Civilians and Warfare in World History

Nicola Foote, Nadya Williams, Nicola Foote, Nadya Williams

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351714563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book explores the role played by civilians in shaping the outcomes of military combat across time and place.

This volume explores the contributions civilians have made to warfare in case studies that range from ancient Europe to contemporary Africa and Latin America. Building on philosophical and legal scholarship, it explores the blurred boundary between combatant and civilian in different historical contexts and examines how the absence of clear demarcations shapes civilian strategic positioning and impacts civilian vulnerability to military targeting and massacre. The book argues that engagement with the blurred boundaries between combatant and non-combatant both advance the key analytical questions that underpin the historical literature on civilians and underline the centrality of civilians to a full understanding of warfare. The volume provides new insight into why civilian death and suffering has been so common, despite widespread beliefs embedded in legal and military codes across time and place that killing civilians is wrong. Ultimately, the case studies in the book show that civilians, while always victims of war, were nevertheless often able to become empowered agents in defending their own lives, and impacting the outcomes of wars. By highlighting civilian military agency and broadening the sense of which actors affect strategic outcomes, the book also contributes to a richer understanding of war itself.

This book will be of much interest to students of military studies, international history, international relations and war and conflict studies.

Part I
Case studies from the ancient and medieval world

The chapters in this section challenge the continued interest, even since the advent of “New Military History,” among military historians of the Ancient Mediterranean and Medieval Europe in the role of the military personnel in war. The authors of these chapters accept the importance of the events on the battlefields, but challenge them as incomplete, presenting the case, instead, for a much greater civilian agency in ancient and medieval warfare. The case studies show the blurring of the lines, in particular, between civilians and military personnel during siege warfare (Chapters 1, 3, 4 and 5), types of warfare that directly targeted civilians (Chapter 2, in particular), and the unexpected involvement in war of even the clergy (Chapter 6).

A concomitant question that emerges throughout this section is, at the same time, that of perspective: what did civilians themselves think about their involvement in war? And what would it be like to see ancient and medieval warfare through a “pro-civilian lens,” as Kathy Gaca, in particular, challenges us to do in her chapter?

1 The evolution of civilian participation in Ancient Greek warfare

Nadya Williams

Introduction

Imagine the following two scenarios. One state has been at war with another for many years, and the citizens have grown weary of the war. Missing their husbands, who are away fighting much of the time, the women decide to take matters into their own hands. Summoning an assembly of fellow-wives from all states involved in the war, both friend and foe, they propose the only untried way to end the war once and for all: to go on a sex strike until their husbands agree to a peace treaty. Endless hilarity ensues, but in the end, the women get their way. Their intervention into the war proves successful in the best way possible: it provides swift reconciliation and peace, without a clear winner and loser in the conflict and, most importantly, without any further bloodshed.

Now imagine another scenario in that same prolonged war. A farmer of military age, who is not, however, serving in the army at the given moment, is upset at the long duration of the war and its effect on him as a civilian. Unable to get anyone else in the state to listen to his anti-war views, he strikes a personal peace treaty with the enemy, effectively declaring his farm Switzerland.

If these two scenarios seem funny and, furthermore, utterly absurd, that is precisely their aim. These are plot summaries of Lysistrata and Acharnians, two comedies of the late fifth century BCE Athenian playwright Aristophanes. Both comedies were produced during the Peloponnesian War. The war that the respective protagonists of the two plays end is, indeed, the Peloponnesian War, a deadly conflict between Athens and Sparta, which embroiled the entire Greek-speaking world for almost 30 years (431–404 BCE). But while these particular stories of the successes of civilians in ending the Peloponnesian War are merely hypothetical scenarios from comedies, Aristophanes’ portrayal of civilians in such an active role shows his awareness of one basic, yet surprising, truth about the nature of Greek warfare: it was not only the armed forces who could affect the course of a war and its outcome. Furthermore, Aristophanes is not the only Greek fictional or historical author to portray civilians taking matters into their own hands to intervene in the course of a war.

Based on an overview of selected examples from Greek literature from Homer to the fourth century BCE, this chapter argues that non-combatants and civilians participated in warfare during all periods of Greek history, and their intervention – albeit never quite in the form of a sex strike or the proclamation of one’s farm as a separate state – often played a crucial role both in directing the course of wars and in determining their eventual outcome. Such active participation of civilians in war, if correctly assumed, complicates the picture of Classical Greek warfare traditionally accepted in modern scholarship as dominated by citizen militias, fighting honorably in hoplite formation.¹ Instead of this traditional narrative, the examination of the active involvement of civilians shown in this chapter presents a picture of Greek warfare that looks surprisingly akin to the experiences of civilians in later periods. As a reader of subsequent chapters in this volume will see, the experiences of Greek civilians under siege were not very different from those felt by those who were unfortunate enough to be besieged by the Romans in the Jewish War, described in Chapter 3. Likewise, Athenian farmers who grudgingly found themselves fighting in the Peloponnesian War would have found much in common with the citizen militias in Ottonian Germany, described in Chapter 5. Finally, the narrative of the escalating involvement of civilians in Greek warfare echoes remarkably closely to the story of a similarly escalating involvement of civilians in modern warfare, which Nicole Dombrowski Risser presents in her chapter. These similarities between the experiences of the Greek civilians and their later historical counterparts in wartime makes the Greek civilians’ story all the more valuable for anyone interested in the big picture of the global history of civilians and war. Weapons and military technology have changed drastically since the fifth century BCE, and yet, as this volume shows overall, the level of civilian involvement and civilian experiences in war, have retained remarkable similarities over time.

Warfare was endemic in the Greek world, but it was mostly a seasonal affair for Greek city-states until the fifth century BCE.² Every spring, citizen armies would set out to war, often not going further than the neighboring city, and upon the completion of the campaign, they would return forthwith.³ In any Greek city-state, the military class – meaning, adult citizen males who could afford to provide their own hoplite armor – would have been a minority, albeit one whose exact percentage is debatable.⁴ Upon setting out to war, therefore, the army left behind the vast majority of the population: women, children, the elderly and disabled, foreigners, slaves and, last but not least, adult male citizens who were either too poor to afford armor or, for some other reason, were not drafted or even illegally evaded the draft for the given campaign.⁵ What exactly did they do in time of war? And what were the contemporary views of their appropriate role in warfare? Finally, why was there no term designating “non-combatants” or “civilians” in the Ancient Greek language? These questions, significant for acquiring a complete picture of the Greek city at war, have yet to receive close attention in modern scholarship.⁶ This chapter proposes answers to these questions by surveying non-combatant and civilian participation in Greek land warfare from the Archaic period to the mid-fourth century BCE.

My argument proceeds chronologically, as I consider contemporary views on the ideal contributions of non-combatants to warfare in three different periods: Archaic Greece (c.800–480 BCE), the era of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), and the Late Classical period (the fourth century BCE). I argue that while discussions of civilian participation in warfare exist in evidence from all three periods, the portrayals of civilians’ involvement in warfare become increasingly less symbolic and more “hands-on” over time, reflecting both the changing nature of Greek land warfare and the shifting social dynamics in the Greek city-states.⁷

Specifically, I will argue that in the Archaic period, the accepted ideal was for the heroes to do the fighting, in order to retain their monopoly on glory. As a result, the participation of civilians in warfare in the Archaic period was strictly limited to the religious sphere. Moreover, civilians were not expected to contribute to the war effort through their own initiative. Rather, they awaited the instructions of the religious and military leaders. At the same time, there was an awareness that the exclusion of civilians from the war effort was detrimental to the morale of the entire state, because of the state of panic into which the unoccupied civilian could swiftly fall.

The rise of the hoplite phalanx sometime in the eighth century BCE eradicated the possibility of winning individual glory, since all soldiers now had to fight together as one within the formation. Over time, this new ideal of communal participation in war affected the place of the civilian in time of war as well. The era of the Peloponnesian War, specifically, with its introduction of “total war” mentality, encouraged a reassessment of the ideal roles of civilians in the process of war. The result was the creation of the character of the pacifist-activist civilian in Athenian drama. Through the analysis of the civilian participation in Aristophanes’ comedies Acharnians, Peace, and Lysistrata, I argue that the ideal non-combatant in the late fifth century BCE was a pacifist, who was thinking of increasingly more creative – albeit non-violent – ways to intervene into the process of warfare, with the ideal goal of ending the war without bloodshed. Outside the sphere of comedy, however, there remains the previous awareness of the necessity of including the civilian in the war effort in order to uphold the morale of the public and the army. This awareness, I argue, is visible in the Funeral Oration of the Athenian statesman Pericles.

Finally, following the invention of the catapult in the early fourth century BCE, and the increasing complexity of siege warfare thereafter, the role of the civilian in warfare evolved into an even more active one. I argue that from the fourth century onwards, because of the increase in siege warfare, the difference between combatants and non-combatants in the Greek city at war became tenuous, as all citizens were now expected to participate actively in the defense of their city, if it were under siege.

One obvious objection could be made to the study of non-combatants and civilians in Greek warfare: while ample vocabulary exists in the Ancient Greek language to designate armies and soldiers, there are no terms that mean “civilian” or “non-combatant.”⁸ A final aim of this study is to show that, while no neat terminology served to designate all non-combatants and civilians together, there existed, nevertheless, a concept of the population of each city-state as split into two clear-cut categories in wartime: those who fought in the official army, and those who did not. The universal recognition of this division is seen both in the treatment of non-combatants during the war and in the fate that typically awaited the different segments of the population upon defeat in war. During combat, informal laws of war by which the Greek city-states abided, frowned upon attacks primarily against non-combatants.⁹ After the war as well, women, children and, sometimes, the elderly were often treated differently from adult men. While the worst-case scenario awaiting the women and children of a defeated city was slavery, adult males could be summarily executed.¹⁰

Winning over the gods: civilians’ contribution to Archaic Greek warfare

The use of Homer as a historical sourc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: blurred boundaries and ambiguous divisions – civilians and combat from ancient times to the present
• PART I Case studies from the ancient and medieval world
• PART II Case studies from the early modern and modern world
• PART III Conceptual and historiographical debates and implications
• Index