Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-2023
Publisher
Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
Abstract
This article argues that the purpose of ravaging in Greek warfare was not to goad the enemy into fighting or to cause systematic economic harm but to facilitate plundering. The cereal harvest was commonly chosen as a time for invasion, because it maximized the amount of plunder an invading force could expect to find in the enemy countryside. While ravagers were unlikely to cause permanent economic harm to a community as a whole, they could imperil the livelihoods of individual farmers, both directly through theft and destruction and indirectly by preventing farmers from processing the harvest in a timely fashion. This explains the consistent fear of plundering and ravaging present in our sources.
Recommended Citation
Lindberg, N. (2023). The Bronze Harvester: Ravaging and Plundering in Greek Warfare. The Classical Quarterly, 73(2), 532–540. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009838823000939
Comments
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association.