The horror of ancient warfare

[O'ETAIPOS]

Psychological pressure is one very interesting subject. Battles fought in melee were definitely not a nice place to be. But I read in some memoirs (sp?) that from at least US civil war the most devastating to psychic were not the actual melee, but rather artillery and later machine gun fire. It reached peak during I world war, with trench warfare, when terror never ended, as artillery was constant threat, just like stupid charges against MG's. On the other hand warfare in ancient times was a lot of marching and camping and only few battles, when the winning side soldiers often haven't seen any fighting. Only 1-2 first rows out of 6 (roman) - 32 (deepest hellenistic) were affected by the actual combat if the battle went well.

Losses were also very small - 1 to 10% for the winner and to 20% for looser. I was shocked when I found out that in the Napoleonic period losses for the winner could be as high as 50%! And differences between winner and looser losses were often rather small.

Good info can be found researching amount of volunteers to Roman army in II c BC. For example wars in Spain or in Liguria were extremely unpopular, while finding people to fight in Greece or for III Punic War was not a problem. Hard fighting in poor, mountainous terrain was not fun while rich lands, with consolidated rule that would be broken after 1-2 battles received flood of happy recruits.

Edit: What's more, piercing or cutting wounds from ancient battles were much easier to heal than large calibre musket and rifle bullet, not to mention artillery or mine wounds. Greek surgeons were also very good.