… for a lot of Roman reforms or other changes we just don’t have a lot of evidence for how they were presented. What we often have are descriptions of programs, proposals or ideas written decades or centuries later, when their effects were known, by writers who may be some of the few people in the ancient world who might actually know how things “used to be”.
What I will say is that the Romans were very conservative in their outlook, believing that things ought to be done according to the mos maiorum – “the customs of [our] ancestors”. The very fact that the way you say “ancestors” in Latin is maiores, “the greater ones” should tell you something about the Roman attitude towards the past. And so often real innovations in Roman governance were explained as efforts to get back to the “way things were”, but of course “the way things were” is such a broad concept that you can justify pretty radical changes in some things to restore other things to “the way they were”.
The most obvious example of this, of course, is Augustus with his PR-line of a res publica restituta, “a republic restored”. Augustus made substantial changes (even if one looked past his creation of an entire shadow-office of emperor!) to Roman governance on the justification that this was necessary to “restore” the Republic; exactly what is preserved tells you a lot about what elements of the Roman (unwritten) constitution were thought to be essential to the Republic by the people that mattered (the elites). And Augustus was hardly the first; Sulla crippled the tribunate, doubled the size of the Senate and made substantial reforms to the laws claiming that he was restoring things to the way they had been – that is, restoring the Senate to its position of prominence.
And one thing that is very clear about the Greeks and Romans generally is that they had at best a fuzzy sense of their past, often ascribing considerable antiquity to things which were not old but which stretched out of living memory. Moreover there is a general sense, pervading Greek and Latin literature that people in the past were better than people now, more virtuous, more upright, possibly even physically better. You can see this notion in authors from Hesiod to Sallust. This shouldn’t be overstressed; you also had Aristotelian/Polybian “cyclical” senses of history along with moments of present-triumphalism (Vergil, for instance, and his imperium sine fine). But still there seems to have been a broad sense of the folk system that things get worse over time and thus things must have been better in the past and thus returning to the way things were done is better. We’ve discussed this thought already where it intersects with Roman religion.
And the same time, here we run into the potential weakness of probing elite mentalités in trying to understand a society. Some Romans seem quite aware of positive change over time; Pliny the Elder and Columella are both aware of improving agricultural technology in their own day, particularly as compared to older economic writing by Cato the Elder. Polybius has no problem having the Romans twice adopt new and better ship designs during the First Punic War (though both are “just-so” stories; the ancients love “just-so” stories to explain new innovations or inventions). And sometimes Roman leaders did represent things as very much new; even Augustus combined his res publica restituta rhetoric with the idea that he was ushering in a saeculum novum, a “new age” (based on the idea of 110 year cycles in history).
So there is complexity here. The Romans most certainly did not have our strong positive associations with youth and progress. Their culture expected deference to elders and certainly didn’t expect “progress” most of the time; things, they thought, generally ought to be done as they had “always been done”. Consequently, framing things as a return to the mos maiorum or as a means to return to it was always a strong political framing and presumably many of the folks doing those things believed it. On the other hand the Romans seem well aware that some of the things they did were new and that not all of these “firsts” were bad and that some things had seemed to have gotten better or more useful since the days of their maiores. And some Romans, particularly emperors, are relatively unabashed about making dramatic breaks with tradition and precedent; Diocletian comes to mind here in particular.
Bret Devereaux, “Referenda ad Senatum: January 13, 2023: Roman Traditionalism, Ancient Dates and Imperial Spies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-01-13.
October 16, 2025
QotD: The Roman proclivity to accept changes that “go back to the way things used to be”
October 13, 2025
Stephen Fry’s Odyssey weighed in the balance and found wanting
Bryan Mercadente received a copy of Stephen Fry’s latest foray into Greek mythology and not only is not impressed, he writes, “Every page wasted on Fry is a page stolen from the real thing. The copy my aunt has given me for my birthday is already skimmed with disgust and thrown into the dustbin: it is too disgusting for the charity shops.”
The Iliad and Odyssey are the founding works of our civilisation. They are poems of war, loss, exile, and return. The hero of The Odyssey is a liar, a man of cunning and cruelty, but also a survivor who longs for home. The Homeric poems have come to us out of the Bronze Age. They have survived the collapse of at least two civilisations, and will survive the collapse of our own. They survive because they are already perfect. The hexameters carry an austere music. Their formulaic epithets — “ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς“, “πόδας ὠκὺς Ἀχιλλεύς“, “δῖος Ὀδυσσεύς” — are the memory-tricks of a sung tradition, but they also give the poems a dignity that no one who reads them can ever forget. Like The Iliad, The Odyssey was not written to be read in comfort with a cup of tea. It was composed to be chanted in smoky halls to men who might be dead tomorrow.
Stephen Fry knows none of this. Or if he knows it, he does not care. His Odyssey is Homer without the difficulty. It is Homer stripped of his grandeur, reduced to banter and “relatable” anecdotes. The Observer praised it for bringing “contemporary relevance” to the myths. That line is damning enough. Homer does not need contemporary relevance. A book that has spoken to audiences across three thousand years already possesses the only relevance that matters. To make Homer relevant is to make him trivial.
The Guardian called the book “relatable and full of humour“. Again, the praise condemns. Relatable? Homer is not relatable. The world he describes is harsh and alien. His heroes live by honour and die by the sword. They weep like children and sacrifice to gods who may or may not answer. That strangeness is the point. It is what makes Homer worth reading. To make him “relatable” is to gut him of meaning.
The Irish Independent calls Fry “A born storyteller“. This blurb, like the others, is the language of people who cannot read. No serious critic would praise a reteller of Homer as “a born storyteller”, as if the original poet were not the greatest storyteller of them all. These blurbs are not criticism. They are advertising slogans. And they work. The book is a bestseller.
Why, then, is Fry’s book a bestseller? Not because of merit. It sells because of Stephen Fry himself. For thirty years, he has been cultivated as a “national treasure”. He is the ideal leftist intellectual: clever enough to appear learned, shallow enough never to disturb. He quotes Wilde, sprinkles in Latin tags, and sprinkles them badly. His claque tells us that he is bipolar, gay, witty, and charming. He is on panel shows, chat shows, and literary festivals. He is always agreeable, always moderate, and always applauded.
Fry has built a career on the fact that the English middle classes like to feel cultured without effort. They want Plato without philosophy, Shakespeare without metre, Wagner without subversion, Homer without Greek. They want to be reassured that the classics are not difficult or dangerous, but fun. Fry gives them what they want. He domesticates the wild. He reduces epic to anecdote. He packages civilisation as entertainment.
It is not enough to call this dumbing down. It is worse. Dumbing down implies a reduction in complexity. What Fry does is not simplification but falsification. The Odyssey is not a sequence of funny stories about gods and monsters. It is about endurance and the fragility of human life under the indifference of the divine. To make it “funny” is to destroy it. It is as if someone rewrote the Inferno as a travel blog or recast the Iliad as a football commentary. The whole point of the work is lost.
Popularity, however, is not a defence. It is an indictment. Books that sell by the million are almost always worthless. They are consumed because they flatter the prejudices of the public. They make readers feel clever without having to be clever. They make them feel cultured without culture. They are the literary equivalent of processed food: cheap, sweet, addictive, fattening.
What, then, is the harm? Why not let people have their Fry and be happy? So what if his writing is as inconsequential as his suicide attempts? The harm is that time is short. Every hour spent on Stephen Fry is an hour not spent on Homer. It is an hour subtracted from Gibbon, Johnson, or Shakespeare. It is an hour less of life. The opportunity cost is everything. Bad books are not neutral. They are parasites. They feed on the hours that might have been spent on good ones.
October 10, 2025
QotD: Cleopatra’s reign in Egypt
These are related but disconnected questions. While we’ll get to the evidence for Cleopatra’s relationship with the people of Egypt, the broader legacy of the Ptolemies itself is very clear: the Ptolemaic dynasty and the Greek-speaking settlers it brought were an ethnically distinct ruling strata installed above native Egyptian society, an occupying force. None of Cleopatra’s royal ancestors, none of them had ever even bothered to learn the language of the people they ruled, whose taxes sustained their endless wars (initially foreign, later civil). Top administrative posts remained restricted to ethnic Greeks (though the positions just below them, often very important ones, might be held by Egyptians), citizenship in Alexandria, the capital, remained largely (but not entirely) restricted to Greeks and so on. It’s clear these designations were not entirely impermeable and I don’t want to suggest that they were, but it is also clear that the Greek/Macedonian and Egyptian elite classes don’t begin really fusing together until the Roman period (when they were both equally under the Roman boot, rather than one being under the boot of the other).
Consequently, the interest of the Ptolemaic dynasty could be quite a different thing from the interests of Egypt.
And I won’t bury the lede here: Cleopatra, it seems to me, chose the interests of her dynasty (and her own personal power) over those of Egypt whenever there was a choice and then failed to secure either of those things. Remember, we don’t have a lot in the way of sketches of Cleopatra’s character (and what we have is often hostile); apart from a predilection to learn languages and to value education, it’s hard to know what Cleopatra liked. But we can see her strategic decisions, and I think those speak to a ruler who evidently was unwilling or unable to reform Egypt’s ailing internal governance (admittedly ruined by generations of relatively poor rule), but who shoveled the resources she had into risky gambles for greater power outside of Egypt, all of which failed. That doesn’t necessarily make Cleopatra a terrible ruler, or even the worst Ptolemaic ruler, but I think it does, on balance, make her a fairly poor ruler, or at best a mediocre one.
But before we jump into all of that, I think both a brief explanation of the structure of this kingdom and brief timeline of Cleopatra’s life would be good just so we’re clear on what happens when.
For the structure of the kingdom, we need to break up, to a degree, the peoples in Egypt. Ptolemaic Egypt was not even remotely an ethnically uniform place. Most of the rural population remained ethnically Egyptian but there were substantial areas of “Macedonian” settlement. Ptolemaic subjects were categorized by ethne, but these ethnic classifications themselves are tricky. At the bottom were the Egyptians and at the top were the “Macedonians” (understood to include not just ethnic Macedonians but a wide-range of Greeks). The lines between these groups were not entirely impermeable; we see for instance a fictive ethnic grouping of “Persians” who appear to be Hellenized Egyptians serving in the military. At some point, this group is seems to be simply rolled into the larger group of “Macedonians”. nevertheless it seems like, even into the late period the “Macedonians” were mostly ethnic Greeks who migrated into Egypt and we don’t see the Egyptian and Macedonian elites begin to fuse until the Roman period (when they both shared an equal place under the Roman hobnailed boot). Nevertheless, this was a status hierarchy; “Macedonian” soldiers got paid more, their military settlers got estates several times larger than what their native Egyptian equivalents (the machimoi) got, the tippy-top government posts were restricted to Macedonians (though the posts just below them were often held by Egyptian elites) and so on. And while there was some movement in the hierarchy, for the most part these two groups did not mix; one ruled, the other was ruled.
To which we must then add Alexandria, the capital, built by Alexander, which had a special status in the kingdom unlike any other place. Alexandria was structured as a polis, which of course means it had politai; our evidence is quite clear that all of the original politai were Greek and that new admission to the politai did happen but was very infrequent. Consequently the citizen populace of Alexandria was overwhelmingly Greek and retained a distinctive Greek character. But Alexandria was more than just the politai: it was a huge, cosmopolitan city with large numbers of non-Greek residents. The largest such group will have been Egyptians, but we know it also had a large Jewish community and substantial numbers of people from basically everywhere. So while there were, according to Polybius, three major groups of people (Greek citizens, Egyptian non-citizens and large numbers of mercenaries in service to the king, Polyb. 34.14), there were also lots of other people there too. I do want to stress this: Alexandria was easily one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the ancient world; but for the most part only the Greeks (and not even all of them) were citizens there.
That’s in many ways a shamefully reductive summary of a very complex kingdom, but for this already overlong essay, it will have to do. On to the timeline.
Cleopatra was born in 69 BC, the middle of three daughters of Ptolemy XII Auletes, then ruler of Egypt (he also had two sons, both younger than Cleopatra). In 58 BC (Cleopatra is 11) her father, by all accounts an incompetent ruler, was briefly overthrown and his eldest daughter (Berenice IV) made queen; Cleopatra went into exile with her father. In 55 BC, with Roman support, Ptolemy XII returned to power and executed Berenice. Ptolemy XII then died in 51, leaving two sons (Ptolemy XIII and XIV, 11 and 9 years old respectively) and his two daughters; his will made Cleopatra queen as joint ruler-wife with Ptolemy XIII (a normal enough arrangement for the Ptolemies).
Before the year was out, Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIII (or perhaps more correctly, his court advisors) were at odds, both trying to assert themselves as sole monarch, though by 49 Ptolemy XIII’s faction (again, it seems to mostly have been his advisors running it) had largely sidelined Cleopatra in what had become a civil war. Cleopatra travels to Syria to gather an army and invades Egypt with it in 48, but this effort fails. She is able, however, to ally with Julius Caesar (lately arrived looking for Pompey, who supporters of Ptolemy XIII had killed, to Caesar’s great irritation). Caesar’s army – Cleopatra’s military force is clearly a non-factor by this point – defeats Ptolemy XIII in 47. Caesar appoints Cleopatra as joint ruler with her youngest brother, Ptolemy XIV (he’s 12) and Cleopatra bears Caesar’s son, Ptolemy XV Caesar in 47, who we generally call “Caesarion”.
Cleopatra then journeys to Rome late in 46 and seems to have stayed in Rome until after Caesar’s assassination (March, 44) and the reading of Caesar’s will (April, 44). Ptolemy XIV (the brother) also dies in this year and Cleopatra then co-rules with her son, Caesarion. Cleopatra returns to Egypt, attempts to dispatch troops to aid the Caesarian cause against Brutus and Cassius, but fails and loses all of the troops in 43. She is saved from being almost certainly steamrolled by Brutus and Cassius by their defeat in 42 at Philippi. Cleopatra meets with Marcus Antonius in 41 and they form an alliance, as well as (at some point) a romantic relationship. Cleopatra has three children by Antonius: Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios (twins, born in 40) and Ptolemy Philadelphus (born in 36).
With Cleopatra’s resources, Antonius launches an invasion of Parthia in 38 BC which goes extremely poorly, with him retreating back to Roman territory by 36 having lost quite a fair portion of his army (Cleopatra is back in Egypt ruling). In 34, Antonius embarks on a massive reorganization of the Roman East, handing over massive portions of Rome’s eastern territory – in name at least – to Cleopatra’s children, a move which infuriated the Roman public and cleared the way politically for Octavian to move against him. Through 33 and 32, both sides prepare for war which breaks out in 31. Cleopatra opts to go with Antonius’ combined land-sea military force and on the 2nd of September 31 BC, solidly outmaneuvered at Actium, she and Antonius are soundly defeated. They flee back to Egypt but don’t raise a new army and both die by suicide when Octavian invades in the following year. Octavian reorganizes Egypt into a Roman province governed by an equestrian prefect. Octavian and subsequent Roman emperors never really adopted the title of pharaoh, though the Egyptian priesthood continued to recognize the Roman emperors as pharaohs into the early fourth century – doubtless in part because the religion required a pharaoh, though Roman emperors could never be bothered to actually do the religious aspects of the role and few ever even traveled to Egypt.
So ended the 21-year reign of Cleopatra, the last heir of Alexander.1
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Reign of Cleopatra”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-05-26.
- Except not really, as Cleopatra’s three children by Antonius survived their mother (though the two boys vanish from our sources fairly quickly, though we’re told they were spared by Octavian) and Cleopatra Selene actually ended up a queen herself, of the kingdom of Mauretania. There’s a recent book on what we know of her life, J. Draycott, Cleopatra’s Daughter: From Roman Prisoner to African Queen which I have not yet had a chance to read.
September 23, 2025
Voters didn’t have to pay attention, but now they really, really should
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tristin Hopper posted the best explanations I’ve seen for why Canada is in the state it’s in:
Canadians took it for granted that, no matter which party was in government, the country would continue to be stable, predictable, and competent. That’s clearly wrong today, yet the voters haven’t really accepted the new situation yet. Until they start paying attention, things may not improve.
It’s not just Canada, of course, but Canada is further down the road to ruin and thanks to the governments’ conscious actions, it will probably take longer to recover (and I don’t see a Canadian Javier Milei on the horizon, more’s the pity).
At The Freeman, Will Ogilvie Vega de Seoane discusses a related issue with most forms of representative government:
We are stupid. There, I said it. I feel much better now — like I’ve finally opened up in group therapy. PhDs won’t fix it, nor will subscriptions to all the best outlets. As individuals, we simply do not have the capacity to decide what is best in public life. As voters, we don’t usually care what our representatives are up to, nor do we have the faintest idea what the best policy on agriculture, artificial intelligence, or healthcare should look like — and that’s on a good day. But we do think we know. Deep down we think we are sovereign, that democracy is “all of us”, as though the government were some noble embodiment of “the people” rather than just another collection of organized persons with private agendas.
“Aristeides and the citizens” from Plutarch’s lives for boys and girls (1900).
Plutarch tells a story that I have always found marvelous. It’s about Aristeides “the Just”, one of Athens’s heroes in the Persian Wars. The Athenians, weary of kings and tyrants, invented ostracism — a mechanism to expel for ten years any citizen who got too powerful. Each voter would scratch a name onto a shard of pottery, and if more than 6,000 shards had the same name on them, the man was politely asked to take a decade-long sabbatical. Today we’d probably call it “a career break for the common good”.
Anyway, one day a farmer approached Aristeides himself — without realizing who he was — and asked him to write the name “Aristeides” on his shard. Surprised, Aristeides asked if he had ever harmed him. “No,” said the farmer, “nor do I know him by sight. But I am tired of always hearing him called ‘the Just’.” Aristeides, being annoyingly noble, wrote down his own name and handed the shard back. Later, as he left the city in exile, he prayed the opposite prayer of Achilles: that no crisis should come which would force the Athenians to remember him. On LinkedIn, Aristeides might have written: “Currently on a ten-year sabbatical generously sponsored by the people of Athens. Seeking new challenges outside the Attic peninsula #OpenToWork.”
This, in miniature, is how people vote. Not with knowledge, or vision, or even vague coherence — but out of envy, spite, boredom, or some other glorious irrationality. The Athenians had shards; we have hashtags. Instead of ostracism by pottery, we have ostracism by X: one bad joke, one leaked email, and the digital mob sends you packing. Today in Britain, people can even be jailed for their comments on social media. So much for parrhêsia, that old Athenian virtue of speaking frankly to power. We’ve managed to turn it into a crime — and worse, the canceling mob thinks it’s “speaking truth to power” when in fact it is obedience dressed as rebellion.
Modern voters aren’t any better. Some vote because the candidate owns a cute dog. Others because the candidate is endorsed by Taylor Swift. Entire campaigns have been won on promises of free cable, or by a politician smiling the right way on TikTok. In Spain, we even coined a term for it: the Charo. A Charo is usually an old lady with pink hair who parrots whatever our president says. Charos cannot resist the presidential smile. Even when the president contradicts himself, as he normally does, doing the exact opposite of what he promised, they just blush and blink as if to say: “Oh, Pedro, always misbehaving — we love you all the more for it.” They pamper their charming president and dismiss any criticism as fascist slander. Welcome to the Charocracy.
That’s a pitch-perfect description of the typical Liberal voter in Canada. Mark Carney’s Canada is clearly a maple-flavoured Charocracy.
September 6, 2025
QotD: Leadership training for Persian nobles
Anyway, young Cyrus […] and his classmates spend practically every waking moment being little Tai-Pans. They study in classrooms, receive military training,1 and shadow the magistrates in their official duties; but all of these official lessons are just the backdrop against which the real lessons are taking place. The boys have missions to accomplish, missions which they cannot possibly accomplish individually. So they have to learn to put together a team, to apportion responsibilities, and to judge merit in the aftermath. Anytime one of the boys commits an infraction,2 the adults ensure that he is judged by the others. All of this is carefully monitored, and boys who show partiality or favoritism, or who simply judge poorly, are savagely punished.3
The most common sort of mission is a hunt, the boys are constantly going on hunts, because: “it seems to them that hunting is the truest of the exercises that pertain to war”. This is obvious at the level of basic physical skills: while hunting they run, they ride, they follow tracks, they shoot, and they stab. But the military lessons imparted by hunting are not just physical, they’re also mental. They learn to “deceive wild boars with nets and trenches, and … deer with traps and snares”. To battle a lion, a bear, or a leopard on an equal footing would be suicide, and so by necessity the boys learn to surprise them, or exhaust them, or to terrify them with psychological warfare, doing everything in their power to find an unfair advantage or to create one from circumstances.4 As Cyrus’s father tells him years later: “We educated you to deceive and take advantage not among human beings but with wild animals, so that you not harm your friends in these matters either; yet, if ever a war should arise, so that you might not be unpracticed in them.”
There’s another reason that the boys constantly hunt wild animals, which is that it habituates them to hunger, sleep-deprivation, and extremes of heat and cold. When they depart on a hunt the boys are deliberately given too little food, and what they have is simple and bland (though that’s hardly an issue for those who “regularly use hunger as others use sauce”). Some of this is ascesis in the original Ancient Greek meaning of the word (ἄσκησις – “training”); by getting used to being tired and hungry and cold under controlled circumstances, they will be better at shrugging off these disadvantages when the stakes are higher.
But the real core of it lies in the phrase: “He did not think it was fitting for anyone to rule who was not better than his subjects.” Later, when they’ve reached manhood, the boys will oftentimes be called upon to share physical hardship with those they have been set over, and in that moment it is vital to this social order that they not be soft. “We must of necessity share with our slaves heat and cold, food and drink, and labor and sleep. In this sharing, however, we need first to try to appear better than they in regard to such.” Better in the sense of physically tougher, but also better in the sense of having achieved the absolute mastery of the will over any and all desires.5
Constant exposure to deprivation and hardship isn’t just supposed to improve their endurance, it’s also supposed to make them better at sneering at comforts.6 This is a society which believes that men are more easily destroyed by luxury than by hardship, and that it’s especially important that the leaders be seen to scorn luxury, for “whenever people see that he is moderate for whom it is especially possible to be insolent, then the weaker are more unwilling to do anything insolent in the open.”7 What I love about Xenophon is that unlike many Greek authors, who would deliver that line completely straight, he instead subverts (or at least balances) it with the observation that any kind of suffering is easier to bear when you’re in charge, and even easier when you’re bearing it in order to be seen to be bearing it.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Education of Cyrus, by Xenophon”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-01-08.
1. If you’ve ever been a little boy, or the parent of a little boy, you know how true this is:
“Now the mode of battle that has been shown to us is one that I see all human beings understand by nature, just as also the various other animals each know a certain mode of battle that they learn not from another but from nature. For example, the ox strikes with his horn, the horse with his hoof, the dog with his mouth, the boar with his tusk … Even when I was a boy, I used to seize a sword wherever I saw one, even though I did not learn how one must take hold of it from anywhere else, as I say, than from nature. I used to do this not because I was taught but even though I was opposed, just as there were also other things I was compelled to do by nature, though I was opposed by both my mother and father. And, yes, by Zeus, I used to strike with the sword everything I was able to without getting caught, for it was not only natural, like walking and running, but it also seemed to me to be pleasant in addition to being natural.”
2. Not just explicit violations of the rules though: “they also judge cases of ingratitude, an accusation for which human beings hate each other very much but very rarely adjudicate; and they punish severely whomever they judge not to have repaid a favor he was able to repay”.
3. “In one case, I was beaten because I did not judge correctly. The case was like this: A big boy with a little tunic took off the big tunic of a little boy, and he dressed him in his own tunic, while he himself put on that of the other. Now I, in judging it for them, recognized that it was better for both that each have the fitting tunic. Upon this the teacher beat me, saying that whenever I should be appointed judge of the fitting, I must do as I did; but when one must judge to whom the tunic belongs, then one must examine, he said, what is just possession.”
4. Players of old-school tabletop role-playing games might be reminded of the distinction between “combat as sport” and “combat as war” or the parable of Tucker’s Kobolds.
5. Years later one of Cyrus’s classmates gives a long speech about how falling in love is optional — a real man can make himself love any woman he chooses, and conversely can restrain himself from loving any woman, no matter how desirable. All poetic references to being made a prisoner by love, or forced by love to do certain things, are excuses made by weaklings who wish to give into their desires. This is a message right in line with the most inhuman aspects of Greek philosophy, and to his credit Xenophon immediately subverts it by having the guy who delivers it immediately fall madly in love with his beautiful female captive.
6. One of the highest compliments ever paid to Cyrus is when an older mentor remarks of his posse that:
“I saw them bearing labors and risks with enthusiasm, but now I see them bearing good things moderately. It seems to me, Cyrus, to be more difficult to find a man who bears good things nobly than one who bears evil things nobly, for the former infuse insolence in the many, but the latter infuse moderation in all.”
7. Compare this to the American ruling class, which is also weirdly Spartan in its own way. The wealthiest Americans on average work a crazy number of hours, lead highly regimented lives, and avoid drugs. The difference is that whereas the Persian aristocracy does this as an example for the lower classes, the American aristocracy actively encourages the lower classes to consume themselves in cheap luxury and sensual dissipation.
August 19, 2025
Roman Hellenism
In his post “A Pagan Confession“, Fortissax provides an explanation of Roman Hellenism, the most widespread religious system in Europe before Christianity:
The Roman Empire at its maximum extent
The closest term that would describe me is “Roman Hellenist”.
Roman Hellenism was the largest religion in the Western world prior to the rise of Christianity. It was followed from Britain to Greece, from Spain to Romania, and was the first civilization-wide faith for Europeans.
At its height under the Roman Empire, Hellenism was a vast and adaptable religious tradition that united Greek mythology, Roman state religion and cults, household rites, and philosophical schools into a coherent spiritual world. As the organized state religion, the Dii Consentes were worshipped in every corner of the empire under both Latin and Greek names. Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Apollo, Minerva, and others were honoured through public festivals, imperial temples, military devotions, and local folk religion. This civic devotion was shaped by writers such as Cicero, Livy, and Plutarch, who emphasized the importance of piety, order, and divine ancestry.
Hellenism offered more than just myth or folklore. It provided a structured understanding of the cosmos, where the gods represented natural and moral forces, and where religion was interwoven with daily life, civic duty, and personal virtue. Mystery cults such as those of Dionysus and the Eleusinian rites offered deeper initiatory experiences, described by authors like Herodotus and Euripides. Philosophers such as Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, Damascius, and Hierocles were considered divinely inspired and were often trained by the augurs, or in the College of Pontiffs, established in 400 B.C., and the inspiration for the College of Cardinals. These were priests within the state religion.
They built the theology of the faith. These philosophers were not monotheists or atheists, but pagans, and their theology came from Hellenism. Ordinary people prayed, sacrificed, and kept sacred fires at home. This marks the distinction between the folk religion of the everyman and the theological work of the priestly and philosophical elite, though they formed a whole, similar to Christian folk religion compared to the sophistication of the clergy. Hellenism in the Roman world was participation in a divine order that shaped identity, politics, culture, and destiny.
It had a core, but it was a dynamic tapestry. It often accommodated or incorporated local and regional gods of subject peoples throughout the empire, including other Europeans. It was normal to find shrines or temples dedicated to syncretic deities where Roman and provincial traditions were blended. This reflected a deeper truth shared by many Indo-European peoples. Across vast distances, from the Celts and Germans to the Greeks and Romans, there was a common spiritual grammar. Their gods often held similar roles, attributes, and origins. Rather than destroy or suppress local belief, Roman Hellenism often absorbed and integrated it within a universal metaphysical framework, though one without too strict of a dogma, which allowed spiritual continuity across cultures.
The Romans referred to this process as interpretatio graeca, the identification of foreign gods with Greek ones, and interpretatio romana, the application of Roman names and attributes. In Gaul and Germania, local deities such as Lugh or Wodan were equated with Hermes or Mercury. Camulos and Tyr equated with Mars, Taranis with Jupiter through interpretatio gallica and interpretatio germanica.
These interpretive traditions allowed theological bridges across linguistic and ethnic boundaries, fostering religious continuity and civic unity. Writers like Varro, Tacitus, and Strabo observed this continuity, noting that while names and symbols differed, the gods themselves were one in essence. This interpretive unity was ritualized practically in temple, altar, hymn, and law.
This faith, was shaped by the Iliad and the Aeneid, the rituals of Rome and the hymns of Orpheus, the Chaldean Oracles, the laws of the Twelve Tables and the meditations of Aurelius. It spoke through the Sibyl and the Stoic, the philosopher and the priest, the hearth and the polis. It is the soul of the West in its first religious form, a religion of cosmic order, virtue, memory, and return. Its path leads from the One to the many, and back again through sacrifice, contemplation, and union.
To be a Hellenist, in this fuller sense, is to honour the gods as real beings and divine intelligences who participate in the life of the soul and the order of the cosmos. It is to seek harmony with this order through philosophy, ritual, moral striving, and ancestral memory. It is a way of life, rooted in reason and reverence.
August 10, 2025
Al Stewart – “Helen and Cassandra”
jonnoms
Published 19 Jun 2011Slight re-working of ‘Where Are They Now?’ video to another, Al Stewart song.
July 6, 2025
QotD: After the Bronze Age Collapse
But what surprised me most about After 1177 B.C. is how short this era was. In some places, anyway.
We have a vague picture of what happens after a civilizational collapse, but it’s been disproportionately influenced by two particularly dramatic examples: sub-Roman Britain and the Greek Dark Ages. This was perfectly sensible coming from the Anglo historians and archaeologists who have dominated the public conception of the field — after all, the only thing more interesting than the history of your own island is that of the classical world you’ve been studying since you got your first Latin grammar at age six — but it turns out that neither of these are the general rule. Foggy, faraway Britain, so reliant on imported goods and troops, was far more seriously impacted by the withdrawal of Rome than was most of the Empire and saw a longer and more significant reduction in cultural complexity, standards of living, average stature, and of course population. (Imagine what would happen to a Mars colony if the connections to the home planet stopped working.)
Greece after the fall of the Mycenaeans suffered an even more striking decline. As Austrian archaeologist Sigrid Deger-Jalkotzy summarizes:
The impressive palatial structures were not rebuilt, and very little of the representational arts and crafts of the palaces seems to have survived. The complex forms of political, social, and economic organization fell into oblivion. Palaces, kings, and royal families became matter for Greek myths. The art of writing was lost for centuries. In short, Greek civilization was reduced to the level of a prehistoric society.
The Greeks of the classical era had little conception that the Mycenaeans had even existed, let alone that they were their own ancestors: they retained a vague mythological tradition of past kings, but they attributed the few surviving Mycenaean structures to the work of cyclopes. In fact, the disconnect between the civilization of the Late Bronze Age and the later classical world was so great that until Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B, it was an open question whether the people responsible for the Lion Gate and the Treasury of Atreus were even Greeks at all. (The answer, in case you’re wondering, is yes: Linear B turns out to be a syllabic script for the most ancient attested form of Greek. It features a number of uniquely Greek words and deity names even in the limited surviving corpus. More recently, ancient DNA has confirmed the linguistic evidence: the classical Greeks were the descendants of the Mycenaeans.)1
But the more you look at the archaeological record, the more you can pick out signs of cultural continuity. Agricultural practices don’t seem to have changed much, nor did Mycenaean pottery styles, and the names and attributes of the gods preserved in Linear B are close if not identical to their forms as codified in Homer and Hesiod. Even the cyclopean architecture continued to provide shelter: the Mycenaean palace at Pylos was almost completely destroyed in the Collapse, but the few rooms that survived intact show signs of having been inhabited by squatters over the next century or two.
Homer too is chock full of details that turn out to be distant memories of the Mycenaean world, somehow preserved in the oral tradition until writing was reintroduced to Greece.2 For instance, he describes a kind of boar’s tusk helmet that, by his time, no one had worn for centuries, but which archaeologists have since regularly discovered in Mycenaean shaft graves throughout the Aegean. But my favorite example, which is of course linguistic, is the word for “king”: Homer describes Menelaus, Agamemnon, Odysseus and others with the word anax, which is recognizably the Linear B word 𐀷𐀙𐀏, wa-na-ka, used in the Bronze Age to describe the supreme rulers of the Mycenaean palatial societies. (The w sound was lost with the tragic death of the digamma.) By the classical era, however, anax had fallen out of use in preference for basileus (Linear B 𐀣𐀯𐀩𐀄, qa-si-re-u), which in the Mycenaean period had referred to a much lower-level chieftain.
This all paints an evocative picture of a post-apocalyptic world. You can imagine it transplanted to an American context, with the scattered survivors of some great cataclysm huddled around fires built in the corners of a crumbling Lincoln Memorial. You can picture them passing on stories of the great men of the past with their tall tube-shaped hats and the shiny black stones they carried in their pockets. And by the time this remnant rebuilt, they might well have forgotten the word “President” except as an archaism; after centuries of as a small-scale society, “Mayor” might become so deeply engrained as the highest title that two thousand years later they would still use it to refer to their emperor.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: After 1177 B.C., by Eric H. Cline”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-07-08.
1. It’s slightly more complicated than that, because of course it is; see here for more detail from Razib Khan.
2. A reasonable ballpark guess is that the poems traditionally attributed to Homer were composed in something like their current forms around 750 BC and written down for the first time shortly before 525 BC, although like the dating of Beowulf there’s a great deal of argument.
May 16, 2025
A Very Basic Introduction To Ancient Carthage
MoAn Inc.
Published 1 Jan 2025Images Used
Hamilcar Barca and The Oath of Hannibal – Benjamin West (1738–1820) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient…
Ancient Carthage. (2024, December 27). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient…
Numerius Fabius Pictor (antiquarian). (2023, October 11). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeriu…)
Aristotle. (2024, December 27). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle
Herodotus. (2024, December 30). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus
Cassius Dio. (2024, November 28). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassius…
Plutarch. (2024, December 23). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutarch
Polybius. (2024, December 31). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybius
Livy. (2024, November 23). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livy
File:Death Dido Cayot Louvre MR1780.jpg. In Wikipedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
Colosseum. (2024, December 21). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colosseum
Carthage Ports Puniques, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
File:Bardo National Museum tanit-edit.jpg. In Wikipedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
File:Bardo Baal Thinissut.jpg. In Wikipedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
File:Ginnasium Solunto.jpg. In Wikipedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
File:Carthage 323 BC.png. In Wikipedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…A Bit About MoAn Inc. –
Trust me, the ancient world isn’t as boring as you may think. In this series, I’ll be walking you through a VERY basic idea of what happened during Rome’s famous Punic Wars.Donate Here: https://www.ko-fi.com/moaninc
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May 11, 2025
History of Britain, I: Hail Prettanike! Early References to the British Isles
Thersites the Historian
Published 6 Jan 2025The natural starting point for examining the history of Britain is to look at how the island and its inhabitants first entered the historical record.
May 8, 2025
QotD: Trade empires
So let us consider the motives of Empire in a few cases.
The Phoenicians had a magnificent trade empire, though with a few elements we find familiar from the more recent Viking version, or indeed the Venetian “Republic” — namely a bit of raiding, and quite a bit of slave trading. All three broadened into a bit of conquest — Carthage, Normandy and the sack of Constantinople in the 4th Crusade come to mind — but all those offshoots were by-products of the original cultures, and none of them became the norm for the ongoing home culture (each of which faded away as circumstances changed and they failed to adapt). So we could say that they were essentially trading empires.
Greece and Carthage and Rome were also trade empires, initially letting their security concerns drag them into a bit of conquest on the side. The difference in their cases was that the conquest element became dominant and completely changed the “homeland”. The city states of Greece becoming the world-conquering hordes of Alexander, and completely undermining the vibrant city state cultures that had proceeded them. The Phoenician trading city of Carthage becoming an expansionary conquest state that eventually pushed Rome too hard. And Rome’s overseas campaigns in Spain and North Africa completely undermining the independent farmer/citizen/soldier class of the Roman Republic, and replacing them with a system of professional troops whose loyalty could only be bought by ever increasing conquests by the emperors.
Naturally every expansion eventually reaches limits, and the concern reverts to trying to secure what you have, and hold the outsiders further away. Which is why, amusingly, people like the Romans and the Chinese came through their expansionary conquest phase, and then found themselves back in the position of having to protect the fringes through deals with tribes that can be traded with/employed by/or paid tribute. Cue Attila the Hun and his ilk.
So empires on the way down may also be considered trade and security empires I suppose, though many still had a conquest impulse (for fame or fortune or simply to pay the defenders off) built in, or tried to act as if they were still conquering hordes. Cue Constantinople and Belisarius.
In fact most empires will go through a variety of stages, though I think it fair to say that most empires have a core purpose and attitude, no matter how they tinker at the edges to deal with specific circumstances.
Nigel Davies, “Types of Empires: Security, Conquest, and Trade”, rethinking history, 2020-05-02.
April 24, 2025
QotD: The Phalanx
So let’s start with the equipment, formation and fighting style. The older hoplite phalanx was a shield wall, using the large, c. 90cm diameter aspis and a one-handed thrusting spear, the dory. Only the front rank in a formation like this engaged the enemy, with the rear ranks providing replacements should the front hoplites fall as well as a morale force of cohesion by their presence which allowed the formation to hold up under the intense mental stress of combat. But while hoplites notionally covered each other with their shields, they were mostly engaged in what were basically a series of individual combats. As we noted with our bit on shield walls, the spacing here seems to have been wide enough that while the aspis of your neighbor is protecting you in that it occupies physical space that enemy weapons cannot pass through, you are not necessarily hunkered down shoulder-to-shoulder hiding behind your neighbor’s shield.
The Macedonian or sarisa-phalanx evolves out of this type of combat, but ends up quite different indeed. And this is the point where what should be a sentence or two is going to turn into a long section. The easy version of this section goes like this: the standard Macedonian phalangite (that is, the soldier in the phalanx) carried a sarisa, a two-handed, 5.8m long (about 19ft) pike, along with an aspis, a round shield of c. 75cm carried with an arm and neck strap, a sword as a backup weapon, a helmet and a tube-and-yoke cuirass, probably made out of textile. Officers, who stood in the first rank (the hegemones) wore heavier armor, probably consisting of either a muscle cuirass or a metal reinforced (that is, it has metal scales over parts of it) tube-and-yoke cuirass. I am actually quite confident that sentence is basically right, but I’m going to have to explain every part of it, because in popular treatments, many outdated reconstructions of all of this equipment survive which are wrong. Bear witness, for instance, to the Wikipedia article on the sarisa which gets nearly all of this wrong.
Wikipedia‘s article on the topic as of January, 2024. Let me point out the errors here.
1) The wrong wood, the correct wood is probably ash, not cornel – the one thing Connolly gets wrong on this weapon (but Sekunda, op. cit. gets right).
2) The wrong weight, entirely too heavy. The correct weight should be around 4kg, as Connolly shows.
3) Butt-spikes were not exclusively in bronze. The Vergina/Aigai spike is iron, though the Newcastle butt is bronze (but provenance, ????)
4) They could be anchored in the ground to stop cavalry. This pike is 5.8m long, its balance point (c. 1.6m from the back) held at waist height (c. 1m), so it would be angled up at something like 40 degrees, so anchoring the butt in the ground puts the head of the sarisa some 3.7m (12 feet) in the air – a might bit too high, I may suggest. The point could be brought down substantially if the man was kneeling, which might be workable. More to the point, the only source that suggests this is Lucian, a second century AD satirist (Dial Mort. 27), writing two centuries after this weapon and its formation had ceased to exist; skepticism is advised.
5) We’ll get to shield size, but assuming they all used the 60cm shield is wrong.
6) As noted, I don’t think these weapons were ever used in two parts joined by a tube and also the tube at Vergina/Aigai was in iron. Andronikos is really clear here, it is a talon en fer and a douille en fer. Not sure how that gets messed up.Sigh. So in detail we must go. Let us begin with the sarisa (or sarissa; Greek uses both spellings). This was the primary weapon of the phalanx, a long pike rather than the hoplite‘s one-handed spear (the dory). And we must discuss its structure, including length, because this is a case where a lot of the information in public-facing work on this is based on outdated scholarship, compounded by the fact that the initial reconstructions of the weapon, done by Minor Markle and Manolis Andronikos, were both entirely unworkable and, I think, quite clearly wrong. The key works to actually read are the articles by Peter Connolly and Nicholas Sekunda.1 If you are seeing things which are not working from Connolly and Sekunda, you may safely discard them.
Let’s start with length; one sees a very wide range of lengths for the sarisa, based in part on the ancient sources. Theophrastus (early third century BC) says it was 12 cubits long, Polybius (mid-second century) says it was 14 cubits, while Asclepiodotus (first century AD) says the shortest were 10 cubits, while Polyaenus (second century AD) says that the length was 16 cubits in the late fourth century.2 Two concerns come up immediately: the first is that the last two sources wrote long after no one was using this weapon and as a result are deeply suspect, whereas Theophrastus and Polybius saw it in use. However, the general progression of 12 to 14 to 16 – even though Polyaenus’ word on this point is almost worthless – has led to the suggestion that the sarisa got longer over time, often paired to notions that the Macedonian phalanx became less flexible. That naturally leads into the second question, “how much is a cubit?” which you will recall from our shield-wall article. Connolly, I think, has this clearly right: Polybius is using a military double-cubit that is arms-length (c. 417mm for a single cubit, 834mm for the double), while Theophrastus is certainly using the Athenian cubit (487mm), which means Theophrastus’ sarisa is 5.8m long and Polybius’ sarisa is … 5.8m long. The sarisa isn’t getting longer, these two fellows have given us the same measurement in slightly different units. This shaft is then tapered, thinner to the tip, thicker to the butt, to handle the weight; Connolly physically reconstructed these, armed a pike troupe with them, and had the weapon perform as described in the sources, which I why I am so definitively confident he is right. The end product is not the horribly heavy 6-8kg reconstructions of older scholars, but a manageable (but still quite heavy) c. 4kg weapon.
Of all of the things, the one thing we know for certain about the sarisa is that it worked.
Next are the metal components. Here the problem is that Manolis Andronikos, the archaeologist who discovered what remains our only complete set of sarisa-components in the Macedonian royal tombs at Vergina/Aigai managed to misidentify almost every single component (and then poor Minor Markle spent ages trying to figure out how to make the weapon work with the wrong bits in the wrong place; poor fellow). The tip of the weapon is actually tiny, an iron tip made with a hollow mid-ridge massing just 100g, because it is at the end of a very long lever and so must be very light, while the butt of the weapon is a large flanged iron butt (0.8-1.1kg) that provides a counter-weight. Finally, Andronikos proposed that a metal sleeve roughly 20cm in length might have been used to join two halves of wood, allowing the sarisa to be broken down for transport or storage; this subsequently gets reported as fact. But no ancient source reports this about the weapon and no ancient artwork shows a sarisa with a metal sleeve in the middle (and we have a decent amount of ancient artwork with sarisae in them), so I think not.3
Polybius is clear how the weapon was used, being held four cubits (c. 1.6m) from the rear (to provide balance), the points of the first five ranks could project beyond the front man, providing a lethal forward hedge of pike-points.4 As Connolly noted in his tests, while raised, you can maneuver quite well with this weapon, but once the tips are leveled down, the formation cannot readily turn, though it can advance. Connolly noted he was able to get a English Civil War re-enactment group, Sir Thomas Glemham’s Regiment of the Sealed Knot Society, not merely to do basic maneuvers but “after advancing in formation they broke into a run and charged”. This is not necessarily a laboriously slow formation – once the sarisae are leveled, it cannot turn, but it can move forward at speed.
The shield used by these formations is a modified form of the old hoplite aspis, a round, somewhat dished shield with a wooden core, generally faced in bronze.5 Whereas the hoplite aspis was around 90cm in diameter, the shield of the sarisa-phalanx was smaller. Greek tends to use two words for round shields, aspis and pelte, the former being bigger and the latter being smaller, but they shift over time in confusing ways, leading to mistakes like the one in the Wikipedia snippet above. In the classical period, the aspis was the large hoplite shield, while the pelte was the smaller shield of light, skirmishing troops (peltastai, “peltast troops”). In the Hellenistic period, it is clear that the shield of the sarisa-phalanx is called an “aspis” – these troops are leukaspides, chalkaspides, argyraspides (“white shields”, “bronze shields”, “silver shields” – note the aspides, pl. of aspis in there). This aspis is modestly smaller than the hoplite aspis, around 75cm or so in diameter; that’s still quite big, but not as big.
Then we have some elite units from this period which get called peltastai but have almost nothing to do with classical period peltastai. Those older peltasts were javelin-equipped light infantry skirmishers. But Hellenistic peltastai seem to be elite units within the phalanx who might carry the sarisa (but perhaps a shorter one) and use a smaller shield which gets called the pelte but is not the pelte of the classical period. Instead, it is built exactly like the Hellenistic aspis – complete with a strap-suspension system suspending it from the shoulder – but is smaller, only around 65cm in diameter. These sarisa-armed peltastai are a bit of a puzzle, though Asclepiodotus (1.2) in describing an ideal Hellenistic army notes that these guys are supposed to be heavier than “light” (psiloi) troops, but lighter than the main phalanx, carrying a smaller shield and a shorter sarisa, so we might understand them as an elite force of infantry perhaps intended to have a bit more mobility than the main body, but still be able to fight in a sarisa-phalanx. They may also have had less body-armor, contributing that the role as elite “medium” infantry with more mobility.6
Finally, our phalangites are armored, though how much and with what becomes really tricky, fast. We have an inscription from Amphipolis7 setting out military regulations for the Antigonid army which notes fines for failure to have the right equipment and requires officers (hegemones, these men would stand in the front rank in fighting formation) to wear either a thorax or a hemithorakion, and for regular soldiers where we might expect body armor, it specifies a kottybos. All of these words have tricky interpretations. A thorax is chest armor (literally just “a chest”), most often somewhat rigid armor like a muscle cuirass in bronze or a linothorax in textile (which we generally think means the tube-and-yoke cuirass), but the word is sometimes used of mail as well.8 A hemithorakion is clearly a half-thorax, but what that means is unclear; we have no ancient evidence for the kind of front-plate without back-plate configuration we get in the Middle Ages, so it probably isn’t that. And we just straight up don’t know what a kottybos is, although the etymology seems to suggest some sort of leather or textile object.9
In practice there are basically two working reconstructions out of that evidence. The “heavy” reconstruction10 assumes that what is meant by kottybos is a tube-and-yoke cuirass, and thus the thorax and hemithorakion must mean a muscle cuirass and a metal-reinforced tube-and-yoke cuirass respectively. So you have a metal-armored front line (but not entirely muscle cuirasses by any means) and a tube-and-yoke armored back set of ranks. I would argue the representational evidence tends to favor this; we most often see phalangites associated with tube-and-yoke cuirasses, rarely with muscle cuirasses (but sometimes!) and not often at all in situations where they have the rest of their battle kit (helmet, shield, sarisa) as required for the regular infantry by the inscription but no armor.
Then there is the “light” reconstruction11 which instead reads this to mean that only the front rank had any body armor at all and the back ranks only had what amounted to thick travel cloaks. Somewhat ironically, it would be really convenient for the arguments I make in scholarly venues if Sekunda was right about this … but I honestly don’t think he is. My judgment rebels against the notion that these formations were almost entirely unarmored and I think our other evidence cuts against it.12
Still, even if we take the “heavy” reconstruction here, when it comes to armor, we’re a touch less well armored compared to that older hoplite phalanx. The textile tube-and-yoke cuirass, as far as we can tell, was the cost-cutting “cheap” armor option for hoplites (as compared to more expensive bell- and later muscle-cuirasses in bronze). That actually dovetails with helmets: Hellenistic helmets are lighter and offer less coverage than Archaic and Classical helmets do as well. Now that’s by no means a light formation; the tube-and-yoke cuirass still offers good protection (though scholars currently differ on how to reconstruct it in terms of materials). But of course all of this makes sense: we don’t need to be as heavily armored, because we have our formation.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph, Part Ia: Heirs of Alexander”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-01-19.
1. So to be clear, that means the useful is P. Connolly, “Experiments with the sarissa” JRMES 11 (2000) and N. Sekunda, “The Sarissa” Acta Universitatis Lodziensis 23 (2001). The parade of outdated scholarship is Andronikos, “Sarissa” BCH 94 (1970); M. Markle, “The Macedonian sarissa” AJA 81 (1977) and “Macedonian arms and tactics” in Macedonia and Greece in Late Classical and Early Hellenistic Times, (1982), P.A. Manti, “The sarissa of the Macedonian infantry” Ancient World 23.2 (1992) and “The Macedonian sarissa again” Ancient World 25.2 (1994), J.R. Mixter, “The length of the Macedonian sarissa” Ancient World 23.2 (1992). These weren’t, to be clear, bad articles, but they are stages of development in our understanding, which are now past.
2. Theophrastus HP 3.12.2. Polyb. 18.29.2. Asclepiodotus Tact. 5.1; Polyaenus Strat. 2.29.2. Also Leo Tact. 6.39 and Aelian Tact. 14.2 use Polybius’ figure, probably quoting him.
3. Also, what very great fool wants his primary weapon, which is – again – a 5.8m long pike that masses around 4kg to be held together in combat entirely by the tension and friction of a c. 20cm metal sleeve?
4. Christopher Matthew, op. cit., argues that Polybius must be wrong because if the weapon is gripped four cubits from the rear, it will foul the rank behind. I find this objection unconvincing because, as noted above and below, Peter Connolly did field drills with a pike troupe using the weapon and it worked. Also, we should be slow to doubt Polybius who probably saw the weapon and its fighting system first hand.
5. What follows is drawn from K. Liampi, Makedonische Schild (1998), which is the best sustained study of Hellenistic period shields.
6. Sekunda reconstructs them this way, without body armor, in Macedonian Armies after Alexander, (2013). I think that’s plausible, but not certain.
7. Greek text is in Hatzopoulos, op. cit.
8. Polyb. 30.25.2. Also of scale, Hdt. 9.22, Paus. 1.21.6.
9. The derivation assumed to be from κοσύμβη or κόσσυμβος, which are a sort of shepherd’s heavy cloak.
10. Favored by Hatzopoulos, Everson and Connolly.
11. Favored by Sekunda and older scholarship, as well as E. Borza, In the Shadow of Olympus (1990), 204-5, 298-9.
12. Representational evidence, but also the report that when Alexander got fresh armor for his army, he burned 25,000 sets of old, worn out armor. Curtius 9.3.21; Diodorus 17.95.4. Alexander does not have 25,000 hegemones, this must be the armor of the general soldiery and if he’s burning it, it must be made of organic materials. I think the correct reading here is that Alexander’s soldiers mostly wore textile tube-and-yoke cuirasses.
March 29, 2025
The Life of Plutarch
MoAn Inc.
Published 19 Sept 2024#AncientHistory #AncientGreece #Plutarch
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March 3, 2025
All The Basics About XENOPHON
MoAn Inc.
Published 7 Nov 2024I actually found this video really tricky considering I want to go into the texts of Xenophon and if I told you everything about the march of the ten thousand then I would have just told you the whole Anabasis?? Which defeats the whole purpose of an introductory video?? So I PROMISE more clarity will come in future videos as Xenophon himself breaks down his journey home from Persia and why they were there in the first place. Therefore, you have ALL OF THAT to look forward to — coming soon!!!
(more…)
March 1, 2025
QotD: Roman Republic versus Seleucid Empire – the Battle of Magnesia
Scipio also brought fresh troops with him. The Senate authorized him to raise a supplementum (recruitment to fill out an army) of 3,000 Roman infantry, 100 Roman cavalry, 5,000 socii infantry and 200 socii cavalry (Livy 37.2.1) as well as authorizing him to carry the war into Asia (meaning Anatolia or Asia Minor) if he thought it wise – which of course he will. In addition to this, the two Scipios also called for volunteers from Scipio Africanus’ veterans and got 5,000 of them, a mix of Romans and socii (Livy 37.4.3), so all told Lucius Cornelius Scipio is crossing to Greece with reinforcements of some 13,000 infantry (including some battle-hardened veterans), 300 cavalry and one Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus.1 That said, a significant portion of this force is going to end up left in Greece to handle garrison duty and the Aetolians. Antiochus III, for his part, spends this time raising forces for a major battle, while dispatching his son Seleucus (the future Seleucus IV, r. 187-175) to try to raid Pergamum, Rome’s key ally in the region.
Once the Romans arrive (and join up with Eumenes’ army), both sides maneuvered to try and get a battle on favorable terms. Antiochus III’s army was massive with lots of cavalry – 62,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry, an army on the same general order of magnitude as the one that fought at Raphia – so he sought an open area, setting up his fortified camp near Magnesia, with fairly formidable defenses – a ditch with a double-rampart (Livy 37.37.9-11). Unsurprisingly, the Romans, with a significant, but smaller force, preferred a fight in more confined quarters and for several days the armies sat opposite each other with minor skirmishes (Livy 37.38).
The problem Scipio faced was a simple one: the year was coming to a close, which meant that soon new consuls would be elected and he could hardly count on his command being extended. Consequently, Scipio calls together his war council – what the Romans call a consilium – to ask what he should do if Antiochus III couldn’t be lured into battle on favorable terms. The answer he got back was to force a battle and so force a battle Scipio did, advancing forward onto the ground of Antiochus’ choosing, leading to the Battle of Magnesia.
We have two accounts of this battle which mostly match up, one in Livy (Livy 37.39-44) and another in Appian’s Syrian Wars (App. Syr. 30-36). Livy here is generally the better source and chances are both authors are relying substantially on Polybius (who would be an even better source), whose account of the battle is lost.
Antiochus III’s army was enormous, with a substantial superiority in cavalry. From left to right, according to Livy (Livy 37.40), Antiochus III deployed: Cyrtian slinger and Elymaean archers (4,000), then a unit of caetrati (4,000; probably light infantry peltasts), then the contingent of Tralli (1,500; light infantry auxiliaries from Anatolia), then Carian and Cilicians equipped like Cretans (1,500; light archer infantry), then the Neo-Cretans (1,000; light archer infantry), then the Galatian cavalry (2,500; mailed shock cavalry), then a unit of Tarantine cavalry (number unclear, probably 500; Greek light cavalry), a part of the “royal squadron” of cavalry (1,000; Macedonian shock cavalry), then the ultra-heavy cataphract cavalry (3,000), supported by a mixed component of auxiliaries (2,700; medium thureophoroi infantry?) along with his scythed chariots and Arab camel troops.
That gets us to the central component of the line (still reading left to right): Cappadocians (2,000) who Livy notes were similarly armed to the Galatian infantry (1,500, unarmored, La Tène infantry kit, so “mediums”) who come next. Then the main force of the phalanx, 16,000 strong with 22 elephants. The phalanx was formed 32 ranks deep, with the intervals between the regiments covered by the elephants deployed in pairs, creating an articulated or enallax phalanx like Pyrrhus had, but using elephants rather than infantry to cover the “hinges”. This may in fact, rather than being a single phalanx 32 men deep be a “double” phalanx (one deployed behind the other) like we saw at Sellasia. Then on the right of the phalanx was another force of 1,500 Galatian infantry. Oddly missing here is the main contingent of the elite Silver Shields (the Argyraspides); some scholars2 note that a contingent of them 10,000 strong would make Livy’s total strength numbers and component numbers match up and he has just forgotten them in the main line. We might expect them to be deployed to the right of the main phalanx (where Livy will put the infantry Royal Cohort (regia cohors), confusing a subunit of the argyraspides with the larger whole unit. Michael Taylor in a forthcoming work3 has suggested they may also have been deployed behind the cavalry we’re about to get to or otherwise to their right.
That gets us now to the right wing (still moving left to right; you begin to realize how damn big this army is), we have more cataphracts (3,000, armored shock cavalry), the elite cavalry agema (1,000; elite Mede/Persian cavalry, probably shock), then Dahae horse archers (1,200; Steppe horse archers), then Cretan and Trallian light infantry (3,000), then some Mysian Archers (2,500) and finally another contingent of Cyrtian slinger and Elymaean archers (4,000).
This is, obviously, a really big army. But notice that a lot of its strength is in light infantry: combining the various archers, slingers and general light infantry (excluding troops we suspect to be “mediums”) we come to something like 21,500 lights, plus another 7,700 “medium” infantry and then 26,000 heavy infantry (accounting for the missing argyraspides). That’s 55,200 total, but Livy reports a total strength for the army of 62,000; it’s possible the missing remainder were troops kept back to defend the camp, in which case they too are likely light infantry. A Roman army’s infantry contingent is around 28% “lights” (the velites), who do not occupy any space in the main battle line. Antiochus’ infantry contingent, while massive, is 39% “lights” (and another 14% “mediums”), some of which do seem to occupy actual space in the battle line.
Of course Antiochus also has a massive amount of cavalry ranging from ultra-heavy cataphracts to light but highly skilled horse archers and massive cavalry superiority covereth a multitude of sins.
But the second problem with this gigantic army is one that – again, in a forthcoming work – Michael Taylor has pointed out. The physical space of the battlefield at Magnesia is not big enough to deploy the whole thing […]
Now Livy specifies that the flanks of Antiochus’ army curve forward, describing them as “horns” (cornu) rather than “wings” (alae) and noting they were “a little bit advanced” (paulum producto), which may be an effort to get more of this massive army actually into the fight […]. So while this army is large, it’s also unwieldy and difficult to bring properly into action and it’s not at all clear from either Livy or Appian that the whole army actually engaged – substantial portions of that gigantic mass of light infantry on the wings just seem to dissolve away once the battle begins, perhaps never getting into the fight in the first place.
The Roman force was deployed in its typical formation, with the three lines of the triplex acies and the socii flanking the legions (Livy 37.39.7-8), with the combined Roman and socii force being roughly 20,000 strong (the legions and alae being somewhat over-strength). In addition Eumenes, King of Pergamum was present and the Romans put his force on their right to cover the open flank, while he anchored his left flank on the Phrygios River. Eumenes’ wing consisted of 3,000 Achaeans (of the Achaean League) that Livy describes as caetrati and Appian describes as peltasts (so, lights), plus nearly all of Scipio’s cavalry: Eumenes’ cavalry guard of 800, plus another 2,200 Roman and socii cavalry, and than some auxiliary Cretan and Trallian light infantry, 500 each. Thinking his left wing, anchored on the river, relatively safe, Scipio posted only four turmae of cavalry there (120 cavalry). He also had a force of Macedonians and Thracians mixed together – so these are probably “medium” infantry – who had come as volunteers, who he posts to guard the camp rather than in the main battleline. I always find this striking, because I think a Hellenistic army would have put these guys in the front line, but a Roman commander looks at them and thinks “camp guards”. The Romans also had some war elephants, sixteen of them, but Scipio assesses that North African elephants won’t stand up to the larger Indian elephants of the Seleucids (which is true, they won’t) and so he puts them in reserve behind his lines rather than out front where they’d just be driven back into him. All told then, the Roman force is around 26,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry – badly outnumbered by Antiochus, but of a relatively higher average quality and a bit more capable of actually fitting its entire combat power into the space.
The Battle
Because the armies are so large, much like as happened at Raphia, the battle that results is almost three battles running in parallel: the two wings and the center. Antiochus III commanded from his right wing, where – contrary to the expectations of Scipio who thought the river would secure his flank there – he intended his main attack. His son Seleucus commanded the left. Livy reports a light rain which interfered with both with visibility and some of Antiochus’ light troops’ weapons, as their bows and slings reacted poorly to the moisture (as composite bows will sometimes do; Livy 37.41.3-4, note also App. Syr. 33).Antiochus opens the battle on his left with his scythed chariots, a novel “gimmick” weapon (heavy chariots with blades all over them, used to shock infantry out of position). This may have been a nasty surprise for the Romans, but given the dispositions of the army, it was Eumenes, not Scipio who faces the chariots and as Livy notes, Eumenes was well aware how to fight them (Livy 37.41.9), using his light troops – those Cretan archers and Trallian javelin-troops. Deployed in loose order, they were able to move aside to avoid the chariots better than heavy infantry in close-order (similar tactics are used against elephants) and could with their missiles strike at chariot drivers and horses at range (Livy 37.41.10-12). Turning back this initial attack seems to have badly undermined the morale of the Seleucid left-wing, parts of which fled, creating a gap between the extreme left-wing and the heavy cavalry contingent. Eumenes then, with the Roman cavalry, promptly hammered the disordered line, hitting first the camel troops, then in the confusion quickly overwhelming the rest of the cavalry, including the cataphracts, leading Antiochus’ left wing to almost totally collapse, isolating the phalanx in the center. It’s not clear what the large mass of light infantry on the extreme edge of the battlefield was doing.
Meanwhile on the other side of the battle, where Scipio had figured a light screen of 120 equites would be enough to hold the end of the line, Antiochus delivered is cavalry hammer-blow successfully. Obnoxiously, both of our sources are a lot less interested in describing how he does this (Livy 37.42.7-8 and App. Syr. 34), which is frustrating because it is a bit hard to make sense of how it turns out. On the one hand, the constricted battlefield will have meant that, regardless of how they were positioned, those argyraspides are going to end up following Antiochus’ big cavalry hammer on the (Seleucid) right. They then overwhelm the cavalry and put them to flight and then push the infantry of that wing (left ala of socii and evidently a good portion of the legion next to it) back to the Roman camp.
On the other hand, the Roman infantry line reaches its camp apparently in good order or something close to it. Marcus Aemilius, the tribune put in charge of the camp is able to rush out, reconstitute the infantry force and, along with the camp-guard, halt Antiochus’ advance. The thing is, infantry when broken by cavalry usually cannot reform like that, but the distance covered, while relatively short, also seems a bit too long for the standard legionary hastati-to-principes-to-triarii retrograde. Our sources (also including a passage of Justin, a much later source, 31.8.6) vary on exactly how precipitous the flight was and it is possible that it proceeded differently at different points, with some maniples collapsing and others making an orderly retrograde. In any case, it’s clear that the Roman left wing stabilized itself outside of the Roman camp, much to Antiochus’ dismay. Eumenes, having at this point realized both that he was winning on his flank and that the other flank was in trouble dispatched his brother Attalus with 200 cavalry to go aid the ailing Roman left wing; the arrival of these fellows seem to have caused panic and Antiochus at this point begins retreating.
Meanwhile, of course, there is the heavy infantry engagement at the center. Pressured and without flanking support, Appian reports that the Seleucid phalanx first admitted what light infantry remained and then formed square, presenting their pikes tetragonos, “on all four sides” (App. Syr. 35), a formation known as a plinthion in some Greek tactical manuals. Forming this way under pressure on a chaotic battlefield is frankly impressive (though if they were formed as a double-phalanx rather than a double-thick single-phalanx, that would have made it easier) and a reminder that the core of Antiochus’ army was quite capable. Unable in this formation to charge, the phalanx was showered with Roman pila and skirmished by Eumenes’ lighter cavalry; the Romans seem to have disposed of Antiochus’ elephants with relative ease – the Punic Wars had left the Romans very experienced at dealing with elephants (Livy 37.42.4-5). Appian notes that some of the elephants, driven back by the legion and maddened disrupted the Seleucid square, at which point the phalanx at last collapsed (App. Syr. 35); Livy has the collapse happen much faster, but Appian’s narrative here seems more plausible.
What was left of Antiochus’ army now fled to their camp – not far off, just like the Roman one – leading to a sharp battle at the camp which Livy describes as ingens et maior prope quam in acie cades, “a huge slaughter, almost greater than that in the battle” (Livy 37.43.10), with stiff resistance at the camp’s gates and walls holding up the Romans before they eventually broke through and butchered the survivors. Livy reports that of Antiochus’ forces, 50,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry were killed, another 1,500 captured; these seem really high as figures go, but Appian reports almost the exact same. Interesting, Livy doesn’t report the figure in his own right or attribute it to Polybius but instead simply notes “it is said that”, suggesting he may not be fully confident of the number either. Taylor supposes, reasonably I think, that this oversized figure may also count men who fled from the battlefield, reflecting instead that once Antiochus III could actually reconstitute his army, he had about 19,000 men, most of the rest having fled.4 Either way, the resulting peace makes clear that the Seleucid army was shattered beyond immediate repair.
Roman losses, by contrast, were shockingly light. Livy reports 300 infantry lost, 24 Roman cavalry and 25 out of Eumenes’ force; Appian adds that the 300 infantry were “from the city” – meaning Roman citizens – so some socii casualties have evidently been left out (but he trims Eumenes’ losses down to just fifteen cavalry) (Livy 37.44.2-3; App. Syr. 36). Livy in addition notes that many Romans were wounded in addition to the 300 killed. This is an odd quirk of Livy’s casualty reports for Roman armies against Hellenistic armies and I suspect it reflects the relatively high effectiveness of Roman body armor, by this point increasingly dominated by the mail lorica hamata: good armor converts lethal blows into survivable wounds.5 It also fits into a broader pattern we’ve seen: Hellenistic armies that face Roman armies always take heavy casualties, winning or losing, but when Roman armies win they tend to win lopsidedly. It is a trend that will continue.
So why Roman victory at Magnesia? It is certainly not the case that the Romans had the advantage of rough terrain in the battle: the battlefield here is flat and fairly open. It should have been ideal terrain for a Hellenistic army.
A good deal of the credit has to go to Eumenes, which makes the battle a bit hard to extrapolate from. It certainly seems like Eumenes’ quick thinking to disperse the Seleucid chariots and then immediately follow up with his own charge was decisive on his flank, though not quite battle winning. Eumenes’ forces, after all, lacked the punch to disperse the heavier phalanx, which did not panic when its wing collapsed. Instead, the Seleucid phalanx, pinned into a stationary, defensive position by Eumenes’ encircling cavalry, appears to have been disassembled primary by the Roman heavy infantry, peppering it with pila before inducing panic into the elephants. It turns out that Samnites make better “glue” for an articulated phalanx than elephants, because they are less likely to panic.
Meanwhile on the Seleucid right (the Roman left), the flexible and modular nature of the legion seems to have been a major factor. Antiochus clearly broke through the Roman line at points, but with the Roman legion’s plethora of officers (centurions, military tribunes, praefecti) and with each maniple having its own set of standards to rally around, it seems like the legion and its socii ala managed to hold together and eventually drive Antiochus off, despite being pressured. That, in and of itself, is impressive: it is the thing the Seleucid center fails to do, after all.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph, Part IVb: Antiochus III”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-04-05.
1. I enjoy this joke because the idea of bringing Scipio Africanus along as a junior officer is amusing, but I should note that in the event, he doesn’t seem to have had much of a role in the campaign.
2. E.g. Bar Kockva, The Seleucid Army: Organization and Tactics in the Great Campaigns (1979)
3. “A Commander Will Put an End to his Insolence: the Battle of Magnesia, 190BC” to appear in The Seleucids at War: Recruitment, Organization and Battles (forthcoming in 2024), eds. Altay Coşkun and Benhamin E. Scolnic.
4. Taylor, Antiochus the Great (2013), 143.
5. On this, see, uh, me, “The Adoption and Impact of Roman Mail Armor in the Third and Second Centuries B.C.” Chiron 52 (2022).
