Just how much training did an ancient army require?

[PMBardunias]

I am curious about opinions on the training of ancient armies (mentioned in another thread).  There is what believe to be compelling evidence that hoplites for example had a minimal level of formal drill.  I have watched a group about 50 men trained to deploy and move in the manner of a 5th century phalanx, complete with Laconian countermarch in less than an hour.

This makes me wonder about all of the uses for training and how historical armies dealt with each challenge:

1) Individual weapon skill (or horsemanship)
2) Deployment
3) Group movement coordination
4) Fighting in groups
5) Not routing
6) Regrouping after routing

To start us off, here are may answers for hoplites:

1) Limited training.  As Xenophon tells us, weapon use is "natural" like an animal using it's claws or teeth. Probably it was handled within families, and Hoplomachoi provide training for the wealthy, but even this is most useful in the rout and chase.
2) Xenophon's "Dinner drill" shows how simple deployment is from a line of march.  As long as the men know who stands in front of them, or that there is no one in front of you if you are a file leader, all you have to do is form up to the left of the files in front of you. It is indicative that only Spartans could form up with just anyone- probably because they had a better understanding of their actual place in file and rank.
3) Here, I believe much of this is best explained by drawing in concepts from swarm behavior that do not require very much training or understanding of the movement of the larger group around you. For example, birds and fish move in elegant unity by simply responding to the few individuals around them- which Thucydides tell us is all a hoplite has awareness of in any case. Some things that are not traditionally considered drill- like group dancing or even wrestling- made moving in groups, where much of the information is passed between men by reading the jostling of those around them, easier.
4) While I am sure that a hoplite would take opportunity shots at men to either side of the foe in front of him, I believe such tactics are wildly overblown and hoplites focused on the fellow in front of them.
5) Part of the problem with all of the lack of excessive drill described above is that hoplites could be quick to break.  More drill, seen in groups like the Spartans and probably the various select units, the Sacred bands, etc., carried the primary advantage of allowing men to stay on task when bad things happened.  To counter this, hoplites formed up first with kin, then with civic groups, which eliminated anonymity in flight, and raised the price of doing so an leaving allies to die.
6) The linear deployment described above and emphasis on standing ground that aids in holding a position in battle rendered hoplite formations largely unable to reform without some physical feature to rally around.

[RichT]

There's a lot that could be said, but this:

More drill ... carried the primary advantage of allowing men to stay on task when bad things happened.

seems to me to be the crux of it. Probably anyone could march around a parade ground in good style with very little training; but doing the same thing in the heat of battle required more drill and experience.

[evilgong]

Ask the re-enactment people.  They know about such things.

[Erpingham]

Ask the re-enactment people.  They know about such things.

They will tell you the basics of personal drill are quickly taught and can be improved through practice (ask any drill sergeant on the latter ).

What may be harder - opinions from the more knowledgeable on classical matters needed - is moving beyond drill moves to operating on a battlefield.  Did armies muster in large groups and go through evolutions?  Or was this where on-the-job experience kicked in?

[RichT]

For Hellenistic armies, yes they did large scale manoeuvres, some examples:

(Perseus, Macedonians): "It was the custom when the ceremony of purification was finished to manoeuvre the army and dividing it into battle-lines to clash in a sham battle." Livy 40.6.5

(Citium review, Perseus, Macedonians): "The array of the review was set briefly in motion (not however in a regular manoeuvre), so that they might not seem to have merely stood under arms; the king summoned them, in arms as they were, to an assembly." Livy 42.52.4

(Philopoemen, Achaeans): "Moreover, we are told that at the celebration of the Nemean games, when he was general of the Achaeans for the second time and had recently won his victory at Mantineia, but was at leisure the while on account of the festival, Philopoemen in the first place displayed before the assembled Greeks his phalanx, with its splendid array, and performing its tactical evolutions, as it was wont to do, with speed and vigour." Plut Philop 11.1-2

Also clarification from the other thread, it was Livy said this, not Polybius:

"The twenty-sixth year was passing, since peace had been granted to Philip at his request; throughout all that time unmolested Macedonia had both produced offspring, a large number of whom were of military age, and yet, in minor wars with her Thracian neighbours, of a sort to give training rather than to produce weariness, had been unremittingly in arms." Livy 42.52.1-2

Though Polybius was Livy's main source here, so ultimately Polybius.

[Patrick Waterson]

I don't think the efficacy of training or experience is doubted.
I think the more interesting question is: How much combat experience did the average soldier have? I am positing the answer: very little.

This may be not far off the mark, although the historical record may be missing a lot of comparatively low-level combat activity (raids, patrols, etc.).  Alexander the Great's men had on average one or two battles and one or two sieges every year, in addition to various subjection campaigns which get only a sentence or two in the sources.  So out of 365 days in the average year, they might be in combat for 25 or so, one way or another.  Xenophon's Ten Thousand seemed to have an action every week or two.  In each case, the result was troops who were essentially at the top of their class.

In any event (as Richard has also pointed out), classical period phalanx combat does not appear to have been particularly lethal, at least for the winner.

This essential seeks to avoid the maths, by saying there is an inexhaustible supply of foreigners willing to die to give me experience.

Is this not what Alexander found?   Although one does not have to kill opponents to gain experience, merely defeat them.  Some will of course end up dead, but even in a rout like Issus or Gaugamela this is usually no more than 16-25% of the total and the vast majority of the loser's deaths occur after the battle has been won.  Spartans forbore to pursue routers ('let the cowards breed'), indicating that killing per se was not considered ipso facto essential for putting an edge on a soldier's quality.

Take a really simple case, two adjacent Greek city states who don't like each other. Pick your lethality numbers, maybe 3% for the victor and 10% for the loser? There is no way that a population could sustain annual practice, its too lethal. So I think that most of an army, most of the time, had no combat experience. But then periodically you have an unlucky age cohort who accumulate a lot of experience and probably have their demography and economy wrecked for a generation because of it.

There might be some excellent direct evidence that suggests otherwise?

Again, I would not equate death with combat experience (particularly for the deceased ).  Being in the field, seeing and facing an actual enemy and surviving your first combat through following your training all helped to cement troop quality; striking down an opponent, while wonderful for individual morale, was an optional extra.  What seems to have been most important was being 'in the system' for some length of time; combat experience put the edge upon good, or even adequate, training and self-belief.

The classic case in these matters is the war between Sparta and Thebes from 395 to 387 BC, the so-called 'Corinthian War'.  395-394 BC saw, unusually, three major land battles (two Spartan victories) and a major sea battle (a Spartan defeat).  393 BC saw raiding and a battle at Lechaeum, won by the Spartans.  392 BC was quieter, as everyone avoided engaging Spartans and tried to build up their diplomatic positions (i.e. get Persian support and money); the Spartans raided Persian territory.

391 BC was quite exciting, as Iphicrates reversed the trend of Spartan victory at Lechaeum and the Spartans countered by invading Argos.  No major battles resulted.  390 BC was comparatively quiet; in 389 BC Sparta assailed Acarnania and inflicted a defeat, taking Acarnania out of the war.  Spartan operations against Asia Minor continued until Iphicrates ambushed the Spartan force involved.  At the same time fighting spread to Aegina, in what became primarily a war of ambushes, land and naval.

The following year, the Spartan general Antalcidas persuaded the Persians that supporting the anti-Spartan league was not helping them (the Persians were also keen to make peace in Greece, the reason being they wanted to hire Greek mercenaries to help them reconquer Egypt) and the Persians accordingly shifted support to Sparta, resulting in the King's Peace of 387 BC.

The result of all this fighting was that the city-states involved all developed experienced armies, but interestingly began to switch their emphasis from citizen hoplite armies to epilektoi, full-time crack troops almost on the Spartan model.  The reaction to continuous war was to produce a class of men who specialised in continuous warfare.  City-state demographics seem to have been largely unaffected, although Sparta continued to show a steady decline; this decline would not however become critical until after Leuctra in 371 BC and its aftermath.  Economies may have been strained, although they were a long way from being wrecked (with the possible exception of Corinth, which had been a main battleground for much of the war and was temporarily subsumed by Argos) and Athens actually seems to have improved in all respects during the fighting.

In any event, with re-establishment of what was essentially the status quo ante bellum, both sides subsided muttering for the next sixteen years or so, the Spartans keeping their hand in with occasional punitive expeditions against the more prominent mutterers.

[Edit: tidied up typos]

[Dangun]

Again, I would not equate death with combat experience (particularly for the deceased ).  Being in the field, seeing and facing an actual enemy and surviving your first combat through following your training all helped to cement troop quality; striking down an opponent, while wonderful for individual morale, was an optional extra.  What seems to have been most important was being 'in the system' for some length of time; combat experience put the edge upon good, or even adequate, training and self-belief.

I don't mind, how we define combat experience. I think any experience or training would be valuable.
But I am very interested in how much the average soldier had. I sense a potentially very large difference between the casual comments we make and reality.

In any event, with re-establishment of what was essentially the status quo ante bellum, both sides subsided muttering for the next sixteen years or so, the Spartans keeping their hand in with occasional punitive expeditions against the more prominent mutterers.

And that illustrates the point... for a whole generation afterwards (and maybe beforehand? not my period) no-one had any experience. So for an unlucky few age cohorts they get a lot of experience and many of them die. But most potential soldiers, most of the time, would have had no combat experience at all. I think the combat experience of your average Roman legionnaire might also be surprisingly low.

The efficacy or training/drill seems obvious.

[Andreas Johansson]

And that illustrates the point... for a whole generation afterwards (and maybe beforehand? not my period) no-one had any experience.

But that's not true. The next major war broke out in 378, just nine years after the end of the Corinthian War, and in the meantime there'd been Spartan interventions in Boeotia and whatnot.

At the other end, there's also just nine years between the end of the (2nd) Peloponnesian War and the start of the Corinthian, and in between there was opportunity for excercise most notably in the expedition of the Ten Thousand.

[Patrick Waterson]

Not to mention Chabrias' mercenaries in Cypriot (390 BC) and Egyptian (c.377 BC) service and then Iphicrates' in Persian service (375-3 BC).  Arguably, these men acquired more combat experience than did their compatriots in Greece.

I don't mind, how we define combat experience. I think any experience or training would be valuable.
But I am very interested in how much the average soldier had. I sense a potentially very large difference between the casual comments we make and reality.

And whether we equate combat experience with battle experience.  The latter is often a subset of the former, especially for cavalry and lighter types of infantry.

If we consider Xernophon's Ten Thousand, when they initially came together they included numbers of men with no combat experience whatsoever (and some officers with no command experience).  Yet between their ethnic elan and their battle-wise leader and comrades (and the presence of veterans is as good as personal combat experience for making a unit effective*) they were fighting fit by the time they assembled at Tarsus (some contingents had on-the-job training against Thracians etc. as a by-product of Cyrus' cover plan for assembling his army) and sufficiently effective at Cunaxa to beat (in stages) the entire Achaemenid army.

[*It was standard Wehrmacht practice to keep a unit in the field until it burned down to about 20% of its strength.  It was then sent back to Germany to rebuild; the veterans trained the new recruits and the full-strength unit returned to the front fully combat-effective.]

So for an unlucky few age cohorts they get a lot of experience and many of them die.

With reference to Greek hoplite warfare, the first part is usually more true than the second.

Getting back to the hypothetical instance of a polis which fields an army, loses 3% and inflicts 10% and the question of how long it (or its foes) can sustain such operations, it is worth considering the 'replacement rate', i.e. how many citizens come of age and take up arms each year.  This will of course vary depending upon the birth rate, death rate, abundance or scarcity of food, disease and such factors, but normally in the ancient or classical world the population pyramid will have a 'youth bulge' which more than makes up for the 3%.  10% is unsustainable (leading to Livy's implicit questioning of his sources about Rome's repeated annual early victories over its immediate neighbours) and appears to be sufficient to promote peacemaking, or at least avoidance, for a few years.  (The latter is my impression; I have not correlated it with recorded loss figures and it anyway does not apply to Rome.)

However even in a decade of (relative) peace the younger citizens of a polis will a) exercise for war and b) converse with their living antecedents and friends of same, picking up knowledge, information and a few interesting tricks second-hand.  Once contemporaries engage in mercenary service, they will come back with experiences and stories which are avidly devoured and go into the pool of general knowledge.

And there will usually be a war (generally foreign, occasionally civil) every few years - not necessarily a major one, although these are not infrequent in 5th-4th century BC Greece - so everyone gets to keep their hand in.

But most potential soldiers, most of the time, would have had no combat experience at all. I think the combat experience of your average Roman legionnaire might also be surprisingly low.

Or surprisingly high.  The doors of the Temple of Janus were only closed twice (indicating Rome was not at war) for two years during the history of the Republic.  Livy describes annual campaigns as the norm.  While not every Roman served every year, a Roman citizen's military service obligation extended to sixteen (if I remember correctly) campaigns, and most of these campaigns would involve fighting, often more than once.

The efficacy or training/drill seems obvious.

Yes.  I suppose what we are really reaching for in this discussion is whether good training is more important than actual combat experience in determining a soldier's (and a unit's) effectiveness.  It probably is, although it is a bit like asking which is better: the cake or the icing.

[Erpingham]

There are a whole set of nested questions here.

What were the key points of advantage of trained and/or experienced troops?  We can agree, I expect, that untrained and inexperinced is bad and trained and experienced is good but where do the advantages lie in between?  Are well trained inexperienced troops better than badly trained troops with some combat experience? 

How well was experience and training distributed.  Andreas and Patrick have demonstrated that Greece had a period where there was always something going on, even if there was no major war.  But was this experience equally spread, or were there communities who rarely fought and ones who had a near constant level of low level war?  Did mercenaries come from all communities or were they the speciality of only some?  This would be important in the refreshing of communities experience of war even if not actually at war.

And a related point, which Patrick has touched on, which is the importance of leaders with experience (from generals to nco-equivalents).  The availability of combat-tested leaders seems to me to be a constant theme when it comes to what we might refer to as citizen armies, where the army is drawn from obligated civilians rather than a social or professional military caste.

[Dangun]

But that's not true. The next major war broke out in 378, just nine years after the end of the Corinthian War, and in the meantime there'd been Spartan interventions in Boeotia and whatnot.

I was actually relying on Patrick's quote, where I think he said 16 years... 

Anyway, we may have picked a portion of Greek history crowded with violence. Or maybe it was constant. I am not sure, that is part of the question.

But even if Greek history really (in aggregate) is so violent that someone, somewhere is always getting lethal combat experience, we have to demonstrate - as Anthony suggests in the comment re: distribution - that all Greek citizens/potential hoplites are always getting the same experience. Consider by analogy, a Roman timeline of violence, it might look like a font of lethal combat experience, but what percentage of the legions fought in any one engagement or campaign, 5%? 10% on average? What about the lucky buggers sunning themselves in a Spanish garrison. (I haven't thought through the specifics of Spain as example, but it illustrates the point.)

[aligern]

Could I add to this thread fitness and particularly stamina. I suggest there is a major difference between a unit that does hard regular marches, trains with heavy swords, practise shields, etc, and one in which chaps sit in garrisons or ponce around the palace or get blind drunk in the mead hall and do a bit of hunting. My suggestion is that skill with your weapon might be relatively easy to train, but endurance isn't. A good swordsman with stamina will keep up a rhythm of attack and parry with his opponent until one if them tires. He then has to parry more and eventually, if the difference in fitness is great enough, the fitter man will wound or kill his opponent. A man, shall we say a Kelt, who slashes madly for the first few minutes is dangerous and intimidating, but if you can hold him off he will tire and become an easy victim.

Secondly, we should be careful with differences in technique. Only a small advantage is needed to beat an opponent unless he gets lucky because both warriors will concentrate more on defence than offence, so a minor difference will result in wounding, perhaps only a nick, but that will affect the confidence of the less good man and he will cede the initiative to concentrate on defence.

When Romans fight a barbarian tribe the likelihood is that the best barbarians are as good with their weapons as Romans, but the mass are not. It depends a bit on which period Romans, but I suggest that the Legionaries and auxiliaries are likely to be quite a bit fitter than their opponents. Of course the Romans are better protected, but I suggest that the tribesmen's effectiveness will decline after their initial burst and then the fitter Romans will pick them off.

I do also wonder If there is a difference in stamina between the hoplites and the Persians?

Roy

[aligern]

Interestingly isn't it Caesar who cites Roman legionaries who, due to long experience in Spain, fought inna looser order much like the Spaniards with whom they were in combat?
Caesar's handling of his newly recruited legions is interesting, he took care not to expise them to the brunt of a fight. At Pharsalus Pompey was weak because he had many newly raised troops, oerhaps this was a cosequence of not srptarting with a cadre of vets? Though soneone in a 5,000 strong unit must know what they are doing. Caesar's Xth legion gets smaller and smaller, but hugely experienced and more elite.
Roy

[Jim Webster]

Getting back to the hypothetical instance of a polis which fields an army, loses 3% and inflicts 10% and the question of how long it (or its foes) can sustain such operations, it is worth considering the 'replacement rate', i.e. how many citizens come of age and take up arms each year.  This will of course vary depending upon the birth rate, death rate, abundance or scarcity of food, disease and such factors, but normally in the ancient or classical world the population pyramid will have a 'youth bulge' which more than makes up for the 3%.  10% is unsustainable (leading to Livy's implicit questioning of his sources about Rome's repeated annual early victories over its immediate neighbours) and appears to be sufficient to promote peacemaking, or at least avoidance, for a few years.  (The latter is my impression; I have not correlated it with recorded loss figures and it anyway does not apply to Rome.)

In campaigns where we have decent figures, losses through disease, desertion and men dying or being injured in brawls within camp are normally higher than in battle
Veteran campaigners who could pass on skills that kept the new guys alive in camp could well be more useful than veterans who kept them alive on the battlefield

[Patrick Waterson]

But that's not true. The next major war broke out in 378, just nine years after the end of the Corinthian War, and in the meantime there'd been Spartan interventions in Boeotia and whatnot.

I was actually relying on Patrick's quote, where I think he said 16 years... 

Patrick was over-simplifying (smacks wrist).  It was sixteen years to the next major all-out war.  Patrick should have been clearer about the bouts of restlessness in the interim.  Sorry.

But even if Greek history really (in aggregate) is so violent that someone, somewhere is always getting lethal combat experience, we have to demonstrate - as Anthony suggests in the comment re: distribution - that all Greek citizens/potential hoplites are always getting the same experience.

Or at least comparable levels of experience.  In 400-390 BC it seemed that every second Arcadian was off to be a mercenary, while in the 370s and 360s BC Athenians seemed to be at the head of the mercenary queue.  During the 370s and 360s everyone who was not Boeotian or Achaean was generally ganging up on the Thebans to try and break up Thebes' hegemony, and this meant all the usual suspects (Athens, Sparta, Argos) plus their friends were marching back and forth gaining experience.  Backwater powers like Corinth, Megara and Tegea were largely subsumed into someone else's army, usually as part of a league.

It is probably fair to say that in the 5th and 4th centuries Greek city-states were rarely short of a war they could join or were already part of; in the late 5th and for much of the 4th they turned out a steady stream of mercenaries as the cream of their military crop.  After the decline of Thebes post-362 BC, Phocis (a small state rather than a city) had its moment of glory in the Third Sacred War (356-346 BC), but only by hiring every loose mercenary in Greece.  After Alexander, the Greek powers essentially split betwen Macedon and the Achaean League, with occasional sideshows, and Greece was still a simmering pot (occasionally boiling over) when the Romans introduced themselves late in the 3rd century BC.  Action in the Hellenistic era seems to have been just as frequent as in previous centuries, but tended to be more consequential.  The Lamian war knocked out Athens as a real power; Sellasia almost finished Sparta (although Nabis managed to make himself felt until he tangled with the Romans) and Thebes was of no consequence following its revolt against Alexander.

Consider by analogy, a Roman timeline of violence, it might look like a font of lethal combat experience, but what percentage of the legions fought in any one engagement or campaign, 5%? 10% on average? What about the lucky buggers sunning themselves in a Spanish garrison. (I haven't thought through the specifics of Spain as example, but it illustrates the point.)

This depended upon the century and the war; most of the time it was four legions being enrolled, two in each consular army.  This meant that 20,000 or so of the citizen body gained a season's combat experience, most of it (as Jim indicates) involving making camp in sanitary (and defensible) places, rapidly becoming fully familiar with procedures and discipline and looking forward to distinguishing themselves in battle (and, if opportunity offered, coming home noticeably richer than they left).  Hence around 10% of the listed citizenry of presumably all ages (census numbers here) were getting campaign experience every year; this proportion would increase when larger armies were fielded for major wars.  Come the Second Punic War and mobilisation rocketed: eight, ten, even twelve legions might be mobilised in a year, fighting in Italy (two consular armies), Spain (one consular army) and conceivably also elsewhere, e.g. in Illyria.  Casualties also skyrocketed during the early part of the war, when Hannibal was gobbling up Roman armies; this in turn led to hastily-raised forces without the customary buttress of veterans, notably the army which perished at Cannae, following which Roman generals were more careful about when, where and how they fought battles.

Service in Spain invariably involved fighting until the early Empire; once Scipio had more or less persuaded the main tribes to align with Rome, a succession of get-rich-quick consuls spent the next century subduing the remainder, albeit with a number of reverses, notably at the hands of Viriathus, and even then Spain was never quiet: Lusitanians and Gallaecians were usually on the move, trying their hand at a bit of hit-and-run.  Then came Sertorius, and the armies sent against him soon learned that Spain was more of an ulcer than a picnic.  The legacy of this was, as Roy has mentioned, that Pompey's legions as of 49 BC had adopted Spanish tactics, the better to chase the thieving natives in their own mountains.

It may be worth mentioning that most powers and cultures lived in a ground state of war or likely war, and much of their attention was focussed on preparation for same.  It was a rare tribe or city that did not engage in periodic conflict with someone.