Christopher Matthew (2)

An assortment of essays about the Battle of Thermopylae in 480BCE. With the exception of an American from Duluth, the authors are all from Australia or New Zealand; relevant, because the ANZACs deployed at Thermopylae trying to hold the Germans in 1941. Essay include a discussion of the origins and progress of the Persian Wars, the battle itself, the topography of the area as it was in 480BCE, a discussion of whether the deployment to Thermopylae was a suicide mission, the way the battle was remembered in antiquity, the influence of Homer on Herodotus’ description, other battles at the site, and the idea of as “glorious defeat” through history.

Ancient descriptions of the battle come from Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus (Plutarch’s description seems to be derivative from Herodotus). The accounts are contradictory for the end; Herodotus has the Spartans retreating to a small hill where they are killed by missile fire while Diodorus has them dying in a failed night raid on the Persian camp; it’s thought that Herodotus’ account is more likely, since he was a near contemporary, but Diodorus found favor with ancients who favored more aggressive tactics.

Discussion of the weapons and arms used by both sides notes that hoplite arms were well suited for the situation. The Persians depended heavily on their cavalry archers, who were useless on the narrow battlefield; Persian infantry used a shorter spear than the Greeks and couldn’t close; Persian foot archers, slingers and javelin throwers couldn’t penetrate Greek armor. (An endnote describes an experiment from 2009; 700 arrows were fired at 20 re-enactors armed and formed as hoplites; there were only three hits in unarmored areas).

Although it’s conceded that the size of the Persian army is greatly exaggerated by the ancient authors, it still would have needed immense amounts of forage and supplies, and the longer it could be kept in place the worse its sanitation situation would become. Thus if the Spartans had been able to hold a little longer, Xerxes’ army might have collapsed due to disease and starvation.

The essay on topography, by the sole American contributor, geologist George Rapp, was of interest. Rapp drilled boreholes at the site and noted that the 480BCE ground surface is almost 60 meters lower than the current elevation (he notes he had some difficulty convincing historians). Alluvial deposits from the Sperchios River and travertine from the hot springs that give Thermopylae its name have widened the original narrow strip between the Gulf of Malia and the Mount Kallidromon. Rapp notes that it’s often casually assumed that Thermopylae was a mountain pass; it’s true there are (and were in 480BC) cliffs on one side but the other side was swampy ground along the gulf.

The essays were all easy reads. I think my view of the battle has been colored by the movies 300 and The 300 Spartans and the novel Gates of Fire so this was an instructive read. Maps and pictures of the area; extensive endnotes; bibliography of ancient and modern authors.… (més)

Among surviving Classical literature are three tactical treatises on Hellenistic (roughly 350 - 50 BC) warfare, all rather similar in content and all written during the Roman Imperial period, when their subject matter was of primarily antiquarian interest. Aelian's hasn't been easily available in English until last year, when Christopher Matthew published this annotated translation complete with facing Greek text.

Like the others (Asclepiodotus' and Arrian's), Aelian's manual of tactics deals primarily with the pike-armed phalanx. There's a little on cavalry and light infantry - practically nothing on the peltasts (medium infantry), elephants, and chariots that Aelian notes as also part of a Hellenistic army. The emphasis on manoeuvring with pikemen incidentally helped Aelian's work to renewed popularity in the 16-17th centuries, when pikes were again important on the battlefields of Europe (having played a marginal role at best from the last century BC to the 15th AD).

The annotations are mostly good enough, helping make sense of convoluted passages and offering some background, but are occasionally confusing or even confused, particularly when trying to explain the distinctions between hoplites, peltasts, and phalangites. There are also some unnecessary inconsistencies of translation: hoplitai becomes variously "hoplites" and "armed infantry"; and the "Lakonian countermarch" from a certain point on is suddenly the "Lacedaemonian countermarch". The words are approximate synonyms, both refering to Sparta and its surrounding region, but there's no justification for the variation in the Greek, which has Lakon (ie. Lakonian) through-out.

These are fairly minor faults however. The book's a must-buy for those interested in ancient military history.… (més)