Animals and Warfare

Abstract

In a world without heavy automated machinery and where day-to-day economics depended as much on pasture land as anything else, animals were unwitting perpetrators and inevitable victims of ancient warfare. Animals were crucially important for the execution of all military activity, most especially as draught animals, and the detailed descriptions of campaigns which occupy much space in the Greek and Latin historical texts are laid against an animal backdrop which included horses and baggage animals in their thousands, in addition to more exotic fighting animals such as elephants. Horses formed the backbone of military charges, and were evidently used in very large numbers;¹ and these war animals even had their own heroic rôle model in Alexander the Great’s legendary horse Bucephalus. Animals were also valuable resources to be fought over: cattle and other herds were a major factor in the accumulation and storage of wealth. Although the narrative of the Trojan War is of one exceptional campaign waged on behalf of a slighted husband whose wife had been abducted, in the Homeric epics which became the bibles of ancient warfare, other stories of cattle plundering are common in tangential narratives and in the story of Odysseus’s journey back to Ithaca. Here the older Greek warrior Nestor relates a former exploit, and his description of the number of animals seized is a formula which occurs four times in the Homeric corpus in other accounts of cattle raids.²