08-05-2006, 01:41 PM
Quote:the view expressed by Jona is that Leonidas got his men butchered through incompetence, rather than heroism. He looks at the facts, and the periods for which we cannnot be sure of the evidence, and chooses to come down on the side of prosaic military incompetence.I think that summary is too easy. I take the devotio theory seriously, if only because I proposed it myself in the late 1980's. And that makes our men heroes. My main point is that we do not know.
Do I prefer incompetence to heroism if I have to explain something? Certainly; that goes without saying. The accounts that I have read about battlefield experience, have convinced me that it is a total mess, and that acts that are later called heroic, are often accidental. (There are exceptions; there is no need to diminish the heroism of Alexander.) Incompetence is standard; cf. the quote by the elder Von Moltke, when he was told that an officer had shown himself to be half-competent, that the guy had to be decorated because in war, nobody can possibly be competent. (In fact the central thesis of Von Clausewitz.)
I think that in battle, there are two constants. The first one is that people can not know what they are doing, and are therefore incapable of acting according to a plan. The second one is the need to create heroes, because without heroes, the generals soon have no soldiers. Thermopylae has all the aspects of a story invented to inspire; personally, I think that it was invented by someone in the circle of Gorgo, wife of Leonidas, who appears to have been one of Herodotus' sources.
