Fields of Death

Retracing Ancient Battlefields

Richard Evans

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781848847972
• eBook ISBN: 9781473829893
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

Richard Evans revisits the sites of a selection of Greek and Roman battles and sieges to seek new insights. The battle narratives in ancient sources can be a thrilling read and form the basis of our knowledge of these epic events, but they can just as often provide an incomplete or obscure record. Details, especially those related to topographical and geographical issues which can have a fundamental importance to military actions, are left tantalisingly unclear to the modern reader. The evidence from archaeological excavation work can sometimes fill in a gap in our understanding, but such an approach remains uncommon in studying ancient battles. By combining the ancient sources and latest archaeological findings with his personal observations on the ground, Richard Evans brings new perspectives to the dramatic events of the distant past. For example, why did armies miss one another in what we might today consider relatively benign terrain? Just how important was the terrain in determining victory or defeat in these clashes.The author has carefully selected battles and sieges to explore, first of all to identify their locations and see how these fit with the ancient evidence. He then examines the historical episodes themselves, offering new observations from first-hand study of the field of battle along with up-to-date photographs, maps and diagrams. In the process he discusses whether and how the terrain has since been changed by land use, erosion and other factors, and the extent to which what we see today represents a real connection with the dramatic events of the distant past. This first volume considers: 1. The Greek Victory over the Persians at Marathon (490 BC)2. Leonidas and his Three Hundred Spartans at Thermopylae (480 BC)3. The Athenian Siege of Syracuse (414-413 BC)4. The Syracusan Siege of Motya (397 BC)5. Alexander's Defeat of Darius at Issus (333 BC)6. Hannibal's Victory at Cannae (216 BC)7. Titus Quinctius Flamininus and Philip V at Cynoscephalae (197 BC)8. Gaius Marius' Victory over the Teutones at Aquae Sextiae (102 BC)9. Octavian versus Antony and Cleopatra of Egypt: The Battle of Actium (31 BC)10. The First Battle of Bedriacum (April AD 69)

Chapter One

The End of Sybaris (510 BC)

If you were to gaze out through the haze of a summer’s day from the Pollino Massif in that part of southern Italy, which is the border between Calabria and Basilicata, where the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas are separated by scarcely a hundred kilometres (60 miles) of mountainous terrain, you might find it difficult to grasp that two and a half thousand years ago there should have been visible below towards the east a thriving metropolis. H.V. Morton wrote, in one of his travels to Italy in the mid-1960s, that:

When I left Castrovillari I could look down over blue hills and woodland to the Ionian Sea and the yellow plain upon which the city of Sybaris once stood. Rich and famous, the parent of Paestum, a city that could put three hundred thousand men into the field, a city whose wealth and luxury excited the envy of the Hellenic world. Sybaris has vanished from the map.¹

This city is mentioned numerous times in the ancient literature and examples of its coinage illustrate apparently a sophisticated and wealthy community. It is a little more than thirty-four kilometres (21 miles) from the town of Castrovillari to the Museo di Sibaritide, which is situated on the edge of an area that has been identified, after prolonged excavation work, as the site of Thurii beneath which lay Sybaris. The landscape is a rather non-descript coastal plain of mostly cultivated fields criss-crossed by roads and irrigation ditches. The museum, a modern building of utilitarian design, constructed some years after Morton came here, is also about three kilometres (¾ of a mile) from the sea and the modern lidos that characterize the landscape of the Italian coastline. This countryside has that timeless quality that is quintessentially Mediterranean although, as is often the case, it hides well the fact that much has changed here since the ancient world, not least it seems the disappearance of so powerful a city of the Greeks. How and why did Sybaris cease to be and how much truth can we attach to the ancient accounts of its end? These questions and a search for answers are the focus of the discussion here in this first chapter of tracing ancient battlefields.

Not least among the intriguing aspects of this subject is the widely reported information that once the city of Sybaris had been occupied by its besiegers the Crotoniates they not only levelled the whole urban area to the ground but they then covered it with water. Indeed the geographer Strabo, writing in the first century AD, states (16.1.14) that the local river or rivers, the Crathis and the Sybaris, were diverted over the site so that its whereabouts would thereafter be completely forgotten. Yet it was not forgotten and in fact tales about Sybaris and its end seem to have quickly sprung up during or soon after the Classical period of Greece, initially perhaps within a generation or two of its apparent demise. The result was that the city’s name became forever linked with wealth and unimaginable riches, and its citizens described as devotees of an unparalleled decadent lifestyle. However, scepticism has not surprisingly been voiced and here again it is well worth noting another comment by Morton.

Why Sybaris should be so fascinating is difficult to say. Perhaps the words ‘sybaritic’ and ‘sybarite’ give it a certain interest, though when one has read all the references to ‘sybaritism’, how commonplace they are: the feasts, the street awnings, the honour paid to cooks, the chariots in which men visited their estates, the Maltese lapdogs which women carried, the pet monkeys, the purple cloaks, the scented hair bound by gold fillets … all this appears merely to reflect a standard of living that one would expect to find in any rich community of the time. Why the writers of antiquity should have picked upon Sybaris as the symbol of excessive luxury is difficult to understand.²

Aelian in his Varia Historia also pours cold water on the notion that Sybaris was destroyed for its luxurious lifestyle. Aelian (1.19) calls the destruction of Sybaris a widely circulated popular tale (δημώδης λόγος) but says that the Ionian city of Colophon was also destroyed for its attachment to luxury and that this information was much less well known. So too the downfall of the Bacchiadae at Corinth was caused by what Aelian describes as excessive luxury (τρύφη). Aelian was writing about AD 200 and his dismissal of the tale should alert us to the fact that the destruction of Sybaris even if a real event had become embellished by extraneous details.³ Therefore the discussion here will also focus on why these have entered the tradition and, having advanced some reason for such material dominating what should be a straightforward account of a war between two states, some idea about what occurred in 510 and which brought about disaster to Sybaris will be presented.

Southern Italy was a prosperous region of the ancient Mediterranean world and contained from early times a large population of Greeks. The Greek cities of the southern coast of Italy from east to west were: Taras (Tarentum), Metapontion (Metapontum), Heracleia (Siris), Sybaris (later called Thurii and later still Copia), Croton, Caulonia and Locris Epizephyri (‘Locri towards the west wind’), which were roughly fifty to sixty kilometres (25–30 miles) from one another, with finally far-flung Region (Rhegium), which completed this line of cities at the Straits separating Italy from Sicily.⁴ Sybaris is said to have been among the first to be established by the Greeks in a region, which became known as Magna Graecia, in the last decades of the eighth century BC. It was therefore among that initial wave of settlements set up by the Greeks as they ventured into the western Mediterranean from mainland Greece at just about the same time as Homer was recounting the stories of the Trojan War and the homecoming – or was it setting up new homes – of the various Greek heroes who had fought in this epic struggle.⁵ Other cities founded in this same period include Naxos, Syracuse, Leontinoi, Catane, Messene (Zancle) and Megara Hyblaia in Sicily and Region, Croton and Taras.⁶ On account of its antiquity Sybaris naturally held a preeminent place in the communities of the region, but its immediate southerly neighbour Croton – a mere 200 stadia (40 kilometres, 25 miles) separates them – was founded only a very short time afterwards (Strabo, 6.1.12). The founders of Sybaris were Achaeans (Strabo, 6.1.13) and it is possible that a former citizen of Helice, a city which was situated on the southern shore of the Corinthian Gulf, was the leader of the settlers. These were almost certainly looking to trade with the local Italian tribes. The identity of the founder is uncertain because the text of Strabo is not fully intelligible at this point, and a lacuna may be conjectured, but if it was indeed a Helicaean then this provides a link that is perhaps of a considerable significance in the later tradition about the fate of his city and its people (see further below).⁷ Considering the fame of Sybaris, Strabo’s coverage is surprisingly brief in comparison to the other cities and he merely states that Sybaris became a great power with control extending over four of its neighbouring states and that this included twenty-five satellite towns, that it could muster an army of 300,000,⁸ and its city had circuit walls of fifty stadia (ten kilometres, approximately 6 miles), and that it was destroyed by Croton in a campaign that lasted a little more than two months (seventy days).⁹ After Strabo relates a rise to dizzy heights of power and wealth he shows an equally sudden disinterest in the general history of Sybaris thereafter in what was said to have been a great power.

Today the generally accepted foundation date for Sybaris is roughly 720 BC, yet there is some internal conflict in Strabo’s evidence that makes this date uncertain and seems at odds with the information rendered by a writer known in modern times as Pseudo-Scymnus, who lived in the first century BC.¹⁰ First of all this is because Strabo’s account of Croton is far more elaborate than that for the other Italian Greek cities, and contained in it there is also mention of Sybaris. This is not a problem if Croton was founded after Syabaris but Strabo appears to think that it was founded just before Syracuse or about 735. The oikist or founder of Croton is said to have been a certain Myscellus who had sought and received an oracle from the Pythia at Delphi concerning the whereabouts of a new settlement. He was advised to situate the new town at the place where Croton was eventually established, but when he reconnoitred the area he preferred the site of the already established Sybaris. Seeking a second message from Apollo he was told to ignore Sybaris and settle where he was first directed. While on this second visit to Delphi he is supposed to have met Archias, who was to be the oikist of Syracuse, who helped in the settlement of Croton before he sailed down the coast to Sicily. The chronology clearly does not work, and this immediately calls into question either the date of the foundation of Sybaris or that of Croton and Syracuse. The date attributed to Syracuse may of course be rather too early for in a way it is remarkable that the Greeks are described as setting up settlements in Sicily before they did in so in southern Italy, which was closer to mainland Greece.¹¹ Thus Syracuse’s enhanced antiquity may well have been deliberate and an instance of Sicilian pride.¹² Croton too could easily have accepted a series of immigrants over a generation or so and the stories of their arrival were synthesized into one grand tale. To be the first was important and there is clearly some element of one-upmanship in the stories attached to foundations of cities especially those in the western Mediterranean. Syracuse certainly aspired to be the first of the Sicilian Greek cities, a dispute over primacy between Sybaris and Croton, may therefore be exposed in this account and probably had an early origin. The dates themselves were always mere approximations and were recognized as such by most sensible commentators in antiquity. However, that there was some debate about the respective ages of Croton and Sybaris can in part account for the hostility between two states vying with each other for dominance in both territorial extent and respectability in a region where, because of the geographical constraints, the military expansion of one could spell disaster for the other.

In terms of literary evidence, the destruction of Sybaris is first remarked upon by Herodotus writing about seventy-five years after the event. Although it could be supposed that he would have shown a particular interest in the history of this city, especially since he was then living in Thurii,¹³ his comments are quite brief and lacking much substance. Sybaris’ end was not an episode directly related to Herodotus’ main theme of the wars between the Greeks and Persians. Still the writer was also not above going into lengthy digressions when these might suit or enliven his narrative. That he seems to pay scant regard to the Sybarites is curious. Herodotus’ history is the literary source that is by far the closest in time to the event in question and the evidence it provides about Sybaris tends to highlight economic or other ties between this and other cities on the Greek mainland and in Ionia rather than military issues. There is a specific recall of a firm relationship between the citizens of Sybaris and Miletus, although the focus of his attention is on the destruction of the latter in 494/3, a decade and half after that of the former.

The Sybarites, who were living in Laos and Scidros, after the fall of their city did not exhibit the correct form of respect for the people of Miletus following their own disaster, for after the destruction of Sybaris the entire citizen body of the Milesians including the boys shaved their heads and went into deep mourning as a sign of the friendship between the two cities. In fact I am not aware of two other cities that were more closely linked.¹⁴ (Herodotus, 6.21)

This connection has been the subject of scrutiny since Sybaris did not have an ethnic tie with Miletus, which was, however, highly active in setting up trading posts around the Euxine and the northern Aegean.¹⁵ The reason for the distress of the citizens of Miletus is therefore held to have been not one of sentimental origin but of economics for it is implied that the Milesians lost a valuable market for their goods. The Sybarites were apparently very fond of wearing cloth imported from Ionia. When Miletus was ravaged and depopulated by the Persians after a siege in 494/3,¹⁶ Herodotus states that any surviving Sybarites did not respond to the fate of the Milesians with the same sympathy that had been accorded them. It should be noted though that they were no longer living in their own city and this supposed economic bond had long been severed. That link itself may also be associated in a rather more negative way with lifestyle since both cities were considered to have been devoted to luxury. Men who wore their hair long surely had a great deal of leisure time and did not face the drudgery of physical labour. Herodotus may have intended his comment to reflect poorly on the people of Sybaris, although it is rather unfair if any survivors of the fall of the city were living elsewhere. On the other hand, he is not particularly complimentary about the Milesians either in his account of the Ionian revolt against Persia. Moreover, those Sybarites referred to by Herodotus may have left Sybaris even before its capture by Croton and been the supporters of Telys who had made himself tyrant of the city, possibly in emulation of Histiaeus, tyrant of Miletus and prime instigator of the Ionian Revolt. The relationship between the two states may therefore...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Abbreviations and Notes
• Maps and Plans
• List of Plates
• Chapter 1: The End of Sybaris (510 BC)
• Chapter 2: The Athenian Siege of Syracuse (414–413 BC)
• Chapter 3: The Siege and Destruction of Motya (397 BC)
• Chapter 4: Aquae Sextiae and Vercellae (102–101 BC): Marius’ Victories over the Germans
• Chapter 5: Julius Caesar, Mithridates of Pergamum and the Relief of Alexandria (47 BC)
• Notes
• Bibliography