2. Persia.—Drawn from a hardy and nomadic race, the armies of Persia at first consisted mainly of cavalry, and owed much of their success to the consequent ease and rapidity of their movements. The warlike Persians constantly extended their power by fresh conquests, and for some time remained a distinctly conquering and military race, attaining their highest power under Cyrus and Cambyses. Cyrus seems to have been the founder of a comprehensive military organization, of which we gather details from Xenophon and other writers. To each province was allotted a certain number of soldiers as standing army. These troops, formed originally of native Persians only, were called the king’s troops. They comprised two classes, the one devoted exclusively to garrisoning towns and castles, the other distributed throughout the country. To each province was appointed a military commander, responsible for the number and efficiency of the troops in his district, while the civil governor was answerable for their subsistence and pay. Annual musters were held, either by the king in person or by generals deputed for the purpose and invested with full powers. This organization seems to have fully answered its original purpose, that of holding a vast empire acquired by conquest and promptly repelling inroads or putting down insurrections. But when a great foreign war was contemplated, the standing army was augmented by a levy throughout the empire. The extent of the empire made such a levy a matter of time, and the heterogeneous and unorganized mass of men of all nations so brought together was a source of weakness rather than strength. Indeed, the vast hosts over which the Greeks gained their victories comprised but a small proportion of the true Persians. The cavalry alone seems to have retained its national character, and with it something of its high reputation, even to the days of Alexander.
3. Greece.—The Homeric armies were tribal levies of foot, armed with spear, sword, bow, &c., and commanded by the chiefs in their war-chariots. In historic times all this is changed. Greece becomes a congeries of city-states, each with its own citizen-militia. Federal armies and permanent troops are rare, the former owing to the centrifugal tendency of Greek politics, the latter because the “tyrannies,” which must have relied very largely on standing armies to maintain themselves, had ultimately given way to democratic institutions. But the citizen-militia of Athens or Sparta resembled rather a modern “nation in arms” than an auxiliary force. Service was compulsory in almost all states, and as the young men began their career as soldiers with a continuous training of two or three years, Hellenic armies, like those of modern Europe, consisted of men who had undergone a thorough initial training and were subsequently called up as required. Cavalry, as always in the broken country of the Peloponnesus, was not of great importance, and it is only when the theatre of Greek history is extended to the plains of Thessaly that the mounted men become numerous. In the 4th century the mainstay of Greek armies was the hoplite (ὁπλίτης), the heavy-armed infantryman who fought in the corps de bataille; the light troops were men who could not provide the full equipment of the hoplite, rather than soldiers trained for certain special duties such as skirmishing. The fighting formation was that of the phalanx, a solid corps of hoplites armed with long spears. The armies were recruited for each war by calling up one or more classes of men in reserve according to age. It was the duty and privilege of the free citizen to bear arms; the slaves were rarely trusted with weapons.
4. Sparta.—So much is common to the various states. In Sparta the idea of the nation in arms was more thoroughly carried out than in any other state in the history of civilization. In other states the individual citizen often lived the life of a soldier, here the nation lived the life of a regiment. Private homes resembled the “married quarters” of a modern army; the unmarried men lived entirely in barracks. Military exercises were only interrupted by actual service in the field, and the whole life of a man of military age was devoted to them. Under these circumstances, the Spartans maintained a practically unchallenged supremacy over the armies of other Greek states; sometimes their superiority was so great that, like the Spanish regulars in the early part of the Dutch War of Independence, they destroyed their enemies with insignificant loss to themselves. The surrender of a Spartan detachment, hopelessly cut off from all assistance, and the victory of a body of well-trained and handy light infantry over a closed battalion of Spartiates were events so unusual as seriously to affect the course of Greek history.
5. Greek Mercenaries.—The military system of the 4th century was not called upon to provide armies for continuous service on distant expeditions. When, after the earlier campaigns of the Peloponnesian War, the necessity for such expeditions arose, the system was often strained almost to breaking point, (e.g. in the case of the Athenian expedition to Syracuse), and ultimately the states of Greece were driven to choose between unprofitable expenditure of the lives of citizens and recruiting from other sources. Mercenaries serving as light troops, and particularly as peltasts (a new form of disciplined “light infantry”) soon appeared. The corps de bataille remained for long the old phalanx of citizen hoplites. But the heavy losses of many years told severely on the resources of every state, and ultimately non-national recruits—adventurers and soldiers of fortune, broken men who had lost their possessions in the wars, political refugees, runaway slaves, &c.—found their way even into the ranks of the hoplites, and Athens at one great crisis (407) enlisted slaves, with the promise of citizenship as their reward. The Arcadians, like the Scots and the Swiss in modern history, furnished the most numerous contingent to the new professional armies. A truly national army was indeed to appear once more in the history of the Peloponnesus, but in the meantime the professional soldier held the field. The old bond of strict citizenship once broken, the career of the soldier of fortune was open to the adventurous Greek. Taenarum and Corinth became regular entrepôts for mercenaries. The younger Cyrus raised his army for the invasion of Persia precisely as the emperors Maximilian and Charles V. raised regiments of Landsknechte—by the issue of recruiting commissions to captains of reputation. This army became the famous Ten Thousand. It was a marching city-state, its members not desperate adventurers, but men with the calm self-respect of Greek civilization. On the fall of its generals, it chose the best officers of the army to command, and obeyed implicitly. Cheirisophus the Spartan and Xenophon the Athenian, whom they chose, were not plausible demagogues; they were line officers, who, suddenly promoted to the chief command under circumstances of almost overwhelming difficulty, proved capable of achieving the impossible. The merit of choosing such leaders is not the least title to fame of the Ten Thousand mercenary Greek hoplites. About the same time Iphicrates with a body of mercenary peltasts destroyed a mora or corps of Spartan hoplites (391 B.C.).
6. Epaminondas.—Not many years after this, Spartan oppression roused the Theban revolt, and the Theban revolt became the Theban hegemony. The army which achieved this under the leadership of Epaminondas, one of the great captains of history, had already given proofs of its valour against Xenophon and the Cyreian veterans. Still earlier it had won the great victory of Delium (424 B.C.).
It was organized, as were the professional armies, on the accepted model of the old armies, viz. the phalangite order, but the addition of peltasts now made a Theban army, unlike the Spartans, capable of operating in broken country as well as in the plain. The new tactics of the phalanx, introduced by Epaminondas, embodied, for the first time in the history of war, the modern principle of local superiority of force, and suggested to Frederick the Great the famous “oblique order of battle.” Further, the cavalry was more numerous and better led than that of Peloponnesian states. The professional armies had well understood the management of cavalry; Xenophon’s handbook of the subject is not without value in the 20th century. In Greek armies the dearth of horses and the consequent numerical weakness of the cavalry prevented the bold use of the arm on the battlefield (see [Cavalry]). But Thebes had always to deal with nations which possessed numerous horsemen. Jason of Pherae, for instance, put into the field against Thebes many thousands of Thessalian horse; and thus at the battle of Tegyra in 375 the Theban cavalry under Pelopidas, aided by the corps d’êlite of infantry called the Sacred Band, carried all before them. At Leuctra Epaminondas won a glorious victory by the use of his “oblique order” tactics; the same methods achieved the second great victory of Mantineia (362 B.c.) at which Epaminondas fell. Pelopidas had already been slain in a battle against the Thessalians, and there was no leader to carry on their work. But the new Greek system was yet to gain its greatest triumphs under Alexander the Great.
7. Alexander.—The reforms of Alexander’s father, Philip of Macedon, may most justly be compared to those of Frederick William I. in Prussia. Philip had lived at Thebes as a hostage, and had known Iphicrates, Epaminondas and Pelopidas. He grafted the Theban system of tactics on to the Macedonian system of organization. That the latter—a complete territorial system—was efficient was shown by the fact that Philip’s blow was always struck before his enemies were ready to meet it. That the new Greek tactics, properly used, were superior to the old was once more demonstrated at Chaeronea (338 B.C.), where the Macedonian infantry militia fought in phalanx, and the cavalry, led by the young Alexander, delivered the last crushing blow. On his accession, like Frederick the Great, Alexander inherited a well-trained and numerous army, and was not slow to use it. The invasion of Asia was carried out by an army of the Greek pattern, formed both of Hellenes and of non-Hellenes on an exceedingly strong Macedonian nucleus. Alexander’s own guard was composed of picked horse and foot. The infantry of the line comprised Macedonian and Greek hoplites, the Macedonians being subdivided into heavy and medium troops. These fought in a grand phalanx, which was subdivided into units corresponding to the modern divisions, brigades and regiments, the fighting formation being normally a line of battalion masses. The arm of the infantry was the 18-foot pike (sarissa). The peltasts, Macedonian and Greek, were numerous and well trained, and there was the usual mass of irregular light troops, bowmen, slingers, &c. The cavalry included the Guard (ἄγημα), a body of heavy cavalry composed of chosen Macedonians, the line cavalry of Macedonia (ἑταῖροι) and Thessaly, the numerous small contingents of the Greek states, mercenary corps and light lancers for outpost work. The final blow and the gathering of the fruits of victory were now for the first time the work of the mounted arm. The solid phalanx was almost unbreakable in the earlier stages of the battle, but after a long infantry fight the horsemen had their chance. In former wars they were too few and too poorly mounted to avail themselves of it, and decisive victories were in consequence rarely achieved in battles of Greek versus Greek. Under Epaminondas, and still more under Philip and Alexander, the cavalry was strong enough for its new work. Battles are now ended by the shock action of mounted men, and in Alexander’s time it is noted as a novelty that the cavalry carried out the pursuit of a beaten army. There were further, in Alexander’s army, artillerymen with a battering train, engineers and departmental troops, and also a medical service, an improvement attributed to Jason of Pherae. The victories of this army, in close order and in open, over every kind of enemy and on every sort of terrain, produced the Hellenistic world, and in that achievement the history of Greek armies closes, for after the return of the greater part of the Europeans to their homes the armies of Alexander and his successors, while preserving much of the old form, become more and more orientalized.
The decisive step was taken in 323, when a picked contingent of Persians, armed mainly with missile weapons, was drafted into the phalanx, in which henceforward they formed the middle ranks of each file of sixteen men. But, like the third rank of Prussian infantry up to 1888, they normally fought as skirmishers in advance, falling into their place behind the pikes of the Macedonian file-leaders only if required for the decisive assault. The new method, of course, depended for success on the steadiness of the thin three-deep line of Macedonians thus left as the line of battle. Alexander’s veterans were indeed to be trusted, but as time went on, and little by little the war-trained Greeks left the service, it became less and less safe to array the Hellenistic army in this shallow and articulated order of battle. The purely formal organization of the phalanx sixteen deep became thus the actual tactical formation, and around this solid mass of 16,384 men gathered the heterogeneous levies of a typical oriental army. Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, retained far more of the tradition of Alexander’s system than his contemporaries farther east, yet his phalanx, comparatively light and mobile as it was, achieved victories over the Roman legion only at the cost of self-destruction. Even elephants quickly became a necessary adjunct to Hellenistic armies.
8. Carthage.—The military systems of the Jews present few features of unusual interest. The expedient of calling out successive contingents from the different tribes, in order to ensure continuity in military operations, should, however, be noticed. David and Solomon possessed numerous permanent troops which served as guards and garrisons; in principle this organization was identical with that of the Persians, and that of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Particular interest attaches to the Carthaginian military forces of the 3rd century B.C. Rarely has any army achieved such renown in the short space of sixty years (264-202 B.C.). Carthage produced a series of great generals, culminating in Hannibal, who is marked out, even by the little that is known of him, as the equal of Napoleon. But Napoleon was supported by a national army, Hannibal and his predecessors were condemned to work with armies of mercenaries. For the first time in the world’s history war is a matter with which the civil population has no concern. The merchants of Carthage fought only in the last extremity; the wars in which their markets were extended were conducted by non-national forces and directed by the few Carthaginian citizens who possessed military aptitudes. The civil authorities displayed towards their instruments a spirit of hatred for which it is difficult to find a parallel. Unsuccessful leaders were crucified, the mercenary soldiers were cheated of their pay, and broke out into a mutiny which shook the empire of Carthage to its foundations. But the magnetism of a leader’s personality infused a corporate military spirit into these heterogeneous Punic armies, and history has never witnessed so complete an illustration of the power of pure and unaided esprit de corps as in the case of Hannibal’s army in Italy, which, composed as it was of Spaniards, Africans, Gauls, Numidians, Italians and soldiers of fortune of every country, was yet welded by him into thorough efficiency. The army of Italy was as great in its last fight at Zama as the army of Spain at Rocroi; its victories of the Trebia, Trasimene and Cannae were so appalling that, two hundred years later, the leader to whom these soldiers devoted their lives was still, to a Roman, the “dire” Hannibal.
In their formal organization the Carthaginian armies resembled the new Greek model, and indeed they were created in the first instance by Xanthippus, a Spartan soldier in the service of Carthage, who was called upon to raise and train an army when the Romans were actually at the gates of Carthage, and justified his methods in the brilliant victory of Tunis (255 B.C.). For the solid Macedonian phalanx of 16,000 spears Xanthippus substituted a line of heavy battalions equal in its aggregate power of resistance to the older form, and far more flexible. The triumphs of the cavalry arm in Hannibal’s battles far excelled those of Alexander’s horsemen. Hannibal chose his fighting ground whenever possible with a view to using their full power, first to defeat the hostile cavalry, then to ride down the shaken infantry masses, and finally to pursue au fond. At Cannae, the greatest disaster ever suffered by the Romans, the decisive blow and the slaughter were the work of Hannibal’s line cavalry, the relentless pursuit that of his light horse. But a professional long-service army has always the greatest difficulty in making good its losses, and in the present case it was wholly unable to do so. Even Hannibal failed at last before the sustained efforts of the citizen army of Rome.