Greek Warfare beyond the Polis: Defense, Strategy, and the Making of Ancient Federal States

David A. Blome, Greek Warfare beyond the Polis: Defense, Strategy, and the Making of Ancient Federal States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020). 9781501747526.

Reviewed by Jesse Obert, University of Pittsburgh, jesse.obert@pitt.edu.

David Blome’s book explores four important moments in classical Greek history: the Thessalian invasion of Phocis at the beginning of the fifth century, the Athenian invasion of Aetolia in 426 during the Archidamian War, the Peloponnesian invasion of Acarnania in 389 during the Corinthian War, and the Lacedaemonian invasion of Arcadia in 370 following Sparta’s catastrophic defeat to the Thebans at Leuctra.¹ Through a close review of the relevant passages in the literary sources,² he argues that the Phocians, Aetolians, Acarnanians, and Arcadians carried out sophisticated defensive strategies in the classical period, thereby indicating that these communities were acting as “confederations,” or proto-koina. This interpretation would push the chronology for many Hellenistic koina back into the classical period. For Blome, this controversial debate is ultimately rooted in questions about the ways in which ancient communities raised armies and fought. Blome explores each episode in detail and presents a series of interesting conclusions, insightful reflections on the biases of ancient historians, and ingenious deductions about those communities about whom Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon are largely silent. But his project goes one step further and wades into face-of-battle analysis, framing violence in the ancient world in the narrow terms of controversial twentieth-century theories like the hoplite orthodoxy. Interestingly, I am left with the overall impression that his own work unintentionally upends those same outdated paradigms and serves as a nail in the coffin, so to speak, for that ethnicity-based (i.e., Greek vs. non-Greek) framing of politics and war in the ancient Mediterranean.

The book explores four instances in classical Greek history when “upland ethnē”—a term that Blome uses to frame communities without a single central polis above 400 meters in elevation (p. 3, n. 1)—deployed a defense-in-depth strategy in order to turn away lowland invaders. Phocis, Aetolia, Acarnania, and Arcadia were home to several important polities in ancient Greece, but these communities infrequently appear in Herodotus’s history of the Persian Wars, Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, and Xenophon’s history of the Spartan and Theban hegemonies. Thucydides famously described upland communities, including the Aetolians and Acarnanians, as especially violent and distrustful of their neighbors (Thuc. 1.5–6). He thought of them as “living ancestors” and remnants of the Greek past—Greek barbarians living in the mountains and hills of mainland Greece. Blome is committed to, and succeeds in, proving Thucydides wrong.

His book uses a strict organizational structure that is replicated for each chapter, which results in each being capable of standing alone. Clear, consistent, and repeated section titles make the reading quick and easy. Each chapter has the same four sections: a summary of past scholarship and the biases of our sources, a narrative of the conflict, a summary of the aftermath for Greek history more broadly, and an analysis of the episode as evidence for a proto-koinon.

Sometime in the early fifth century, the Thessalians and their allies invaded Phocis. Herodotus explains how the Phocians covered themselves in white chalk and silently sneaked into the Thessalian camp, using the moonlight and the element of surprise to slaughter the invaders (Hdt. 8.27). Based on the topography and place names included in the narrative, Blome convincingly argues that the Phocians were trying to avoid a pitched battle, baited the Thessalians into unfamiliar territory, and used their own land, quite literally, to defeat the invaders.

In 426, Demosthenes led an army into Aetolia to pacify the region and bolster Athenian interests in central Greece (Thuc. 3.94–97). This invasion ended in disaster when the Athenians attempted to sack Aegitium: the city was empty, and Aetolian forces surrounded the Athenians and the city from the surrounding hills. Blome argues, persuasively, that this action was clearly coordinated—the Aetolians “yielded portions of their territory, exploited the physical environment to neutralize and contain invading armies, lured these armies to locations that maximized the defenders’ advantages, and from there judiciously attacked” (p. 97).

A similar episode occurred thirty-seven years later, when the Lacedaemonians and Achaeans invaded Acarnania (Xen. Hell. 4.6.3–12). Blome argues that the Peloponnesians were also baited into unfavorable terrain where they could be surrounded by the locals. Unlike the Athenians, however, the Peloponnesians were able to fight their way back to the coastline. Blome considers this “a major victory” for the Acarnanians (p. 99), although he admits that it may not have been so simple, since they approached the Spartans to negotiate a ceasefire and alliance in the following year (p. 67).

Finally, in the penultimate chapter, Blome explores the Lacedaemonian invasion of Arcadia in 370. The formation of an Arcadian koinon that year had led to stasis in Tegea (Xen. Hell. 6.5.7–9). In the winter of 370/69, Sparta sent an army headed by Agesilaus into Arcadia to avenge those killed in the stasis (Xen. Hell. 6.5.10–23). But, again, the Lacedaemonians found themselves situated in unfavorable terrain and surrounded. Blome argues that the Arcadians tried baiting Agesilaus into attacking uphill, but he instead chose to withdraw to Sparta. Xenophon praised this campaign as an intimidating show of force, but, for Blome, it represents a successful upland defense.

Each chapter starts strong, and Blome is especially talented at identifying the problems with and internal logic of the ancient authors. He spots not only how the sources sympathize with, or even idolize, the aggressive invaders, but also how they omit certain important details about the upland communities so as to portray them as uncivilized and disorganized. At some point, however, each chapter transitions from detailed historical analysis to hypothetical speculation. As Blome explains in his introduction (pp. 6–7), he is interested in thinking through the lived experiences of the upland warriors themselves. This is, of course, an impossible task, especially given the untrustworthy and extremely fragmentary nature of the sources. None of the sources describe the Phocians, Aetolians, Acarnanians, or Arcadians in any detail—only that they used arrows, slings, javelins, swords, and spears. We know nothing of the combatants’ economic status, political identities, or personal motivations. In most cases, we cannot even accurately reconstruct the numbers of combatants involved or topography of the battle sites. With such limited source material, Blome unfortunately turns to problematic paradigms, like the hoplite orthodoxy, to probe the decision-making processes of the Phocians, Aetolians, Acarnanians, and Arcadians.

If it is not already obvious, I do not endorse the hoplite orthodoxy. Briefly, scholars in the 1850s invented a system of combat, which we call the hoplite phalanx, and argued that this style of fighting created the democratic institutions of Greek poleis. Several twentieth-century scholars, who make up a significant portion of Blome’s bibliography, further claimed that this system of violence was uniquely Western and superior to non-Western means of fighting. Within this framework, the upland ethnē were explicitly non-Westerners, and Blome approaches their lived experiences with this mindset. Already by the 1960s, however, scholars had been noting that there was very little substantive evidence for the hoplite phalanx in the archaeological and historical records. Using ancient literary sources, Hans van Wees outlined the problems with this narrative in his 2004 book, Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities. Numerous books, articles, and chapters have followed, and some of the greatest hits from the last decade are missing from Blome’s bibliography.

The author indicates that he is aware of the debate and then takes a side. Much of his understanding of upland communities is rooted in the hoplite orthodoxy. He predicts, for example, the size and structure of the Athenian “phalanx” in Aetolia even though Thucydides never uses that word (p. 35). He assumes that the Acarnanian combatants were the youngest, poorest, and “easiest to replace” because they were using missiles and not fighting face to face (p. 65). In his conclusion, he outlines how the upland communities were different from other Greeks like the Athenians and Spartans: they had “little interest in fair, open, gentlemanly fights”; did not place “a premium on territorial integrity”; and did not consider crop destruction to be a major victory (pp. 98–99). But when in Greek history was this ever true of lowland Greek communities? The Spartans and Athenians fought at Thermopylae and Salamis explicitly because those locations gave them an unfair advantage in a closed space; the Athenians withdrew from Athens and let the Persians burn their city to the ground, and they also let the Spartans raid their farmlands on and off for the better part of three decades during the Peloponnesian War. If anything, Blome’s book succeeds at poking holes in the orthodoxy and illustrating that upland Greeks were just like lowland Greeks in terms of the way that they waged war and coordinated defensive alliances.

Similar issues arise in terms of Blome’s engagement with political theory. Each chapter seeks to place upland Greek communities on a spectrum between Thucydides’ “living ancestors” (Thuc. 1.5–6) and the Hellenistic koina. In the conclusion, the author presents two tables listing the prerequisites of a koinon and checks off how closely each community qualifies (pp. 101–2). Out of seven possible check marks, the Phocians get five, the Aetolians and Acarnanians get four each, and the Arcadians get a full seven. There is, of course, great value in comparative analyses, but this methodological framework teleologically assumes that upland Greek communities were on a positivist trajectory towards a federal system and that this system consisted of a series of processual benchmarks. Blome rightly emphasizes at the end of his conclusion that this evolutionary framework is fundamentally flawed and unsatisfactory (p. 101), but this final reflection feels too little too late considering sections of each chapter are building towards this model.

It is probably also worth mentioning that although this book investigates only thirty-five passages of Greek (Hdt. 8.27-8; Thuc. 3.94-98; Xen. Hell. 4.6.1-14, 6.5.10-23), Blome never provides an excerpt of the primary sources in the original or translation. He opts instead to summarize the history into a narrative of his own crafting, with quotations from the original interspersed alongside other discussions and analysis. Although this admittedly makes his prose more entertaining and engaging, from the perspective of an ancient historian, this approach is not only a missed opportunity but also rather problematic. His overarching observation that these communities had an “ethnic identity recognizable to outsiders” and “involvement in foreign affairs as a collective” hinges on how we understand the original Greek (pp. 100–101). Thucydides, for example, describes the Aetolians with the collective “Aetolians” (Αἰτωλοί; Thuc. 3.100), and Blome considers this sufficient evidence of Aetolian “involvement in foreign affairs as a collective” (pp. 30, 101). In his description of the Sicilian expedition, however, Thucydides lists eighty Cretans among the Athenian coalition, calling them simply “Cretans” (Κρῆτες; Thuc. 6.43). No one would realistically cite this passage to argue that the Cretans participated in the Sicilian expedition as a unified collective. Homer describes the island as being “one-hundred citied” (Il. 2.649: ἑκατόμπολιν) and having “ninety cities” (Od. 19.174: ἐννήκοντα πόληες)—there were probably fewer Cretan warriors in the Athenian army than cities on the island. There is no easy solution to this conundrum, but Blome’s choice to rework the original passages into his own narrative sidesteps a major problem with his thesis and obfuscates the nuance in what our sources are actually saying.

Greek Warfare beyond the Polis raises many important questions about war and politics in ancient Greece. And, at its core, it is no doubt correct in its assessments that upland communities orchestrated sophisticated defensive strategies in the classical period and that these important episodes probably indicate that coalitions were already forming a century before the earliest formal koina. Blome has a deep understanding of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, and gracefully reads between and around their biases to reconstruct versions of what may have happened in Phocis, Aetolia, Acarnania, and Arcadia. This book is a good entry point for anyone interested in these topics or these moments in classical history, with the disclaimer that its theoretical framework is rooted in controversial and outdated paradigms and that serious scholars will want to read it with copies of the primary sources at hand.

Table of Contents

Preface: The Iliad in Iraq (ix–xi)
Introduction (1–8)
1. The Phocian Chalk Raid of the Thessalian Camp Circa 490 (9–28)
2. The Aetolian Route of the Athenians in 426 (29–49)
3. The Defense of Acarnania in 389 (50–72)
4. The Defense of Arcadia in 370 (73–95)
Conclusion (96–106)

Notes

1. All dates are BCE except in reference to modern scholarship.

2. There are occasional references to archaeological, epigraphic, and numismatic material, but these are only in passing and never explored in depth.

Discussion

1. Phocis vs. Aetolia vs. Acarnania

It strikes me that three of the four communities in your book occupied the southern portions of the Pindus mountain range. As you rightly observe in each chapter, there was an impressive amount of intercommunication and coordination throughout this region. With this in mind, I wonder how you might characterize military traditions in this region more broadly between c. 490 and 389 BCE. Did these events build on each other to any degree? If we set aside the cultural groupings of Phocian, Aetolian, and Acarnanian for a moment, can we say anything about how military practice changed in this region over the classical period?

I am not sure if we have enough evidence to study how military traditions or practices changed in this region over the classical period. One of my main arguments is that the Phocians, Aetolians, Acarnanians, and Arcadians practiced a way of war that was shaped by their way of life. We see only glimpses of this way of war in the encounters I study, but when understood in relation to each other, these glimpses reveal a fascinating and effective strategic capability. Given our limited sources for the classical period, I am uncomfortable taking the argument any further. We would have to extend the analysis into the Hellenistic period in order to understand how military practices changed in this region over time.

2. Xenophon’s and Thucydides’ experiences

In the preface, you acknowledge the influence of your own experiences in combat on your understanding of the past. I wonder if you would say the same for the primary sources. Thucydides hesitated to march inland (away from the sea) against Brasidas, and it cost him his generalship. In the Anabasis, Xenophon personally led Greeks from “upland ethnai” through the rugged Caucasus mountains. How much, if any, did the personal experiences of ancient authors impact their treatments of the events in Aetolia, Acarnania, and Arcadia? What does this mean for our understanding of these moments in history?

The personal experiences of ancient authors undoubtedly impacted their writing. As you note, Thucydides and Xenophon both experienced warfare firsthand, and this experience informed the explanations they offered for the events that unfolded in Aetolia, Acarnania, and Arcadia. These explanations, however, raise a variety of questions about the decisions and actions of invading armies, the defensive capabilities of upland Greeks, and the sources of information available to Thucydides and Xenophon. We must contend with these questions and exercise caution when using their narratives to reconstruct ancient military encounters. When available, we also need to incorporate archaeological studies to explore alternative explanations.

3. Hoplite debate

In a Q&A with Cornell University Press, you called for public debates between ancient military historians on some of the more controversial topics. Did you have the hoplite question specifically in mind? If so, given its politicization—with the traditional view often being associated with right-wing public commentators and the revisionist account seeing growing support in the academy—what would you hope comes from a more public engagement? Do you worry that such a debate could descend into a political argument? Or were there other topics you had in mind? 

I did not have the hoplite question specifically in mind, but I would support a public debate on the topic. With that remark in the Q&A, I was calling for more engagement with broader historical debates that speak to modern concerns. Examples include the relationship between war and society, the successes and failures of democracies, and the origins and development of federal states and institutions. Scholars of the ancient world bring a unique perspective to these debates, and their contributions should be accessible to a wide audience.

4. Review within a Review 

Brill’s Companion to Greek Land Warfare Beyond the Phalanx came out in 2021, a year after your monograph. In my mind, it is the gradualist’s response to Kagan and Viggiano’s 2013 challenge to dismantle the hoplite orthodoxy and rewrite the history of Greek warfare. What did you think of the volume? Did it make you reconsider any of your reconstructions and conclusions? What did you think was missing or insufficiently addressed?

I think the volume makes a thought-provoking contribution to the study of ancient Greek warfare and advances the conversation among scholars and enthusiasts. I welcome such studies, and I am grateful for the work that the editors devoted to the project. In many ways, the volume affirms the unconventional approach that I took to classical Greek warfare and reinforces the conclusions that I reached. Different military practices prevailed in different parts of the Greek world, and these differences have a lot to teach us about the Greeks and their way of life outside of the classical city state. I encourage scholars to build on this work.

Thank you for your thoughts and thanks for your vital contribution to the field!