This conference volume on sundry topics and periods in ancient warfare – from Assyrians to Helvetians, from charioteering to rowing – raises the question whether it is more or less than the sum of its parts. The answer is neither. If published separately, these essays would have the same value as they do under one cover.
H. van Wees' ‘Those Who Sail Are to Receive a Wage: Naval Warfare and Finance in Archaic Eretria’ (German version, in F. Burrer and H. Müller [edd.], Kriegskosten und Kriegsfinanzierung [2008], pp. 128–50) is one of two illustrations of an essay that extrapolates regional history from exiguous materials – in this case, four lines from IG xii. 9 1273 + 1274, an Eretrian law of c. 525 b.c.e. These lines refer to sailors, a wage, voyages outside the strait of Euboea and obligations falling on ‘all inhabitants’. Francis Cairns thought the wage was naval pay. v.W. goes further, adding no higher pay for officers, no booty for the navy, and triremes, not penteconters, in a word, a ‘revolution’ that set an example for Cleisthenes of Athens to follow in 508 b.c.e. The thesis is ingenious; its republication, unnecessary. In the same vein, N. Rosenstein, ‘Phalanges in Rome?’, proposes that Livy and other sources that occasionally speak of early Roman ‘phalanges’ are mistaken, for they say that the phalanx existed in Rome at a time when (following v.W.) R. says it could not have existed in Greece. R. believes that the Roman phalanx must have come later, if at all, and concludes it never existed. This is ingenious, too, but avoids ‘revolution’.
P. Krenz, ‘A Cup by Douris and the Battle of Marathon’, deals with the weight of hoplite gear. At 70 lbs, a common estimate, this gear makes the reported 1400-metre run at Marathon impossible, and so K. reduces the weight to 45 lbs or less by replacing the metal cuirass with a linen one, a reduction of some 20 lbs, and by replacing oaken shields with those made from other woods, a reduction of up to 10 lbs. Yet no undamaged cuirass survives, making estimates doubtful, and the best preserved shield, now in the Museo Gregoriano in the Vatican, likely weighed 14 lbs, the high end of the range assigned by K. Whatever the weight of the cuirass and shield, could Athenian farmers and artisans run a country mile and then fight? Non liquet.
L. Rawlings' ‘The Carthaginian Navy: Questions and Assumptions’ is among several wider-ranging essays by less senior scholars. R. asks whether Carthage's fleet was an expression of mercantilism or an instrument of Punic militarism. His evidence for the second answer points to another question: aside from being aggressive, why were the Carthaginians successful? The answer may lie in a study of Phoenician and Punic navies and of accompanying economic and administrative structures. Another essay that deals with Semitic warmaking is F.'s ‘“I Fell Upon Him like a Furious Arrow”: Towards a Reconstruction of the Assyrian Tactical System’. This system, F. admits, is mostly unknowable, but the Assyrians used combined arms and trained officers in a way that would not appear in Greece until Philip II of Macedon. An engagement with Accadian vocabulary would have strengthened this essay, but it is successful through its own version of combined arms: textual, visual and archaeological evidence. The same is true of R. Waters' ‘Chariotry to Cavalry: Developments in the Early First Millennium’. W.'s view that charioteering and cavalry both developed in the Near East has visual evidence in its favour, but he does not cite any primary literary sources.
Using abundant evidence, T., ‘Coinage and the Transformation of Greek Warfare’, confirms an old view: coined money and naval power had a symbiotic relation in Classical Greece. Just as F. and Waters might have done more with Accadian sources, T. might have done more with financial statistics. He says little about the financing of the Peloponnesian Navy before Persian subsidies began, and nothing about Phoenician naval finance, which must have antedated the introduction of Phoenician coinage in the mid-fifth century.
The best piece, C. Tuplin's ‘All the King's Horse: in Search of Achaemenid Persian Cavalry’, offers a new view: ancient and modern references to Persian reliance on cavalry reflect the final years of the Achaemenid Empire more than earlier times. Here, too, an engagement with Accadian sources would have made a good piece better. The typical order of battle that T. finds in early Persian armies, one centred on infantry with bows, derives from Assyrian armies. This feature of Persian imperialism, like many others, may have reached Persia from Mesopotamia via Elam.
The worst piece, F. Echevarría Rey's ‘Weapons, Technological Determinism, and Ancient Warfare’, slays the straw man in the middle of the title. Among the scholars whom E.R. attacks for holding this view, Victor Hanson is something of a socio-economic determinist, but not a technological determinist, and Paul Cartledge dismissed ‘brute technological determinism’ in ‘Hoplites and Heroes: Sparta's Contribution to the Technique of Ancient Warfare’ (JHS [1977], 20). For every example of weapons that failed to change warfare, like the iron tube used at the battle of Delium, there is another example of weapons that did, like the improved siege engines of the fourth century b.c.e. The effect of better weapons is a military variable, not a constant.
One piece, D. Potter's ‘Caesar and the Helvetians’, is effectively truncated. It mentions the Helvetians only three times. The first sentence says ‘The Helvetian campaign was the turning point of Caesar's career’. Three pages later, when Teutons are said to charge uphill, come the words ‘just as the Helvetians did at Bibracte’, and ‘[Caesar] pursued the main body of the Helvetians’. Eighteen pages after that, a sentence describes the battle against the Helvetians at Vesontio. Voilà tout.
