War: What is it good for? (11 page)

We would not know any of this were the Ice Man not so spectacularly preserved, but systematic study of large samples of skeletons can produce equally nasty and brutish results. Sometime around
A.D.
1325, for instance, at least 486 people were slaughtered and their bodies tossed into a ditch at Crow Creek in South Dakota. A good 90 percent—and possibly all—of the dead had been scalped. Eyes had been gouged out, tongues sliced off, teeth shattered, and throats cut. Some were beheaded. For a few, this was not even the first time they had been scalped or shot: their bones bore the telltale marks of older, partially healed wounds.

Excavations began at Crow Creek in 1978, and since then evidence for Native American massacres has come thick and fast. The most recent example (as I write) is at Sacred Ridge in Colorado, where a village was burned down around
A.D.
800 and at least thirty-five men, women, and children were tortured and killed. Their enemies used blunt weapons—clubs, or perhaps just rocks—to smash their feet and faces to pulp. The killers scalped everyone, cutting off ears and hacking some corpses into dozens of pieces. Like the Romans described by Polybius a thousand years earlier, they even killed the village dogs.

In fact, not much about Crow Creek, Sacred Ridge, or Samoa would have surprised the Romans. Cicero and Tacitus, like Hobbes and Golding, knew perfectly well that the Beast was close, close, close, and that only an even more terrifying beast—Leviathan—could cage it.

Getting to Rome

In his book
The Origins of Political Order,
the political scientist Francis Fukuyama asks a penetrating question: How do we get to Denmark?

Fukuyama asks this not because he doesn't know how to buy a plane ticket but because for social scientists Denmark has come to stand in as (in Fukuyama's words) “a mythical place that is known to have good political and economic institutions: it is stable, democratic, peaceful, prosperous, inclusive, and has extremely low levels of political corruption. Everyone would like to figure out how to transform Somalia, Haiti, Nigeria, Iraq, or Afghanistan into ‘Denmark.'”

If there had been political scientists two thousand years ago, they would have asked instead how to get to Rome. The Roman Empire was not very democratic, but it certainly was peaceful and, by the standards of the day, stable, prosperous, and inclusive (corruption is a little harder to judge). The alternative to getting to Rome was to live in societies with more than a passing similarity to modern-day Somalia, Haiti, Nigeria, Iraq, or Afghanistan—but more dangerous.

I have suggested in this chapter that the explanation of how the Romans got to Rome is very much a paradox. On the one hand, Leviathan was what suppressed violence, and suppressing violence was what being Roman (or now Danish) was all about; but on the other, violence was what made Leviathan possible in the first place. All in all, war seems to be good for something. And yet … not all roads led to Rome. In the Mediterranean Basin, war proved to be the path to peace and prosperity, but in many other places it did not. Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of incessant fighting around the shores of the Baltic, in the deserts of Australia, and in the forests of central Africa, but none of these regions produced its own Roman Empire.

Why not? Why did the Beast not turn into a stationary bandit everywhere? War, it would seem, is only
sometimes
good for something. We need to know what makes the difference.

Footnotes

¹
Making sense of ancient battle descriptions is a notoriously thorny problem for historians. I discuss the (many) issues of interpretation in the “Notes” and “Further Reading” sections at the end of this book.

²
Romans borrowed this condescending catchall label for foreigners from Greeks, who claimed to think that other languages sounded like people saying “bar bar bar.” One of the ironies, lost on no one, was that most Greeks included Romans on the list of barbarians.

³
So far as we can tell, what Ptolemy and Attalus really loved were their own womenfolk. Before seducing his stepdaughter, Ptolemy had married his sister (which meant that his stepdaughter was also his niece), while Attalus's attraction to his own mother struck even the worldly Greeks as unhealthy. (The other love of Attalus's life was growing poisonous plants, for which he apparently had a real talent.)

⁴
Few things get anthropologists more worked up than terminology. According to one study of the arguments over Chagnon's work,
“Yanomamo
is the term Chagnon gave the collective group, and those who refer to the group as
Yanomamo
tend to be supporters of Chagnon's work. Those who prefer
Yanomami
or
Yanomamo
tend to take a more neutral or anti-Chagnon stance.” Eternally optimistic about finding middle ground, I go with Yanomami.

⁵
Chest pounding involves two angry men taking turns to punch each other in the left breast until the pain proves too much for one of them. In a duel, two even angrier men hit each other over the head with wooden stakes (sometimes sharpened) until one collapses.

⁶
Here again, terminology can cause offense. A conference of San speakers agreed in 1996 to use “San” as a collective label instead of the older term “Bushmen,” but some consider “San” derogatory because it means “outsider” in the Nama language.

2

CAGING THE BEAST: THE PRODUCTIVE WAY OF WAR

Not the Western Way of War

“The Greeks had a word for it,” the saying goes, and one of the words they gave us is “chaos.” In Greek mythology, chaos was the disordered void that existed before the gods created the cosmos; in Greek warfare, it was the kind of scene that greeted the Persian general Mardonius one August morning in 479
B.C.
as the sun came up over the country town of Plataea. For a week, a dense mass of armored Greek infantrymen had lined the hills overlooking Mardonius's camp. During the previous night, they had started withdrawing but had made a monumental mess of it. Some had refused to pull back, insisting that retreat would be cowardly. Some had followed orders but gone in the wrong direction. And some had disappeared altogether.

It was Mardonius's moment. He led his best men in a charge straight at the Spartan contingent, which was cut off from the other Greeks by a steep ridge. Within moments, the rest of the Persian host had broken ranks and rushed forward too, swamping the heavily outnumbered Spartans. The fifth-century Greek historian Herodotus tells what happened next: “The Persians were as brave and strong as the Greeks, but they had no armor, no training, and nothing like the same skill as their enemies. Sometimes one at a time, sometimes in groups of ten or so, they rushed at the Spartans. But regardless of whether there were more or less of them, they were cut down.

“Wherever Mardonius was, riding round on his white horse and surrounded
by his thousand crack troops, they would attack fiercely. While he was still alive, they held their own, fighting hard and killing many Spartans. But as soon as he went down, and his personal bodyguard was destroyed, then all the other Persians broke, turned, and ran.” The harsh truth, Herodotus concluded, was that “the Persians … had many men, but few soldiers” (
Figure 2.1
).

This, suggests the military historian Victor Davis Hanson, is the key to a contrast in fighting styles that has shaped all subsequent history. “For the past 2,500 years,” Hanson argues, “there has been a peculiar practice of Western warfare, a common foundation and continual way of fighting, that has made Europeans the most deadly soldiers in the history of civilization.”

Hanson calls this peculiar practice the Western way of war. It was invented, he tells us, by Greeks, who, between about 700 and 500
B.C.
, began
settling their differences with head-on charges between phalanxes of armored spearmen. “It is this Western desire for a single, magnificent collision of infantry,” Hanson concludes, “for brutal killing with edged weapons on a battlefield between free men, that has baffled and terrified our adversaries from the non-Western world for more than 2,500 years.”

The late John Keegan, the dean of twentieth-century military historians, took the argument further. Since Herodotus's time, Keegan suggested, there has been “a line of division between [the Western] battle tradition and the indirect, evasive, and stand-off style of combat characteristic of the steppe and the Near and Middle East: east of the steppe and south-east of the Black Sea, warriors continued to keep their distance from their enemies; west of the steppe and south-west of the Black Sea, warriors learned to abandon caution and to close to arm's length.” Mardonius came from the wrong side of the line.

At the end of the last chapter, I asked how the Romans got to Rome (as it were) while so many other people in ancient times did not. If Hanson and Keegan are correct, we perhaps have the answer: building on their arguments, we might suggest that the Romans got to Rome because they inherited the Western way of war from the Greeks, and only this direct, bloody form of fighting was capable of creating Leviathan. We might then draw the further conclusion that when I say war has been good for something, what I really mean is that the Western way of war has been good for something.

The only way to find out if this is true is by broadening our perspective. We need to know first whether the way the Greeks fought at Plataea really was uniquely Western, and next whether the growth of large, safe, and prosperous societies was also a Western peculiarity.

In this chapter, I will try to show two things: first, that the answer to both these questions is no; and second, that that is precisely what makes the questions interesting. As we widen our inquiry from the Mediterranean Basin to the rest of the world, the real explanation for how the Romans got to Rome begins to emerge, and with it the key to understanding why war has been good for some things.

Age of Empires

I want to start with the second of my questions: Were large, safe, and prosperous societies a Western peculiarity?

The answer is no. We can see this just by looking at a map (
Figure 2.2
). In the two or three centuries after the Battle of Plataea, a band of rather
similar empires grew up across the Old World from the Mediterranean to China. All were large, peaceful, stable, and prosperous. Across the oceans, smaller but still formidable states also ruled parts of Central America and the Andes.

At their height, the greatest of these empires—the Roman in the West, the Han in what we now call China, and the Mauryan in modern India and Pakistan—each covered about 1.5–2 million square miles, governed thirty to sixty million people, and beat (most of) its swords into plowshares. In each empire, rates of violent death declined sharply, and people put their plowshares to good use, prospering in a golden age of relative peace and plenty.

On the whole, we know less about the Han and Mauryan Empires than about Rome, and less still about states in the New World. In the Americas, the shortage of evidence is so acute that specialists cannot even agree on where Leviathans first appeared. Some archaeologists see the Olmec culture in Mexico (ca. 1200
B.C.
) and Chavín de Huantar in Peru (ca. 1000
B.C.
) as the pioneers. Mainstream opinion, however, holds that it was only a thousand years later, in the age of the Moche culture in Peru and the city-states of Monte Albán and Teotihuacán in Mexico, that America's first functioning governments put in an appearance, imposing their will over thousands of square miles and populations probably running up into a few million. They built great monuments, oversaw elaborate trade
networks, and presided over rising standards of living, but remained preliterate.

That is bad news for historians. Even when archaeology reaches the highest standards possible, there are limits to what it can tell us about Leviathan. Perhaps the human sacrifices excavated at Teotihuacán show that this was a more violent society than the Old World's ancient empires, but since Romans did flock to watch gladiators hack each other to pieces (plenty of their dismembered bodies have been dug up), perhaps not. The sixty bodies found buried in a royal tomb of the Andean kingdom of Wari around
A.D.
800—long after Old World empires had given up such practices—might also point to higher levels of violence in the New World than in the Old, but when we get right down to it, the evidence is just not good enough for systematic comparisons. What we really need is a Mesoamerican Tacitus who would tell us what was going on.

Yet the fact that we do not have one, and almost certainly never will, is revealing in itself. There seems to be a general rule that the stronger a Leviathan becomes, the more evidence it leaves for historians and archaeologists, because great governments need to build a lot of things and write down even more. The absence of writing probably means that New World Leviathans were not governing at the kind of level that made writing indispensable—which probably also means that they never got anywhere near as close to Denmark as the Romans.

The Parthian Empire, centered on what are now Iran and Iraq, seems to have fallen somewhere between Rome and the New World states in its level of development. The Parthians inherited southwest Asian literary traditions stretching back millennia and certainly had rulers and bureaucrats who could read and write, but very few of their texts survive. Technical factors explain part of this. Bureaucrats shifted from writing on bakedclay tablets, which last forever, to writing on parchment and papyrus, which do not, and archaeological fieldwork slowed down massively under Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Iran's ayatollahs. But that cannot explain the whole pattern. Parthia also had rather weak government. Roman writers were amazed by Parthia's anarchic aristocrats (Norbert Elias would not have approved), who sometimes ruled virtual mini-kingdoms in their own right and regularly went to war with one another, simply ignoring their king.

China and India, however, are different matters. It is hard not to be impressed by the parallels between the empires of Rome and Han dynasty China (206
B.C.–A.D.
220). After an escalating spiral of wars that filled the
fourth and third centuries
B.C.
, the Han dynasty created a Pax Sinica to rival the Pax Romana, imposing peace across the length and breadth of the land. Warrior burials, which had still been common until the third century
B.C.
, virtually disappeared in the second. Travelers began going around unarmed, and cities let their pounded-earth walls fall into disrepair. Law replaced war.

As in Rome, the government suppressed bandits and pirates, and officials were made to answer for excesses. The first-century-
B.C.
governor Yin Shang is a good example: he ended his career in a blaze of glory after stamping out violent gangs in the capital city of Chang'an, but only after being fired from an earlier posting in Hebei Province for using too much force in making the roads safe to travel.

Again like Rome, Han China was no paradise and remained much more violent than any stable modern state. Officials regularly complained that people took matters into their own hands, even hiring gangs of thugs to kill rivals. Nor were the officials themselves above reproach. No right to remain silent here: one set of official guidelines for judges investigating murder begins by demanding multiple witnesses, cross-examination, and physical evidence but ends by adding, casually, “When one has questioned pressingly to the limits of the case … beat with rods those whom the statutes allow to be beaten.”

Compared with earlier eras, though, the Han were well on their way to Denmark. One pre-Han law code had punished even minor acts of violence with amputations of noses, ears, feet, and hands, while major acts called for holes to be bored into perpetrators' skulls, varying numbers of ribs to be removed, heads to be cut off, and bodies buried alive or chopped in two at the waist. Nor was this just talk, meant to scare people straight. Records of court decisions, found in the tombs of judges, show that these penalties really were carried out.