The identification of the Nesaean horse with the great war-horse of Parthia (see p. 78, n. 1) can perhaps also be found from the Chinese side, in Ssu-ma Ch'ien's story, already mentioned, of how in 101 B.C. the Emperor Wu-ti got horses from Ferghana (Hirth, pp. 109 sqq.). There were two breeds in Gerghana, corresponding to the two types in Parthia; the horses which Wu-ti coveted, and which were “much stronger” than the Wusun horses, were the superior breed, and Hirth suggests (p. 141) that this must mean that the better breed had been imported from elsewhere; this can only mean Parthia. Now long ago T. de Lacouperie (Western Origin of Chinese Civilisation, pp. 220 sq.) transliterated the name of the capital city of Ferghana, which the Chinese attacked, as Nise, and suggested that the horses were Nisaean. This found little acceptance, and several other transliterations have been proposed (I noticed some, J.H.S. 1902, p. 281); but Hirth, who has always read the name Ir-shi, after a long discussion (pp. 141—2) now considers Nish a possible ancient equivalent of Ir-shi and inclines to agree with de Lacouperie in connecting Nish with the home of the Nisaean horses; he suggests that the word had come to be a technical term which was applied wherever good horses were bred.

My subject is the development of warfare in the Hellenistic period, that is, roughly speaking, in Greece and Asia between Alexander and Augustus; I am not dealing with Rome. I shall take first the general outline of the subject and the history of infantry; the second lecture will deal with the use of animals in war, that is, cavalry and elephants, for this was essentially the age of cavalry; the third lecture must be given to machines, that is, siege warfare and naval warfare. I am afraid that in this lecture I shall only be treating well-known things, but I hope afterwards to have a little that is new both about horses and about ships. It may be an unfortunate thing that war should have occupied such a large place in the outlook of every State during the period I am considering, but if we are going to try and understand the ancient world we cannot leave out any part of it. Some indeed believe that for the Graeco-Roman world war was at first, speaking generally, the normal condition and peace the abnormal one, and it is not difficult to find facts to support this, such as treaties of peace made for a short and definite term of years.

The warfare of the little states of classical Greece had once been a kind of seasonal occupation; the harvest was reaped early, and there was little to do for the rest of the summer: there were not many amusements, so you fought somebody.

When many years ago I wrote on the “Greek Warship” (J.H.S. 1905, pp. 137, 204), it appeared to me that the key to the understanding of what a trireme was could be found in the word δίκροτος. Given that δίκροτος was a triakontor, there was little difficulty in showing that it meant, not “double-beating,” as had always been assumed, but “double-beaten,” “double-welded” and referred to two horizontal squads of rowers, and consequently that a trireme had three horizontal squads, thranites astern, zugites amidships, thalamites in the bows; for details I must refer back to my paper. The proof however ultimately depended on the equation δίκροτος = triakontor, and that equation was a deduction from some passages in Arrian. It seemed to me, however, an inevitable deduction, and so I think it has turned out; for to-day the equation δίκροτος = triakontor can be based on a simpler foundation.

The papyrus in question is a Ptolemaic papyrus of the first century B.C. from Heracleopolis, and is Nos. 4 and 5 (two parts of one document) of the Heracleopolis papyri, all of the same time, published by W. Kunkel, Archiv für Papyrusforschung, viii, 1927, pp. 169, 190. It deals with the despatch of rations of wheat for a number of ships, which are not at sea, but whose crews are doing liturgies for the dioecetes Athenaeus, and contains a list of ships and their trierarchs; the ration, reckoned in artabae, is for a period of eleven months.

In the first lecture I considered the general features of Hellenistic warfare, and more especially the infantry; it is now necessary to consider the development of cavalry. The history of cavalry at this time belongs primarily to Asia, just as the history of infantry belongs to Europe; but the cavalry arm had been well developed in two Greek-speaking countries, Macedonia and Thessaly, and it was really the conjunction of Asiatic horse with Macedonian leadership which for a century after Alexander made cavalry the dominant arm. This was followed by a period in which such preponderance did not exist; then a new set of circumstances brought about a revival in Asia, and the period we are examining closes with a cavalry victory more extraordinary than anything Alexander ever dreamt of. Closely bound up with the history of cavalry is the history of the bow, a weapon whose fortunes were largely omitted from the first lecture.

When the Persians overran Western Asia they won their battles by a combination of cavalry and the bow; their archers threw the enemy into disorder, and then the cavalry charged and finished up what the archers had begun. It has recently been suggested that the spear, rather than the bow, was the national weapon of the Persians; but even if Darius I does speak metaphorically of the triumphs of the Persian spear, and pictures of Persian spearmen exist, I feel little doubt from the course of history that the traditional view is the correct one.

I Must now deal with the use of machines in war, which means siege warfare and naval warfare. The developments which I sketched in the first two lectures were due to the Macedonian and the Asiatic; but the story of machines—siege trains and ships—is largely one of Greek brains, though often in Macedonian service. This illustrates both the driving power of the Macedonian and the tremendous pressure exerted by war, for, apart from military needs, Greeks invented next to nothing in the way of machinery; the Greek mind, perhaps happily for itself, did not work that way.

It had been very difficult in classical Greece to take a walled city. They had some sort of battering ram—Pericles used one at Samos; scaling ladders were known, and tunnelling under the wall; a mound of earth might be raised against the wall, as the Spartans did at Plataea. But speaking generally, you either tried to starve a city out, or relied on your friends inside; a large part of Aeneas' military manual, written about 350 for commanders of besieged cities, is taken up with devices to circumvent the friends of the besiegers inside the wall, and even Philip secured nearly every city he took through treachery. But the later Assyrian kings had known more than this; beside rams, they had used towers to raise their archers to the level of the battlements, and they had regularly taken walled cities in a way which Greeks before Philip's time were quite unable to do.