground, eventually becoming generally accepted as the one that best fits the evidence, the topographical reality, and military practicality. See, for instance, the definitive book on the battle*. (Cough, cough)

Yes, I'm using the drawing in my book. So sue me.

 In 1981, however, Peter Connolly dropped a very astute bombshell onto this increasingly cosy consensus. It was all very well working on the basis of the texts, he pointed out, but we only have two items of geography to correlate with our literary evidence, and while the hill of Cannae is conveniently stationary, rivers have a habit of moving. What, he asked, if the Aufidus had flowed rather further north in 216 BC than it had done in his day? 

Assuming the river was at the northernmost limit of its floodplain in 216 BC, he placed the main Carthaginian camp at the modern town San Ferdinando with the main Roman camp just over a mile downhill. His proposed site for the battle, shown in pink below, falls down largely because it doesn’t allow for Hannibal having challenged the Romans to battle on the left bank of the Aufidus the previous day. Polybius 3.112 describes Hannibal’s army deploying for battle along the Aufidus, without crossing the river, and if we follow Connolly’s theory there simply isn’t space for them to have done that in the narrow stretch between San Ferdinando and Connolly's hypothetical battlefield.

Nevertheless, Connolly had raised an important point, one that Adrian Goldsworthy was to take up a few years ago in his book Roman Warfare (as shown in orange) and subsequently revisit in his books on The Punic Wars (with the battle located in the general area of the dotted turquoise box) and Cannae (as shown in olive green), where he explained his theory. Goldsworthy clearly changed his mind a couple of times as to the precise location of the battle, but that’s no argument against his basic thesis, which needs to be addressed. 

• First, he says, Kromayer requires Hannibal’s camp to be in the open plain rather than on higher ground at the modern San Ferdinando – of this he says "there could have been no intrinsic value to such a position apart from the pressure it applied on the enemy by its proximity to their camp". 
• Second, he argues that the location where Varro offered battle, according to Kromayer, is no less suited to cavalry combat than that location declined by Paullus the previous day. 
• Third, he points out that we have no reason to believe the course of the Aufidus in 216BC was anywhere near where it is now, and it could well have been much further north as per Connolly’s theory. 
• Finally, he says that Connolly has overestimated – and Kromayer has grossly overestimated – the frontage that a Roman army of 76,000 men would need. It would be possible, he argues, to squeeze an enormous Roman army into a battlefield only two kilometres wide – and with one Roman flank anchored on the river and the other flank anchored on the hill of Cannae or thereabouts, the Romans would be able to thwart any attempts by Hannibal’s cavalry to outflank and surround them.

Where do we start? Well, firstly there’s the issue of Hannibal gaining nothing from being encamped in the plain, barring the pressure that he’d apply on the Romans through being so close to their camp. Frankly, that could be reason enough to camp there – Hannibal wanted to draw the Romans out, after all. He wanted them to fight him, since he was sure that if they fought, he’d win.

What then of the charge that Kromayer’s proposed location for the battle is just as well-suited to cavalry combat as the the plain between the camps, in Kromayer’s thesis? That’s simply not true. The map I've cunningly nabbed from my own book shows that the terrain between the two camps is as flat as a pancake, perfect for cavalry combat, while there are at least a few contours in the area where Kromayer places the battle. But even if that area had been better suited to cavalry combat than the area where Hannibal had offered battle the previous day, Varro would still have had good psychological grounds for offering battle there. The previous day Hannibal had picked his terrain – now it was time for the Romans to pick theirs. This is an example of the dangers of applying "inherent military probability" to cultures that are different from our own.

Third, and now we’re moving into the meat of the Connolly/Goldsworthy hypothesis, what if the Aufidus flowed rather further north in Hannibal’s day than it does now? The first thing that has to be borne in mind is that, yes, the river’s current path almost certainly doesn’t match its route in 216BC. It doesn't follow exactly the same route now, even, as it did when Kromayer drew his map. Rivers move, and over the course of six or seven centuries the river could easily move from one side of its flood plain to the other. 

The Aufidus – or the Ofanto as it’s now called  isn’t a particularly impressive river, after all. It’s neither broad nor deep, and lacks in power – it’s the type of river that would always take the path of least resistance. But there’s no evidence at all for what path it took in Hannibal’s day. Yes, it’s rather arbitrary to assume that the river’s current course matches its course when the battle was fought, but it’s equally arbitrary to assume that its course in 216 BC was along the northern limit of its floodplain. It’s even possible that its course then was slightly further to the southeast than it is now, so that it would have tightly hugged the hill of Cannae.

Certainly, whatever path the river took when the battle was fought, two things are definite. Firstly, its general direction must still have been towards the northeast, and second there's no way it followed the almost straight path we see in Connolly and Goldsworthy’s diagrams – though not in Connolly’s reconstruction, which is a more accurate reflection of reality. Rivers don’t follow straight paths in their old age – they meander wildly, as Gerry Fee taught me in geography class millions of years ago, and whatever course the Aufidus would have followed would have been marked by twists and turns, just as today’s river is, if not more so. 

The only way to find what the course of the Aufidus would have been in 216 would involve a close topographical and geological study of the area, looking for evidence of meanders and oxbow lakes – these would almost certainly have been filled in over time, but they could be found. Once found, they could be cored, and the cored deposits could be dated. Without such a project, any attempt to locate the ancient course of the Aufidus must be regarded with suspicion.

What then of the idea that a Roman army of 70,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry could have been squeezed into a plain two kilometres wide? Well, it’s possible. It does seem terribly convenient, though, doesn’t it? The Roman army can, just about, be squeezed into a frontage two kilometres wide… and the gap between the hill of Cannae and the river Aufidus can, just about, be stretched to two kilometres wide. It does rather look as though the facts are being forced to fit the theory here. Besides, it would have been very tricky to deploy an army squeezed so tightly together into such a narrow corridor.

What about the suggestion that with their flanks protected by the river and the hill the Romans would have been well-protected, at least in theory, from Hannibal’s cavalry? Well, the first thing you might wonder is "why doesn’t Polybius or any of our other sources for the battle even hint at the Romans having adopted such a position?" That doesn’t disprove Goldsworthy’s theory, by any means, since ancient writers are often far from forthcoming on the topography of battlefields, but Goldsworthy’s asking us to accept that Polybius was willing to relate the positions of the armies at Cannae to one of the battle’s crucial landmarks, but not to the other. Such a half-silence would be curious, to say the least.

We also need to remember that the encounter at the Aufidus had been invited in the first place by Hannibal’s seizure of Cannae’s citadel, as is described in Polybius 3.107 Hannibal had since then moved the bulk of his army to the left bank of the Aufidus (Polyb. 3.111.11), but it seems unlikely that he would have altogether abandoned the most important and defensible strategic point in the vicinity. For what it’s worth, Plutarch suggests that Hannibal had control of the heights around Cannae when he describes a rather feeble joke made by Hannibal while on a hilltop viewing the Roman army being deployed (Plut., Vit. Fab. Max. 15.1)

If Hannibal did control the hill of Cannae it would have been suicidal for the Romans to have anchored their left flank on it, exposing their men to a potential bombardment of missiles from above – such missiles might not just include the heavy stones that Hannibal’s Balearian slingers could hurl for great distances, but even such simple things as rooftiles! Again, this doesn’t definitively refute Goldsworthy’s thesis, but again it should cause us to pause before swallowing it.

One thing that’s crucial to remember in evaluating this hypothesis is that the hill of Cannae is not an isolated hill. Rather, it’s part of a ridge about fifty to sixty metres high You can pick out Cannae on this shot, just about, by squinting and looking for the memorial column. 

These hills are quite steep with something in the region of a 45 degree slope. All very well, you might think, but bear in mind how little space Goldsworthy allows for the Roman frontage – somewhere in the region of two kilometres – 360 metres for the 2,400 citizen cavalry at the river, 1050 metres for the infantry in the centre, and 540 metres for the 3,600 allied cavalry at the foot of the hills. This seems terribly constricted. 

It’s reasonable to assume that the cavalry by the river were squeezed tightly together –  Polybius 3.115 and Livy 22.47 relate how with little room to manoeuvre the cavalry battle by the river turned into a barbaric melee with all fighting being done at close quarters. But what of the cavalry on the other flank? Polybius 3.116 gives no hint that the cavalry there lacked room to move; on the contrary, it seems as though that part of the battle was characterised by the typical skirmishing and repeated sallies so typical of the Numidian cavalry; there’s certainly no suggestion of any close combat between the Numidians and the Allied cavalry, something which surely would have happened had they been wedged between the infantry and the steep slopes of Cannae and the adjoining hills. No, this part of the battle took place in the open plain.

So where does this leave us? Goldsworthy’s theories don’t really hold up, but can we simply return to Kromayer? Not quite. Kromayer’s theory that the battle was fought on the plain where the uplands near Cannae slope gently towards the sea at Barletta is still the best theory to date, fitting all the facts we have. Unfortunately, the river moves, and until we know exactly what course it took in 216 BC we can never be fully sure where the battle was fought. 

As it happens, even that may be too optimistic; part of me suspects that unless we find a big pile of spearheads with ‘made in Carthage’ written on them we’ll never know for certain, but that’s just me. 

– Modified from a talk first given in July 2005.
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* Also available in Italian, and a second Italian version at that. I hear it's good.