Cognitive Change and Tactical Change

From what I wrote last night, it follows that periods in which we see significant changes in cognition, belief, and expansion of the general body of knowledge should also be those where we see changes in warfare. This is because these are the periods in which the limits on thought and action were changing. It has been the case in several periods. The earliest for which we have good evidence is classical Greece.

Among the ancient Greeks, for a period of two- to three-hundred years, hoplite warfare was dominant. This centered on a citizen soldier armed with a spear, sword, a large, round, bronze-covered shield, a close, bronze helmet, greaves, and a cuirass of either bronze or laminated linen. They lined up in formations several men deep (eight perhaps being usual) and charged. The major portion of the battle is supposed to have been the othismos, which is depicted by modern historians as a prolonged shoving match with shields, after which one side or the other broke. Most casualties are assumed to have occurred after the othismos. That is the way they fought one another, and it is considered by modern historians to be fairly ritualized. (There are a lot of uncertainties about the mechanics of all of this, and frankly it is difficult to read the scholarly articles and be completely convinced. The blog "Hollow Lakedaimon" has a number of compelling posts following the arguments for and against the prevailing interpretation.)

Fortunately, my point is not about the details of hoplite battle, but, rather, that it changed dramatically in the later years of the fifth century B.C., and continued to change throughout the following century. The changes become discernable in the Peloponnesian War and those that followed. As early as Sphacteria in 425, when Athenian light troops played a decisive role against the Spartans, and Delium in 424 B.C., when Thebans began to vary the formations and tactics of hoplites to defeat the Athenians, it is clear that the old, formalized, semi-ritualized forms of combat were obsolescent. In the decades that followed, both changes in how hoplites fought and in the use of light troops led to a revolution in Greek warfare, culminating in the rise of Philip and Alexander of Macedon, who incorporated Greek ideas into a much more flexible system.

This coincided with tremendous cognitive changes at Athens and elsewhere. This was the age of Socrates (who in fact fought at Delium), Thucydides (who was a general as well as an historian), Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Xenophon (another commander and literary figure). Plato and Aristotle (who was Alexander's tutor) followed. No one doubts that new ways of thinking emerged in this time period, but they are not generally tied to other developments, such as the change in equipment and tactics. As I will try to show in future posts, these changes often occur in periods of intellectual ferment. The old limitations are removed and new modes emerge not just in philosophy and literature, but in all walks of life, war included.

We cannot separate military history from cultural and intellectual history.