A Companion to Greek Warfare

"The first part of the book, a "Historical Survey," focuses on changing issues in strategy and grand strategy-on Greek motives, goals, and responses to military success and failure, the Macedonians, Persians, Romans, and Carthaginians being given due weight. These five chapters cover chronological fundamentals, but deal with modalities and patterns more than with campaigns, and with campaigns more than with battles. Johannes Heinrichs, in "Bronze Age and Early Greek Wars," sees Mycenaean warfare in terms of "the centralized organization of life," then deals with Homer as evidence of an ideological rather than sociological character. Among late Archaic Wars, Sparta's efforts to dominate the southern Peloponnesus illustrate a grand strategy that evolves from annexation to domination. The next chapter, Sabine Mèuller's "The Persian Wars to Alexander," gives a holistic account of the conflicts between the Achaemenids and both the Greeks and Macedonians, one that dismantles propaganda and rationalizations in order to demonstrate interdependence as well as rivalry. Frances Pownall's chapter on "Internal Wars from the 'First Peloponnesian War' to Chaeronea" covers much the same period but centers on alliance systems and spheres of influence; one after another, the Greeks states failed to implement strategies that would that would do more collective good than harm. She emphasizes Persia's role in this sequence of events"--