Preparing and organising for war in Classical Greece: seeking the diversity of city-state practice

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Project Summary (Please do not exceed 4000 characters, including spaces):My research uses a context-specific approach to identify the extent to which military traditions varied between ancient Greek poleis (city-states). The study will use a combination of literary, epigraphic, and archaeological data to challenge traditional perceptions that ancient Greek warfare was uniform and characterised by the relative 'amateurism' of its protagonists - the hoplite (heavy-armed) militia and its leaders. By interrogating individual societies, my research will generate a more accurate view of the relationship between each polis, its mode of warfare and its military tradition. My research is inspired by the most recent work on the ancient Greek polis, which examines the specific character of each polis, treats it on its own merits and avoids the assumption that there was ever a typical polis. Under the influence of Gehrke (1986) and other studies, scholars have explored alternative forms of social organisation beyond the traditional 'Athens v. Sparta' polarity (e.g. Brock-Hodkinson 2000), an approach culminating in the Hansen-Nielsen Inventory (2004). Yet this methodology has had limited impact in the area of Classical warfare, where we are still mainly confronted by a generalised picture of the dominance of the hoplite (Hanson 1999), the 'amateur' nature of polis militias (Konijnendijk 2017) and the so-called 'professional' system of Sparta. A consideration of material remains of Greek military hardware, and the representation of military values in art and coinage, will strengthen my polis-centred approach. Studies of classical warfare have claimed that polis (city-state) militias were archetypal and distinctly 'amateur' in their military traditions (Rawlings 2008). This uniformitarian approach ignores the different social, political, and institutional characters of societies, and the topographical and geographical constraints to which each was subject. It is already clear from my research that these features varied strongly. For instance, the society of Mantinea in Arcadia was organised otherwise than in Thebes and Athens (Hansen 2002); yet there has been little research into how these differences played out in terms of military tradition. My key research questions are: 1. How were citizens prepared for warfare on individual and communal platforms? 2. What variations can we detect between poleis, and how did they vary over time? 3. How did different military traditions develop and what stimuli (e.g. topographical, political, social) were they responding to? My study centres on the Classical period (5th-4th centuries BC), before the rise of the royal armies of the Hellenistic period. Case studies will be drawn from regions across the Greek world, notably Arcadia (traditionally a source of mercenaries), Boeotia (especially hegemonic Thebes), Sicily (whose 'tyrants' employed mercenaries), and Macedonia (where scholars credit Philip II with professionalising the army). These will offer a more accurate view of how different societies prepared for warfare, shifting our gaze away from the traditional focus on Athens and Sparta. My research has implications for modern concepts of conflict. It suggests how, for example, modern insurgencies labelled 'amateur' (such as ISIS) adapt the preparation of their fighters to face 'professional' modern armies effectively.