Historia Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte -'Greek Mercenary Troops and Their Equipment' Paul...

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Greek Mercenary Troops and Their Equipment

Author(s): Paul McKechnieSource: Historia: Zeitschrift fr Alte Geschichte, Bd. 43, H. 3 (3rd Qtr., 1994), pp. 297-305Published by: Franz Steiner VerlagStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4436335 .

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GREEKMERCENARYTROOPSAND THEIREQUIPMENT'

1. Two Views of MercenariesDavid Whitehead's article "Who EquippedMercenary Troops in Classical

Greece?", in a recent volume of this journal,2expresses disagreement with anargumentI have put forward o the effect thatemployers of mercenaries n fourth-centuryGreece would "often- perhapseven usually- equipthem."3Some furthercomment is required,both to clarify my own case and to question Whitehead'sline of argumentagainst it;and since "generalconsiderationswhich tell, explicitlyor implicitly, a different story"4form an importantelement in Whitehead'sanalysis, I shall take the opportunityof sketchingthe situation a bit morebroadlythan I did before.

It is common ground that earlier scholars, particularlyH.W. Parke,5 haveassumed withoutargument hatmercenariesmustusuallyhaveprovidedtheir ownarms and armour.Whitehead describes this assumptionas an orthodoxy,6but Ithinkthatmay run the risk of dignifying it with a statusthat it does notreally have.It is simply a question that nobody has thoughtabout much. Instances where anemployer did provide the equipment arerecognisedby both of us: the chief onesare Cyrus and the armyhe recruited o attack his brotherKing ArtaxerxesH, andDionysius I and his mercenaryarmyin Sicily.7The issue is whetherany generali-zation from them is possible.

The reasonwhy the questionis an importantone is that an answerto it wouldbe very informative in the context of fourth-centurysocial history as a whole.There were large mercenaryarmies involved in virtuallyall the (many) militarystruggles in and near Greece from the end of the Peloponnesian War to theestablishmentof the Hellenistic Kingdoms. If we could say (at least in general)what kind of men took service in these armies, then the light that information

I Iwish to thankProf.V.J.GrayandProf.K.A.Raaflaub orcomments ndraftsof thispaper.They arenotresponsible or the errors hatremain.2 DavidWhitehead, WhoEquippedMercenary roops nClassicalGreece?"Hist. 40 (1991)pp.105-113. Hereafter Whitehead.3 PaulMcKechnie,Outsiders in the Greek Cities in the Fourth CenturyB.C. (London,1989)p.85. My book hereafter Outsiders.4 Whitehead, p. 105.5 H.W.Parke,Greek Mercenary Soldiers (Oxford,1935), e.g. atp.106.6 Whitehead, p. 110.7 Whitehead, pp.107-8.

Historia, Band XLIII/3 (1994)? FranzSteiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH, Sitz Stuttgart

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298 PAULMCKECHNIEwould cast on the cities they came fromwould be very useful. At riskof seemingover-schematic, I suggest that the possibilities are more or less as follows: eithermercenariesowned their (usually hoplite) equipment,and so were drawnfrompeople with a 'hoplitecensus', i.e. the landowning,agricultural middle class' ofClassical Greece; ormercenarieswere often given theirequipment,andso can bepresumedto have been drawn fromnon-landowners rather ike Marius'Mules).8

Here the matterof 'orthodoxy' may perhapscome in. That is to say thatanold-fashionedview of fourth-centuryGreekhistorywould picture t as a periodofeconomic and moral decline of the Greek city-state, leading up to the momentwhen PhilipIItook overcontrolof a weak andenfeebledsystem.This view wouldfit in with the assumptionthatmercenarieswere men of solid economic statusandgeneral position in their communities,who, when they went soldiering,left theirlanduntended (thuscausingeconomic decline) andabandoned heircivic respon-sibilities (weakening their home cities both militarilyand morally).Men of thatkind could have lived athome:most people werefarmers,after all, and being ableto afford hoplite equipment would imply being in (very roughly) the better-offhalf of the farming population.

The otherpossibility is thatmost mercenarieswere poor.Thatis, they wouldhave been of the economic backgroundof an Athenianrowerrather hana hoplite.The problems are the obvious ones: how did they get armourand training?But,puttingthose aside for a moment,thereareattractive eatures n thehypothesis.Itceases to be necessary to ask why men faced danger, discomfort and socialuprootingwhen they could have been at home growing barleyand olives on theancestralacres. If largenumbersof middle-classmen hadbeen takingthatoption,out of choice (althoughthe pay was bad9),then therereally would be a case forthinkingthatthe lack of patriotismand the generalirresponsibilityof the hopliteclass had led to Philip's takeover. It would amount to a moral decline, andpresumablywe should go back to asking what features of the educationand thecultural life of such people had caused it. But if we take the view that mostmercenariestook to soldieringbecausethey neededthe money (thoughit was nota well-paid job), because they did not have enough land to make a living fromfarming, then the (ratherimplausible) idea that a sort of epidemic of ethicalinadequacyhad struckthe hopliteclass after 403 becomes unnecessary.

A widercomparativeview would support he case forassumingthatmercena-ries were usually poor. PierreDucreydrawsthe parallelbetweenGreekmercena-ries andthe Swiss mercenariesof themedievaland modem periods.10The regions

8 Aristotles quitestraightforwardnthequestion f richandpoor nthepolitical ontext: he"rich" rehoplites, he"poor" re unarmed. olitics1289 b 31-2.9 See Outsiders,pp.89-93.10 PierreDucrey"Remarquesur es causesdumercenariatans a Greceancienne t laSuisse

moderne", n Buch der Freunde ur J.R. von Salis zum 70. Geburtstag Zurich,1971)pp.115-123.



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GreekMercenaryTroopsand theirEquipment 299of Greece that stand out as recruitingareas for mercenaries(Ducrey focuses onArcadia and Crete) were like medieval Switzerlandin being mountainous, iso-lated and poor." A few phrases in Ducrey's article delineate a huge area ofunattemptedresearch in archives, chronicles, registersand municipal and parishdocuments in Switzerland,which could determine the backgroundof men whotook up mercenaryservice. It is to be hopedthatone daysomeone will be attractedto the mountainof workDucreycommends. ButDucrey alreadyhas good a priorigrounds for questioning P. de Valliere's explanationof the exodus of Swiss toserve in foreign armies as attributable o the "turbulencede lajeunesse".'2

2. LiterarySourcesAncient writers who mentioned mercenaries were not aiming at giving a

dispassionate or sociological picture. This makes it difficult to draw accurateinferences from their comments. There are, for instance,a numberof soldiers inPlautus.Plautus' Greekoriginals, mostly from theearlythirdcentury, were set bytheir writers in the context of a reasonablyrecentpastof a non-specifickind. So inthe Bacchides the soldier Cleomachus asks for two hundred"good gold philips" nblackmail'3- thoughof course he does not get the money in the end. The settingimplied is closely related to the period we are considering. But the Plautinesoldiers, though they are mercenaries,do not tell us much. The stereotype onwhich they are constructeddeals with a boastful type (he is an officer, of course)who, among other things, is a big spender. So Antamoenidesin the Poenulus isworryingabout the mina he paid to the pimp,'4and Pyrgopolynices in the MilesGloriosus, when he loses Philocomasium,also loses all the presentshe gave her,plus whatever she likes to take from his house, plus therascallyslave Palaestrio.15All this is comic exaggeration of the impact a flamboyant type of mercenarygeneral,orrecruitingofficer, might have been able to make from time to time. Therhetoricalpurposeof the characterizations clear,and no one gets misledby it intothinkingthat all the thousandsof fourth-centurymercenarieswere like the soldiersin New and RomanComedy.

Not all literarytexts on this subjectare as easy to understand.Some point inthe same direction as Plautus' picture- though without the exaggeration, andwithout the typical reversal which makes the boastful soldier a victim of well-deserved retributionplotted by the scheming slave. Xenophon himself was a

11 Ducrey,Causesdu mercenariatas in n.1O)p.122(andcf. p.116).12 Ducrey, Causes du mercenariat (as in n.10) p.115.13 PlautusBacchides882-3.14 PlautusPoenulus 1280.15 Plautus Miles Gloriosus 1204-5 and 1349-57.



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300 PAUL MCKECHNIEmercenary,anda memberof the upperclass. The two brothers n IsaeusMenecleswere from a similar background.'6To apply this more broadly:a man with apanoplywould ipsofacto be more employableas a mercenary hana manwithoutone. In the case of particular mall forces (like city garrisons), t probablywouldnot be impossible to find enoughready-equippedmen.

It shouldnotbe regardedas surprising hatmen of the upperclasses took someof the leading positions in mercenary ervice, as they did in most aspectsof Greeklife. The same thing is evident in other periods in history. Comparehow in the1030s AD HaraldrSigurbarsson,half-brotherof the deposed king Olaf II ofNorway, went duringhis exile to Byzantiumwith 'a companyof 500 bravemen'and took service underthe emperorMichaelIV Katallakos. 7As an aristocratwhowas down on his luck - like the impecunious brothers in Isaeus - he foundmercenaryservice attractive.It involves war, andwar,in theeleventhcenturyADas in the fourth centuryBC, was a means of gaining honourand so of mendingone's fortunes. Haraldrgained promotionin the Byzantine armyto the rankofspatharokandidatos,and later regainedhis inheritance,becoming king HaraldIIIof Norway.

But the fact that aristocratsat a varietyof periodsmay have seen mercenaryservice as a promising way out of difficulties should not lead us to think thatmercenaryarmies were usually full of upper-classmen in temporarily traitenedcircumstances.Therewere 500 followers for one HaraldrSigurOarsson. o careisneeded in dealing with things like the passage where Xenophon speaks of somesoldiers of the 10 000 having brought slaves with them or even having spentmoney of their own to come on Cyrus' expedition.'8This is a plea intendedtoconvince people who doubt the Cyreians' respectability.Isocrates alleges thatthey were "notchosen for quality,but men who were not able to live in theirownlandsbecause of phaulotes."'9Whichout of XenophonandIsocrates s telling thetruth?Xenophon is known to be capableof suppressioveri on the grandscale,20butIsocrateswasjust as partial,andthecharacter-sketchesn XenophonAnabasis

16 Isaeus 2 (Menecles).6; cf. Outsiders, p.91.17 Themainprimary ource s theLogosNouthetetikos,d. V.G. Vasilevskiiand P. Jemstedt

(St. Petersburg, 896).See Sigfus Blondal,TheVarangians f Byzantiumtr.BenediktS.Benedikt,Cambridge, 978)pp.54-58.18 Xen.Anab.6.4.8.19 Isoc. Panegyricus 146: phaulotes = either "poverty" or "worthless character" (cf. LSJ).

Presumably socratesmeanthis audience o respondbothto the economicandthe moralmeaningsof thisword.20 The argumenthathe wasthere,withthemenwhowentto Babylonandback, s of limitedvalue: in the Hellenicahe does not mentionthe refoundationf Messene - yet it wasSparta's erritorialossesafter370thatcosthimhiscountry state,wherehehadbeen ivingfora number f years.He could keepquietabout hingshehadseenhappen,f it didnotsuithimto revealthem.



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Greek Mercenary Troops and their Equipment 301221 show that Isocrates' implication that all the Cyreians were from the lowestclass is a suggestiofalsi.Cyrus' armystarteda trend. There was barelya time thereafter n the fourthcenturywhen there were not largemercenaryarmies in commission.22Whiteheadthinks, with J. Roy,23 that the size of Cyrus' army is the best argument forbelieving that armourwas providedto the 10 000 (I myself persist in feeling thatthe explicit statement that the Greeks' weapons belonged to Cyrus is just asconvincing24).But Roy's argumentis on the whole prejudicialto Whitehead'scase, because Cyrus had 10 000 men, or rathermore, but "between399 and 375there were never less than 25 000 mercenaries in service."25If Cyrus had toprovide armour,at least to some, in order to recruit 10 000 mercenaries,then I'dhave thoughtthat afortiori some of the 25 000 mercenarieswho were in serviceevery year must have been given theirequipment.

That is, up to a point, a justification for generalizingfromCyrus' army. Thecase of Dionysius I and his armamentsprogramme,narratedby Diodorus under399,26 forms, I think,a very strong parallel because it is also dealingwith a largearmy.The other texts thatI mentioned n Outsidersare less easy to make anythingof. Whitehead is right to point out the difficulties involved in attemptingto usePolyaenus.27"Polyaenus,who producedhis book very quickly, did not make hisown extracts but utilized earlier compilations; theories about his sources areuseless."28One can only note what is thereandpass on.

In this case, briefly, to Evagoras.The peltastssent to him from Athens in 391were given their equipment.29Whitehead'sargument n this connection is that thereason why the equipmentwas given out is related to "the particularnature ofEvagoras' request, in combining an approachto Athens (ratherthan anywhereelse) with a request(if such it was) for peltastsrather hanhoplites."30His idea isthat peltasts were uncommon and few men, if any, who had their own peltastequipment would have been available at this early date. This is questionable:Whitehead does not mentionIphicratesand the xenikon en Korinthoi.390 was theyear when Iphicrates'defeat of a Spartanmora with a peltastforce demonstratedthe capabilities of the peltast,but his army had been operatingsuccessfully for

21 Xen. Anab.2.6.1-30.22 Parke,Mercenaries as in n.5)pp.20-1andTableII.23 Whitehead, . 107, referringoJ. Roy,"TheMercenaries f Cyrus",Hist. 16(1967) pp.287-323.24 Xen. Anab.2.5.38, quotedat Outsiders,p.81.25 Parke,Mercenaries as in n.5) p.227 andTableII; quotedat Outsiders,p.91.26 D.S. 14.41.3-4and42.2-3; Outsiders,pp.82-3.27 Whitehead, pp. 105-7.28 W.W.Tarn in Oxford Classical Dictionary, s.v. "Polyaenus".29 Lysias 19 (A ristophanes).21 and 43; cf. Outsiders, p.84 and Whitehead, p.108.30 Whitehead, p. 108.



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302 PAULMCKECHNIEseveral years before that.Peltast fighting in 391 was not still in the stage wherepeltasts might be "sailorsand/orotherskitted out ad hoc."31All the same, it is asmall force and a single incident. I would not wish to use it to generalize aboutanything.

There is one other large army, though,thatsomethingshould be said about,andthatis the Phocian army.In the first place (andI missed this before)Diodorussays that the Phocians made arrnaments, pparently or their mercenaries,at thetime of Onomarchusand Phayllus.32This points in the same directionas Cyrus'and Dionysius' provision of weapons and armour,suggesting that where largenumberswere required,men who did not own theirown suits of armourwouldbetakenon andequipment ssued. Whiteheadmentionsthe Phocianarmyin anothercontext, at the moment of its ceasing to be a Phocian army. In 345 Phalaecuswithdrew ratherthan fight Philip - the result for Phocis being the end of itsresistance against the Amphictyonic League. Whitehead speaks of Phalaecus'8 000 men being "ceremoniallydisarmed"before their retreat.33 D.S. 16.60.3,which he cites, says that the Amphictyons and Philip threw the arrns of thePhocians and their mercenariesdown the rocks (presumablyat Delphi, towardsthe CorinthianGulf). This happenedafterthe Phociansurrender.WhatWhiteheaddoes not addis that Phalaecusand his men withdrewbeforethePhociansurrender,under a truce (16.59.3). I do not thinkthey had handedover theirweapons: notonly because the chronological sequence in Diodorus implies that they had not,but also because allowing their withdrawalmade sense for Philip. He was apragmaticgeneral - he claimed he could captureany town that a donkey ladenwith gold could be got into - andhis only seriouspitched-battledefeathadbeen atthe handsof Phocianmercenaries.He would havehad every reasonformakingtheoption of walking away an attractiveone for Phalaecusandhis men.Whitehead'alternative s complex. He believes thattheyhandedover theirpanopliesto Philipthen bought themselves new ones before their westwardvoyage. I cannot agree

31 Whitehead, .108andn.23.32 D.S. 16.33.2and36.1;Onomarchusgotreadyamassof weapons rom hebronzeand ron"[sc. thatwas available n the Delphian anctuary] as wellascoiningthesilverandgoldto

use for war expenditure; nd afterthedisasterof theCrocusField(352), Phayllus"begancollectinga massof mercenaries,fferingdouble heusualpay,andsentforhelpfromhisallies.Andhealsomadereadya massof weapons,andstruckgoldandsilvercoinage."Cf.W. KendrickPritchett,The GreekStateat WarV (BerkeleyandLosAngeles,1991)pp.53-4. Diodorus'sourceat thispointis probablyDemophilus'historyof the SacredWar(seeN.G.L.Hammond,"TheSourcesof DiodorusSiculusXVI",CQ 31 [19371pp.79-91,atpp.82-85)andDemophilus' eason ormentioninghemanufacturef weaponswasproba-bly to drawattention o the Phocians'profaneuse of the sacredtreasures f Delphi.Sospecialrhetorical equirementsed Demophilus o refer o manufacturef weapons whichwere for the mercenaries this is not made explicit,butis a fair inference)whichmosthistorians f mostwarsdidnotbother o include.

33 Whitehead, .112.



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GreekMercenaryTroopsand theirEquipment 303that this is likely. Whattheceremonyof throwingarmamentsoff the cliffs seemsto me to suggest is that the Phocians had a stockpile of arms,presumably madefrom metal belonging to the Delphi temple.Itsdestructionwas necessary becauseit was regarded as polluted, having been sacrilegiouslymade out of objects thatshould have been kept for religious purposes.34

3. The Argumentfrom SilenceWhitehead'scase against provision of armourrelies on two arguments.First,

that the cases in which such provision is mentioned in literarysources reflectexceptional situations;andsecond, that if it hadbeen usual to providearmamentsto mercenaries henthis fact would be mentioned n literarysources - above all inAeneas Tacticus.35 Whitehead thinks that if cities kept stocks of armaments,Aeneas might - indeed, must- have said something.The shortestreply to this isthat Aeneas' book, although we have almost 100 Loeb pages of Greek text, isterribly fragmentary.Parke notes this.36Aeneas himself says in a chapter onencouraging homonoia (social concord):37"provision must be made for thosepeople who do not have what they need. How this can be done fairlyandwithouttroublingthe rich, and from what revenuesthe costs can be met, has been dealtwith in my book on Finance." Here he is referring o poor people generally, andthe problemof debt, so I do not thinkarmourwould be includedin the provisionshe has in mind at this exact point - but elsewhere in his book on finance theremight have been something relevant. I cannotaccept that the 'silence' on provi-sion of equipmentto mercenaries in the extant work of Aeneas proves, or evenhints, thatsuch provisionwould only happenexceptionally.

The argument rom silence inWhitehead'sarticleencompassesmorethan ustAeneas, though. He wants to say thatbecause our literarysources in many placesspeak of a mercenaryforce being raised, and do not usually say anythingaboutwhere the mercenaries'weaponscome from, this should be taken as confirmationthat the instances where it is known thatarms were providedwere exceptional.38

34 This would fit in with the idea that Demophilus (Diodorus' source for the Sacred Warnarrative) mentioned the manufacture of the armour (and now its eventual destruction) totrace the fate of the offerings that had been in the temple of Apollo, and to bring out thesacrilegious nature of the Phocians' occupation of Delphi and their use of its wealth: cf.n.32.

35 Whitehead, p.lO. The sections in which nothing is said (and according to Whitehead,something might be) are 10.7, 10.9 and chs. 29-30.

36 Parke, Mercenaries (as in n.5) pp.94-5: "we are unable to have access to Aeneas' generalreflections on the use of mercenaries."

37 Aen. Tact. 14.1-2.38 Whitehead, pp. 1 0- 11.



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304 PAULMCKECHNIEThis, I fear, does not take accountof the complexity of the relationshipbetweenhistories, as literaryworks,and the events they describe.Diodorus,in particular,was working from several publishedhistories of the period and fitting materialfromtheminto a workdesignedto his own plan- a workin which therewas moreof Diodorus and his own ideas thanhas sometimes been recognised.39Many ofDiodorus' lost sourceswere writingon quitea wide canvas so hadto be economi-cal with detail - andwheredetaildid get in historianshadcharacteristicnterests:descriptionsof pitchedbattlescan be detailedbut the minutiaeof campaigns,andeven manoeuvres, are often given such poor-qualityattention that little can bemadeof them.40Even contemporaryhistoriansprobablydid not care muchwhosethe weapons were in a particularmercenaryarmy. They may not even haveknown. Puttingtogetheran army was not really partof what they were writingabout. Xenophon says who recruitedCyrus' soldiers, and where,4' but that isbecause his book is the story of the armyitself, andthe adventuresof the Greekswho served in it. Even so, the information hat the Greeks' armshad belonged toCyrus comes in incidentally, as a point broughtup in an attemptto make theGreeksgive up those arms to the King's victoriousarmy. Similarly,Demophilus'interest in the Phocians' manufactureof arms arose out of his concern withsacrilegioususes of templetreasures: hat s why he also mentionedthe Coiningofthe gold andsilver.42Statesproducedcoinage to payarmies- it is well knownthatthis was one of the main reasons for issue of coins in the ancient world. Yet insummaryreferencesto raisingof armieswe do not usually hear of the moneyersbeing putto work.So buildinganargumentagainstprovisionof armson the basisof literaryreferencesthat do not mentionit is unsatisfactory.

4. In PracticeWhiteheaddescribesmy suggestion thatemployersof mercenaries n fourth-

centuryGreecewould "often- perhapseven usually equipthem"43 s acase "forthe prosecution"."I thinkin this paperI havebeen able to get farenoughto showthatit meets at least an Athenianstandardof proof- which is to say thatit is morelikely thanthe alternative he other side is offering.But it would not be satisfacto-ry to leave what I said in Outsiders unqualified.This is so particularlybecause

39 See Kenneth S. Sacks, Diodorus Siculus and the First Century (Princeton, 1990), forinstance at pp.6-7.

40 See e.g. the confusing accounts of Agesilaus' Sardis campaign, discussed in P.R. McKech-nie and S.J. Kern (eds.), Hellenica Oxyrhynchia(Warminster, 1988) at pp.140-6.41 Xen. Anab. 1.1.6-2.9.42 Cf. nn.32 and 34.43 Outsiders, p.85.44 Whitehead, p.110.



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GreekMercenaryTroopsand theirEquipment 305Whitehead has misunderstood t in an importantrespect.He assumes thatI thinkmercenarieswho received armourwould give it backon leavingthe service of theissuer (and he producesevidence to show thatunemployedmercenarieswere notunarmed45).This is my fault for not dealing with the question. I should assumethat a discharged mercenarywould typically keep his armour.Anemployertakingon men too poor to own their own armourwould in any case have given training,and the issue of armourwould formpart of the whole processof preparation hatwent into forming a hoplite armyout of (so to speak)the oarsmanclass.

There are two possibilities:either that the employer would bearthe cost andwrite it off, or that he would recover it from the soldiers- probablyby deductionsfrom pay. In the first case, the grantof armourmight act as quite a substantialinducement to a man to join an army. For the employer, there would be theadvantageof having his armyin a set uniform of known quality.The uniformitymight make the army look more fearsome on the battlefield, and encouragecohesion andfighting qualitiesamongthe soldiers;but if all the soldiers had theirown armoursomething similar could be achieved by paintingthe shields. In thesecond case the expectationof gettingto own the armourat the end of a campaignmight encourage loyalty. I would not think it likely that a lender other than amercenaryemployer would want to finance purchaseof armour:a soldier mightnever come back to theagora he borrowed hemoney in (indeed,even granted heintention to pay, he might get killed). In a few cases a family member mightfinance purchase of armour for a poor relative, I suppose, but apart from thatpossibility I should think any credit for purchaseof armourwould have to comefrom the mercenary'semployer.University of Auckland Paul McKechnie

45 Whitehead, pp. 112-3.

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