Greek encampment

[John Conyard]

Surely the Anabasis shows us the opposite. Tents are for sleeping in not living in. Small tents are ideal for Greek camp since as Xenophon shows us shelter was well down the list of a general’s priorities. A camp would have been a ramshackle affair of tents, improvised bivouacs and high status tents used by posh travelling Greeks (Plutarch, Themistocles 5.4).

Van Wees took Xenophon (Anabasis 1.5.10) as giving us soldiers using animal hide to make basic one-man bivouacs much like the dog tents illustrated here. Lee decided on a safer option of tents made from leather panels. But the two interpretations do not exclude each other. We can conclude that one man tents could be made of leather panels. Others slept in the open air and of course Xenophon makes the men burn their tents when he claims to have achieved command (Anabasis 3.2.27). Even one man dog tents made of leather could be bulky and heavy.

In the Osprey book “Macedonian Warrior” Heckel and Jones use Polyaenus (Stratagemata 4.8.4) to construct an encampment of two man tents of 6 feet width with eight tents to a file each separated by about 2 feet, all sharing one fire. A pleasing if shaky arrangement based on a false camp constructed by Eumenes. Diodorus (17.95. 1-2) also gives two man tents in a false camp this time constructed by Alexander’s army.

For large single unit tents we have the fictional “Education of Cyrus” in which Xenophon describes how each unit of soldiers sleeps in one large tent provided centrally (2.1.25). He sees this as desirable over the actuality of his own experience. And two Attic red-figure vases (ARV 1426.23 and ARV 406.1 1451) show tent like structures with open sides they do not appear to be military.