tendon (the Greeks called this material "neuron") springs could fire arrows,
rocks, and pots of burning pitch along a parabolic arc. Some of these ma-
chines were quite large and mounted on wheels. One such weapon, the
palintonon, could fire an eight-pound stone over three hundred yards, a
range greater than that of a Napoleonic cannon. Philip was the first to employ
these weapons as a regular part of his siege train. But it fell to Alexander
to make them lighter and more mobile. Alexander's army carried prefab-
ricated catapults weighing only eight-five pounds, and he used them in a
completely new way--as covering artillery. ³⁸

The importance of Greece in the development of war rests in its geographic
position and its location in time. Both combined to make Greece a major
transmission belt for the transfer of important concepts and technologies of
war to the West. The Greeks' ability to write in a form that was usable and
understandable to the citizenry provided a literary vehicle through which
Greek ideas and technologies could be easily transmitted to future genera-
tions. Once incorporated into the Roman empire, the Greek contribution
to war was readily transmitted to Western culture.

A number of these contributions were seminal to the Western practice of
war as it evolved over the centuries. Perhaps most important in terms of
longevity was the Greek attitudinal perspective that war ennobled the human
spirit. This concept became the foundation upon which a new civic religion
was erected that saw war as a vital aspect of modern civilization. The Greeks
developed the notion of military service as a moral obligation of the citi-
zenship that rests at the base of nationalism. Without this, the modern nation
state could not have emerged in the form that it did.

As to technology, the innovations of the Greek Imperial Age, with the
exception of a number of mechanical devices that improved on siege craft,
were few. The armies of Philip and Alexander were not genuinely innovative
when viewed in historical perspective. Armies of earlier periods performed
the same feats with similar and better technologies. But these armies and
empires had little or no contact with developments in the West. The value
of Greece lay in the fact that when it finally achieved the level of military
sophistication evident in these earlier armies, it did so precisely at a time
and place that allowed it to transmit these developments directly into Eu-
ropean culture.

Had the development of war been left entirely to the Greeks, it is likely
that it would have progressed only marginally. The fragmented nature of
Greek society during the classical period mitigated against any sustained
progress, while the personal and unstable nature of Alexander's empire leaves
in doubt the degree to which the Greeks could ever have developed the

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