"Ancient Greek - Camp Appearance?" Topic

So I'm working on a Peloponnesian war project and need to know what a besieging army would look like during the period. I have a ton of reference for the city itself but not much for the look of the army outside the walls.

Any idea on what a camp would look like? What kind of tents (if tents at all)? How they would build counter walls or stockades?

Thanks!

-Brinton

The late Peter Connolly included a useful section on siege warfare in his seminal 'Greece and Rome at War'.

Although we must assume encircling walls would have been wooden palisade atop a ditch and bank in the usual fashion (spoil from the ditch raises the rampart), Connolly shows how at a protracted siege (Plataea) the spoil from the ditches was made into mud brick to raise two 'brick' parallel walls on the rampart.

The space between the two walls was roofed over with a walk way (and the men sheltered in the roofed-over space between the walls – so not much need for tents …)..

Camps: generally, I don't think Greek camps were fortified or 'organised': Herodotus makes a big thing about the Persian fortified refuge at Plataea in 479 as if such things were unknown (of course, the description that follows is pretty much of a stockade big enough to contain the army's camp) … so in the usual summer months at least, I would assume a higgledy-piggledy sea of men sleeping under the stars around camp fires … freelance sutlers with their supplies on donkeys and carts, servants staying awake on guard.

Tents: senior figures would have had tents (as do the heroes at Troy …) but there are no surviving examples or illustrations. Most commentators think these would have been pavillion style rectangular tents. I agree: it is asserted these days that classical architecture probably derives in imitation of tents and temporary buildings (especially of the Persian pavillions in the temporary cities that were part of the invasion of Xerxes): pillars are posts, the pitched roof is the canvas etc. etc.

Altars: all camps would have had an altar (as ritual was part of the daily routine) – which needn't have been more than a raised platform with barbecue coals on it (where the sacred parts of the animals would have been burned). An organised force like the Spartan army took their own flock of sheep with them for ritual purposes.

Baggage: Greek baggage is basically bundles, baskets and amphorae. There are fold up chairs and low tables and benches on vase paintings.

Good luck

Phil
soawargamesteam.blogspot.com

Phil has it right, I think, but I was struck by this:

it is asserted these days that classical architecture probably derives in imitation of tents and temporary buildings (especially of the Persian pavillions in the temporary cities that were part of the invasion of Xerxes): pillars are posts, the pitched roof is the canvas etc. etc.

Do you mind if I ask by whom this is asserted? It doesn't sound terribly likely to me – except for the Odeon of Pericles, of course, but that remained rather untypical; and theatre buildings I suppose – not least because of a certain chronological implausibility, since most of the key features of classical Greek architecture were in place before the Persian wars.

That doesn't mean that those who could afford them didn't have rectangular pavilion tents.

Feel free to ignore the following rambling vocabulary note:

The usual word for tent in classical Greek is σκηνή – which is also used for market stalls, stage buildings and tilts on wagons; basically any kind of fairly flimsy, temporary structure. Casual references to 'tents' in Xenophon et al thus usually don't distinguish between fancy pavilions, more basic tents, and bashas. The Homeric word is κλισίη, which is literally just a place for lying down. Given that they often have the epithet 'well-built', or 'well-put-together' – and the length of the war – many people have taken them to be huts or cabins rather than tents as such. But big, fairly elaborate tents would fit too.

xpalpatinex,
I agree with EvilBen, the Greek word for tent could mean other things, including hut. One source of information on huts showed a framework of saplings bent and tied together. This is the sort of thing I could see covering with leather to become a tent. If you had more time, you could gradually replace the tent cover with wattle and daub, adobe or thatch, and end up with a hut. While the Athenians were campaigning on Sicily, they left their camp behind for months, until somebody came along and burned it down--I'm thinking these were huts, not portable tents.

Xenophon talks of crossing a river on leather tent covers filled with straw.

For transport, the Greeks started out (before the Persian Wars) using pack animals, but gradually incorporated ox carts more and more. Philip of Macedon banned the use of ox carts in his army.

I don't think the Greeks ever had the Roman enthusiasm for marching camps or building walls generally. They put their camps on hills or other hard to attack places. They did use stakes in the ground, though according to Polybius, they didn't use a single stake with a sharpened end, preferring a single trunk that split into branches they had sharpened. They sometimes built low stone walls with prickly bushes on top, reminding me of a zariba. When the Spartans beseiged Plataea, they built a double wall around the town, with watchtowers and roofs; it was 4.5m wide.

Cooking fires might have had grills for cooking.

Some books:
Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon by J. K. Anderson
Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army by Donald W. Engels
The Greek State at War by W. Kendrick Pritchett

Grelber

I understand from the alleged reaction of Pyrrhus to Roman camps that the latter far exceeded Greco-Macedonian forms of camp organisation.

I just got back from the art store, where I looked through a Dover book of somebody's Greek and Roman drawings. They had a picture, probably taken from a Greek vase, of what they called an "itinerant shrine." This was a light wagon drawn by two horses, and would be just the thing to take along with your army.
Grelber

'When he learned that the Romans were near and lay encamped on the further side of the river Siris, he rode up to the river to get a view of them; and when he had observed their discipline, the appointment of their watches, their order, and the general arrangement of their camp, he was amazed, 5 and said to the friend that was nearest him: "The discipline of these Barbarians is not barbarous; but the result will show us what it amounts to."' Plutarch, Pyrrhus 16.
Livy has Philip V saying something similar almost a century later.

This could mean either "Crikey, they are well organised, considering they are barbarians" or "Crikey, they are better organised than us".

Much of the detail of Greek camps comes from much later than the Peloponnesian War.
Livy (putting words in Hannibal's mouth) says that it was Pyrrhus who taught [the Romans and/or Carthaginians] the skill of fortifying camps. Certainly there were fortified camps in Greece around a century earlier – Iphikrates regularly used them.
Polybius says that the Greeks of his times used camps to fit the shape of the land, using nature rather than muscle. They were protected with abatis rather than individual stakes – he says the abatis was inferior as it gave more handholds for the enemy to pull it aside.

Polybius, of course, is about 250 years after the Peloponnesian War (so as near to that period as we are to the American Revolution) …

The detail is very useful though … I think it is clear that between the Persian Wars (and Herodotus's awe at Mardonius's fortified camp) and Pyrrhus (trusting to a story in Livy … ) the Greeks learned a lot of the military arts.

Apologies to EvilBen for taking a while to respond – the notes were on an older computer … for the styles of Greek architecture coming from wooden and temporary structures, I tink this is an established view (certainly taught to me when I did my classical archetecture seminars at University – and that's some while back …) and depends on identifying triglyphs, guttae etc. as vestigial indications of wooden joinery (but which are entirely non-structural as they are decorations on stone blocks) …

The pavilion stuff etc. comes from e.g. this on Livius.org, and made sense to me. Yes, the Pericles Odeon is at the heart of that argument. However, I think there was also a change of scale in the architecture of the generation following the invasion of Xerxes. Off topic, I know (and a conflation …)..

I'm not sure about itinerant shrines …

Phil
Ancients on the Move

Many thanks, Phil.

To stay in this little byway off the side of the topic, I would have thought that the change in scale in the fifth century, represented by the temple of Zeus at Olympia and the Parthenon in Athens – both of which can be seen as victory monuments for the Persian wars – is partly a matter of greater wealth, allowing such ambitious projects actually to be completed in a reasonable time (compare the earlier – pre-invasion – temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens…). (Mind you, some of the Ionian temples of the archaic period were pretty hefty, though not so huge as their later successors.) Of course that wealth came at the expense of the Persians in the first instance. But the Olympia temple is just a scaled-up version of earlier Doric temples (like that of Aphaia on Aegina). The Parthenon may show (subtle) signs of influence by Persian forms, but that influence would have come from the Persians' own monumental architecture, not their tents. And most of the temples built in the fifth century were much smaller than the Parthenon or Zeus at Olympia, and much less… odd than than the Parthenon.

The thing about stone Doric temples developing from wooden archetypes is persistent, but (in e.g. the way Peter Connolly beautifully reconstructed it) subject to intense criticism these days. Barletta's The origins of the Greek architectural orders (2001) has the most sustained, but sensible, criticism of this interpretation, if anyone's interested, and has been generally accepted, I think (though not in every detail). Modern(ish) orthodoxy is I think fairly expressed in James Whitley's 2001 book on Greek archaeology thus: "The Doric order is not then derived directly from a wooden prototype. It is rather an ingenious synthesis of apparently wooden forms, expressed in stone. Its genealogy is complex, and may not fit into simple evolutionary schemes." (page 163)

To lurch back somewhere nearer the topic: none of that means that the Greeks weren't very taken with the Persian tents they saw during the invasion. Even though it was an architectural dead end, the Periclean Odeon is proof enough of that; and I'm sure that more conventional imitations were all the rage during the fifth century.

No .. I'd have no arguments with any of that …

I must confess that my interest was originally inspiried the other way (planning a Persian camp and working backwards from the Odeon story to get an idea of the kind of structures that might have been involved) …

Thanks for the references.

My pleasure entirely.

Did the Persian camp get made? Was it for a Plataea thing?

Thanks for the discourse folks…

What's funny Phil is I'm actually doing Plataea. I'm doing the very early part of the siege I assume before they built the double encircling walls, camped in-between them, roofed them, hung pictures, setup wifi hotspots and settled in for a bit of gardening. I'm building a game of the ~300 odd Thebans who snuck in and took the agora at night. Then they had to try and fight their way out when the townspeople realized they weren't that tough after all. It'll basically be a big city fight with the Theban camp and town walls at one far side of the board representing the goal for the Theban players.

Quick question – In 28mm (or 25mm) who makes tents that would be a good representation of the commanders tents? Or, lacking that, any good reference/drawings of what they should look like if I scratch build it?

Thanks,

Brinton