Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

246 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
Thus, most hoplite battles ended in a tactical victory. The victors
rarely sought to annihilate the enemy or render him incapable of
waging further war. For this reason, often the only tangible consequence
was the setting up of a trophy, or tropaion, at the spot where
the victor had routed the enemy. A tropaion, which derives from the
noun tropê, meaning “a turning around,” generally took the form
of the trunk of an oak tree decorated with the spoils of victory. It
was believed to embody the tropaios theos, or trophy god, who was
thought to have brought about the victory. None has survived, but
from pictorial images we surmise that a trophy consisted mainly of
weapons and armor that had been taken from the losing side. Most
of the plunder, however, was either distributed among the army or
auctioned off. It was also customary to dedicate one-tenth (dekatê)
of the spoils to whichever god or gods had been invoked before the
battle began.
Siegecraft
Legend reports that the Greeks besieged Troy for 10 years and succeeded
in taking it only by using the device of a wooden horse that
they left outside the city, ostensibly as a peace offering. Although this
story may well be pure fantasy, the supposition that Troy was able to
resist for a whole decade the entire military capability of the Greek
world is by no means inconsistent with what we know about the ineffectual
nature of Greek siegecraft, which, even in the fifth century
b.c.e., remained rudimentary. Virtually the only way to achieve success
was by starving a city into submission, which was why Perikles
was so confident that the Peloponnesians would never be able to
defeat Athens if its population withdrew within the walls, because
its navy could guarantee its supply routes. Sieges lasting months, if
not years, were the rule rather than the exception. First a ditch was
dug, and then a rampart was constructed to prevent food from being
brought into the city, a procedure known as circumvallation. In the
fourth century b.c.e., siegecraft became more sophisticated with the
development of catapults and mobile towers. In response to these
improved techniques, walls and towers became thicker and higher.
Curtain walls, ditches, and postern gates were also introduced.
At the conclusion of a successful siege, the defeated population
tended to be treated much more harshly than when hostilities were
confined to the battlefield. As a result, they were commonly either
killed or sold into slavery. Xenophon (Education of Cyrus 7.5.73)
puts the following statement into the mouth of the young Persian