A War Like No Other by Victor Hanson

Author:Victor Hanson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781588364906
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-07T10:00:00+00:00

How to Take a Polis

In an obscure fourth-century military treatise about protecting poleis from besieging armies and intriguers within the walls, a shadowy Greek author, Aeneas Tacticus, who may have been a contemporary Arcadian general, reviewed the intrinsic drama of the siege. Aeneas points out that should the besieged citizenry survive, they thereby send a powerful message to the enemies not to try such a foolish attack in the future. On the other hand, should a city fall, it presaged a fate far beyond that of a defeated army alone: “But if the defenders fail in their efforts to meet the danger, then there is not one hope of safety left.”20

The word for siege or siegecraft in Greek was poliorkia (hence the term “poliorcetics,” or “fencing in the polis”). Although there was an advanced science of taking cities by 431 involving rams, mounds, and fire weapons, walls themselves remained mostly unassailable, as they grew taller and thicker well beyond the old dimensions of ten to twelve feet in height and three to six feet wide, common before the mid-fifth century. The spread of ashlar blocks and regular courses of limestone, replacing mud bricks, rubble, and irregularly shaped stones, throughout the war widened the advantages of defense over offense even further. So there is yet another paradox about the besieging of cities in the Peloponnesian War, one that tells us a great deal about the overall nature of Greek society and culture: almost every assaulted city-state eventually capitulated, and yet almost none of them fell through storming the walls.

Instead, in a world where the art of defensive fortifications had far outstripped the science of offensive siegecraft, city-states like Plataea, Potidaea, Mytilene, Scione, and Melos were starved out only after months, or even years, of systematic circumvallation. The sieges were sometimes accelerated through treachery, mostly in the form of partisans opening the gates at night. Even the supposed experts, the Athenians, did not know all that much about attacking walls and towers directly, smashing through stone foundations, or battering down wooden gates.

Scaling a wall was not as simple as it sounds. Many city ramparts were twenty to thirty feet high. Ladders by necessity were tall, their height calibrated by counting the wall’s stone or brick courses, and thus flimsy. All were easy for defenders to toss back, especially if assault troops were heavy hoplites perched on rungs in the air with sixty to seventy pounds of equipment. No army on either side yet knew how to craft wheeled siege towers with artillery and hinged boarding ramps that might provide a bridge over the fortifications—engines that would become ubiquitous only a century later, during the siege craze among the successors of Alexander the Great. The Athenians’ clumsy attempts to build a primitive tower at Lecythus ended with its collapse.21

The last chance to breach the walls was to follow a beaten army inside the walls before the gates could be shut. Even battering rams—the Athenians purportedly first fashioned them, along with protective sheds, or

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