Les modèles grecs de la guerre

The history of warfare in the Greek world often follows a precise chronology and pattern: the citizen hoplites of the classical polis were superseded in the 4th century by mercenary peltasts and then professional phalangites. The professional armies of Philip II, Alexander the Great and then the kings revolutionized military art and science. Finally, the victory of the Roman Republic revealed the obsolescence of Hellenistic weaponry and tactics from the 2nd century onwards. In this history, the great pitched battles form the milestones or harbingers of new times. This study reveals the difficulties posed by this paradigm and offers a different approach.

The Hellenistic period is not the time of truly professional armies. The history of Roman wars in the East is not just about the duel between the Macedonian phalanx and the legion. The battle-history approach prevents us from grasping the diversity of combat experiences. Although pitched battles or sieges left a lasting mark on many warriors, they were far less frequent than the combats of “mundane” warfare, the countless skirmishes, ambushes, raids and coups de main that punctuated the campaigns on land and sea. Finally, there was never just one way of waging war in the Aegean. At the beginning of the 4th century, the southern Greeks did not fight like the northern Greeks; in the 3rd and 2nd centuries, fighting practices were not even unified, let alone set in stone.

This work studies the Greek ways of war that emerged and were transformed between the early 4th and late 1st centuries bc in the Aegean. It explores the face of battle, “on the ground”, affording a vivid glimpse, through texts and images, of the violence and terror experienced by men at war.