Preface

It took over seven hundred years of disasters and triumphs for the Greek army to develop from the ritualized, self-serving military of the Homeric era into the unified, systematic contingents that would enable Alexander and the Macedonian army to conquer most of the known world. In this sense, it must be examined how, when, and why these adaptations took place in a military system one often times feels is stubbornly entrenched in antiquated methods of approaching battle.
The primary adaptation in the Greek military that allowed it to rise as a world power were the crucial changes that occurred in the organizations of the army, specifically the fruition of the phalanx, the rise of the ptelast, and the growth of the cavalry from a disorganized flank force to a dominate, deciding factor in battle. To explore these transformations, I have chosen the medium of an “epic poem” of sorts.
This paper intends to trace the modifications that occurred during the seven hundred years of recorded Greek warfare by in itself mimicking the changes through use of rhetorical devices, rhyme scheme, and poetry type. The paper starts off addressing the Homeric era and consequently is written in rigid free verse and ends in the rise and fall of Alexander, described in Haiku (which Harold Richardson and others regard as the highest form of poetry, due to its efficiency and simplicity while still being able to convey the deepest sentiments). Thus, one should be able to discover a clear synopsis of key changes in Greek warfare while indulging in less examined areas.

350 Lines about 700 Years of Greek Warfare

Lustful Paris stole Helen from the Greeks
A great fleet arrived a short time after on the shores of Troy
To return the Gods favorite mortal concubine to its
Rightful owners
But the Heroes who knew too much of war,
Ulysses and Hector
Came to reason that the world had enough of petty conflict
That turned trees into coffins
And ships into funeral pyres
But for unproven men, the word of the wise
Was hardly enough to quench their thirst
Glory does not wait for reason
So Ajax grazed the face of Hector with his hand
To start a war everybody who was nobody desired
But in War, the troops
Lacking any order
The masses of men
Unorganized, disheveled
Hesitated from a distance to strike
Only the motivation of a soon to fall Hero
Could demand their short-lived attention;
They prodded and pushed until one would collapse
The Greeks were forced back to their ships
The Trojans back to their walls
And this Epic battle
Became little more then an Epic standstill
No warrior dares venture to far
Only to retreat back in disunity in
A battle with no result.
The Program for this history is not new
We’ve seen this celebrated battle through and through
Did Paris and Hector and all the rest
Have a good life when they died,
Happy enough to die for an Athenian whore
Or enough to base an age-old epic on
That misled Greek energies for centuries
Assuring them the highest form of life
Was the person who died for a noble cause
That was not noble or a cause at all
With one egotistical act, Ajax assured all their fates
And the fates of thousands to come
Who would blindly follow ideals to the grave
Glory comes to all those who fight valiantly in battle
But Glory is hard to savor
When you are dead
Following this unforgettable war
The Dark Ages came to pass
The Landed Aristocracy mounted their horses
And sharpened their javelins
To travel over the mountain
And destroy their neighbors’ way of life
They crossed the foothills
They threw their javelins
They killed the farmers
They took all they could
And burned the rest
Yet the Greek peasant learned better
The quickness of a horse
With an exposed peer of the realm
Could be cancelled out by a long spear
And with a little panoply
And perhaps with a little organization
A little formation
They could turn the aggression of the elites
Into a defeat
For two hundred years
This method was tried and tested
Until the lower class way of fighting
Went uncontested
The Hoplite had not met
A foreign army but got its chance
As Darius amassed a great army
Of numbers, drawing from India to Egypt
To counter the insurrection
Of unappreciative Ionians
As the fleet hugged the coast
The army crossed through
Thrace and Macedonia unopposed
The Athenians rally at Marathon
With the Persian fleet banked, exposed
Across the field, twenty thousand Persians
Accompanied by five thousand cavalry
Readied for the fight
Outnumbered but never outmatched
The ten thousands Greeks
Stood tall in the Phalanx
And the battle panned out
The discipline of ordered men
Led the Greeks to a rout
So was proven this new military development
Of well-pact six by six formations
That saved Athens from disaster
Greek warfare now had a foundation
On the way to conduct military operations
In its future Persian confrontations
Xerxes and the Greeks would meet again
At Thermopylae ten years later
As the Spartans held the narrow pass
Only to be revealed by the traitor Ephialtes
Leonidas, knowing the fateful outcome
Sent the other Greek forces home
The Spartan force stands alone, two thousand strong,
Versus one hundred thousand encircling Persians
As the numbers slowly descended
And the ranks fell one by one
“Tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,
That here obedient to their laws we lie.”
Leonidas surely knew his death transcended
Simple notions of bravery and pride
But foreshadowed a Greece, undeterred, united
Whose path to military dominance was righted
Not only by the actions of the admirable,
But the implicit strategy’s of the General
It took many a defeat and many a more victory
For the Persians to be driven from the land
And when Greece was free of its enemies
It was decided it could create its own
So Sparta brought its armies to the plains
Of Attica and set up an annual residence
As the Athenians sat in their stockades
Lofting and confused in tentative hesitance
But no significant battles were to occur
During this war, as hoplite pushed hoplite
Until one broke and the other prevailed
A fighting style well suited for the
Kings of the Messenian peninsula
Only through the inclusion of the mercenary
Would the Spartans meet a worthwhile adversary
The Thracian peltast, a lightly armored
Spear thrower met the Spartan hoplite
At Sphacteria ; hidden behind the cover
Of forest and brush, the unencumbered
Light troops struck and fell back
Making the hoplites day numbered
All day and night lasted the attack
Of which the infantry could not respond
So the Spartans gave up despondently
This day marked the end of Greek reliance
Upon the use of heavy infantry alone
Though Sparta tried again and again
No longer could immobile men defend
Against an enemy unhindered by the ways
Of the antiquated and old and better days
And so this foreign way of fighting
Brought forth a new innovation
The ranks were no longer to be closed
After the Spartans real life education
The peltasts were now entrenched in the formations
As the Greek military experienced a transformation
A mere fifty years later, the next step
In the military progression would come
At the hands of another force trying to diffuse
The seemingly everlasting Spartan hegemony
The Thebans, Epaminondas and the Sacred Band
Would deal the Spartans their final hand
For when their forces met at Luectra
The Sacred Band, the corps d’élite
Aligned itself on the left to meet
Their Spartan equivalents
And as the dust settled
Four hundred of the Spartans lay
Valiant to the grave in Homers way
Buried beneath layers of Boeotian clay
Were the warriors of Spartans last day
The Left and the Thebans triumph would
Crash as quickly as it had risen
To the new ways of its northern neighbors
A folk with much experience
And an unreasonable mania
The men of Macedonia
A prelude of things to come
Philip and his son gave the world
A window into the future
As it met its Greek counterparts
For as Philip led his pikemen
Alexander rode on his horse
The point in the wedge shape
Outflanked the Sacred Band
Leaving them no room to escape
And cut them down to a single man
Alexander’s fate fell into his lap
When he inherited the throne at twenty
He made quick work of Greek rebellion
And rallied the men behind his cause
No longer would personal glory
Saturate the Greek story
But he was not a man without his problems,
Alexander thought his life was empty,
Filled it up with alcohol
Like many heroes of his day,
The bottle kept cowardice at bay.
And even led him to kill the best friend
Who had many a time saved his head
His forces plowed through the Asian Minor
Ripping apart the Persians at
Granicus and Issus, quickly tearing
Apart the empire that for so long
Had held Greece down
But now reformed, transformed, and strong
Beneath the Macedonian crown
King versus King, Nation versus Nation,
These forces would come to play once more
At Gaugamela in Three Thirty One
Alexander spearheaded the cavalry charge
That plowed through the open ranks
And the infantry, delegated to
A satisfactory second
Stood solidly as the
Battle cry beckoned
Seven hundred years into one beautiful culmination
Of rigorous militaristic evolution,
The Macedonians fell upon
Confused and bewildered men
Separated by space and time
Joined only by avarice
The center crumbled beneath the pressure
And to this Darius’ character was measured
As he fled like a diseased cur
His actions in his soldiers spurred
A great Persian back flood
Behind the Greek swords and shields and spears
Glistening with Persian blood
In retribution for countless oppressive years
The door left open and the world left unattended
Babylon and the gates to the east undefended
The Macedonian army, the apex of organization
Spread from west to east the Greek civilization
Alexander did
Not see his fate at the steps
Of the Oracle
Babylon was no
Place for a deity of
Macedonia
Dark Grey autumn, Kingless
Destroys the Kingdom, a world
Of separate spheres
Overextended,
The horses back was broke
Greece was no more
The four empires
Slowly collapsed, crumbled
Beneath the pressure
Pax imperia
Was too much to handle for
A Greece divided
So ends three hundred
Fifty lines, seven hundred
Years of Greek Warfare