Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome by Hanson Victor Davis

Author:Hanson, Victor Davis [Hanson, Victor Davis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Classics, History & Theory, Technology & Engineering, War, Military Science, Military, History, Ancient, General, Princeton University Press, Political Science, 0691137900
ISBN: 9780691137902
Google: LQgtmAEACAAJ
Amazon: 0691137900
Goodreads: 7722182
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010-03-21T07:00:00+00:00

6. Urban Warfare in the Classical Greek World John W. I. Lee

On a rainy, almost moonless night in early summer 431 BC, a Theban assault force of three hundred men entered the small town of Plataea in central Greece. They were let in by a Plataean, part of an oligarchic faction hoping to seize power with Theban support. In the sodden darkness the Thebans hurried to Plataea’s marketplace. There they issued a proclamation: Plataea was occupied, and the sensible thing to do was to accept the fact. Plataea and Thebes, after all, had once been allies; they could be so again. At first the Plataeans, panicked at the enemy presence in the heart of town, agreed to terms. Soon, though, they realized how few Thebans there were. Digging passages through the earthen walls of their houses and placing wagons in the streets as barricades, the Plataeans surrounded the invaders. In the pre-dawn twilight, they struck. Plataean soldiers rushed down the streets, while women and slaves threw stones and tiles from the rooftops. The surprised Thebans withstood several onslaughts but at last broke and fled, with the Plataeans in pursuit. Unfamiliar with the twisting streets of the town, hindered by mud and darkness, the Thebans scattered in desperation. One group, thinking it had found an exit, stumbled into a warehouse by the city wall, only to be trapped there. A few men made it to the gates; others were cut down in the streets. By daybreak it was all over. One hundred twenty Theban corpses lay scattered in the streets and houses of Plataea. The Plataeans took 180 prisoners; fearing further Theban treachery, they executed all of them.

Thanks to the Athenian writer Thucydides, the vicious fight at Plataea has passed into history as the opening act of the Peloponnesian War

(431–404 BC) between the rival alliances of Athens and Sparta.1 Thucydides’ narrative skill has made the assault on Plataea one of the most famous episodes of the war. Yet the larger phenomenon Plataea represents— pitched battle within city walls—remains relatively neglected in classical Greek warfare studies.2 Instead, scholars have tended to focus on set-piece battles fought on open fields between armies of heavily armored spearmen, or hoplites. As well, studies of Greek fortifications and sieges have concentrated on siege engineering and on the struggle for city walls, rather than on fighting within cities themselves.

Urban combat, however, was hardly uncommon in classical Greece.

Indeed, during the period from about 500 to 300 BC, the preeminent cities of Hellas, including Argos, Athens, Corinth, Sparta, and Thebes, all witnessed major battles within their city limits. Some of the most desperate and most decisive clashes of classical antiquity were urban ones. Athenian democracy was born out of a popular urban revolution against oligarchs and their Spartan supporters in 508–507 BC. After the Peloponnesian War, when a junta of Thirty Tyrants usurped power, democracy was restored only after a civil war that saw intense combat in Athens’s port of Piraeus. It was through an urban uprising in 379

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