Professor Andrew Meyer

again, this very material and person-intensive.

So this requires you to bring more and more common people into the realm of warfare and developing the institutions by which you can recruit common people, lots of them, equip them, and then maintain them on the battlefield through longer and longer engagements.

So really, by the late 5th, early 4th century BC,

Warfare has been completely transformed.

It's no longer really the province of aristocrats.

Most of the people doing the fighting are common infantrymen.

And by the fourth century BC, these common infantrymen are all armed with crossbows.

Crossbows.

Interesting.

Okay.

Yeah, that's a very interesting development.

This is one of the reasons why I always make this claim that if Alexander's army had reached China, his army would have been destroyed by the weakest of the warring states, by the smallest Han.

One of the reasons one can fairly confidently make that claim is the crossbow.

If you've got thousands of infantrymen armed with crossbows who are all trained to sort of move in formation, well, nothing that Alexander could deploy was really going to beat that.

The crossbow, we know, wouldn't be invented in Europe until the second millennium.

And the crossbow, you know, it doesn't quite have the range of a musket, but at least a close range, it has much of the deadly power of a musket.

So that's one of the reasons why...

The interstate warfare by the fourth century BC, it's become very destructive, very sort of, and the stakes get very, very high.

A misstep, a strategic misstep is very, very costly in this realm where political leaders have access to that kind of power.

That's the simplest of them, right?