Thersites the Historian
Published 13 Feb 2025Britain became a quietly productive part of the Roman Empire once the Celts of southern Britain were subjugated. This was the period when the Romans built cities, forts, and roads across the southern portion of the island. The good times corresponded with the Classical Optimum. However, after 150 or 200 CE, Britain was beginning to experience a decline in its material well-being.
July 30, 2025
History of Britain VI: Prime Roman Britain
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July 26, 2025
The unaffordable luxury of a second-best army
At History Does You, Secretary of Defense Rock considers the downfall of Prussia’s vaunted army at the hands of Napoleon in a blink-of-the-eye campaign in 1806:
“Prussian wounded and stragglers leaving battle [after the battles of Jena and Auerstadt]. The mortally wounded Duke of Brunswick is the prominent figure in the painting.”
Painting by Richard Knötel (1857–1914) via Wikimedia Commons.
A vain, immoderate faith in these institutions made it possible to overlook the fact that their vitality was gone. The machine could still be heard clattering along, so no one asked if it was still doing its job.1
– Carl von Clausewitz on Prussia in 1806In the autumn of 1806, the Kingdom of Prussia, “The Iron Kingdom”, suffered one of the most rapid and humiliating military defeats in modern European history.2 The twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt shattered not only its army but the myth of invincibility that had surrounded the legacy of Frederick the Great. For the young Carl von Clausewitz, then a junior officer in the collapsing Prussian forces, this moment marked a personal and national catastrophe that would shape his life’s work. Clausewitz would come to see the defeat not simply as a failure of generalship or tactics, but as the exposure of a more profound institutional and societal crisis; one in which a state had grown complacent, a military rendered obsolete, and a society stripped of civic vitality falling apart during “the most decisive conflict in which they would ever have to fight”.3 In that collapse and Clausewitz’s later reflections, one finds an unsettling parallel to present-day America, a powerful nation outwardly strong, yet increasingly vulnerable to the same internal rot.
Prussia’s disaster in 1806 was the formative experience for the author of On War. How the armies of Frederick the Great and the state that he painstakingly built collapsed like a house of cards was a question that bothered Clausewitz for many years.4 It was a comprehensive disintegration of a system that had, since the mid-eighteenth century, claimed a position of prominence in European military affairs based on its discipline, linear tactics, and centralized command. Yet by the turn of the nineteenth century, these very strengths had calcified into weaknesses. Clausewitz foresaw disaster. Even as a young lieutenant, he was already warning of the Prussian army’s growing detachment from reality. In his early writings, he criticized military exercises as highly scripted performances, lacking genuine tactical challenge, unpredictability, and creativity.5 The number of steps marched in a minute of the cadence, what awards should be placed on a uniform, how a rifle should be cleaned for parade, all of this he feared, was cultivating a “lassitude of tradition and detail”.6 Clausewitz understood that rehearsing war under artificial constraints produced not readiness but ritual. Even though he later wrote, “no general can accustom an army to war”, he worried, presciently, that when confronted by a real enemy operating under real conditions, the army would collapse, and in 1806, it did.7
Whatever reservations he may have held, Clausewitz fulfilled his duty. He led a battalion of grenadiers at the battle of Auerstedt and managed to withdraw with most of his men intact in the chaotic aftermath of defeat. His escape was short-lived; however, he was captured on October 28, 1806, and subsequently marched into captivity in France, where he would spend the next year as a prisoner.8 Napoleon’s campaigns revealed that war had been transformed: faster, larger, and fundamentally political. Clausewitz wrote, “War was returned to the people, who to some extent had been separated from it by the professional standing armies; war cast off its shackles and crossed the bounds of what had once seemed possible”.9 The levée en masse and the corps system shattered the static paradigms of eighteenth-century warfare. Yet the Prussian high command, clinging to the geometries of the past, failed to respond with imagination or speed with any kind of seriousness.
Clausewitz’s later concept of friction — the unpredictable resistance that disrupts even the best plans — emerged directly from this experience.10 The Prussian army collapsed not for lack of courage, but because its institutional mindset could not withstand the volatility of an age that demanded adaptability, political intelligence, and creative command.
1. Carl von Clausewitz, Historical and Political Writings, ed. and trans. Peter Paret and Daniel Moran (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 32.
2. Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006).
3. Clausewitz, Historical and Political Writings, 81.
4. Frederick the Great ruled from 1740-1786 and is usually credited as turning Prussia from a regional power to a continental power.
5. Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 92-93.
6. Clausewitz, Historical and Political Writings, 36.
7. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 122.
8. Partet, 126.
9. Clausewitz, Historical and Political Writings, 287.
10. Clausewitz discusses this concept in Chapter 7 in On War, 119-121.
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QotD: The accumulated friction of bureaucratic growth
Bureaucracies all succumb very quickly to some kind of “Malthusian progression”. I’m not sure what to call it, I suck at naming stuff (please take your shot in the comments), but you all know what I mean: A bureaucracy’s tasks increase arithmetically, but the amount of effort each task requires increases geometrically.
[…] In the early Republic, raising a legion was as simple as a patrician calling his clients to service, or the Senate issuing a conscription decree. One task: the summoning of free men, with their own equipment, and there you go — Legio I Hypothetica.
By the late Empire, though, all those freeholds had been turned into slave-worked Latifundia, so the effort of raising a legion increased enormously. Now the bureaucracy had to go out and hire freemen (if it could even find them), equip them at State expense, train them (again at State expense), and so on. In itself, the number of tasks isn’t that large — we’ve identified three — and they only increase at the rate of n+1.
But the effort each task requires increases to the power of n, such that if you could somehow express the effort expended in physical terms — joules or kilowatts or whatever — you’d see that the creation of Legio I Hypothetica under Scipio Africanus took 10 kilowatts, while raising the same legion under Diocletian took 10,000,000.
This isn’t (just) corruption. Sure, everyone at every level of the Imperial Bureaucracy was getting his beak wet, that goes without saying, but it’s the nature of bureaucracy itself that’s most to blame.
Severian, “Collapse II”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-09.
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July 25, 2025
The ongoing conflict in Gaza
On his Substack, John Spencer responds to a New York Times op-ed that claims Israeli forces in Gaza are engaged in genocide:
In his New York Times op-ed titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It“, Omer Bartov accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. As a professor of genocide studies, he should know better. Genocide is not defined by a few comments taken out of context, by estimates of casualties or destruction, or by how war looks in headlines or on social media. It is defined by specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group in whole or in part. That is a high legal bar. Bartov did not meet it. He did not even try.
I am not a lawyer or a political activist. I am a war expert. I have led soldiers in combat. I have trained military units in urban warfare for decades and studied and taught military history, strategy, and the laws of war for years. Since October 7, I have been to Gaza four times embedded with the Israel Defense Forces. I have interviewed the Prime Minister of Israel, the Defense Minister, the IDF Chief of Staff, Southern Command leadership, and dozens of commanders and soldiers on the front lines. I have reviewed their orders, watched their targeting process, and seen soldiers take real risks to avoid harming civilians. Nothing I have seen or studied resembles genocide or genocidal intent.
Bartov claims that five statements by Israeli leaders prove genocidal intent. He begins with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s comment on October 7 that Hamas would “pay a huge price”. That is not a call for genocide. It is what any leader would say after the worst terrorist attack in the nation’s history. He also cites Netanyahu’s statements that Hamas would be destroyed and that civilians should evacuate combat zones. That is not evidence of a desire to destroy a people. It is what professional militaries do when fighting an enemy that hides among civilians.
Bartov presents Netanyahu’s reference to “remember Amalek” as a smoking gun. But this is a phrase from Jewish history and tradition. It is engraved at Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, and also appears on the Holocaust memorial in The Hague. In both places, it serves as a warning to remain vigilant against threats, not as a call for mass killing.
He also highlights Defense Minister Gallant’s use of the term “human animals” to describe Hamas fighters. That is not a war crime. After the slaughter, rape, and kidnapping of civilians on October 7, many would understand or even share that reaction.
Unable to find intent among those actually directing the war, Bartov turns to far-right politicians like Bezalel Smotrich and Nissim Vaturi. These individuals do not command troops, issue orders, or shape battlefield decisions. I have studied the actual orders. They focus on destroying Hamas, rescuing hostages, and protecting civilians whenever possible. Their rhetoric is irrelevant to the legal case.
Israel has taken extraordinary steps to limit civilian harm. It warns before attacks using text messages, phone calls, leaflets, and broadcasts. It opens safe corridors and pauses operations so civilians can leave combat areas. It tracks civilian presence down to the building level. I have seen missions delayed or canceled because children were nearby. I have seen Israeli troops come under fire and still be ordered not to shoot back because civilians might be harmed.
Israel has delivered more humanitarian aid to Gaza than any military in history has provided to an enemy population during wartime. More than 94,000 trucks carrying over 1.8 million tons of aid have entered the territory. Israel has supported hospitals, repaired water pipelines, increased access to clean water, and enabled over 36,000 patients to leave Gaza for treatment abroad.
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July 23, 2025
QotD: The legion of the Middle Republic
With that said, we reach the first and arguably most important thing to know about the legion: the Roman legion (and socii ala) of the Middle Republic is an integrated combined arms unit. That is to say, unlike a Hellenistic army, where different “arms” (light infantry, heavy infantry, cavalry, etc.) are split into different, largely homogeneous units, these are “organic” to the legion, that is to say they are part of its internal structure (we might say they are “brigaded together” into the legion as well). Consequently, whereas the Hellenistic army aims to have different arms on the battlefield in different places doing different things to produce victory, the Roman legion instead understands these different arms to be functioning in a fairly tightly integrated fashion with a single theory of victory all operating on the same “space” in the enemy’s line.
And you may well ask, before we get to organization, “What is that theory of victory?” As we saw, the Hellenistic army aims to fix the enemy with its heavy infantry center, hold the flanks with lighter, more mobile infantry (to protect that formation) and win the battle with a decisive cavalry-led hammer-blow on a flank. By contrast, the Romans seem to have decided that the quickest way to an enemy’s vulnerable rear was through their front. The legion is thus not built for flanking, its cavalry component – while ample in numbers – is distinctly secondary. Instead, the legion is built to sandpaper away the enemy’s main battle line in the center through attrition, in order to produce a rupture and thus victory.
To do that, you need to create a lot of attrition and this is what the manipular legion is built to do.
The legion of the Middle Republic is built out of five components: three lines of heavy infantry (hastati, principes and triariivelites), and a cavalry contingent (the equites). Specifically, a normal legion has 1200 each of velites, hastati and principes, 600 triarii and 300 equites, making a total combined unit of 4,500. Organizationally, the light infantry velites were packaged in with the heavy infantry (Polyb. 6.24.2-5) for things like marching and duties in camp, but in battle they typically function separately as a screening force thrown forward of the legion.
So to take the legion as an enemy would experience them, the first force were the velites. These seem to have been deployed in open order in front of the legion to screen its advance. These fellows had lighter javelins, the hasta velitaris (Livy notes they carried seven, Livy 39.21.13), no body armor and a “simple headcovering” (λιτός περικεφάλαιος, Polyb. 6.22.3), possibly hide or textile; they also carried a smaller round shield, the parma, and the gladius Hispaniensis for close-in defense (Livy 38.21.13). These are, all things considered, fairly typical ancient javelin troops, aiming to use the mobility their light equipment offers them to stay out of close-combat.
Behind the velites was the first line of the heavy infantry, the hastati. These fellows were organized into units called maniples (lit: “a handful”) of 120, which in turn are divided into centuries of 60 each. The maniples are their own semi-independent maneuvering units (note how much smaller they are than the equivalent taxeis in the phalanx, this is a more flexible fighting system), each with its own small standard (Polyb. 6.24.6) to enable it to maintain coherence as it maneuvers. That said, they normally form up in a quincunx (5/12ths, after a Roman coin with the symbol of five punches, like on dice) formation with the rear ranks, as you can see above.
The hastati (and the principes, who are equipped the same way) have the large Roman shield, the scutum, two heavy javelins (pila), the gladius Hispaniensis sword, a helmet (almost always a Montefortino-type in bronze in this period) and body armor. Poorer soldiers, we’re told, wore a pectoral, wealthier soldiers (probably post-225, though we cannot be certain) wore mail. That is, by the standards of antiquity, quite a lot of armor, actually – probably more armor per-man than any other infantry formation on their contemporary battlefield. That relatively higher degree of protection – big shield, stout helmet (Montefortino’s in this period range from 1.5-2.5kg, making them unusually robust), and lots of body armor – makes sense because these fellows are going to aim to grind the enemy down.
Note that a lot of popular treatments of this assume that the hastati were worse equipped than the principes; there’s no reason to assume this is actually true. The principes are older than the hastati, but the way to understand this formation is that the velites are young or poor, whereas for the upper-classes of the infantry (probably pedites I-IV) after maybe the first year or so, they serve in the heavy infantry (hastati, principes, triarii) based on age, not on wealth (and then the equites are the truly rich, regardless of what age they are; the relevant passage here is Polyb. 6.21.7-9, which is, admittedly, not entirely clear on what is an age distinction and what is a wealth distinction).
We’ve discussed the combat width these guys fight with already – somewhat wider spacing than most, so that each man covers the other’s flanks but they all have room to maneuver. It seems like the standard depth in the Middle Republic was either base-3 (so 3 deep on close order, 6 deep for “fighting” open order) or base-4 (so 4 and 8). Even in open-order with the maniples stretched wide (possibly by having rear centuries move forward), there would have been open intervals (10-20m) between maniples, which reinforces the role of a maniple as a potentially independent maneuvering unit – it has the space to move.2
Behind the hastati are the principes, with the same equipment and organization, slightly off-set to cover the intervals between the hastati, with a gap between the two lines (we do not know how large a gap). These men are slightly older, though not “old”. The whole field army generally consists of iuniores (men under 46) and given how the Romans seem to like to conscript, the vast majority of men will be in their late teens and 20s. So we might imagine the velites to be poorer men, or men in their late teens (17 being the age when one become liable for conscription) or so, while the hastati are early twenties, the principes mid-twenties and the handful of triarii being men in their late twenties or perhaps early 30s. The positioning of the principes isn’t to spare older men the rigors of combat, but rather to put more experienced veterans in a position where they can steady the less experienced hastati.3
Finally, behind them are the triarii, who trade the pila for a thrusting spear, the hasta, the Roman version of the Mediterranean omni-spear. These men are, as noted, the oldest and so likely the calmest under pressure and thus form a reserve in the rear. The three-line system here is what the Romans call a triplex acies (“three battle lines”). This wasn’t the only way these armies engaged and they could sometimes be formed up into a single solid line, but the triplex acies seems to have been the standard. We don’t know exactly how deep such a formation would run, but we have fairly good evidence that a legion might occupy a space around 400m wide (with some variation), meaning a whole Roman army’s core heavy infantry component (the two legions and two alae) might be some 1.6km (about a mile) across.
The equites, while organic to the legion organizationally, will be tactically grouped in battle to form cavalry screens on the edges of the army, not as a grand flanking cavalry “hammer”, but as flank-protection for the advancing infantry body (as a result, they tend to fight more cautiously). The equites in this period are heavy cavalry, with armored riders (after c. 225, that would be mail), using a shield and a hasta, along with a gladius as a backup weapon and thus serving as “shock” cavalry. Roman cavalry, if we look at their deployments, is generally ample in numbers, but the Romans seem to have been well aware it wasn’t very good, and sought allied cavalry (especially non-Italian allied cavalry) whenever they could get it. But the cavalry, Roman or not, was almost never the decisive part of the army.
Polybius tells us that the socii supplies more cavalry than the Romans and implies that there was a standard rule of three socii cavalrymen to every Roman equites, while socii infantry matched Roman infantry numbers (Polyb. 6.26.7). Looking at actual deployments though, we see that the socii tend to outnumber the Romans modestly, on about a 2:3 ratio, with socii cavalry only modestly outnumbering Roman cavalry.4 Consequently a normal Roman consular field army (of which the Romans generally had at least two every year) was 8,400 Roman infantry, around 12,600 socii infantry, 600 Roman cavalry and perhaps a thousand or so socii cavalry, for a combined force of 21,000 infantry (c. 5,000 light 16,000 heavy, so that’s a lot of heavy infantry) and 1,600 cavalry. That somewhat undersells the cavalry force the Romans might bring, as Roman armies also often move with auxilia externa (allied forces not part of the socii), which are very frequently cavalry-heavy (especially, after 203, that really good Numidian cavalry).5 By and large, it’s not that the Romans bring a lot less cavalry (as a percentage of army size), but that Italian cavalry tends to perform poorly and the as a result the Romans do not built their battle plans around their weakest combat arm.
Perhaps ironically, the Romans used their cavalry like Alexander and Hellenistic armies used their light infantry: holding forces designed to keep the flanks of the battlefield busy while the decisive action happened somewhere else.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph, Part IIa: How a Legion Fights”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-02-09.
1. On this, see Burns, M. T. “The Homogenisation of Military Equipment under the Roman Republic”. In Romanization? Digressus Supplement I. London: Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 2003.
2. On this, M.J. Taylor, “Roman Infantry Tactics in the Mid-Republic: A Reassessment”, Historia 63.3 (2014): 301-322.
3. To expound at some length on my own thoughts on how I think the wealth/age issue was probably managed, Dionysius (4.19.2) claims that the Romans recruited by centuries in the comitia centuriata such that the wealthy, divided into fewer voting blocks, served more often, and we know from Polybius that the maximum period of service for the infantry was sixteen years and from some math done by N. Rosenstein in Rome at War (2004) that the average service must have been around seven years. My suspicion, which I cannot prove is that the very poorest Roman assidui (men liable for conscription) might have only been serving fewer years on average and so it wasn’t a problem having them do all of their service as velites (the only role they can afford), whereas wealthier Romans (my guess is pedites IV and up) are the ones who age into the heavy infantry, with pedites I, whose members probably serve more than the seven-year average (perhaps around 10?) might make up close to 40% of the actual heavy infantry body (which is their balance in the comitia centuriata). The velites thus serves two important functions: a place to “blood” wealthier young Roman men to prepare them to stand firm in the heavy infantry line, as well as a place for poorer Romans to contribute militarily in a way they could afford. But I think that, once in the heavy infantry, the division between hastati, principes and triarii was – as Polybius says (6.21.7-9 and 6.23.1) – an age division, not a wealth division. Instead, the next wealth line is for the equites.
4. The data on this is compiled by Taylor, Soldiers & Silver (2020), 26-28.
5. Taylor, op. cit., 54-7 compiles examples.
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July 15, 2025
Why France Couldn’t Crush the Viet Minh – W2W 36
TimeGhost History
Published 13 Jul 2025Why couldn’t France crush the Viet Minh after war broke out in Vietnam? In this episode we dive into the brutal opening years of the First Indochina War, from the outbreak of violence in Hanoi in December 1946 to France’s failed military campaigns and the rise of Vietnamese resistance.
Despite having superior weapons, colonial experience, and Foreign Legion reinforcements, France failed to defeat Ho Chi Minh’s forces. We explore why early offensives like Operation Léa and Ceinture fell short, how the Viet Minh’s rural strategy kept them alive, and why French hopes of ending the war quickly vanished.
As Mao Zedong’s Communist China consolidates power just across the border, the Viet Minh gain strength, support, and a long-term advantage that France simply cannot match.
This video is part of War 2 War, our Cold War history series covering the decade after WW2, a time of seismic global transformation.
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July 12, 2025
Organizing two new divisions for the Canadian Army
To emphasize, these are just strong rumours and have not been formally announced or confirmed by the Department of National Defence or the Canadian Armed Forces:
Let’s start with the major aspect of today’s rumours, restructuring. This has been a hot topic for the last few months and one I have been very hesitant to put in here due to the conflicting and volatile information.
However with plans approved in the last few weeks, as well as going though about four different people for verification, I think I’m finally in a position where I can confidently put this out there.
The new army will be centered around three [two?] divisions, broken down between the regular, reserve, and a support division. The working designation for these two new Divisions are the 6th and 7th.
The 6th Division will be comprised of:
- 1 CMBG
- 2 CMBG
- 5 CMBG
- 1x Light Infantry Regiment
- 1x Fires Brigade
- 1x Protection Brigade
- 1x Sustainment Brigade
The 7th Division will be the reserves and rangers and has been, at least in some documentation, been referred to as the “Continental Division”. I sadly don’t have much on the Seventh.
This is the info that I have as of now. I am still working on gathering more details but this is the basic structure of how the future army will look. Obviously some of you were expecting more, and hoped to see something more radical done.
Some of you will be very happy with this and how straightforward it is. It is a plan that makes sense and is within realistic expectations. As always, we take these as speculation and not as fact. Plans can change but I am fairly confident that this is the active plan.
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July 11, 2025
Why Didn’t France and Britain Stop Germany’s Secret Rearmament? – Out of the Bullpen 001
World War Two
Published 10 Jul 2025In this special “Out of the Bullpen” episode, we answer your burning questions about Weimar Germany’s most turbulent years. From clandestine military pacts with the Soviets to the creative ways Germany sidestepped Versailles, we dig into aspects which shaped a republic on the brink.
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QotD: Pyrrhus arrives in Magna Graecia to support the Tarantines
There are a few reasons I think this is unlikely. First, sources enlarging armies to fit the narrative magnitude of battles is a very common thing. But more to the point, Pyrrhus has crossed to Italy with 28,500 men total and – as Plutarch notes – hasn’t had a chance to link any of his allies up to his army. That may mean he hasn’t even reabsorbed his scouting force of 3,000 and he may well have also had to drop troops off to hold settlements, secure supplies and so on. Pyrrhus’ initial reluctance to engage (reported by Plutarch) is inconsistent with him wildly outnumbering the Romans, but his decision to wait for reinforcements within reach of the Romans is also inconsistent with the Romans wildly outnumbering him. So a battle in which Pyrrhus has perhaps 20-25,000 men and the Romans a standard two-legion, two-alae army of 20,000 give or take, seems the most plausible.1
The two forces met along the River Siris at Heraclea on the coastal edge of Lucania, Laevinius having pushed deep into southern Italy to engage Pyrrhus. As usual for these battles, we have descriptions or partial descriptions from a host of sources (in this case, Plutarch, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Zonaras, Florus) which don’t always agree, leaving the modern historian in a bit of a pickle. Generally, we assume that a lot of the later Roman narratives of a famous defeat are likely to have been tailored to try and minimize the embarrassment, either by implying the battle was closer than it was or that Pyrrhus was a very impressive foe (or both) or other “face-saving” inventions. Worse yet, all of our sources are writing at substantial chronological distance, the Romans not really having started to record their own history until decades later (though there would have been Greek sources for later historians to work with). Generally, Patrick Kent tends to conclude that – somewhat unusually – Plutarch’s moralizing focus renders him more reliable here: Plutarch feels no need to cover for embarrassing Roman defeats or to embellish battle narratives (which he’d rather keep short, generally) because his focus is on the character of Pyrrhus. Broadly speaking, I think that’s right and so I too am going to generally prefer Plutarch’s narratives here.
A fairly handy map of Pyrrhus’ campaigns (though some of the detail is lost in the big sweeping arrows). What is notable is, apart from Pyrrhus’ lightning raid into Latium in 280, he is almost invariably fighting in “friendly” territory, either in Lucania (Heraclea), Apulia (Asculum) or Samnium (Beneventum), the lands of his allies. Pyrrhus never fights an actual pitched battle on Roman-controlled territory, which I think speaks to his strategic intent: to carve out a kingdom in Greater Greece, not to conquer the whole of Italy.
Wikimedia Commons.The battle was defined by Pyrrhus’ use of terrain – Pyrrhus thought delay might be wiser (to link up with his allies) but left a blocking force on the river (the Romans being on the other side). The Romans responded by forcing the river – typical Roman aggression – but Plutarch at least thinks it caught Pyrrhus by surprise (he hadn’t fought Romans before) and so it leaves him in a scramble. He charges his cavalry (Plut. Pyrrh. 16.5) to give his main phalanx time to form up for battle resulting in what seems like a cavalry engagement near the river. Pyrrhus nearly gets himself killed in the fighting, but survives and falls back to his main infantry force, which then met the Romans in an infantry clash. The infantry fighting was fierce according to Plutarch and Pyrrhus, still shaken from being almost killed, had to come out and rally his troops. In the end, the Romans are described as hemmed in by Pyrrhus’ infantry and elephants before some of his Greek cavalry – from Thessaly, the best horse-country in Greece – delivers the decisive blow, routing the Roman force.
It is, on the one hand, a good example of the Hellenistic army “kit” using almost all of its tactical elements: an initial – presumably light infantry – screen holding the river, followed by a cavalry screen to enable the phalanx to deploy, then a fierce and even infantry fight, finally decided by what seems to be flanking actions by cavalry and elephants. Plutarch (Pyrrh. 17.4) gives two sets of casualty figures, one from Dionysius and another from Hieronymus; the former says that the Romans lost 15,000 to Pyrrhus’ 13,000 killed, the latter that the Romans lost 7,000 to Pyrrhus’ just a bit less than 4,000 killed. The latter seems almost certainly more accurate. In either case, the Roman losses were heavier, but Pyrrhus’ losses were significant and as Plutarch notes, his losses were among his best troops.
Even in the best case, in victory, Pyrrhus had lost around 15% of his force (~4,000 out of 28,000), a heavy set of losses. Indeed, normally if an army loses 15% of its total number in a battle, we might well assume they lost. Roman losses, as noted, were heavier still, but as we’ve discussed, the Romans have strategic depth (in both geography, political will and military reserves) – Pyrrhus does not. By contrast, Alexander III reportedly wins at Issus (333) with just 150 dead (and another 4,802 wounded or missing; out of c. 37,000) and at Gaugamela (331) with roughly 1,500 losses (out of c. 47,000). The Romans will win at Cynoscephelae (197) with just 700 killed.
This isn’t, I think, a product of Pyrrhus failing at all, but rather a product of the attritional nature of Roman armies: even in defeat they draw blood. Even Hannibal’s great victory at Cannae (216) costs him 5,700 men, according to Polybius (more, according to Livy). But the problem for Pyrrhus is that his relatively fragile Hellenistic army isn’t built to repeatedly take those kinds of hits: Pyrrhus instead really needs big blow-out victories where he takes few losses and destroys or demoralizes his enemy. And the Roman military system does not offer such one-sided battles often.
Nevertheless, Pyrrhus shows that a Hellenistic army, capable handled, could beat a third-century Roman army, albeit not cleanly, and that is well worth noting.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph, Part IIIb: Pyrrhus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-03-08.
1. I should note, this is Kent’s assessment as well.
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July 10, 2025
The Prussian defeats at Jena and Auerstadt in 1806
At Dead Carl and You, Kiran Pfitzner describes the disastrous 1806 campaign that knocked Prussia out of the war against Napoleon and shattered the military reputation of the army built by Frederick the Great:
In brief, the course of the 1806 campaign was that the Prussians met the French at Saalfeld and were initially defeated. The Prussians therefore decided to retreat before meeting Napoleon himself in battle. However, poor command organization and irresolution ended up dividing and delaying the Prussian forces. Thus, the rearguard ended up meeting the French main body under Napoleon which was able to overwhelm it at Jena.
The battle itself was not especially punishing, but the relentless pursuit of the French cavalry yielded many prisoners and prevented the reconstitution of the army. On the same day, the Prussian main body had encountered a French corps under Marshal Davout at Auerstedt, but failed to overcome it in a series of piecemeal attacks that cost it the lives of its commanders. The Prussians were demoralized enough that an attack from the outnumbered French was enough to force the main body into disorder. The arrival of fleeing forces from Jena spread a general panic and prevented any chance of recovery. From there, the campaign was a matter of pursuit and capitulation — within weeks the French were parading through the streets of Berlin. This humiliating defeat gave Clausewitz impetus to seek an understanding of the nature of war. How could the vaunted Prussian army, envy of the world in the days of Frederick the Great (still within living memory), be so summarily dispatched?
It was clear to virtually all military thinkers of the time that war had changed. To many, Napoleon was utilizing a higher, more perfect form of war than had been previously known. Clausewitz instead recognized that Napoleon was not refining war, but recognizing that changes in social conditions had enabled fighting with more energy and violence than had been possible in the cabinet wars of the 18th century. This had proven significant because the limitations of the 18th century made maneuver and logistics central to skilled generalship. Battles were important, but much that was won or lost in a battle could be subsequently lost or won outside it.
The removal of these restrictions drastically increased the importance of battle as it was able to produce results that could not be compensated for actions outside of it. Skilled generalship was therefore no longer a matter of outmaneuvering the enemy or protecting your supply lines while threatening his, but of bringing maximum force to the point of battle. Initiative, coordination, and aggression become the key traits of an officer. Thus, more expansively, the task of the officer is to recognize changes to the character of war and so understand what is required in practice. Neither history nor experience can anticipate these developments — it falls to the judgment of the individual to recognize them.
This framing shows clearly the mistakes of the Prussians. Operating in the old paradigm, they sought to make good with maneuver what they had lost in the opening battle of the campaign. They had divided their forces under the assumption the French would be unable or unwilling to aggressively pursue their retreat. At the same time, when they engaged the French, they showed caution entirely congruent with a cabinet army but fatally out of place when facing a Napoleonic force. On numerous occasions, the French made serious blunders that went unpunished because the Prussians failed to take the initiative and capitalize on them.
Nowhere is this more clear than in the failure of the Prussian main body to overcome the single corps it faced at Auerstedt. While outnumbering the French, the Prussian attacked piecemeal, becoming demoralized under French fire. The morale of the Prussians was substantially more brittle on account of their relative lack of nationalism — the state and therefore the army were not objects of any great affection by those subject to them. While this would require social reforms to remedy, Auerstedt had nevertheless been an opportunity for the Prussians. They had a French corps outnumbered more than two-to-one and merely needed to bring that force to bear to inflict a serious defeat. A Prussian victory would have positioned the main body to receive the retreating forces from Jena, allowing another confrontation with Napoleon on at least equal terms. Timidity and irresolution therefore played as big a part in the disaster as did the deeper defects.
In part, this must be ascribed to the advanced age of Prussian leadership. The senior commanders at both Jena and Auerstedt were over seventy. Not only did this ensure continuity with older forms of war, but men of such an age were unlikely to have the energy to campaign aggressively — by contrast, Napoleon and his marshals were three or four decades younger. The Prussian leaders did not lack physical courage, as their valiant deaths attest, but exposing oneself to danger is not the same quality that is needed for decisive and energetic action over an extended period of time.
The Prussian strategy deserves further criticism because by that point Bonaparte’s character was well known. There was no justification to have any illusions as to what the consequences of defeat would be. Prussia’s status amongst the great powers — if not its very existence as an independent state — would be determined by the confrontation. Leaving troops in Silesian fortresses or Polish garrisons (through which Prussia’s available forces were reduced by half) meant narrowing the odds of victory in pursuit of things that could be no substitute for victory and no comfort in defeat.
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July 3, 2025
Bill Slim, the most forward-looking British commander of WW2
At The War Room, Dr. Robert Lyman explains how and why General (later Field Marshal) William Slim was able to turn around British and allied military fortunes in Burma and drive the Japanese out of India to their eventual defeat:
Field Marshal Sir William Slim (1891-1970), during his time as GOC XIVth Army.
Portrait by No. 9 Army Film & Photographic Unit via Wikimedia Commons.
“Burma and the Birth of Modern Warfare” is the subtitle to my 2004 book and PhD about General Slim’s command of the 14th Army in Burma during the last war, titled Slim, Master of War, a use of Sun Tzu’s description of a “heaven-born” commander. It may appear a rather grand claim, and perhaps it is, but the purpose of the subtitle reflects that fact that Slim’s conduct of operations in India and Burma in 1944 and 1945 represented an entirely new style of warfighting to that experienced by the British Army during the war. Instead of looking back to the lessons of World War One, Slim’s conduct of operations looked forward to reflect a style of warfare that would only be adopted as formal doctrine by the British Army in the 1980s. In the mid-1940s it remained alien to the vast bulk of similar British military experience and understanding.
My argument wasn’t that Slim was the best general who had ever commanded men in the history of warfare. That may or may not be true, but for the sake of my argument is irrelevant. My proposition, rather, is that:
Slim was the foremost British exponent in the Second World War of the “indirect approach” and that in his conduct of operations in 1944 and 1945 he provided a clear foreshadowing of “manoeuvre warfare”.
My idea, which first saw expression in my 2004 book, has been developed since then in my subsequent writings, including that of Japan’s Last Bid for Victory, which deals with the great events in the Assam and Manipur in 1944 (2011) and A War of Empires (2021). A major reason for the continuing amnesia in British military thinking about the warfighting characteristics of the Burma Campaign – apart from the fact that it is a long way to go for a staff ride – seems to be the fact that Slim’s style of warfighting remained largely alien to the British Army’s doctrinal precepts until the late 1980s. Until then, Slim’s strategic conceptions had been considered an aberration, and Slim himself regarded merely as the epitome of a fine military leader, and nothing more. Then, in a doctrinal revolution which began in the 1980s, the old firepower-based foundations – which themselves were largely a product of Montgomery’s approach to war in 1944 and 1945 – in which the supreme military virtue was the effective and coordinated application of force, were replaced. This revolution in doctrine and thinking about warfighting exchanged the old foundations with new ones based on an entirely different conception, that of manoeuvre at the operational level of war, in which notions of subtlety, guile and psychological dislocation came to be emphasised in an entirely new and refreshing way. My belief is that it was the effective and pragmatic employment of manoeuvre at the operational level of war by Slim in Burma that was the direct cause of the extraordinary victories the 14th Army achieved in 1944 and 1945 and which led to the two greatest defeats the Japanese Army suffered in the field in the Second World War, the first at Imphal-Kohima in India in 1944 and the second at Mandalay-Meiktila in Burma in 1945. My argument I suppose is that Slim’s exercise of command in Burma makes him not merely a fine example of a “manoeuvrist” commander but in actuality the template for modern manoeuvrist command.
[…]
First, the 14th Army was the only truly joint formation in the British armed forces during WW2. Nothing else, in North Africa, Italy or North-West Europe came close to it. Slim insisted on nothing less than full integration. Not only were headquarters joint, but operational and tactic delivery was also joint. At every level of command air and land headquarters were completely interlinked. I became convinced of this fact when I discovered that the RAF and the Army even shared messes! Strategic air transport, winning the air war, the operational reach and flexibility provided by air power underwrote Slim’s conception of battle, to the extent that the senior RAF officer in the theatre ruefully concluded in 1945, and I quote, that:
Slim was quicker to grasp the potentialities and value of air support in the jungles of Burma than most Air Force officers.
There was no snobbery and no shibboleths with Slim: if it worked, it was pressed into action.
[…]
Professor Dixon argues [in On the Psychology of Military Incompetence] that, unusually for a senior commander of his ilk in WW2, Slim was non-ethnocentric. He had no intrinsic prejudices about the virtues of one race over another. Slim, after all, was an officer of the Indian Army, and I have yet to come across any evidence that British regimental officers of the Indian Army regarded their soldiers in any way inferior to themselves. He was commonly known to those who served under him as “Uncle Bill” from the special affinity British troops had to him: the remarkable fact, however, was that at least 87% of his Army of several hundred thousand men recalled him as “Cha Cha Slim Sahib”: 14th Army was, after all, very largely Indian, Gurkha and West and East African. I certainly cannot think of any other Indian Army general who had such an impact on British troops. He became, of course, Chief of the Imperial General Staff following Field Marshal Montgomery, in 1948, which securely establishes this feat. On that note, I cannot conceive of “Uncle Bernard” when referring to Field Marshal Montgomery!
The Burma campaign was as much a struggle for mastery of logistics as it was a struggle for mastery on the battlefield, and it was about risk as much as it was about adherence to logistical principles. Slim had an implicit understanding of the constraints placed on warfare by the demands of logistics. Great efforts were made to increase the quantity of supplies to Burma. Railways were extended, roads built and surfaced, sunken ferries refloated and repaired, barges and rafts built for use on the numerous waterways. In this regard Archibald Nye, the VCIGS under Alan Brooke, regarded Slim’s mastery of logistics to be the most significant measure of his greatness as commander of 14 Army in Burma:
He never had enough to do what he had to do and this … is the measure of his greatness.
The practice of war in Burma by Slim was so startling in its modernity, and unlike any other pattern of warfighting by operational level British commanders in the war. My view of Slim as a commander can be interpreted at two levels. He was, first of all, a great commander and leader. Being a master of strategy, of logistics, of technical proficiency and so on are important in themselves when considering the nature of leadership in war, but by themselves they remain insufficient. Successful military command requires someone who can, through dint of personality and inspirational leadership, wield all of the components of fighting power together so that an extraordinary result transpires. What marks Slim out from the crowd was much more than just his winning of a succession of extraordinary battles. His strength lay in his ability to produce a decisive effect from scratch; to mould thousands of disparate individuals together into a single team with a single goal; to persuade a defeated army that it had the potential to turn the tables on their enemies; to master the complexities of terrain, climate and administrative deficiency so that self-help, resourcefulness and ingenuity could become as much prized as fighting skill. In these individual areas, and more, Slim proved the master. His genius for war was the consequence of his ability to bring together all of these elements to create an extraordinary result, the visible sign of which was the greatest defeat suffered by the Japanese on land during the Second World War.
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July 2, 2025
History of Britain IV: Caesar in Britain, Reconnaissance in Force, 55-54 BCE
Thersites the Historian
Published 29 Jan 2025Caesar’s landings in Britain illustrate his willingness to take risks, even unnecessary ones. The questionable decision-making, however, also led to the first surviving detailed description of people and events in Britain.
(more…)
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June 23, 2025
Augustus and the empire – The Conquered and the Proud 14
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 15 Jan 2025This time we look at Augustus, the empire and the army. The man who built the Altar of Augustan Peace in Rome was also the last of the great conquerors, who added more territory to the Roman Empire than any other individual leader. How he did this, and how he kept the army under control, is the theme of this video.
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QotD: Recruiting and organization under the “Marian reforms”
Sallust reports that Marius, “after he saw that the spirits of the plebs were aroused, he swiftly loaded ships with supplies, pay, weapons and other requirements; with them he ordered Aulus Manlius, his legate, to set out. Meanwhile himself he enrolled soldiers, not according to the mos maiorum [‘the customs of the ancestors’] from the census classes, but making use of whoever wished to go, mostly the capite censi [‘those counted by heads’ = the propertyless poor or proletarii]” (Sall. Iug. 86.1-2, trans mine). Plutarch repeats this report, that Marius violated custom by enrolling men who didn’t meet the property qualification for military service (Plut. Mar. 9.1).
There are a few oddities here to start, though. First, Sallust quickly notes that this resulted in Marius having an army rather larger than what the Senate had actually authorized (Sall. Iug. 86.4) and that’s actually quite a neat detail that may explain part of what’s going on here because this has, in a way, happened before. In 134, Scipio Aemilianus was elected consul for the second time (illegally, again) with a mandate to end the frustrating Roman war against the Celtiberian stronghold of Numantia in Spain. The Senate, however, denied Scipio authorization to raise fresh troops, to which Scipio responded by enlisting some 4,000 volunteers to replenish his legion; Appian says this was done with the consent of the Senate, but Plutarch’s brief note on it sure implies Scipio Aemilianus is end-running around Senatorial efforts to stifle him (App. Hisp. 84; Plut. Mor. 201A-B). And this too was hardly the first time for this sort of end-run; Scipio Africanus (what is it with Scipiones!?) back in 205 agitated for his invasion of Africa to end the Second Punic War and was given the province of Sicily with authorization to go to Africa if he thought it necessary, but the Senate registered its displeasure by refusing to let him levy troops, at which point – wait for it – Scipio took volunteers, equipping and financing his force through the socii and even building a fleet that way (Liv. 28.45.9-12).
In short, the Senate sometimes tried to trim the sails of generals it was displeased with – and Marius reportedly had gotten elected on a campaign platform of “to hell with the Senate” (Sall. Iug. 84.1) – by limiting the size of their armies or refusing to allow them to conduct a levy. And since 205 (a century before Marius), popular generals had occasionally juked this effort by the Senate by instead calling for volunteers, which the Senate could not stop. Marius is not doing something new in taking volunteers to supplement an army through the levy.
He also doesn’t keep doing it. After Marius wins in Africa with his volunteer-supplemented army (the bulk of which of course were still recruited through the dilectus under Metellus), he returns to Italy to take over the war against the Cimbri and Teutones but he doesn’t keep up the volunteer force, instead taking command of his predecessor Rutilius Rufus’ normally levied army (Front. Strat. 4.2.2). In practice, Marius probably took volunteers in part for that first army because the Senate was diverting available levy manpower towards the early phases of the Cimbric War (or at least that was a convenient excuse to kneecap him) – a series of costly military disasters for Rome which likely soaked up much of the manpower the Senate was willing to raise. Once Marius has access to that “primary” stream of manpower generated through the dilectus, he uses it and seems to stop using volunteers.
But what of recruiting the capite censi? Well, that isn’t quite new either, although it surely wasn’t typical. For one, it wasn’t that the poor absolutely never served; Polybius notes that the capite censi served in the fleet (Polyb. 6.19.2). But we also see non-assidui (assidui being the term for those wealthy enough to be liable for normal conscription) in a range of other emergencies. Livy reports in 329 a “crowd of sellularii [men who work sedentary trades, literally, ‘stoolsmen’], a type least suited for military service, were called into the army” (Livy 8.20.4), though the historicity of this report is questionable given the early date. In 296, Etruscan entrance into the Third Samnite War causes a draft of “not only the freeborn or the iuniores took the oath, but cohorts were made of seniores and centuries of freedmen” (Livy 10.21.4). Gellius (16.10.1) quotes Ennius reporting the proletarii were pulled into the armies in 280, presumably in response to Pyrrhus’ victory at Heraclea. And during the Second Punic War the Romans pulled out all of the stops, recruiting debtors and men convicted of capital crimes (Livy 23.14.3), enrolling slaves into the army (called the volones; you free them first and then draft them, Livy 27.38 and 28.10, Val. Max. 7.6.1) and as noted above, taking volunteers more generally.
As an aside, if you are wondering why the Romans seem in some of these to skip recruiting freeborn capite censi and go straight to freedmen and enslaved people, I think there are two answers here for this period. First, many of the available freeborn poor are probably already in service in the fleet. Second, there probably aren’t that many of them. Recall our chart of Roman social classes – the capite censi in the third century is quite small, almost certainly outnumbered by enslaved persons in Italy. But the population of Italy was rising over the third and especially second century and without adding new farmland, those new freeborn Romans may have swelled the ranks of the capite censi, leading to a much larger propertyless class by the late second century or the first century.1 Consequently, there may have been a lot more capite censi worth recruiting by Marius’ day, when Rome no longer needed to keep a large navy at sea (not facing any naval powers in its wars) and the number of capite censi having risen.
Finally, Marius does not mark the end of the Roman dilectus! Evidently Roman conscription persisted at least to the end of the Roman civil wars, as Suetonius reports Augustus (perhaps when he was still Octavian) inflicting the traditional penalty of being sold into slavery for draft-dodging on a Roman eques who cut the fingers off of his two sons to make them ineligible for military service (Suet. Aug. 24.1). Indeed we have attestations of the dilectus in 55, 52, 50, 49, AD 6 and AD 9.2 Even once the army is fairly clearly primarily a volunteer force, at least notionally the ability to hold a levy when necessary to fill the ranks remained “on the books” and Trajan (r. 98-117 AD) holds at least one levy because he punishes a father for the same reason Augustus had done (Dig. 49.16.4.12). So the traditional dilectus remained a thing Roman leaders could do well into the empire. In practice it seems safe to assume the system by the mid-first century is substantially ad hoc, as the census straight up doesn’t happen from 69 BC to 28 BC, which would make it hard to actually enforce the property requirements. But the process doesn’t stop in 107 and there’s no reason to suppose from 107 to 69, with the census being regularly conducted, that most annual levies were not conducted along traditional property lines.3
So the most we might say is that a one-time crisis expedient in earlier periods slowly becomes a standard way to supplement legions and then the standard way to recruit them, with the old normal method of the dilectus instead becoming the unusual way to supplement in a crisis. It’s unclear exactly when that shift-over point happens, but it sure isn’t in the career of Gaius Marius, who sits clearly in the “volunteers as a crisis response” side of the issue.
And what of the notion that Gaius Marius introduced both citizenship as a reward for service as a regular bonus and also that he instituted the paying of soldiers at the completion of a campaign to render them loyal? Well on the latter point, the Romans had been distributing spoils to the soldiers at the end of a campaign as a lump-sum payment since the beginning. This is exceedingly well reflected in Livy’s accounting of the years from 201 to 167 (where we have a nice continuous burst of Livy), see for instance Livy ::deep breath:: 30.45, 31.20, 33.23, 33.37, 34.46, 34.52, 36.40, 37.59, 39.5, 39.7, 40.34, 40.43, 40.59, 41.7, 41.13, 45.40, 45.43.4 And the idea that Roman victories might seize land which would then be settled as Roman coloniae, creating new land for Roman settlers was also not new (Wikipedia has a convenient list of Roman coloniae). So Marius is simply promising to do a thing Roman commanders regularly did, essentially saying, “serve with me, because I’m going to win and victory will make us rich”. Which is exactly the reason volunteers rushed to serve with Scipio Africanus and Scipio Aemilianus: they anticipated a lucrative victory for such well-regarded commanders.
And by now you may well be asking, “but wait, then when does the system change?” Because after all, I said that by the early empire, we can pretty clearly see an army primarily composed of professional, long-service volunteers who receive substantial retirement bonuses and are permanently stationed on the frontiers. Who is responsible for that? And in response, I give you, this guy.
It’s Augustus. It was always Augustus. Or at least I should say that is my view, given the evidence. Older scholarship – I think here of Keppie (1984) in particular – tended to assume that because most of the big changes happened with Marius (but we’ve seen they don’t) that Octavian/Augustus probably made only minimal changes to the military system he inherited from Julius Caesar. I don’t think that’s correct. I think if we look at the evidence in more detail it becomes clear that Augustus is the “break” (though not a clean break by any means) and that in fact we need to start regarding Augustus as a military reformer of some significant scale rather than merely the codifier of a Caesarian military system (though he probably does that too).
Augustus, after all, institutes regular bonuses for discharge, establishing a treasury funded by a regular tax to meet the expense rather than simply promising that he would win a lot and so soldiers would get rich off of their share of the booty (Res Gestae 17). And it’s not hard to see the problem he’s responding to – the massive military buildup of the Roman civil wars had left Octavian, as the victor, with the red-hot potato of hundreds of thousands of soldiers who were promised the spoils of victory, including large numbers of men who didn’t win but who, if not settled down somehow would disrupt the state (RG 3). Earlier in the civil wars, Octavian had used proscriptions and land confiscations to solve this problem but as emperor, he needed a permanent solution, thus the establishment of the aerarium militare and its discharge bonuses (praemia). Before that, you simply had generals promising to feast their soldiers off of the property of the vanquished; the civil wars had only changed that in that the vanquished were now Romans. It also establishes a standard length of service, creating that professional, long-service army.
There’s a related issue which is the fate of the citizen equites and the velites. Caesar’s armies in Gaul seem to have neither, so the assumption was that the shift to recruiting proletarii meant that these wealth-based distinctions (the richest Romans serve as equites, the poorest as velites) dropped away, leaving a uniform heavy infantry legion. And in a schematic it makes sense: both roles are absorbed by the auxilia and indeed Caesar makes use of a lot of Gallic cavalry auxiliaries. But as François Gauthier recently pointed out,5 it’s not all clear that the velites really did vanish in the late-second/early-first century. Cicero still refers to to them writing in the 40s (Cic. Fam. 9.20; Brut., 271) and their apparent absence in Caesar’s writing may well just be an accident of Caesar’s avoidance of technical language. Caesar doesn’t generally talk about hastati or triarii much either; he prefers milites (“soldiers”). Likewise, it’s clear the citizen cavalry – the equites – survived Marius; as Jeremiah McCall notes, we have good evidence for citizen equites at least as late as the 90s BC and suggests the citizen cavalry probably vanished in the 80s as a result of the Social War and Sulla‘s Civil War.6 It surely did not happen in 107 or 104.
Meanwhile the auxilia as a mature part of the Roman army really only emerge under Augustus, and not even right at the beginning of his reign either. Roman armies needed cavalry and light infantry to function, so once again we may not be looking at a clean break but rather a period of transition as a result of some generals preference for (non-Italian) allied or auxiliary cavalry and light infantry and the formalization of that system not in 107 with Marius but again in 27 with Augustus.
Marius is also sometimes credited with the idea of extending citizenship to non-citizens who served, which is a catastrophic misreading of one episode in his career. For one, this gets read as meaning that Marius extended citizenship to all of the Italians in his army or that he made it standard to do so. Note for instance this line pulled from Wikipedia:
Finally, Marius granted citizens of the Italian allies (Etruria, Picenum, etc.) full Roman citizenship if they fought for Rome and completed a period of service in the Roman army.
[Dated] 6/25/2023, specified in the hope this page changes to be less wrong.
And that’s very much not right either. We have evidence for only a handful of citizenship extensions by Marius. In particular, of his army he extended citizenship to just two cohorts (c. 1,000 men) from Camerinum (Plut. Mor. 202D, Cic. Pro Balbo 46.). I can only assume this gets misunderstood because some writers don’t know their unit sizes, but Marius had 32,000 men in his army at Vercellae (101 BC), probably something like half of which were socii. These two cohorts were a comparatively tiny fraction. Marius also seems to have selected a very small number of his other socii veterans for citizenship (Cic. Pro Balbo 48), but there was no blanket grant of citizenship. Of course there wasn’t, this issue remained substantially unsolved until the Social War (91-87BC); if Roman levies had been calmly minting new citizens out of thousands of Italians through the 90s, there would hardly have been a cause for the Social War.
Instead, citizenship as a reward for service is an artifact of the imperial period and the auxilia. The Roman use of non-Roman, non-socii troops to supplement their armies was not new, but it emerged as a formalized, permanent part of the Roman army not during the civil wars – where such units where both ad hoc but also not nearly so numerous – but under the reign of Augustus, coming to form about half of the army by the end of his reign (Tac. Ann. 4.5; on the emergence of the auxilia, see I. Haynes, Blood of the Provinces (2013)). Indeed, as Haynes notes (op. cit. 49), it is actually only under Tiberius (r. 14-37) that we get direct evidence of citizenship grants to auxilia and the practice even then seems at least somewhat irregular (though it comes to be regularized).
In short that, the notion that Gaius Marius instituted the pattern of granting citizenship to serving non-citizens on discharge is simply wrong; that’s not in our sources. That doesn’t become consistent until Tiberius well over a century later. Gaius Marius did recruit volunteer capite censi into his army once but didn’t make a habit of it and as such isn’t a major reformer so much as a key step in a slow process of change which reaches its decisive point probably under Augustus, more than half a century after Gaius Marius died. He wasn’t the first to do either thing, whatever our sources say.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Marian Reforms Weren’t a Thing”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-06-30.
1. For more on the dynamics of this, see N. Rosenstein, Rome at War (2004), as this is part of his central argument.
2. For textual references, see Brunt, Italian Manpower (1971), 636-7.
3. We do not know how that process would have accounted for the massive expansion of the Roman citizen class due to the Social War. But evidently it did!
4. These were happily already compiled by Brunt, op. cit., 394.
5. “Did velites Really Disappear in the Late Roman Republic?” Historia 70 (2021).
6. J.B. McCall, The Cavalry of the Roman Republic (2002), 100-113..
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June 11, 2025
QotD: “Pike and Shot” in the early gunpowder era
Instead, pike and shot were combined into a single unit. The “standard” form of this was the tercio, the Spanish organizational form of pike and shot and one which was imitated by many others. In the early 16th century, the standard organization of a tercio – at least notionally, as these units were almost never at full strength – was 2,400 pikemen and 600 arquebusiers. In battle, the tercio itself was the maneuver unit, moving as a single formation (albeit with changing shape); they were often deployed in threes (thus the name “tercio” meaning “a third”) with two positioned forward and the third behind and between, allowing them to support each other. The normal arrangement for a tercio was a “bastioned square” with a “sleeve of shot”: the pikes formed a square at the center, which was surrounded by a thin “sleeve” of muskets, then at each corner of the sleeve there was an additional, smaller square of shot. Placing those secondary squares (the “bastions” – named after the fortification element) on the corner allowed each one a wide potential range of fire and would mean that any enemy approaching the square would be under fire at minimum from one side of the sleeve and two of the bastions.
That said, if drilled properly, the formation could respond dynamically to changing conditions. Shot might be thrown forward to provide volley-fire if there was no imminent threat of an enemy advance, or it might be moved back to shelter behind the square if there was. If cavalry approached, the square might be hollowed and the shot brought inside to protect it from being overrun by cavalry. In the 1600s, against other pike-and-shot formations, it became more common to arrange the formation linearly, with the pike square in the center with a thin sleeve of shot while most of the shot was deployed in two large blocks to its right and left, firing in “countermarch” (each man firing and moving to the rear to reload) in order to bring the full potential firepower of the formation to bear.
Indeed it is worth expanding on that point: volley fire. The great limitation for firearms (and to a lesser extent crossbows) was the combination of frontage and reloading time: the limited frontage of a unit restricted how many men could shoot at once (but too wide a unit was vulnerable and hard to control) and long reload times meant long gaps between shots. The solution was synchronized volley fire allowing part of a unit to be reloading while another part fired. In China, this seems to have been first used with crossbows, but in Europe it really only catches on with muskets – we see early experiments with volley fire in the late 1500s, with the version that “catches on” being proposed by William Louis of Nassau-Dillenburg (1560-1620) to Maurice of Nassau (1567-1625) in 1594; the “countermarch” as it came to be known ends up associated with Maurice. Initially, the formation was six ranks deep but as reloading speed and drill improved, it could be made thinner without a break in firing, eventually leading to 18th century fire-by-rank drills with three ranks (though by this time these were opposed by drills where the first three ranks – the front kneeling, the back slightly offset – would all fire at once but with different sections of the line firing at different times (“fire-by-platoon”)).
Coming back to Total War, the irony is that while the basic components of pike-and-shot warfare exist in both Empire: Total War and for the Empire faction in Total War: Warhammer, in both games it isn’t really possible to actually do pike-and-shot warfare. Even if an army combines pikes and muskets, the unit sizes make the kind of fine maneuvers required of a pike-and-shot formation impossible and while it is possible to have missile units automatically retreat from contact, it is not possible to have them pointedly retreat into a pike unit (even though in Empire, it was possible to form hollow squares, a formation developed for this very purpose).
Indeed if anything the Total War series has been moving away from the gameplay elements which would be necessary to make representing this kind of synchronized discipline and careful formation fighting possible. While earlier Total War games experimented with synchronized discipline in the form of volley-fire drills (e.g. fire by rank), that feature was essentially abandoned after Total War: Shogun 2‘s Fall of the Samurai DLC in 2012. Instead of firing by rank, musket units in Total War: Warhammer are just permitted to fire through other members of their unit to allow all of the soldiers in a formation – regardless of depth or width – to fire (they cannot fire through other friendly units, however). That’s actually a striking and frustrating simplification: volley fire drills and indeed everything about subsequent linear firearm warfare was focused on efficient ways to allow more men to be actively firing at once; that complexity is simply abandoned in the current generation of Total War games.
Bret Devereaux, “Collection: Total War‘s Missing Infantry-Type”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-04-01.
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