Terror Tactics and the Ancient World (intro) (original) (raw)

When discussing unconventional means of war such as poisoning, sabotage, use of incendiaries, biological agents and the like, military historians will often refer to these and other means of terrorism as relatively recent developements in the evolution of warfare. Most historical treatments on the subject of unsavory means of war place its origins at or near the first world war. The common consensus is that terror tactics in war weren't engaged in by the ancients for the most part because of firmly entrenched codes of honor practiced by the warriors of antiquity. It is true that ancient cultures at least made a great show of condemming unconventional means of warfare as cowardice, but the reality is not so pretty. All of the great cultures of antiquity have resorted, in most cases many times, to the use of extremely barbaric means when it came to reaching their objectives, whatever they were. Poison arrows, poison fumes, flammable materials, booby traps, trained animals, insects, and even disease vectors were commonly employed throughout the ancient world. The truth of the matter is that contradicting military ideologies existed both in ethical codes and in written manuals on how to conduct warfare. Most ancient cultures, with the noteable exception of the Greeks who relied oupon an oral code of military ethics, had written codes of conduct regarding warfare and it seemed then as now these rules came to be stressed simply because of the myriad ways they were commonly ignored by the militaries that supposedly adhered to them. The Greeks, like the others, found ethics easy to ignore where strategic nescessity reared its ugly head.

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