The Transport of Sick and Wounded Soldiers in Classical Greece

Abstract

THE TRANSPORT OF SICK AND WOUNDED WARRIORS in classical Greece has received little attention in modern studies of Greek warfare.' Pritchett, in his authoritative five-volume work, The Greek State at War (1971-91), does not discuss it. Hanson, in The Western Way of War (1989), devotes a chapter to the wounded without considering the problem of long-distance transport. Compared to weaponry, tactics, command structures, and other aspects of warfare that contribute to victory or defeat on the field of battle, the handling of incapacitated soldiers is strictly a side issue. But another side issue, burial of the dead, has been much studied,2 and obviously in the aftermath of battle there were not only corpses to be retrieved but also wounded men who required transport. We have ample indirect evidence that many wounds were survivable, so the wounded could not automatically be considered as good as dead.3 Some managed to reach home in safety.4 The question is how. Although ancient historians rarely discuss the fate of the wounded other than commanding officers,5 a search of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Aeneas Tacticus, Diodorus Siculus, Quintus Curtius Rufus, Plutarch, Arrian, Pausanias, and the canon of ten Attic orators6 turns up little more than a dozen direct references (see Appendix) to the carrying of sick