Just how much training did an ancient army require?

[DougM]

Coming late to this one, but do I recall correctly, that some Roman Generals were very strict about training and were loath to use men even in the Civil War when they had been inadequately trained?

Also there's a significant difference in drill and combat drill. Drill means you can move around a battlefield in an organised way, battle drills tell you how to receive cavalry, inculcate the need to remain in line rather than pursue, when to release missile weapons, how to perform a withdrawal, how to deal with different kinds of opponents, how to close up and lock shields etc.

It's relatively easy to take a farmer and stand him in a line with a pointy stick, it's a lot more complex if you expect him to do anything other than run away when a wave of barbarians is advancing towards him.   

[Patrick Waterson]

But I am confused by the switching between claims about the combat experience of the collective state, and claims about the average combat experience of the average man/citizen/pesant? Mathematically, very different, but the difference as to what is being claimed in not always clear, to me at least...

For example...

At other times they would keep their hand in with a campaign every few years, occasionally one with very low risk. 

Are you talking about the state? Or the average citizen. Put another way, you can't possibly be talking about the average citizen. Right? X million men in the Roman Empire weren't "keeping their hand in" every few years?

My main focus has been the Greek city-states, a societal system where the citizenry and the army were pretty much synonymous.  The 'average citizen' would have had several campaigns under his belt by the time he was passing his military wisdom on to his offspring.

The Roman Empire was a different beast because it had a professional long-service standing army while everyone else, unless from a tribe or client kingdom which was providing auxiliaries, had no military involvement at all.  Hence all military experience (and, more importantly, training) was, with an exception I shall note, concentrated in the Roman army, with the result that the population as a whole was quite defenceless per se.

The exception was city garrisons, which appear to havce been maintained by cities at their own expense as gate guard, wall guards, police etc. and which rarely if ever did anything other than garrisoning their home city.  So under the Empire effective military experience was concentrated in the army.

As Doug indicates, the Romans took their training very seriously; legionaries in particular trained, or were supposed to train, on a daily basis.  As combat tradition was held within the army rather than the citizenry as a whole, it took longer to train recruits and if mustering whole units became necessary (e.g. after the Varian disaster or during AD 69) generals were not keen on committing them until they had been 'worked up' for some time.

A legionary, once trained, could expect considerable combat experience, not least because in the early Empire there were usually barbarians on the borders and Rome felt it a good idea to teach them who was boss; also, troops left to age and murmur in one place for too long without action tended to mutiny or otherwise cause or threaten trouble.  Keeping them active kept them busy and constituted effective asset utilisation, not that the Romans ever seem to have been troubled by this concept.

The example of the US in ww2 showed that even with all the blood and mayhem to go around in ww2 America was only giving combat experience to about 3% of men annually. Spread out over the 20th century the annual figure would be well below 1%. If you are talking about individuals, what percentage of the Greek or Roman populations were getting combat experience annually?

Can we consider the male citizen population, otherwise demographics will somewhat skew the answer?  Among the Greeks, close to 100% of the citizenry would have combat experience at some time in their lives, usually more than once.  Except when threatened with invasion, it would be unusual for an individual Greek to be in combat every year; if operating further afield a fraction of the citizenry would be committed.  Thucydides I.98 and following (up to I.117 inclusive) tracks the expansion of Athens' empire and one can derive one's own estimates from that.

Athens, with a mobilisable population in 431 BC of perhaps 80,000 men, had 13,000 hoplites in the field, 16,000 in garrison and 200 triremes manned of which 130 were committed to campaigning.  Actual combat in 431 BC was as follows: 1) 1,200 cavalry who skirmished with the Peloponnesian invaders.  2) 100 ships (each with c.200 men) went to ravage the Peloponnesian coast.  3) 30 ships did much the same closer to Attica.  4) 3,000 hoplites besieged Potidaea. 5) 10,000 hoplites (plus 3,000 allies and associated light troops) invaded the Megarid.  Leaving aside the cavalry, the number of citizens gaining combat, if not actual battle, experience, was 10,000 + 3,000 + 6,000 + 20,000, i.e. 39,000 of whom about 60% were oarsmen unengaged in land fighting but keeping up their naval proficiency.

The Athenians were thus giving campaign experience to about half their citizenry in that particular year.  The ratio does not seem to have changed much - except to increase - as the war went on.  Combat experience within that campaign experience was more diluted: not every Athenian raider made contact with armed enemies (Cephallenia, for example, was taken without resistance).  As has been previously observed, combat puts an edge on training rather than being a substitute for it, and the Athenians were keeping their forces at a 'good enough' level but never felt they could win a battle against Spartans (Alcibiades in 418 BC was the exception, and that did not work out).  Apart from the 418 BC venture, throughout the Peloponnesian War period the Athenians were deliberately eschewing open battle with the Spartans and their Peloponnesian allies, conscious of their opponents' manpower (and, in the case of Spartans, training) advantage.

When making comparisons with modern societies, one should be aware that the later 20th-early 21st centuries, like the 19th century, tend to have short, intense wars followed by serious outbreaks of peace, so averaging combat experience through a whole century is misleading: a nation's armed forces are either very experienced (e.g. in 1815, 1918, 1945) or mostly stultified through insufficient activity.  There is also a tendency nowadays to use special forces in small wars and general incidents, resulting in these being highly experienced in combat while the bulk of the army has next to nothing by way of experience.  Furthermore, modern society has a sharp and artificial dividing line betwen civil and military which simply did not exist before Diocletian.  I am not sure we can validly make comparisons between modern societies and anything except the later Roman Empire (unless we go further east).

Also there's a significant difference in drill and combat drill. Drill means you can move around a battlefield in an organised way, battle drills tell you how to receive cavalry, inculcate the need to remain in line rather than pursue, when to release missile weapons, how to perform a withdrawal, how to deal with different kinds of opponents, how to close up and lock shields etc.

True.  As far as I know, in a classical army, drill was combat drill, as there was no reason to do anything else (except march and occasionally escort a VIP as we see in some Egyptian reliefs and read in accounts of classical parades).  The Romans in particular are noted by Josephus as: "their drills are bloodless battles and their battles sanguinary drills", indicating the seamlessness between drills and battle procedures.  As far as I know, the idea of ceremonial drill dates from the Age of Reason, when parading about in front of the monarch was the ground state of most armies, or at least the household regiments, which set the tone and fashion for the remainder.