Was war in ancient times more brutal than war in the middle ages and early modern period?

Was war in ancient times more brutal than war in the middle ages and early modern period?

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Depends on what you would consider brutal. A bullet could kill you long before you got close enough to see your face, and firearms and chemical weapons could kill many many more people than ancient times. But back then it was mostly face to face and you watched as the life drained from their eyes.

Certainly no. Life in the legions was marching, digging, building and marching. When battle finally came, it was regimented, and systematic. You swing your sword exactly as you have for the last few years, stab a few screaming barbarians, and move back in the line of your buddies who all take turns in formation.

A lot of modern day psychologist and military historians suppose the rate of PTSD has gone up because warfare is both more brutal and stressful and occurs more frequently with less downtime to decompress the horror.
Certainly ancient times were violent, but violence today is pretty fucking bad compared to then.

Modern warfare is infinitely more brutal than ancient war both in term of deaths and stress

Depends.

Among the greeks, fighting generally lasted till one side breaks, and that was it. Pursuing the enemy was frowned upon. This resulted in no more than 10% dead or injured.

I think war has always been equally brutal regardless of technology.

The only factor deciding the brutality is the intensity of the combat and culture surrounding it. A lot of tribes evolve into a form of light skirmishing where no one gets seriously injured and deaths are rare, but any actual inter state warfare is brutal as fuck regardless of swords or guns.

Because in the end people being blown to pieces by artillery is horrific but so is seeing someone hacked to pieces by a sword.

Seeing your comrades hacked down next to you while you are slashing at someones stomach must be pretty devastating on a psychological level.

Compare it to say the Iraqi war in 2003 and those US soldiers had it way better.

More brutal but with less frequency so you’re not constantly stressed out. Think a day or two of fighting versus six months of wondering if today you’re going to hit an ied or get shot

This is actually very wrong. The Greeks took joy in chasing their opponents and in fact made momuments dedicated to the killing of their opponents. The Greeks chased each other until nightfall.

There was a lot more disease and IMO being killed with hand to hand weapons or bows and crossbows is more gruesome than guns or explosives. Torture, slavery and rape were also more accepted. But in another sense standing in formation with your allies and perhaps even your king on the battlefield is a lot more inspiring than running across a minefield like rats or being cooped up in a foxhole, or just patrolling around until your vehicle hits an IED. There were nowhere near as many defeaning noises on the battlefield and a lot less directions you could be attacked from compared to being blown away by artillery or an air raid or drone at seemingly random. So in the physical sense it was more brutal but in the psychological sense, I'd say modern warfare is just as bad or worse. At the end of the day a kick to the head kills you just as dead as a nuke though. War changes methods but the consequences are mostly the same.

Whosoever held the field by nightfall was declared the victor. After which the victors would comb the field, stripping arms of enemies and retrieving their dead. The losing side would request the liberty to retrieve their own dead, and this would be granted as a matter of policy.

At least, so they say. The 10% thing sounds right to me too, because studies have shown that this seems to be the magic number at which units/formations break. Hence the confusion around the word "decimate", which some people take to mean "destroy" but really it just means a rout. Casualty rates of 20% or more tend to be interpreted as disasters.

Maybe some of the confusion arises from Hollywood movies where the battles are often glorious last stands and warriors fight to the end. There's probably a misconception that old-timey people were much more willing to die violently than we are. In fact they tended to go to pieces when they saw that their chances were as good as nine in ten.

See:
desuarchive.org/his/thread/4137517/#q4141166

For the bloodthristy nature of Greek warfare. Peter Krentz came up with a 14% casuelty rate for the losers in pitched battle in classical Greek battles. This comes up higher than rates found in later periods.

Also the study:

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Oh, fantastic. I couldn't remember where I got my number from, so it should be fun to get some data I can be more confident in.

>A lot of modern day psychologist and military historians suppose the rate of PTSD has gone up because warfare is both more brutal and stressful and occurs more frequently with less downtime to decompress the horror.
Nah, that's because there weren't veteran's pension for life before.

Having your eardrums constantly bombarded by firearms and seeing your comrade's heads blown up like watermelons by shooters you can't even see is better?

There seems to have been a change with WW1, at least as far as most historical accounts go. I wouldn't say that war was less brutal before then, but you have to consider that most people don't want to die, and in hand-to-hand combat you can pretty sufficiently defend yourself. Death comes when people start to flee and your flanks get exposed, leading to you getting surrounded or running yourself and getting stabbed in the back. In line warfare you had a similar precedent, bullets were unlikely to do much damage, so the main portion of the battle wasn't very deadly and the crux of combat lay on disruptive cavalry and artillery. In both cases, battles were pretty much decided when one side started to rout, so if you were the victor you had good chance of survival, and if you were the loser, you also had a decent chance if you could fall back far enough.

Modern warfare on the other hand employed weapons with more killing power. Whereas before firearms would poke a hole in your skin, now they would either punch through you or break apart once they hit your body, causing far more damage. Since there's no large formations, it's more difficult to tell when your side is losing the battle. If you don't receive a call to retreat, there's a good chance the enemy will be on you before you can react. Additionally, small units can have a lot of killing power, so pockets of resistance can exist once one side has seized control of the area, leading to fights to the death or surprise attacks, whereas before small units would be practically useless against the larger force. Going off of my first point, it's also difficult to defend yourself. Instead of you and your buddies creating an impenetrable defense with your bodies/armor/shields, now only cover can provide security. This means that just the act of trying to spot the enemy in order to kill him can mean instant death. Couple this with mines, airstrikes, artillery, armor, snipers, etc., and i'd say it's more brutal.

Modern soldiers have far more psychological and pastoral support than has ever been the case. A modern soldier is well fed and well equipped and has as many home comforts as possible. The sort of conditions in say Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, weeks on end sleeping in the snow, starvation, disease wouldn't happen. Modern generals value their troops too much to subject them to avoidable deprivation. Also modern soldiers are generally airlifted or shipped out. There's no months of marching across enemy territory just to get to the battle.

That's also true, but poor conditions still exist, especially in areas of prolonged fighting. Troops in Vietnam would patrol dozens of miles of jungle a day laden with more equipment than your average pre-modern soldier. Soldiers in Afghanistan spend months in isolated posts with little outside support or modern amenities.
And that's just the US military, I doubt soldiers in Syria or Burma receive creature comforts and psychological support.

I'd argue that atleast european warfare was much more terrible in ancient times in comparison to medieval times due to the much larger scale of it.

From what I've understood the difference in psychological pressure in warfare has shifted immensly with modern warfare.
Earlier warfare was primarily long periods of boring monotony followed by short periods of extreme psychological pressure as a battle was made. In contrasts modern warfare is a never ending string of chronic 'low-scale' psycological pressure as you can never be certain when the next attack will happen. At any moment a bomb can go off or a sniper might take a shot.

>go to war and see horrible things
>spend months marching back home leaving it all behind you

>go to war and see horrible things
>spend a week or two on a ship and keep it in recent memory but leave it behind you

>go to war and see horrible things
>fly back in twelve hours, land and walk through a walmart while dumb normies who have never seen the things you did talk shit about you and don't understand the horrors you experienced
It's all about decompression time.

I misread the OP and thought he said modern instead of medieval and early modern. Sorry.

Even in postings where there are some amenities, I can only imagine that the tension, uncertainty and malaise of waiting around for sneaky sectarians to blow your legs off (or not) has its own unique psychological toll. The sad plight of many returning vets seems to bear this out.

It's much easier on the morale to know where and when the fight is, even if that means it's more dangerous. Ever since forever the advantage in morale has gone to the proactive party. Greeks knew it. Aztecs knew it. Americans know it. Hide & seek, waiting games and almost domestic routine seem to make modern soldiering a baked-in emotional conflict that it must be difficult to train people for. That's what I imagine, at least.

We should bring back troop ships, maybe. But that could also potentially put large numbers of troops in danger.

But, hell, the 7th Fleet has already been doing that.

From what I understand the casualty rates in battles in antiquity were generally greater than during the middle ages, provided they weren't some form of ritualised warfare.
This probably can be explained due to armour, as even light troops in the medieval period generally at least had something, while even the heaviest armour during Roman times was usually little more than a helmet and body armour, outside of extreme cases like cataphracts.
Because of this you were more likely to be captured if you lost in the middle ages, and due to culture at the time, you were also more likely to be released later on (although context was a big deal here).

i'd say so. You would most likely have to slice and stab your enemy multiple times until he falls down breathless. It's a whole different thing to shoot once or twice never feeling the meat slice along your bronze blade or your spear sink into lungs and getting stuck between his ribs. But of course if you consider everything ww1 has to be the most ruthless one with it's length, stagnate stragedies, shelling, the disease, chemical weapons and all other things considered. Then again you'll have to take into account that beating animals to death was common in ancient times versus the animal factories and maybe never seeing anything die in modern times. It's a whole different experience depending what you have already seen.

Depends on the region. For example in Ancient Greece ambushes, surprise attacks, raids and small warfare was the order of business. Decisive pitched battles were the execption, not the norm.

It was normal to kill hostages and enslave civilians in the ancient times, so ancient times were more brutal.

I saw a study on that where they compared a war in relatively tribal societies with ww2. The amount of people killed from the war in relation to the total population was higher in the tribal societies. That's mainly because the violent direct clashes of ww2 led to a decisive victory that was sealed in 6 years. The states agreed to ceise the fighting and it stopped. The skirmishes of the tribes never brought forth a winner and both sides continued skirmishing, raiding villages, killing members of other tribes here and there. The conflicts kept smoldering, the violence and violent revenge for violence had become a cicle.
That's how I imagine war could be without real central powers leading them

People were more tougher than people today. That's an indisputable fact.

>infinitely more brutal
>getting shot from afar and it's either insta death or you get proper medical attention
vs
>getting stabbed multiple times
>having your eyes gouged out
>having your head caved in
>dying a slow and painful death from infection if you survive
I'll take modern combat, being blasted to pieces in an instant is more gory, but it's less painful.

Ancient Roman/Greek were more infantry based so it was more up front and personal

Medieval was more Calvary based but also more inclusive to higher classes (so less people = less people dying)

Modern long distance

Just have more councilling prior to discharge.
With the proper methods and funding, this decompression stuff can be done effectively.

>Additionally, small units can have a lot of killing power, so pockets of resistance can exist once one side has seized control of the area, leading to fights to the death or surprise attacks, whereas before small units would be practically useless against the larger force. Going off of my first point, it's also difficult to defend yourself. Instead of you and your buddies creating an impenetrable defense with your bodies/armor/shields, now only cover can provide security.

Yeah but in that case, why don't we go back to building forts when fighting opponents that don't have missiles?

>Medieval was more Calvary based but also more inclusive to higher classes

>Earlier warfare was primarily long periods of boring monotony followed by short periods of extreme psychological pressure as a battle was made.
That's how the old saying goes. War is long stretches of boredom punctuated by brief moments of sheer terror.

>This probably can be explained due to armour, as even light troops in the medieval period generally at least had something
True. Plate armor-obsessed people will shit on hardened leather armor, but that leather will still stop a knife in most cases.

>indisputable fact

You're the one with the statement. You ought to be the one to prove it, user.

The thing is, you can't. Most human life is undocumented. You may be right, but you're making generalizations that have no real basis beyond some things you learned in school about history and some things you see on TV about modern people.

>I wouldn't say that war was less brutal before then, but you have to consider that most people don't want to die, and in hand-to-hand combat you can pretty sufficiently defend yourself. Death comes when people start to flee and your flanks get exposed, leading to you getting surrounded or running yourself and getting stabbed in the back. In line warfare you had a similar precedent, bullets were unlikely to do much damage, so the main portion of the battle wasn't very deadly and the crux of combat lay on disruptive cavalry and artillery. In both cases, battles were pretty much decided when one side started to rout, so if you were the victor you had good chance of survival, and if you were the loser, you also had a decent chance if you could fall back far enough.

It's not really surprising and makes sense when you think about it., but I find it neat that in warfare among st Nahua cultures, such as the Aztecs, when the enemy lines broke and they started to flee was also when the other side would come in and collect captives .

People have this impression that Aztec and Mesoameerican warefare was just small bands that foguth each other in individual combat and then collected the captives for sacrifice instead of just dealing mortal blows whenever; but like in bronze and iron age warfare in eurasia, you had organized armies tthat fought in formations, used standard bearers, flags, and trumpets to coordinate movement and relay orders, and similarly when you caused the enemy lines to break was when you had the causalities, with the Aztecs, just the with some of the inflicted deaths replaced by capturing prisoners

Almost no one ever died in the "battle" part of the battle, 95% of deaths was when one side broke formation and ran, then got routed.

why isn't this addressed more? i think this is one of the biggest problems of the modern soldier.