from port cities to exhaust their men and their supplies. (The British at that time had the best navy in the world, but they were less impressive on solid ground. And in the wilderness, those bright red coats made easy targets.) Yet as Greene subsequently reported, the idea “appeared to be new” to colonial representatives. Ellis notes that “Congress was apparently taken aback, because a Fabian strategy meant that Washington did not intend to defend Philadelphia at all costs if [British general] Howe chose to make it his target. His highest priority was not to occupy or protect ground, but rather to harass Howe while preserving his army.”
Washington’s political foes had to be salivating over this seemingly eccentric move, especially when the revised plan and the reason behind it — the sorry state of the Continental army — had to be kept secret from a fickle public to make sure the British stayed in the dark as well. Yet what no one, not even Washington, apparently knew was that the Fabian strategy was not a last-ditch, gamble of a move created by a desperate Roman dictator. It was a proven tactic used by a highly successful culture that incorporated equine wisdom into daily life. Fabius himself could have easily gotten the idea from a popular series of books by Herodotus.
In analyzing the Greek historian’s brief yet telling accounts of an ancient horse tribe’s behavior, we can see that Washington’s plan actually had more in common with the strategy’s original inspiration than the Roman’s subsequent interpretation of it. Fabius had combined evasive maneuvers with a scorched-earth practice to prevent enemy forces from obtaining grain and other resources. Washington blatantly refused to engage in such destruction. Ellis’s comparison of Washington’s plan to the “guerilla and terrorist strategies of the twentieth century” also falls short in characterizing the Continental army’s unusually constructive implementation of this long-neglected technique. Civilians, even those obviously aligned with the British, were never considered expendable for the cause. In this sense, the American general’s restraint, compassion, and sensitivity to nuance brought a truly nonpredatory defense tactic back to life, changing the course of history forever.
Traveling Light
The first equestrians galloped across that vast sea of grass known as the steppes of Eurasia, and they put on quite a show. Adventurous souls who discovered how to ride about six thousand years ago (in the region now known as Ukraine) eventually took up the nomadic ways of their horses, abandoning the sedentary lifestyle of their agricultural ancestors for three thousand years of freedom.
Nomadic pastoralism, contrary to popular belief, was not a primitive condition. It was a specialization that developed out of settled farming communities, requiring horses and skillful riding techniques. It required the wheel to allow populations to migrate with their herds by cart and wagon, leaders able to make quick decisions in an emergency, and a variety of craftsmen and specialists, far more than family subsistence farming did. The early horse tribes even managed to raise crops without becoming enslaved by them. They simply planted wheat in patches of fertile soil and returned to reap the benefits during seasonal migrations.
Recent archeological findings also suggest that women were equal to men in many of these tribes. Skeletons of warriors at first thought to be young boys later proved to be female. Over time, it was estimated that nearly 25 percent of warrior graves contained women dressed for battle, some of them obviously bowlegged from years spent on the back of a horse. Yet these wild-riding ladies, mythologized as Amazons by the Greeks, were no less aware of their femininity. Their graves are filled with mirrors, scent bottles, and cosmetics of various colors. And like many women today, they loved to groom their horses. In burial mounds across Ukraine and southern Russia, up toward Tuva and the Altai Mountains, human and equine corpses lay side by side among a dazzling array of colorful saddle cloths depicting scenes from daily life. These in turn revealed a culture of decorative mane dressing and fantastic crested horse masks. Four-legged members of the tribe were dressed with as much enthusiasm as their two-legged counterparts.
And that’s saying a lot, as it turns out: Contact with Greek colonies along the Black Sea brought a few, well-chosen luxuries. Since nomadic horse tribes only kept what they could carry, they wore their wealth in the form of elaborate, highly symbolic jewelry, gold weapon adornments, richly ornamented belts, and stylish riding clothes. Credited with the invention of pants, warriors of both sexes wore tight-fitting leggings tucked into leather boots, long-sleeved shirts and hip-length coats, all of which were embroidered with intricate designs, and some of which were trimmed in precious metals. In these tribes, later known as Scythians and Sarmatians, there was also a marked preference for “flame-colored” horses. According to Renate Rolle’s The World of the Scythians, “The rich warriors on the gleaming red animals, with shining gold clothing and weapons, must have presented an impressive picture in the brilliant sunlight of the steppe.”
More impressive, however, are reports of the nomads’ behavior in battle, descriptions that have little in common with standardized legends of fierce barbarians out to vanquish the sacred innovations of the civilized world. Around 450 BCE, Herodotus, the Greek “father of history,” wrote about a curious, highly frustrating encounter that King Darius I of Persia had with these tribes before deciding to take on a much easier project and invade Greece. Darius was chasing a group of Scythians who’d either attacked or offended him in some way, and he was apparently planning to punish them, but good. Gathering his troops together, he entered Eurasia for the first time in 512 BCE, but when he arrived at the edge of the steppes, none of his officers could figure out how to engage these so-called primitives in combat.
Whenever the troops got too close, the Scythians simply dispersed, riding into the grasslands, leading the king’s rigidly disciplined military force farther and farther into the wilderness. For weeks, the horsemen watched from a safe distance, ignoring the king’s provocative insults, infuriating him further by breaking ranks to chase a stray rabbit as the Persians made their threatening gestures. The Scythians were sleeping on horseback, drinking mare’s milk and playing games along the way, while Darius’s men were growing weak from starvation and exposure. Finally, the Persians were forced to turn around and march home as the Scythians cheered and chuckled in the distance.
The horse tribes maintained their culture and their territory by acting like the horses they rode. Choosing flight over fight was not a cowardly act but an obvious, thoroughly natural way to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. The enemy was ultimately irrelevant because there were no cities to defend. Warrior riders of both sexes led the challengers away from women with young children and mares with foals (who were mobile, though undoubtedly slower). It was only when increasingly materialistic members of these tribes began trading profusely with city dwellers that they sacrificed centuries of freedom. The more possessions they craved and acquired, the more their belongings weighed them down, and the more sedentary they became. Greek gold and wine and decorative vases eventually lured the nomads into a gilded cage of cultural amnesia. The ones who refused to forget fled farther into the grasslands until civilizations developing to the east and west expanded and overlapped right over their graves.
The assumption that nomads were more violent than their “civilized” counterparts has begun to evaporate in light of new research. The Danish archeologist Klavs Randsborg insists it wasn’t marauding hordes of barbarians that led to the fall of the Greco-Roman world. Rather, these societies destroyed their environment and, in desperation, moved out to incorporate the lands and cultures nearby — Celtic, Germanic, Thracian, Scythian — “which until then had led an effective and long-standing existence in harmony with nature.” Citizens of early cities were suffering from anxieties derived from the instability resulting from conspicuous consumption and unchecked population growth. Their only choice was to expand outward, taking over the territories of other peoples, subjugating those peoples and transforming them into the slave labor needed to build new buildings and reap greater harvests. Randsborg and his colleagues insist that, after nearly a millennium of expansion to compensate for repeated economic failure, this process had brought city dwellers to the point at which they had devastated the whole natural and political world around them.
The Gods of
