Hello and welcome to the third episode of Ancient Warfare Answers, our new series of very short videos in which we try to answer one particular question real quick in five to ten minutes.

With me today is Murray Dom, the assistant editor of ancient warfare, and I'm Jasper Oathouse, and I'm the editor of the magazine.

And question today is Greek, so it goes to Murray.

And it is, yeah, well, you know, that's how we sort of divided them.

Yeah, at least for now, for now.

The question is, Murray, what can you tell me about the organization of the Athenian army?

Oh, what a good question.

Because, of course, there's so much focus given to the Spartans and Athenian army. Oh, what a good question. Because of course, there's so

much focus given to the Spartans and the ancient Spartan army. And of course, we know a lot about

the ancient Spartan army, written by Athenians on the most part. And the bizarre thing is that

they seem to have neglected telling us about their own army. So we've got a couple of sources

from various different time

periods, and we have to work out whether it's telling us something that exists when it was written.

So there's a work by, well, people say Aristotle, but then there's the pseudo-aristotle,

Athenian constitution, which gives us information in the 320s, and then it's the how far back

does that go?

So we have Herodotus, who's telling us about the 10 Stratagoi, who have a daily command,

and they rotate that daily command, but at the same time there's a polymark, Kilamacus,

at the Battle of Marathon, and we're not sure if that's a transitional system or whether

Herodotus has got it wrong, or whether they're drawn by lot or whether they're elected.

Later, and it would seem to be reasonably soon after the Battle of Marathon, what you have is the 10 Stratagoy at Athens are elected from the entire body of citizens, not from the tribe of the individual.

So they wouldn't elect their own or they wouldn't draw lots of their own.

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