War: What is it good for? by Ian Morris Page B

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.

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    CAGING THE BEAST: THE PRODUCTIVE WAY OF WAR
    Not the Western Way of War
    â€œThe 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.
    â€œWherever Mardonius was, riding round on his white horse and surroundedby 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