The Greek and Macedonian Art of War

Sather Classical Lectures

by Frank E. Adcock

This informal history traces battle tactics and military strategy from the time of the city-states' phalanxes of spearmen to the far-reaching combined operations of specialized land and sea forces in the Hellenistic Age.

The author first describes the attitude of the Greek city-state toward war, and shows the military conventions and strategies associated with it. He then recounts how the art of war gradually evolved into new forms through the contributions of such men as the great commander Epaminondas, Philip of Macedon, his son Alexander the Great, and others. He also discusses the independence of land and sea power, describes the first use of calvary, and tells of the ingenious Greek devices of siegecraft, including the "fifth column."

Genres: History, Military History, Nonfiction, Military Fiction, War, Ancient History, Ancient

109 pages, Paperback

First published January 2, 1962

About the author

Sir Frank Ezra Adcock, OBE, FBA was the son of Thomas Draper Adcock, the head of Desford Industrial School, and Mary Esther Adcock (née Coltman). He was educated at Wyggeston Grammar School, a grammar school in Leicester.

He went on to study classics at King's College, Cambridge. In 1911, Adcock was elected as a fellow and lecturer of King's College, Cambridge. He held the chair of Ancient History at the University Cambridge from 1925 to 1951 when he retired.

Adcock was president of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies from 1929 to 1931. He was president of the Classical Association from 1947 to 1948. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1936.

In addition to his academic work, he also served as a cryptographer in both World War I and World War II. At the 1918 King's Birthday Honours, Adcock was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for hi work during the war.

Reviews

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was less embarrassed writing about the last* dirty book
that I read than I am about copping to this little bit of weirdo-nerd-boy war porn. The Greek and Macedonian Art of War comprises a series of lectures given at my alma mater by Cambridge ancient historian and cryptanalyst (Bletchley Park alumn!), Sir Frank Adcock. I grabbed it at a library sale because I'm the aforementioned weirdo nerd-boy, but I happened to read it now because I actually had some current questions. With a lot of Covid time on my hands, I just finally watched my director's cut of Oliver Stone's Alexander as well as an old videocassette of Michael Wood's In the Footsteps of Alexander tv series from the nineties. Additionally, I recently purchased James Romm's Ghost on the Throne, about Alexander's generals and the Hellenistic successor states. The planets were clearly aligned for me to get my phalanx on.

When I saw the Stone movie in the theater**, the Gaugamela sequence was the only thing that really impressed me. Watching it again recently, it was pretty obvious that this one set piece received an inordinate amount of Stone's attention and money, at the expense of the rest of the movie. For ten minutes, an awkward and indifferent yet sprawling and overambitious mess hits on all cylinders. At any rate, what I liked was the way I could understand the deployment of Alexander's wings and center from the montage of the sequence. It is the only war movie I can think of that shows generalship in quite that way. So it was sorta cool to learn from this book that tactics and strategy, in the Greek world at any rate, were intellectual developments of the two generations that preceded Alexander.

To the degree that war is an art in the West, Adcock seems to maintain, it is entirely the legacy of Epaminondas and Philip. Hoplite combat was performed by citizen soldiers, who were usually less than a day's march from their polis. Battles generally lasted for an afternoon - prisoners were taken, ransoms paid, trophies erected, and everyone went home until next season. There was no real scope for tactics, let alone strategy. Two lines of hoplites would face each other and shove and poke until one line gave way. Only in the fourth century BCE did Greek armies learn to effectively use cavalry, light infantry, and archers and to plan their battles according to a kind of narrative.

I found the naval warfare chapter particularly illuminating. When I read Stephen Pressfield's novel Tides of War, about the Peloponnesian conflict, I remember having a hard time visualizing the naval battle in the bay of Syracuse. One reason for that may have been that, as Pressfield knew and I didn't, triremes were really small, more like an open Viking longship than the galleys in Ben Hur. Because of the name, I had always pictured three banks of oarsmen, one on top of another; in fact, it was probably one bank but each oarsman pulled a triple-bladed oar. Adcock says that a wading man could easily climb over a trireme's gunwales.

The strategic analysis in The Greek and Macedonian Art of War is as illuminating as the technical detail. In Michael Wood's Alexander series, he spends a good bit of time detailing the siege of the island of Tyre, which took the better part of a year and required the construction, effectively, of a peninsula. Wood portrays Alexander's monomaniacal fixation on subduing a single city as emblematic of a tyrant's ragefulness in the face of defiance. Adcock suggests that it wasn't willfulness but necessary strategy - when Alexander invaded Asia, he had to guard his rear by destroying the Persian navy. The only way to do that - unable, so far from home, to support a substantial navy of his own - was to deny the Persians any ports by means of land war.

*Well, most recent. I very much doubt it will be the last.
**On the Saturday morning after it opened. With my Greek class. I wasn't kidding about the weirdo-nerd-boy. When it was over, my instructor said, "Well, he managed to make a boring movie about Alexander the Great, which is an achievement of sorts."

[Ralph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though this book is not nearly as lengthy as many others on the subject of warfare among the ancient Hellenic peoples, it is as fully packed with information, and then some, as other books I’ve read on the subject, and contains many insightful observations ignored by other experts. Part of the reason for its conciseness, impact and scope rests, I think, in the fact that it began as a series of lectures to university students. The author was able to hone his words on the grindstones of students’ heads, achieving a keenness of prose that might have otherwise been missing from the narrative. The author very quickly looks at and disposes of warfare in the Heroic Age, since that was largely a matter of hero vs hero, with limited strategy, few weapons, no cavalry and no use for ships in war except as troop transports, in short everything which was not true of warfare among the Classic Greeks and the later conquering Macedonians. The author more than adequately examines the evolved role of the infantry, chariots, cavalry, long-range weapons such as slings and javelins, but I particularly enjoyed the section on naval warfare. Not only is it a favorite subject of mine, but is an aspect of ancient warfare where the weapon systems become more important that those wielding the weapons, where the motto of the day was innovate or be sunk. Those readers who want to read about warfare among the ancient peoples of the Hellenic Peninsula and yet not have to wade through pages of dense prose will find it well worth their while to track down this little book.

[Gerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has been on my "will read sooner or later" shelf since I bought it at near Bowling Green State University in 1976! It was published from a series of lectures presented by Dr. Frank E. Adcock (1886-1968) at the University of California in 1957 (or just before). It traces the history of Greek and Macedonian military systems, strategy, and generalship from just after Homeric times through Greece's early encounters with Carthaginians and Romans. It begins with the men of conflicting city states putting on what armor they could afford, lining up opposite each other, and just going to. It winds up with battles fought with different kinds of units and according to plans formulated by talented generals with the enemy’s annihilation in mind. Light infantry, cavalry, siege warfare, and navies are covered. The chapter on strategy was a little hard to follow but not impossibly so. I found the whole book to be a good overview of the period.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quick analysis of the Greek way of war. The author provided more in depth comments on how these armies fought than in previous books I’ve read on the subject. Key thoughts below.

- It did not suit the ideas of an early aristocracy to provide equipment for men who could not afford to provide it for themselves, or to train such men to fight on an equality with their betters. P5. PJK. Early armies were not supplied by the state as they are now.
- Thus the hoplite army was the army of the upper and middle classes, end of these alone, and on this army depended the safety of the community. P5.
- The advantage of fighting downhill was so great - for it added to the momentum of the phalanx - that no army could allow its opponent to fight at this advantage. So it would usually be level ground. And in the economy of any ordinary city state the “fairest and smoothest” ground was the fertile ground that was the most worth fighting to defend. If the enemy could not be challenged on this ground with a fair chance of victory, it was idle to challenge him at all. P6. PJK: Terrain analysis! Know the ground.
- … If a state is invaded, it is an advantage to offer battle as near to the shelter of its city walls as possible, for that will reduce losses in the event of defeat. But this strategy cannot be adopted if it means yielding to the enemy the control of the state’s good land. P6.
- In most Greek armies the most that a general can do is dispose his troops as well as he can, encourage them to fight well, and then fight well himself, there's one hopefully among the rest. P6. PJK: Very different in today’s world.
- As has been seen, the normal battle between hoplite armies ends, after a severe clash and some fighting at close quarters, in the realm of one side or the other. Pursuit is limited; the victor remains in possession of the battlefield, as though that was what he was fighting to possess. P14.
- Mercenaries had not the local patriotism of the citizen troops, but that made them, as it were, nonpolitical. They were loyal to their paymasters and they had no republican principles which make a tyrant distrust them. P22. PJK. Thus why tyrants even to this day employ mercenaries (see Putin in Ukraine w/the Wagner Group, North Korea, etc).
- … states may find themselves forced into wars which their policy never contemplated, which they would have avoided if they could do so without loss of honor or a freedom. P64. PJK: Thus why policy is so hard to craft; what are the second and third order effects?
- The belief that the democracy could do no wrong means that the leader of today might be the scapegoat of tomorrow. P75. Interesting comment about how the Greek States operated without much oversight on overall strategy by a legislative body. The author mentions that with the future Roman Senate, this would be adjusted.

[Jamie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very small and short book, containing a series of lectures the author gave around 1957. I know that doesn’t sound like a very promising start, but it is definitely worth reading. Adcock had an encyclopedic knowledge of the weapons and tactics of Greece and Macedonia, and his information is presented in a clear and straightforward style. It starts with the heroic age of single combat, proceeds through the early melee combat of mobs of farmers turned temporary soldiers hacking at each other with whatever weapons and armor they could lay their hands on, then moves to the more organized hoplite warfare, with standardized equipment and tactics that required training and experience. It also covers the evolution of the armies and the incorporation of auxiliaries. The strategies of the great commanders are discussed, not just Alexander but Epaminondas, who broke the Spartan phalanx at Leuctra in 371 BC and ended their hegemony over Greek land warfare.

By the time of the Macedonian conquest the armies were made up of professional soldiers capable of a wide array of tactical formations, skilled at siege warfare, and incorporating artillery and even exotic weapons such as elephants when appropriate.

There is a very good chapter on the evolution of naval warfare, demonstrating that the Greeks were innovative tacticians. Naval battles showed a high degree of tactical skill as the commanders maneuvered their formations to take advantage of wind, geography, and time and tide.

The book ends with the first encounters with Rome. Adcock doesn’t discuss it, but it brings to mind one of those great what-if questions: would a phalanx in its prime have defeated a legion in its prime? The phalanxes the Romans encountered were not the same quality as those of the Spartans or Macedonians of old. The Roman legion was far more maneuverable than the lumbering phalanx, but with auxiliaries to protect the flanks the sheer weight of attack power, with their long spears and heavy armor, would have been a formidable challenge to a legion. Alas, we will never know.

With the passage of time, there have been advances in scholarship, so some of what Adcock says has probably been superseded. For instance Christopher Matthews, in A Storm of Spears, makes a pretty convincing case, backed up by real-world experiments, that the dory, the fearsome hoplite spear, was probably wielded underhand, not held over the head for stabbing downward. Nevertheless, Adcock’s book is well worth reading for anyone with an interest in the warfare of ancient Greece.

[Michael David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short book traces the evolution of the Grecian art of war from the use of hoplites, to the use of light cavalry once Aetolia proved their power to the Greek, and then the eventual combination of naval and land warfare. Siegecraft and elephants were also discussed, as were the exploits of great general such as Alexander the Great, and Epaminondas. It's a good, lucid introduction to the evolution of war from the Greeks and Macedonians.

[Quinton Carr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Provides a good general discussion of the Greek and Macedonian art of war, including tactical and technological innovations, leadership and evolving strategies.

AVOID the Kindle edition - the final section was so badly digitized that it was almost unreadable.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short book on Hellenic military strategy developed from university lectures. Quick and interesting read, although the author assumes the reader has a more intimate knowledge of key Hellenic military leaders.

[Måns Elfström · Rating 3 out of 5]

Det tog lite tid men den var faktiskt ganska spännande.

[Al · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a small book with a tremendous amount of data and analysis packed into the 100+ pages. Dr. Adcock traces the evolution of the hoplite and what constituted membership in that class. He also mentions some of the training. Within this book, we go from citizen-soldier to professional soldier, as Macedon perfects the phalanx as the ultimate form of maneuver. He also covers siegecraft, the use of elephants, cavalry, and naval warfare. This is an excellent book, and serves as an introduction to Hellenistic warfare.

[Rollo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of lectures by Frank Ezra Adcock. Adcock held the chair in Ancient History in Cambridge University and co-edited the Cambridge Ancient History series of the 1920's and 1930's. This is a classic in its field.