From our earliest written accounts in third-millennium bc Mesopotamia to the fall of the Roman Empire siege operations remained remarkably consistent. Attackers tried to go through, over or under fortifications and, if that failed, to starve out the defenders or force a surrender through other means. The besieged responded by undermining ramps, building secondary walls, setting fire to siege engines or making sorties. Sometimes a relieving army, political exigencies or logistical failure drove the attackers away. Technological advancements were few: the battering ram and siege tower in the third millennium, iron weapons towards the end of the second millennium and missile-throwing artillery at the start of the fourth century bc. Fortifications included some combination of fosses, ramparts, walls and towers. Though the behaviour of individual armies varied according to cultural norms and the immediate circumstances, sieges tended to be brutal affairs that often ended in unrestrained slaughter. This much is well established, even obvious. Seeking to move beyond the paradigm, this volume explores the complexities of siege warfare in ancient Assyria, Egypt, Greece and Rome.
To start the process, the editors Armstrong and Trundle remind readers that ancient sieges varied in intensity and duration, ‘were products not just of attack, but of defence’ (p. 6) and did not ‘stand aloof’ from the campaigns of which they were a part. Sieges could be foundational experiences that shaped group identities and became the stuff of legend, but most were lesser affairs that did not resonate beyond their immediate context. Several topical threads wind through the volume's fourteen chapters and epilogue: the problems of source interpretation; the development and conduct of operations; and the relationship between state level organisation and military capability.
In ‘The Landscape of Siege’ G. Davies investigates how Greek and Roman commanders used climate and terrain to their advantage. Before committing to a siege, leaders had to assess terrain and procure provisions and material resources such as wood. Careful preparation not only increased the likelihood of success but prevented casualties and limited material costs. Although experience led to the development of standard solutions and procedures that did not result in strict adherence to a predetermined process, and while the environment alone did not determine tactics, it figured into the ‘calculus of siege’. Davies's astute observations lay the groundwork for the next eleven contributions, which appear in chronological order.
Several chapters highlight the connections between social organisation, economic capacity and military capability. L.R. Siddall and D. Nadali examine the role that siege warfare played in the expansion of the Assyrian Empire. Both chapters address the problem of interpreting sources whose primary goal was to glorify the reigning king. Concentrating on the conduct of campaigns as recorded in royal inscriptions, Siddall observes that once the Assyrians had isolated the target city, they picked off vulnerable towns in its vicinity. Low-intensity side operations cost the Assyrians little but provided necessary resources and pressured the enemy to capitulate. Turning to depictions of siege on Assyrian palace reliefs, Nadali explores the difficulty of distinguishing between historical events, the official version of those events and the artist's ability to depict them. That the volume contains two Assyrian chapters, but nothing devoted to earlier states or the Persian Empire (excepting A.B. Lloyd's contribution) seems unbalanced and a little misleading. Successful as they were, the Assyrians did not revolutionise siege warfare but used methods such as ramp-building, sapping and escalade that had been standard practice since the third millennium bc. What gave them the advantage in a siege was access to abundant resources and the ability to deploy them effectively. As a centralised, wealthy state Assyria could carry out sustained military operations that its competitors could not. According to the chapters that follow, the same may be said of similarly resourced ancient states.
B.H. Heagren's contribution discusses the written and pictorial evidence of city-assault (as opposed to siege) from the late Predynastic period and Old Kingdom (c. 3200–2181 bc) to the end of the New Kingdom (c. 1186–1069 bc). Those unfamiliar with Egyptian art will find the chapter rich in description but frustratingly devoid of illustrations. According to Heagren, the Egyptians favoured frontal assaults on fortified cities over full-scale sieges. Other than ladders and battering poles such attacks required no specialised siege equipment and therefore led to ‘quick and cheap victories’ (p. 105). Perhaps assaults cost little in material terms, but the human price of such actions has always been notoriously high (Napoleonic era soldiers called the first troops to reach a city wall the ‘forlorn hope’ for a good reason). Even after the Egyptians developed the infrastructure necessary to support complex sieges, the evidence indicates that they usually chose to attack straight on. Yet, ancient sources are rarely so straightforward. For example, I. Shaw (Ancient Egyptian Warfare [2019], p. 29) observes that some Middle Kingdom siege scenes are likely fictional, and certainly Egyptian art and literature adhered to long-standing conventions. Even if, as Heagren rightly concludes, the Egyptians understood ‘Operational Art’, the sources probably do not offer an accurate record of their siege methods.
Three chapters deal with the early development of warfare in Greece and Rome. Trundle argues convincingly that three factors facilitated advancements in Greek siege operations during the fifth century bc: exposure to Persian, Carthaginian (and earlier Assyrian) siege methods; wealth gained from economic development; and the centralisation of the polis. Armstrong outlines how social organisation shaped military capability in early Rome. At first, loosely organised clans undertook raids for plunder rather than conquest. Since they did not have the logistical capability to execute lengthy sieges or fund the construction of fortifications, few cities – including Rome – boasted strong defences. By the fourth century bc demographic and commercial shifts reduced the appeal of raiding, and people gained wealth through land ownership. Greater wealth and stability facilitated the development of the civic infrastructure and resources necessary to build territorial defences. J. Crooks's chapter on early republican recruitment of voluntarii sheds further light on this transformation. Crooks argues that the siege of Veii in c. 400 bc marked a major turning point in Roman military development as the need for additional men prompted irregular forms of recruitment. Success at Veii may have inspired additional innovations in the following century.
Siege was also an instrument of strategy. Lloyd's enlightening chapter analyses the defence of Egypt against four separate Persian and Macedonian invasions: the Persian invasions of 374 and 343, Perdiccas’ attempted conquest in 321 and the two-pronged effort of Antigonus Monophalmus and Demetrius Poliorcetes in 306 bc. Well-placed forts, even if defenders considered them ultimately expendable, could hold up the invader long enough to cause him critical logistical shortages. To be successful, conquest and defence require competent leadership, careful logistical planning and thorough understanding of terrain and climate conditions. As Lloyd shows, weakness in any one of these categories often led to failure.
On the tactical level, defence involved all the inhabitants of a besieged city. The editors point out in their introduction how siege violates the normal parameters of war, and as a consequence ‘an activity that is typically meant to occur outside the bounds of civilised society violently re-enters that sphere – bringing the horrors of war to an entire community’ (p. 7). Sieges belong to the realm of total war for they turn women, children and old people into combatants. J. Martinez Moralez takes up this theme in her perceptive treatment of women's contributions to defence during sieges in the Classical World. Citing a wide range of examples, including women who helped build walls, engaged in subterfuge and spying, and fought alongside men, Moralez demonstrates that people willingly abandoned traditional gender roles when the need arose. This groundbreaking chapter serves as a reminder that war often upends social norms, which in any case tend to be more flexible than history allows.
Two chapters study individual leaders and their involvement in sieges. T.C. Rose discusses the ancient world's most famous besieger, Demetrius Poliorcetes, both as an attacker and as a builder of fortifications. At the siege of Rhodes his massive engines and persistent assaults would have won him the city had the political situation not made it prudent to negotiate a settlement. Rose's keen analysis highlights how politics can affect military operations. D.B. Campbell's thorough study of Julius Caesar's sieges challenges the notion – particularly as set forth in J. Levithan's Roman Siege Warfare (2013) – that Roman commanders followed a standard siege progression. Like Davies and Lloyd, Campbell stresses the myriad factors that influenced tactical decisions made under difficult conditions. Commanders during the Late Republic drew upon the toolkit of experience but did not slavishly follow doctrine. Both Rose and Campbell warn against using the most famous sieges, such as Demetrius’ siege of Rhodes or Caesar's siege of Alesia, as models since they became famous precisely because they stood out from the rest.
The last two contributions consider, among other points, the literary aspects of siege narratives. C. Whately analyses Procopius’ lengthy treatment of Belisarius’ defence of Rome in ad 537 and finds that despite literary embellishments, the account is both plausible and perceptive. Rather than fictionalising what happened, literary references cued the reader to the significance of events and shaped their understanding. Cross-references to other chapters would have been useful, since Nadali points out that Assyrian siege narratives – both written and pictorial – use tropes to convey their official message. In his thoughtful ‘Afterlives of the Ancient Siege’ J. Levithan investigates how the Iliad and other heroic literature coloured siege accounts in Classical and Renaissance literary works such as the sixteenth-century Italian epics Orlando Furioso and Gerusalemme Liberata. He wraps up the chapter with a look at how Roman siege accounts continued to influence historical writing into the nineteenth century.
Finally, F. Echeverría's ‘Epilogue’ pulls the book together, thus mitigating to some degree the lack of cross-referencing noted earlier. Echeverría challenges the reader to consider sieges in their military and political contexts, rather than as separate phenomena or ends in themselves. He also condones the development of new theory-based methodologies and warns against reliance on simple paradigms. The volume's introduction and epilogue together with Davies's and Levithan's chapters flank the chronologically arranged core contributions to produce a remarkably cohesive account of siege warfare in the ancient world. This excellent volume is a must-read not only for researchers in ancient military history but for those interested in related fields such as art, literature, gender or social and political history.
