Brief Western Way of War

As Victor Davis Hanson noted, ‘since Greco-Roman times, 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. This “singularity” of battlefield prowess resides in free men mustering under consensual governance. “Citizens, it turns out, are history’s deadliest killers.” In this tour we survey two representative battles of the Western Way of War.

We firstly travel to Leuctra, some 75 km from Athens. In this battle in 371 BC the Thebans defeated Spartans who had invaded Boeotia. In this battle Theban general Epaminondas employed his famous ‘oblique phalanx’. Chaeronea, 50 km to the northwest, was the site of battle fought in 338 BC between Philipp II of Macedonia who won the combined forces of the rest of Greek city-states. His son Alexander distinguished himself as the cavalry commander.