Isotope study hints ancient Greeks used foreign fighters in key battle
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
They establish a baseline of what they expect local strontium isotope composition should be both from local flora and fauna samples and from burials not associated with the battle. They then compare this to the greek combatants of these two battles. They find that 67% of Greek soldiers from 480 BCE are likely non-local, while 36% of Greek soldiers from 408 BC were non-local.
Up to this point, the paper supports historical sources and seems to be quite well done. After this point, they speculate that the non-local individuals present were mercenaries based solely on the strontium isotope ratios in their tooth enamel, and further speculate on where specific individuals might have originated. This is where the authors might be going out on a limb.
Greek colonies were widespread at this point in history, and it's very likely that some "mercenaries" were just from distant colonies. This doesn't seem to be adequately addressed in the paper. It's also possible that soldiers ate a different diet than the locals, possibly higher in fish or imported foods, which could have made them appear non-local. It's also possible soldiers moved around more, and that might have affected their levels in difficult to predict ways.
Bottom line, strontium isotope analysis is great at the population level, but there's a lot that can go wrong when dealing with individuals. I find the notion that Greek's hired mercenaries plausible, but this paper doesn't provide strong evidence for it.
The possibility of a local coalition is not negligible, but you should also consider that the amount of different origins of the bodies implies that this coalition is really wide in geographic terms and is hard to form on diplomacy only. It would be illogical for an italian city to reach out to a Black Sea one for help and for the latter to respond in time and in force. It is more likely that the soldiers were already on the area and they were acting in their own interests, not in the interests of their origin city.
In any case, an important point missed here in this thread that’s made in Thucydides is that Syracuse was a cosmopolitan melting pot of the Greek Mediterranean, large, rich, and attracting both Dorian and Ionian immigrants. An army raised there probably had Massalians and Athenians and Greeks from the Euxine and a dozen other tribes/cities.
From the infamous Mauro Nero company?
"Mauro" is the word for "black" in the Venetian dialect. Side-by-side with "Nero" (also "black") I thought you were making a joke in Italian, but I couldn't tell what it was.
Also, in ancient Greek it would be "Melan Ydor" (Μέλαν Ύδωρ).
In ancient (but also in modern) Greek, "nearon hydor" means "young (i.e. "fresh") water", and at least according to a greek professor whom I was watching on tv the other day, this phrase is where the modern "nero" originates from.
The paper makes a weird mental leap here, in that the relative percentages of dead soldiers corresponds to the relative percentages of soldiers that participated in the fights. One would expect that if Himera (in Italy) went through the trouble of procuring the services of Greek mercenaries from far-away mainland Greece, it did so because Greek mercenaries were good at their job, which essentially was: not dying.
If the greek were less likely to die, how much less likely would that be exactly? I don't see how that could ever be determined.
I’d posit that these individuals could also have been slaves that were used as “meat-shields” to soften opposing armies resulting in a higher ratio of deaths amongst the group.
What i was wondering: Does the strontium ratio in teeth change over the course of your life or is it determined by where you grew up/your teeth developed?
I will save you the travel... Greeks have a very standard diet, and is also fairly uniform across Greece.
Even taking today, it probably hasn’t changed much to 2000 years ago at least for the staples.
Teeth found in one city (out of the major cities of mainland ancient Greece, Sicily's was more recent-ish colonies) is not exactly proof of widespread mercenary use "against popular lore" (which includes existing history and centuries of scholarship).
(They did use Scythes for something like guards/cops in Athens, and ocassionally made use of others, but nothing major).
"like frogs around a pond" -Plato
Presumably this required some skillful diplomacy, alliances, and the ability to call for help when / if it was needed. Mercenaries seem like a logical tool in that case.
I think you're projecting modern population density into pre-classical times.
Colonies were just a bunch of people from one place that decided to grab some available land somewhere else.
The Peloponesian War began with a dispute with Athens over the government of Corinth’s ancient (at least 400 years at this point) Adriatic colony of Cocyra. There is today in the museum of the Acropolis a stele recording a treaty between Cocyra and Athens agreed during this crisis. Corinth maintained mother-city ties - and disputed Athen’s influence.
Later in the same war, the Athenians launched an ambitious invasion of Sciliy, pursuing empire against their enemy Sparta’s ally Syracuse (and other cities of Magna Grecia).
After the war, a multinational Greek force famously marched all the way to Mesopotamia as mercenaries (and only a few generations later Alexander would come the same way). Those mercenaries were saved when the returned to the very edge of the Greek sphere at Trebizond (Thallata! Thallata!). From there they were plugged back in to a network of communication, commerce and diplomacy that stretched all the way down the Mediterranean to Marsielle (the colony of Marsala).
This diplomacy and internationalism of the Classical Greek Mediterranean was a change from the dark ages of the Bronze Age collapse, where a colony may indeed be another world. But before that there was another cosmopolitan period of treaties and internationalism (of a sort). We associate that period with the relations between Mesopotamian states (Akkad etc), Mediterranean states (Egypt, Knossos, Acheans) and Anatolian states (Hitties, Hurrians, etc). Complex diplomacy between these states is recorded in cuneiform clay.
My impression is that the ties to colonies were like family obligations, and there was not a grand imperial design to them. Even so, Sparta let Melos perish without help, and helped Syracuse with just one man, who did lead the defense against the incompetent Athenian attack well enough.
I do not think that national unity and integrity of territory were part of the mindset back then. Alcibiades, for one, strolled back and forth to the hated Persians when out of favor. And it seems to me that colonies were planted either without consent in areas of tenuous control, or with the sort of permission a landlord might grant to a rentier likely to make a piece of empty land profitable.
But "barbarian" meant something like "speaking another language".
They however had no ideas about the inferiority of those (except that they preferred their own lifestyles which considered free-er).
Ancient slavery also was not about race, but about e.g. losing the battle and being caught or debt. Greeks could be (and often were) slaves to other Greeks.
"barbarbar" ~ "blahblahblah"
I don't think this is right. "Blah blah" implies someone who is overly talkative. "bar bar" [1] is an onomatopoieia of someone speaking a non-Greek language, like "arf arf" is for a dog.
I'm not even sure it has the meaning of "speaking gibberish" that you give it. I think it was literally just the way that some ancient language that was not Greek sounded to Greek ears. A bit like with the Swedish chef in Muppet show.
_________
[1] Actually, "var var". In Greek it's "βάρβαρος", pronounced "varvaros".
Did the Greeks use it frequently to describe any one people in particular?
In Homer there is no "barbarian"; only "barbar-speaking". But by the time of Aeschylus, it was a noun denoting people speaking non-Greek. There was also the corresponding verb that meant "speak a foreign language" but also "speak broken Greek / make lots of errors speaking (Greek)".
In Roman times, "barbarian" meant anyone who was not Roman or Greek.
It does not mean such people do not posses intelligence for this, it's just a cultural difference they might choose to keep their thoughts to themselves or see no point in convincing others through discourse if the power is established through sword.
Starting from Late Antiquity they've been completely pushed out of the steppe, at least culturally, by nomads that came from further East (Turkic peoples). The last Eastern Iranian group living North of the Caucasus is the Ossetians.
You’re probably thinking of the Scythian-Greek syncretism that occurred in Greek Crimean colonies during a the Hellenistic (post Alexander) and early Roman periods.
- Machiavelli, The Prince, on Hiero II of Syracuse (308 - 215 BC)
Also, the original article title ("Contrary to popular lore, ancient Greek armies relied on foreign mercenaries") seems to have had linkbait powers, resulting in some reflexive objections in the comments here. Keep that in mind as you read them.
Which would not be surprising at all; Carthage was a nautical trading state which is known to have used mercenaries extensively.
Next time I am out grocering, I will be sure to mention that Carthage must perish ( and how Rome fell, because of communism -- gotta lure people in somehow )!
Hoplites (shield, spear, helmet, greeves) were rich citizens which is how they could afford their armor. Many of the men who fought in the Classical era were slaves or foreigners or teenagers, often from Macedonia, called peltasts or psiloi.
Kinda silly though, as "popular lore" already ignores the thousands of other Greeks at the battle, as well as the also concurrent Battle of Artemisium.