Much has been said and written in the past about the strategies and tactics that the ancient Greeks employed on the battlefields and that were crucial to the development of Greek and European history.
In ancient Greece, the Greek army generally consisted of trained men who were dressed martially (chest armor, shin, helmet) and were skilled with weapons (spear, sling, bow, sword).
The Rhodians were the best slingers, the Cretans the best archers, the Acarnans (from Acarnania) and the Agrians (a people near the Strymon River) the best spearmen, and the Thracians the best peltasts.
The army of the ancient Greeks was the first to use military formations in battle and to charge with battle cries to attack the enemy.
The naval power of the time was Athens. The famous tactics of the Athenians are known, who misled their enemy by changing the formations of their fleet. In the land army, the Greek army has used siege engines such as siege rams, catapults, and siege towers since the 5th century BC, long before the Roman army (which had a mercenary army of Roman and foreign men).
The Romans copied the ancient Greek military model: the equipment (armor, horsemen, peltasts, spearmen, archers, slingers), the war constructions (triremes, siege engines), and the strategy, both in infantry and fleet.
The Syracusan Greeks in the Peloponnesian War—the Sicilian campaign (415–413 BC)—had Italian mercenaries from whom they learned the art of war. The Greeks also had trumpeters who gave military orders in battle, as well as pipers who coordinated the march of the soldiers
As for the Spartan army, it was the first to use military formations in battle, even changing them during the fight. This was long before the appearance of the Macedonian phalanx, created around 338 BC by the Macedonian king Philip II.
The Lacedaemonian hoplites wore a dark red epaulet or breastplate (the most heavily armed), a spear, a shield with the characteristic large Greek letter L (=Lacedaemonian), and a small hand tool (a killing knife). The soldiers synchronized their steps with the flute music. During the battle, the formations were changed so that the best warriors were on the front lines.
If the enemy broke the formation, the fallen soldiers were replaced by other hoplites in the battle area.
The Spartan army also used other war tactics. For example, one such ploy was to feign the inactivity of the Spartan army in order to mislead the enemy. However, both the Spartan and Macedonian armies were models of organization and tactics. The same is true of other armies, such as those of the Athenians and the Boeotians.
Even in late antiquity, Greek and Roman writers and even modern scholars studied the subject from a distance, either by thinking of the tactical movements of opposing armies on a map or by studying on a geostrategic and political level the conditions of the area.
But they almost all failed to deal with and study the necessity from which these tactical and strategic applications emerged and led to the element that had such a crucial effect on shaping the battlefield and societies, which is the invention and introduction of the military phalanx!
It is obvious that the success of the phalanx on the battlefield depended directly on the precision and timing of its movements and, of course, on the degree of discipline of those who formed it. The need to develop a method of transforming a large number of people from a simple gathering of a disorderly crowd into a synchronized, compact, and determined war machine with an excellent arrangement of lines became immediately apparent.
Of course, each individual soldier did not cease to have a distinct personality, with individual character, needs, and desires. The functioning of the phalanx, however, required the self-chosen and voluntary subjugation of personal needs and the conscious disciplining of the movements and decisions of each individual soldier.
Thus was born the culmination of Greek social consciousness, which meant the subordination of personal interests to societal ones.
In this way, privileged states were built, composed of conscientious, productive, and active citizens that we admire and envy today, as if they were an unattainable dream.
Thus, the person in charge decided under a specific military command what would be the next movement of the phalanx, but the common conscious co-decision of all hoplites was the simultaneous and precise execution of the specific movement at the specific time.
This naturally led to the next practical need: a clear and precise way to communicate the leader's orders to the last soldier in a manner understood by all and with common terminology.
Thus came the invention of the command, which is nothing more than a codification of a series of actions and movements at a given moment after the leader has said a short and sharp sentence or word.
With the goal of making these movements effective and synchronized on the battlefield, precision drills were introduced in peacetime to train and prepare soldiers.
The more precisely the hoplites executed their movements, the more effective they were on the battlefield, as shown by the example of the Spartans, who not only developed the idea of the phalanx but also turned military training into a true art, making it an indisputable benchmark of martial virtue throughout the ages. From ancient times to the present day, in the modern army, we say that the discipline index of a division is the degree of accuracy in the execution of precision exercises.
The ancient historians even transmitted to us the astonishment in the eyes of the Persians when they saw from a distance the advance of the Macedonian phalanx of Alexander the Great. They compared them perfectly and said that the hoplites were so perfectly balanced and lined up during their movement that, from a distance, they did not look like a crowd but like nails in perfect geometric position on a board. And this image alone made them freeze with fear.
