Classical Greek Armies Grew Out of Classical Greek Societies
Today our armies are parallel societies or total institutions. They take in individual recruits, separate them from their prior friends and relations, and teach them everything they will need while they are isolated from their civilian associates. They re-organize these recruits into a new hierarchy of units for both everyday and tactical purposes (people in the same platoon both live and fight together, at least in the field). Armies like the army of Classical Athens were nothing like this and yet they fought….
Soldiers in Classical Greece were expected to teach themselves or seek out whatever training would be useful. Cities which wanted to be skilled at war encouraged pastimes such as archery or choral dancing to prepare their men for war. The closest thing to this in our societies are the Scouting movement…, physical education and free lunches in schools, all of which were meant to create a population of healthy and skilled recruits. Except in Sparta, there is no clear evidence for mandatory peacetime training of infantry before 338 BCE (although armies could train together once they were assembled with their arms). We have a number of examples in Thucydides and Herodotus of armies and navies which refused training or work which their commander wished them to perform.
Greek cities were small and recruited their troops by subdivisions such as the tribes of Athens or messes of Sparta. Soldiers in one of these groups knew each other before they joined the army. It would have been impossible for most cities to break up these ties, since they had only a few hundred or a few thousand adult male citizens. In the Iliad, enemies like Glaucus and Diomedes sometimes know each other, and since many Greek wars were between great families not great cities, this may not have been unknown in real warfare.
We [today] have elaborate systems of professional military education modelled after universities and public schools with examinations and grades and certifications. Commanders of ancient armies learned in their families or through apprenticeship with more experienced commanders. They sought out idiosyncratic personal training and education from all kinds of sources. Among other things, this let groups which were good at war like the Spartans keep their practical wisdom for themselves and only share it with people who took time to befriend them. Anyone [today] can go to a leadership course for senior NCOs or a staff college by meeting meritocratic criteria, but someone like Iphicrates had to like you or decide you were useful before he took you under his wing. If you were in the position to decide who had access to secret knowledge, you had social power.
…Classical Greek armies grew out of Classical Greek societies, rather than creating a new parallel society with new rules, social ties, and systems of reward. Good generals worked with this rather than trying to turn these armies into something more like the Roman army of Augustus or whining that their solders were self-governing citizens not mute pawns from a board game….
— Ancient Greek Armies Were Part of Ancient Greek Society – Book and Sword
