Ancient Greece paid mercenaries to defend it in wars

Wherever there is a war in a faraway place, there will be mercenaries — contract fighters whose only commonality is perhaps a thirst for adventure. Some join armies or rebel forces in other countries because they believe in the cause. Others enlist because the pay is good.

This was the case in ancient Greece, although we could not know it by reading the ancient Greek historians, for whom the polis—the independent Greek city-state—symbolized the end of the oppression of kings and the rise of equality and pride. citizens’ civic. Neither Herodotus nor Diodorus Siculus, for example, mentioned mercenaries in their accounts of the first Battle of Himera, a fierce dispute fought in 480 BC in which Greeks from several Sicilian cities banded together to ward off a Carthaginian invasion. Mercenaries were seen as the antithesis of the Homeric hero.

“Being a salaried combatant carried some negative connotations: greed, corruption, shifting loyalties, the downfall of civilized society,” explained anthropologist Laurie Reitsema of the University of Georgia. “Considering the issue in this light, it is not surprising that ancient authors chose to reinforce the ‘Greeks defending Greeks’ aspect of battles, rather than admitting that they had to pay to have defenders.”

But research published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the ancestry of the troops who defended Himera was not as uniquely Greek as it appeared in historical accounts at the time.

The victory was seen as an event that defined Greek identity. But the new study — an analysis of degraded DNA from 54 bodies found in the recently unearthed western necropolis of Himera — found that the mass graves were largely occupied by professional soldiers from as far away as Ukraine, the Baltic region (the present-day Latvia) and Thrace (now Bulgaria).

The finding reinforces research published last year in which Katherine Reinberger, a bioanthropologist at the University of Georgia, and her colleagues did a chemical analysis of the tooth enamel of 62 combatants killed and buried near the Himera battlefield. Two major clashes took place there: one in 480 BC, when Himera’s forces defeated those of the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Magus, and a second battle seven decades later, when Hamilcar’s grandson returned seeking revenge and Himera was destroyed.

Reinberger’s team concluded that about a third of those who fought in the first conflict were locals, up from three-quarters in the second battle. Laurie Reitsema is the lead author of both studies.

Greek historian Angelos Chaniotis of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton said the new study sheds new light on the composition of the fighting forces in Himera, even if it does not reveal more about the outcome of the battles. “It confirms the general picture we had from the ancient sources, while also underscoring the role of mercenaries,” he said. “Mercenaries are mentioned in our evidence, but in many cases they are hidden in plain sight.”

David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard whose lab generated the data, noted that their paper “suggests that the Greeks played down the role played by mercenaries, possibly because they wanted to project an image of their homeland being defended by heroic Greek armies of citizens and known spearmen.” like hoplites, who wore armor.” Presumably, the presence of soldiers for hire in Greek armies would detract from this image.

The tyrants who ruled over Greek Sicilian cities in the Hellenic era recruited mercenaries to expand their territories, and in some cases because these rulers were extremely rejected by their citizens and needed bodyguards. “The recruitment of mercenaries even encouraged the production of coins in Sicily with which to pay them,” Reitsema said.

Rich in resources and occupying a strategic location, ancient Sicily was home to Greek and Carthaginian colonies, which for a long time coexisted peacefully. But when Terilus, tyrant of Himera, was deposed by his own people in 483 BC, he called on his Carthaginian allies to help him retake the city.

Three years later, the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Magus sailed from North Africa to Himera with an expeditionary force estimated by Herodotus at over 300,000 men (modern historians estimate it to be around 20,000). But cavalry and infantry from two nearby Sicilian Greek city-states, Syracuse and Agrigento, came to Himera’s aid. Hamilcar’s troops were driven out, and his ships were set on fire. When all seemed to be lost, the general would have killed himself, jumping on a pyre.

In 409 BC Hamilcar’s grandson Hannibal Magus returned to settle the score. This time the Greek army was composed mainly of citizens of Himera, with few reinforcements. The Greeks were defeated and the city was razed to the ground.

The tombs and western necropolis of Himera were discovered in 2009, during the construction of a railway between Palermo and Messina. Since then, the remains of more than 10,000 buried bodies have been found at the site. For archaeologists, one of the best clues to a mercenary — foreign or not — is whether he was buried in a mass grave.

“Most likely, the people cleaning the battlefield and burying the bodies didn’t know the mercenaries,” Reitsema said. As a result, mercenaries would be more likely than citizen soldiers to end up buried in unmarked mass graves and become archaeologically invisible, or less visible, she explained.

All the remains found in the mass graves at Himera were adult males. According to Reitsema, in order to distinguish the fighters from the others it was necessary to find “several lines of evidence”. Signs of violent trauma, such as spearheads lodged in the body, indicate that an individual died in combat. “We didn’t find any armor or weapons, except for the ones that were embedded in bones,” Reitsema said. “These objects must have been recovered by survivors on the battlefield.”

The dates of the graves, estimated based on stratigraphy and a few scattered objects, correspond closely with the dates of historically documented battles.

Determining which bones were Hymerians and which Carthaginians was a matter of location. Alissa Mittnik, a Harvard geneticist responsible for the genomic analysis, said the fact that the dead were buried inside the necropolis denotes that they were part of Himera’s army, not the enemy force.

“We don’t know anything about how members of the Carthaginian army were buried,” she said, “but in Greek wars, normally, the victorious side let the enemy have access to the battlefield to retrieve their dead.”

Chemical isotopes in the mercenaries’ bones indicated that the soldiers were born far from Himera and that their parents and grandparents were not immigrants. And, Reich said, the ancient genomes were sequenced and compared against all published genomes. “The new genomes are closer to those of Ukraine and Latvia.”

Mittnick speculated that the soldiers for hire may have arrived in Himera with the army commanded by the tyrant Gelon of Syracuse. Diodorus wrote of 10,000 foreign “settlers” that Gelon would later reward by giving them citizenship. But its geographical origins are unknown.

“We know that many of the young men in the mass graves probably grew up outside the Mediterranean region. They may have gone to Sicily because of the promise of citizenship or monetary rewards,” Mittnick said.

In addition to highlighting the disparate genetic origins of the troops, research has shown that genetic ancestry determined which bodies were buried in which graves. “The intentional grouping of foreigners sheds light on the internal logic of Greek settlers’ identity construction,” Reitsema said.

Foreign fighters from different backgrounds were buried in the same mass graves. They were respected enough to be buried in the necropolis, yet they were treated differently from many people of Greek origin. The smaller mass graves, in which the soldiers were probably Greeks, show signs of greater care in the placement of bodies and objects buried with them, indicating that they had greater prestige and were treated with greater reverence than outsiders.

Anthropologist Britney Kyle, from the University of Northern Colorado and one of the study’s authors, said the research demonstrated the power and potential of new techniques to illuminate what life was like in the past.

“Many ancient DNA studies focus only on genetic results, without fully exploring the biocultural background to contextualize their findings,” she said. “We made a concerted effort to gather information from historical accounts, archaeology, bioarchaeology and isotopic analysis to put the genetic data into context. It’s surprising what we can discover when we put together multiple lines of evidence.”

Of all the surprises Kyle found in the investigation, the biggest may have been the distances traveled by some of the mercenaries to reach Sicily. “We think of war as something that causes or deepens divisions between people,” she said. “That’s why it’s fascinating to think of war as something capable of bringing people together.”

^{Translation by Clara Allain}