WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) Read Online Free Page A

had lived. Pindar’s great fame had grown out of his ability to compose fine choral songs for special occasions, a skill that had given him employment by princes all over the Hellenic world. Alexander the Great is believed to have spared the house that Pindar had lived in at Thebes because of the fine poems he had written in praise of Alexander’s ancestor, King Alexander of Macedonia.
    Alexander may also have had spared the temples of Thebes because of their historical associations, perhaps picked up in his reading of the work of the sixth-century historian Herodotus. Herodotus mentioned in his Histories the oracle of Ismenian Apollo at Thebes and the great temple dedicated to Ismenian Apollo, where he recalled seeing the solid gold shield and spear that Croesus had dedicated to the Argos hero Amphiaraus and examples engraved on three tripods of the Cadmean writing that the Phoenicians had brought to Greece.
    Determined that no Thebans would ever rise in revolt against him again and, no doubt, wanting to make an example of Thebes to the rest of Greece, Alexander slew 6,000 of the inhabitants and sold 30,000 of them as slaves. The once-great city was subdued indeed. At the same time, the four centuries-long era of the classic, Hellenistic city state was ended; from this time on mainland Greece became very much a political backwater.
    Thebes was rebuilt 20 years later by the Macedonian prince, Cassander, with the help of the Athenians, but it later suffered considerable damage again during the wars for possession of Greece and Macedonia that were fought among the successors of Alexander the Great. Thebes never regained its former greatness and power, and its death blow was finally dealt by the Roman dictator Sulla, who handed over half its territory to the Delphinians.
     
    SUCCESSFUL FORMATIONS
     
    There is a historical irony in the fact that Alexander the Great’s amazing success as a warrior king owed much to the great Theban statesman and general Epaminondas, who scored a decisive success over the Spartans in the battle of Leuctra in 371 bc. The general was helped to victory by the way in which he changed the battle formation of his army. Instead of deploying his heavily armed soldiers (hoplites) in the usual long even lines, Epaminondas formed some of them into a wedge, 50 men deep, on one wing, in which he included the Theban ‘Sacred Band’. Alexander’s father, Philip of Macedon, improved on this ‘strength-in-depth’ principle demonstrated so effectively by Epaminondas by creating the more open and freer-moving phalanx. When Alexandra the Great added a large cavalry force on the wings of his father’s phalanx at the outset of his Persian campaign his army became virtually unbeatable.

Part Two: Medieval War Crimes

William The Conqueror And ‘The Harrying Of The North’
    1069–70

     
    Dictionaries define ‘to harry’ as ‘to ravage’, ‘torment’, ‘harass by forced exactions’, ‘make rapacious demands’ and, in warfare, ‘to devastate’. William the Conqueror did all these things in the north of England when, within three years of his victory at the Battle of Hastings in October 1066, he found himself having to put down serious rebellions in the northern parts of his new kingdom.
    William had fought at Hastings to gain the English crown from Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon king. William claimed it had been promised to him by Edward the Confessor, who had spent many years at the court of William’s father in Normandy before mounting the throne of England in 1042. However, by the time Edward died in 1065, his realm was in disarray. He was not a forceful ruler and the kingdom’s great men, or thanes, had everything their own way, while at the same time they quarrelled among themselves.
    England looked as if it would fall back into the hands of the Scandinavians, so the thanes buried their differences. Ignoring William of Normandy’s claims and those of Edward’s nearest blood