As I hammer home to my students, no one rules alone and no ruler can hold a kingdom by force of arms alone. Kings and emperors need what Hannah Arendt terms power – the ability to coordinate voluntary collective action – because they cannot coerce everyone all at once. Indeed, modern states have far, far more coercive power than pre-modern rulers had – standing police forces, modern surveillance systems, powerful administrative states – and of course even then rulers must cultivate power if only to organize the people who run those systems of coercion.
How does one cultivate power? The key factor is legitimacy. To the degree that people regard someone (or some institution) as the legitimate authority, the legitimate ruler, they will follow their orders mostly just for the asking. After all, if a firefighter were to run into the room you are in right now and say “everybody out!” chance are you would not ask a lot of questions – you would leave the room and quickly! You’re assuming that they have expertise you don’t, a responsibility to fight fires, may know something you don’t and most importantly that their position of authority as the Person That Makes Sure Everything Doesn’t Burn Down is valid. So you comply and everyone else complies as a group which is, again, the voluntary coordination of collective action (the firefighter is not going to beat all of you if you refuse so this isn’t violence or force), which is power.
At the same time, getting that compliance, for the firefighter, is going to be dependent on looking the part. A firefighter who is a fit-looking person in full firefighting gear who you’ve all seen regularly at the fire station is going to have an easier time getting you all to follow directions than a not-particularly-fit fellow who claims to be a firefighter but isn’t in uniform and you aren’t quite sure who they are or why they’d be qualified. The trappings contribute to legitimacy which build power. Likewise, if your local firefighters are all out of shape and haven’t bothered to keep their fire truck in decent shape, you – as a community – might decide they’ve lost your trust (they’ve lost legitimacy, in fact) and so you might replace them with someone else who you think could do the job better.
Royal power works in similar ways. Kings aren’t obeyed for the heck of it, but because they are viewed as legitimate and acting within that legitimate authority (which typically means they act as the chief judge, chief general and chief priest of a society; those are the three standard roles of kingship which tend to appear, in some form, in nearly all societies with the institution). The situation for monarchs is actually more acute than for other forms of government. Democracies and tribal councils and other forms of consensual governments have vast pools of inherent legitimacy that derives from their government form – of course that can be squandered, but they start ahead on the legitimacy game. Monarchs, by contrast, have to work a lot harder to establish their legitimacy and doing so is a fairly central occupation of most monarchies, whatever their form. That means to be rule effectively and (perhaps more importantly) stay king, rulers need to look the part, to appear to be good monarchs, by whatever standard of “good monarch” the society has.
In most societies that has traditionally meant that they need not only to carry out those core functions (chief general, chief judge, chief priest), but they need to do so in public in a way that can be observed by their most important supporters. In the case of a vassalage-based political order, that’s going to be key vassals (some of whom may be mayors or clerics rather than fellow military aristocrats). We’ve talked about how this expresses itself in the “chief general” role already.
I’m reminded of a passage from the Kadesh Inscription, an Egyptian inscription from around 1270 BC which I often use with students; it recounts (in a self-glorifying and propagandistic manner) the Battle of Kadesh (1274 BC). The inscription is, of course, a piece of royal legitimacy building itself, designed to convince the reader that the Pharaoh did the “chief general” job well (he did not, in the event, but the inscription says he did). What is relevant here is that at one point he calls his troops to him by reminding them of the good job he did in peace time as a judge and civil administrator (the “chief judge” role) (trans. from M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol 2 (1976)):
Did I not rise as lord when you were lowly,
and made you into chiefs [read: nobles, elites] by my will every day?
I have placed a son on his father’s portion,
I have banished all evil from the land.
I released your servants to you,
Gave you things that were taken from you.
Whosoever made a petition,
“I will do it,” said I to him daily.
No lord has done for his soldiers
What my majesty did for your sakes.Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: Thoughts on CKIII: Royal Court”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-02-18.
March 25, 2025
QotD: The nature of kingship
March 19, 2025
QotD: The purpose of fortification
In the former case, the fortified center contains three interlinked things: the local market (where the sale of agricultural goods and the purchase by farmers of non-agricultural goods can be taxed and controlled), a seat of government that wields some customary power to tax the countryside through either political or religious authority and finally the residences of the large landholders who own that land and thus collect rents on it (and all of these things might also come with significant amounts of moveable wealth and an interest in protecting that too). For a raiding force, the concentration of moveable property (money, valuables, stored agricultural goods) this creates a tempting target, while for a power attempting to conquer the region the settlement conveniently already contains all of the administrative apparatus they need to extract revenue out of the area; if they destroyed such a center, they’d end up having to recreate it just to administer the place effectively.
In the latter case, the presence of a fortified center with even a modest military force makes effective exploitation of the countryside for supplies or revenue by an opposing force almost impossible; it can thus deny the territory to an enemy since pre-industrial agrarian armies have to gather their food locally. We have actually already discussed this function of point defenses before: the presence of a potent raiding force (typically cavalry) within allows the defender to strike at either enemy supply lines (should the fortress be bypassed) or foraging operations (should the army stay in the area without laying siege) functionally forcing the attacker to lay siege and take the fortress in order to exploit the area or move past it.
In both cases, the great advantage of the point defense is that while it can, through its administration and raiding threat, “command” the surrounding hinterland, the defender only needs to defend the core settlement to do that. Of course an attacker unable or unwilling to besiege the core settlement could content themselves with raiding the villages and farms outside of the walls, but such actions don’t accomplish the normal goal of offensive warfare (gaining control of and extracting revenue from the countryside) and peasants are, as we’ve noted, often canny survivors; brief raids tend to have ephemeral effects such that actually achieving lasting damage often requires sustained and substantial effort.
All of which is to say that even from abstract strategic reasoning, focusing considerable resources on such fortifications is a wise response to the threat of raids or invasion, even before we consider the interests of the people actually living in the fortified point (or close enough to flee to it) who might well place a higher premium on their own safety (and their own stuff!) than an abstract strategic planner would. The only real exception to this were situations when a polity was so powerful that it could be confident in its ability to nearly always win pitched battles and so prohibit any potential enemy from getting to the point of laying siege in the first place. Such periods of dominance are themselves remarkably rare. The Romans might be said to have maintained that level of dominance for a while, but as we’ve seen they didn’t abandon fortifications either.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part III: Castling”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-12-10.
March 13, 2025
QotD: Processing flax to make linen
The process for this is called retting and changed relatively little during the pre-modern period. The term “retting”, related to the Dutch reten shares the same root as English “rot” and that is essentially what we are going to do: we are going to rot away every fiber that isn’t the bast fibers themselves. The first step is to dry the stalks out, at least to a certain point. Then in the most common form of retting (called “water retting”) the partially dried stalks are submerged in stagnant or slow-moving waters (because you do not want too much water-motion action on the flax washing it away). Pliny (Natural History 19.17) notes the use of weights to hold the stalks down under the water. The water penetrates into the partially dried stalks, causing the pith to expand and rupture the skin of the stalk, which permits bacteria into the stalk. That bacteria then rots away the chemicals which bind the fibers together (this is pectin, located in the cell walls of the plant cells) allowing the fibers to be separated. This process takes around two to three weeks to complete, but has to be carefully controlled and monitored; over-retting will make the bast fibers themselves too weak, while under-retting will make it more difficult to separate the fibers.
By the Roman period at least, the potential benefits of retting in warm water were already well known (Pliny, NH 19.17). There is some evidence, for instance from Staonia and Saetabis, that at least by the Roman period specially built pools fed by small channels and exposed to the sun (so they would heat up) were sometimes used to speed the process. Very fine flax was in some cases double-retted, where stalks are partially retted, removed early, then retted a second time. Alternately, in water-poor regions, retting might instead be done via “dew retting” where the stalks are instead spread evenly and carefully on either grassy fields or even on the roofs of houses (e.g. Joshua 2:6), where the action of morning dew provides the necessary moisture for bacteria to break down the pectin. Dew retting generally seems to have taken rather longer as a process.
Once retted, the flax must be dried completely. The nest step is breaking, where the pith of the stalks is broken up by being beaten, sometimes with a wooden club (Pliny mentions a particular type of mallet, a stupparius malleus, or a “tow-club”, tow being the term for short broken fibers produced in the processing of flax, for this purpose, Pliny, NH 19.17). In some places (particularly in Northern Europe) it seems that stomping on the flax by foot or having horses do so was used for this purpose. Once broken up, the pith and other fibers may be separated from the bast using a wooden knife in a process called scutching (the knife is called a scutching knife). By the 1800s, this process was assisted through the use of a swingle, essentially a board stood upright with an opening at the top where the flax could be inserted and held, while the scutcher then strikes with the scutching knife downward against the board. Scutching is a fairly rapid process; Sir George Nicholas detailing flax production in the 1800s (in The Flax-Grower (1848), 45-6) reports that a skilled worker could scutch ten to fifteen pounds of flax a day by hand, though improper retting or low-quality flax might be more difficult to process. Scutching, when completed, left a bundle of fibers (sometimes slightly twisted to hold them together), with almost all of the other plant matter removed.
All of these steps, from planting to scutching, seem to have generally been done on the farm where the flax was being cultivated. At least in the early modern period, it was only once the flax had been scutched that the bundles might be sold (Nicholas, op. cit., 47). That said, our flax is not quite ready to spin just yet. The final step is hackling (also spelled heckling), where the bast fibers are combed along a special tool (a hackling board or comb) to remove the last of the extraneous plant matter, leaving just the bast fibers themselves. The hackling board itself is generally a wooden board with several rows of nails (the “teeth”) put through it, through the earliest hackles seem to have been made of bone or else a wood board using thorns or thistle as teeth (see Barber (1992), 14 for a reconstruction). The fibers that come out of this process are generally separated into grades; the “tow” fibers are short, loose or broken fibers that come loose from the longer strands of bast during scutching or hackling; these are gathered and spun separately and typically make a lower-quality linen thread when spun. They stand in contrast to the “line” of long bast fiber strands, which after hackling form long wavy coils of fibers called stricks; the small tangles give these fibers coherence and account for part of the strength of high quality linen, once spun. Pliny comments on the roughness of the entire process, quipping that “the more roughly treated [the linen is] the better it is” (Pliny NH 19.18). Nicholas, on this point, is explicit that the two grades ought to be kept separate, so as not to lower the value of the more useful fibers (op. cit., 47).
There was a significant amount of skill in the entire process. Pliny notes that the ratio of flax input to usable fiber output was skill dependent (NH 19.18) and that a good worker could get around fifteen Roman pounds (10.875lbs, 4.93kg) of usable fiber out of fifty Roman pounds (36.25lbs, 16.44kg) of raw flax. Nicholas agrees, noting that hand scutching skill was deemed sufficiently important for experienced scutchers to be sent to train workers elsewhere in the best methods (op. cit. 47). Pliny concludes on this basis that producing flax was a sufficiently skilled job as to befit free men (Nicholas also assumes a male worker, at least with his pronouns; he is explicit that breaking was done by men, though with women or children assisting by placing and retrieving the bundles of flax as they are broken), though it seems that much of this work was also done by women, particularly scutching and hackling. In each case it seems fairly clear that this work was done mostly on the flax farm itself, by many of the same people living and working on that farm.
The final result of all of this processing are bundles of individual flax bast filaments which are now quite smooth, with a yellow, “flaxen” color (though early pulled, very fine flax may be a quite pale yellow, whereas utilitarian late-pulled flax is a deeper near-brown yellow), ready to spin. We’ll deal with color treatment in a later post, but I should note here that linen is notoriously difficult to dye, but can be bleached, for instance by exposing the fibers to the sun during the drying process.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part II: Scouring in the Shire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-03-12.
March 7, 2025
QotD: Infantry combat and esprit de corps
Well, no. Not quite.
We can approach this question through the idea of cohesion – the moral force that holds a group of combatants together on the battlefield under the intense emotional stresses of combat. The intense bonds that soldiers form in modern armies (particularly those in the European pattern) are not an accident, but a core part of how those armies, institutionally, seek to build cohesion. [W]e discussed briefly the emergence of the extensively drilled and disciplined “mechanical” soldier of Early Modern Europe, noting that this approach wasn’t necessary for the effective use of firearms (the Ottoman Janissaries, for instance, were quite good with firearms, but were not trained and organized in this way), but rather was a product of elite aristocratic (read: officer) disdain for their up-jumped peasant soldiers and thus the assumption by those aristocrats that the only way to get such men to fight effectively was to relentlessly drill them.
Now the funny thing about this system is that it clearly worked, but not for the reasons its aristocratic pioneers believed. It was only really after the Second World War that systematic study began to be made of unit cohesion (e.g. S.L.A. Marshall, Men Against Fire (1947), though subsequent literature on the topic is voluminous and Marshal’s work has its problems, but its conclusions are broadly accepted having been confirmed in subsequent studies) [NR: Some discussion on Marshall and his theories here]. What emerged quite clearly was that it wasn’t “the cause” or patriotism that held troops together under fire, but group cohesion born out of an intense need not to let fellow soldiers in the unit down. In short, what held units together and made them fight more effectively was (in part, there are many conclusions in Men Against Fire) the strong social bonds between comrades.
And, in fact, the drill and discipline of early modern European armies unintentionally did quite a lot of cohesion building things. Soldiers were removed from civilian society (isolation from larger groups builds unit cohesion), split into very small groups (keeping the core group that coheres below Dunbar’s number aids in group cohesion; thus why the platoon is a natural unit size) and then pushed through difficult and unpleasant training (that drill and discipline) creating a sense of unique shared experience and sacrifice. All of which doesn’t render men machines, but it does create strong social bonds within the units that will keep the men fighting even when they care little for their cause (which they generally did in this period; one does not find a super-abundance of patriotism among, say, the Army of Flanders).
And there is a tendency to point to this cohesion, its modern source in “toughening” boot camp and to say, “aha! That is the true universal about effective soldier-warriors!” Except – and you knew there was going to be an except – except it isn’t. Systems built on the use of drill and discipline for the development of unit cohesion through social bonds are actually, historically speaking, quite rare. We see systems like that in use by the Romans from the Middle Republic forward (but significantly faded by the end of late antiquity; the Byzantine army doesn’t seem to function this way), in China from the Han Dynasty onward, in Japan for the ashigaru infantry from the Sengoku period, and in Europe from the Early Modern period. That sounds like a lot, but that is relatively small minority of the historical period and even then in a relatively small minority of places. It is, for instance, a period that only covers about half of the historical period in Western Europe, the place most often associated with this very system of organization (though that association is perhaps unfair to East Asia).
Instead, most societies relied on existing social bonds formed outside of the experience of war for cohesion. Greek hoplite armies, for instance, generally formed up by polis (read: city) and then within those blocks by still smaller and smaller social divisions, so that family and neighbors would be standing shoulder to shoulder in the battle line (Sparta does this through the system of communal messes, the syssitia, but the idea that you fought alongside the men you dined with socially – your neighbors, generally – was perfectly normal in most Greek cities). That was intentional – it allowed the phalanx to cohere through the social pressure not to be seen as a coward before the men who meant the most to you, whose shaming gaze you would have to endure in civilian life. The same pressures, by the well, held together the (mostly volunteer) armies of the American Civil War (on this, see, McPherson, For Cause and Comrades (1997)).
By contrast, “warrior” classes often rely on a sort of class solidarity along with the demand of an individual military aristocrat to be individually militarily excellent. Richard Kaeuper quips of the literature of the medieval knightly class that it was filled with “utterly tireless, almost obsessional emphasis placed on personal prowess” (R.W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (1999)). We’ve talked a fair bit about the values of mounted aristocrats, both in their role as combatants and in their roles as generals and those values are relatively disconnected from discipline-induced forms of buddy-cohesion. Of course exactly what “good generalship” or “good officership” looks like varies wildly from place to place – Alexander was expected to command his cavalry from the front; Roman emperors rarely took the battlefield and when they did they commanded from the rear since it would be foolish to risk the “brain” of the army in personal combat and in any event someone at the front of a cavalry charge can hardly direct the rest of the army.
One of the things I find most striking about the “warrior ethos” advanced by writers like Pressfield is that it accepts as normal the unique nature of the bonds that hold soldiers together in battle, assuming this bond and its shared sacrifice to be at once unique to combat and also transcendent to all combatants. But one of the key points made very well in Sebastian Junger’s War (2010) and later Tribe (2016) is just how strange that experience is, historically. Junger notes that in earlier societies, soldiers would have returned from war into communities (often small, agricultural communities or tribal communities) every bit as close-knit as the infantry platoon – and indeed, often involving literally the same people as the infantry platoon. Instead, the intense feeling of uniqueness that modern soldiers feel about the bonds of combat is because of the historically unusual deracination produced by modern societies by the industrial revolution and the post-industrial period.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIb: A Soldier’s Lot”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
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).
February 23, 2025
QotD: The Hellenistic army system as a whole
No battle is a perfect “model” battle, but the Battle of Raphia (217BC) is handy for this because we have the two most powerful Hellenistic states (the Ptolemies and Seleucids) both bringing their A-game with very large field armies and deploying in a fairly standard pattern. That said, there are some quirks to note immediately: Raphia is our only really good order of battle of the Ptolemies, but as our sources note there is an oddity here, specifically the mass deployment of Egyptians in the phalanx. As I noted last time, there had always been some ethnic Egyptians (legal “Persians”) in the phalanx, but the scale here is new. In addition, as we’ll see, the position of Ptolemy IV himself is odd, on the left wing matched directly against Antiochus III, rather than on his own right wing as would have been normal. But this is mostly a fairly normal setup and Polybius gives us a passably good description (better for Ptolemy than Antiochus, much like the battle itself).
We can start with the Seleucid Army and the tactical intent of the layout is immediately understandable. Antiochus III is modestly outnumbered – he is, after all, operating far from home at the southern end of the Levant (Raphia is modern-day Rafah at the southern end of Gaza), and so is more limited in the force he can bring. His best bet is to make his cavalry and elephant superiority count and that means a victory on one of the wings – the right wing being the standard choice. So Antiochus stacks up a 4,000 heavy cavalry hammer on his flank behind 60 elephants – Polybius doesn’t break down which cavalry, but we can assume that the 2,000 with Antiochus on the extreme right flank are probably the cavalry agema and the Companions, deployed around the king, supported by another 2,000 probably Macedonian heavy cavalry. He then uses his Greek mercenary infantry (probably thureophoroi or perhaps some are thorakitai) to connect that force to the phalanx, supported by his best light skirmish infantry: Cretans and a mix of tough hill folks from Cilicia and Caramania (S. Central Iran) and the Dahae (a steppe people from around the Caspian Sea).
His left wing, in turn, seems to be much lighter and mostly Iranian in character apart from the large detachment of Arab auxiliaries, with 2,000 more cavalry (perhaps lighter Persian-style cavalry?) holding the flank. This is a clearly weaker force, intended to stall on its wing while Antiochus wins to the battle on the right. And of course in the middle [is] the Seleucid phalanx, which was quite capable, but here is badly outnumbered both because of how full-out Ptolemy IV has gone in recruiting for his “Macedonian” phalanx and also because of the massive infusion of Egyptians.
But note the theory of victory Antiochus III has: he is going to initiate the battle on his right, while not advancing his left at all (so as to give them an easier time stalling), and hope to win decisively on the right before his left comes under strain. This is, at most, a modest alteration of Alexander-Battle.
Meanwhile, Ptolemy IV seems to have anticipated exactly this plan and is trying to counter it. He’s stacked his left rather than his right with his best troops, including his elite infantry (the agema and peltasts, who, while lighter, are more elite) and his best cavalry, supported by his best (and only) light infantry, the Cretans.1 Interestingly, Polybius notes that Echecrates, Ptolemy’s right-wing commander waits to see the outcome of the fight on the far side of the army (Polyb. 6.85.1) which I find odd and suggests to me Ptolemy still carried some hope of actually winning on the left (which was not to be). In any case, Echecrates, realizing that sure isn’t happening, assaults the Seleucid left.
I think the theory of victory for Ptolemy is somewhat unconventional: hold back Antiochus’ decisive initial cavalry attack and then win by dint of having more and heavier infantry. Indeed, once things on the Ptolemaic right wing go bad, Ptolemy moves to the center and pushes his phalanx forward to salvage the battle, and doing that in the chaos of battle suggests to me he always thought that the matter might be decided that way.
In the event, for those unfamiliar with the battle: Antiochus III’s right wing crumples the Ptolemaic left wing, but then begins pursuing them off of the battlefield (a mistake he will repeat at Magnesia in 190). On the other side, the Gauls and Thracians occupy the front face of the Seleucid force while the Greek and Mercenary cavalry get around the side of the Seleucid cavalry there and then the Seleucid left begins rolling up, with the Greek mercenary infantry hitting the Arab and Persian formations and beating them back. Finally, Ptolemy, having escaped the catastrophe on his left wing, shows up in the center and drives his phalanx forward, where it wins for what seem like obvious reasons against an isolated Seleucid phalanx it outnumbers almost 2-to-1.
But there are a few structural features I want to note here. First, flanking this army is really hard. On the one hand, these armies are massive and so simply getting around the side of them is going to be difficult (if they’re not anchored on rivers, mountains or other barriers, as they often are). Unlike a Total War game, the edge of the army isn’t a short 15-second gallop from the center, but likely to be something like a mile (or more!) away. Moreover, you have a lot of troops covering the flanks of the main phalanx. That results, in this case, in a situation where despite both wings having decisive actions, the two phalanxes seem to be largely intact when they finally meet (note that it isn’t necessarily that they’re slow; they seem to have been kept on “stand by” until Ptolemy shows up in the center and orders a charge). If your plan is to flank this army, you need to pick a flank and stack a ton of extra combat power there, and then find a way to hold the center long enough for it to matter.
Second, this army is actually quite resistive to Alexander-Battle: if you tried to run the Issus or Gaugamela playbook on one of these armies, you’d probably lose. Sure, placing Alexander’s Companion Cavalry between the Ptolemaic thureophoroi and Gallic mercenaries (about where he’d normally go) would have him slam into the Persian and Medean light infantry and probably break through. But that would be happening at the same time as Antiochus’ massive 4,000-horse, 60-elephant hammer demolished Ptolemaic-Alexander’s left flank and moments before the 2,000 cavalry left-wing struck Alexander himself in his flank as he advanced. The Ptolemaic army is actually an even worse problem, because its infantry wings are heavier, making that key initial cavalry breakthrough harder to achieve. Those chunky heavy-cavalry wings ensure that an effort to break through at the juncture of the center and the wing is foolhardy precisely because it leaves the breakthrough force with heavy cavalry to one side and heavy infantry to the other.
I know this is going to cause howls of pain and confusion, but I do not think Alexander could have reliably beaten either army deployed at Raphia; with a bit of luck, perhaps, but on the regular? No. Not only because he’d be badly outnumbered (Alexander’s army at Gaugamela is only 40,000 infantry and 7,000 cavalry) but because these armies were adapted to precisely the sort of army he’d have and the tactics he’d use. Even without the elephants (and elephants gave Alexander a hell of a time at the Hydaspes), these armies can match Alexander’s heavy infantry core punch-for-punch while having enough force to smash at least one of his flanks, probably quite quickly. Note that the Seleucid Army – the smaller one at Raphia – has almost exactly as much heavy infantry at Raphia as Alexander at Gaugamela (30,000 to 31,000), and close to as much cavalry (6,000 to 7,000), but of course also has a hundred and two elephants, another 5,000 more “medium” infantry and massive superiority in light infantry (27,000 to 9,000). Darius III may have had no good answer to the Macedonian phalanx, but Antiochus III has a Macedonian phalanx and then essentially an entire second Persian-style army besides (and his army at Magnesia is actually more powerful than his army at Raphia).
This is not a degraded form of Alexander’s army, but a pretty fearsome creature of its own, which supplements an Alexander-style core with larger amounts of light and medium troops (and elephants), without sacrificing much, if any, in terms of heavy infantry and cavalry. The tactics are modest adjustments to Alexander-Battle which adapt the military system for symmetrical engagements against peer armies. The Hellenistic Army is a hard nut to crack, which is why the kingdoms that used them were so successful during the third century, to the point that, until the Romans show up, just about the only thing which could beat a Hellenistic army was another Hellenistic army.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph, Part Ib: Subjects of the Successors”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-01-26.
1. You can tell how much those Cretans are valued, given that they get placed in key positions in both armies.
February 17, 2025
QotD: Decisive factors in the Roman victory over the Seleucids
Ironically for a post covering land battles, the most important factor may be naval: Rome’s superior naval resources (and better naval allies), which gave the Romans an enormous operational advantage against Antiochus. In the initial phase, the Romans could get more troops to Greece than the king could, while further on, Roman naval supremacy allowed Roman armies to operate in Anatolia in force (while Antiochus, even had he won in Greece, had no hope of operating in Italy). Neutralizing Antiochus’ navy both opened up options for the Romans and closed down options for Antiochus, setting the conditions for Roman victory. It would have also neutered any Roman defeat. If Antiochus wins at Magnesia, he cannot then immediately go on the offensive, after all: he has merely bought perhaps a year or two of time to rebuild his navy and try to contest the Aegean again. Given the astounding naval mobilizations Rome had shown itself capable of in the third century, one cannot imagine Antiochus was likely to win that contest.
Meanwhile, the Romans had better allies, in part as a consequence of the Romans being better at getting allies. The Romans benefit substantially from allied Achaean, Pergamese and Rhodian ships and troops, as well as support from the now-humbled Philip V of Macedon and even supplies and auxiliaries from Numidia and Carthage. Alliance-management is a fairly consistent Roman strength and it shows here. It certainly seems to help that Roman protestations that they had little interest in a permanent presence in Greece seem to have been somewhat true; Rome won’t set up a permanent provincia in Macedonia until 146 (though the Romans do expect their influence to predominate before then). By contrast, Antiochus III, clearly bent on rebuilding Alexander’s empire, was a more obvious threat to the long-term independence and autonomy of Greek states like the Pergamum or Rhodes.
Finally, there is the remarkable Seleucid glass jaw. The Romans, after all, sustained a defeat very much like Magnesia against Hannibal in 216 (the Battle of Cannae) and kept fighting. By contrast, Antiochus is forced into a humiliating peace after Magnesia, in which he cedes all of Anatolia, gives up any kind of navy and is forced to pay a crippling financial indemnity which will fatally undermine the reign of his successor and son Seleucus IV (leading to his assassination in 175, leading to yet further Seleucid weakness). Part of this glass jaw may have been political: after Magnesia, Antiochus’ own aristocrats seem pretty well done with their king’s adventurism against Rome.
But at the same time, some of it was clearly military. Antiochus didn’t have a second army to fall back on and Magnesia represented essentially a peak “all-call” Seleucid mobilization. A similar defeat at Raphia had forced a similarly unfavorable peace earlier in his reign, after all. Part of the problem, I would argue, is that the Seleucids needed their army for more than just war: they needed it to enforce taxation and tribute on their own recalcitrant subjects. As a result, no Seleucid king could afford to “go for broke” the way the Roman Republic could, nor could the Seleucids ever fully mobilize the massive population of their realm. The very nature of the Hellenistic kingdom’s ethnic hierarchy made fully tapping the potential resources of the kingdom impossible.
As a result, while Antiochus III was not an incompetent general, he ruled a deceptively weak giant. Massive revenues were offset by equally massive security obligations and the Seleucids seem to have been perenially cash strapped (with a nasty habit of looting temples to make up for it). The very nature of the Seleucid Empire – like the Ptolemaic one – as an ethnic empire where Macedonians ruled and non-Macedonians were ruled kept Antiochus from being able to fully mobilize his subjects. It may also explain why so many of those light infantry auxiliaries seem to have run off without much of a fight. Eumenes and his Pergamese troops fought for their independence, the Romans for the greater glory of Rome and the socii for their own status and loot within the Roman system, but what could Antiochus offer a subjected Carian or Cilician except a paycheck and a future of continued subjugation? That’s not much to die for.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph, Part IVb: Antiochus III”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-04-05.
February 10, 2025
QotD: The Roman Republic versus the heirs of Alexander the Great
Well, I hope you got your fill of Hellenistic armies winning battles because it is all downhill from here (even when we’re fighting uphill). For the first half of the second century, from 200 to 168, the Romans achieve an astounding series of lopsided victories against both (Antigonid) Macedonian and Seleucid Hellenistic armies, while simultaneously reducing several other major players (Pergamon, Egypt) to client states. And unlike Pyrrhus, the Romans are in a position to “convert” on each victory, successfully achieving their strategic objectives. It was this string of victories, so shocking in the Greek world, that prompted Polybius to write his own history, covering the period from 264 to 146 to try to explain what the heck happened (much of that history is lost, but Polybius opens by suggesting that anyone paying attention to the First Punic War (264-241) ought to have seen this coming).
That said, this series of victories is complex. Of the five major engagements (The River Aous, Cynoscephalae, Thermopylae, Magnesia, and Pydna) Rome commandingly wins all of them, but each battle is strange in its own way. So we’re going to look at each battle and also take a chance to lay out a bit of the broader campaigns, asking at each stage why does Rome win here? Both in the tactical sense (why do they win the battle) and also in the strategic sense (why do they win the war).
We’re going to start with the war that brought Rome truly into the political battle royale of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Second Macedonian War (200-196). Rome was acting, in essence, as an interloper in long-running conflicts between the various successor dynasties of Alexander the Great as well as smaller Greek states caught in the middle of these larger brawling empires. Briefly, the major players are the Ptolemaic Dynasty, in Egypt (the richest state), the Seleucid Dynasty out of Syria and Mesopotamia (the largest state) and the Antigonid Kingdom in Macedonia (the smallest and weakest state, but punching above its weight with the best man-for-man army). The minor but significant players are the Attalid dynasty in Pergamon, a mid-sized Hellenistic power trapped between the ambitions of the big players, two broad alliances of Greek poleis in the Greek mainland the Aetolian and Achaean Leagues, and finally a few freewheeling poleis, notably Athens and Rhodes. The large states are trying to dominate the system, the small states trying to retain their independence and everyone is about to get rolled by the Romans.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph, Part IVa: Philip V”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-03-15.
February 4, 2025
QotD: The American political spectrum
Then on the right you have (4) Right-liberals (“Classical liberals”), who share liberalism with groups (2) and (3) but reject (or at least substantially challenge) the idea that society can be “engineered” with positive results. This group largely left the Republican party between 2016 and the present (though some were already libertarians). Notably, (3) and (4) in the United States tend to share hawkish anti-authoritarian, anti-communist foreign policy views; this is where the foreign policy “blob” lives. To their right are (5) Traditionalist Conservatives. Because the United States was founded as a liberal country, they tend to still hold some liberal views (and respond well to liberal, “freedom-centered” framing) but their main ideological commitment is generally conservative in its literal meaning of being traditionalist, desiring things to not change or to recover that which has changed and there is a willingness to compromise on liberalism in the pursuit of that. This, I’d argue, is where the core of the Republican Party currently exists. Finally, you have (6) Right-Authoritarians, who come in various forms based on the authority they believe ought to structure society, e.g. populist authoritarians are fascists, whereas Catholic religious authoritarians are integralists and so on. But the core idea here is that there exists an authority, be it the “national will” (invariably channeled by an individual charismatic leader and often herrenvolk in nature) or tradition or the church or whatever else, which has a right to structure society which supersedes individual liberties. For our purposes, they key is they generally despise liberalism because it places limits on that authority. They tend to insist that liberalism makes societies weak even as liberal societies pound their favorite dictators into dust over and over again.
To put the spectrum another way, we might think in terms of publications: Jacobin (1) <-> Vox (2) <-> The Atlantic (3) <-> The Bulwark/Dispatch (4) <-> National Review (5); few major publications openly identify as being in (6) in the United States, but you can see editors at The Federalist or First Things platform political visions that [derive] from it. To the degree to which “horse-shoe theory” works it is because the thing that The Left and the Right-Authoritarians have in common is that they believe in an effectively unlimited claim on the individual by the community, whereas the core of liberal ideology is that the social claim on the individual is and must be limited.
Bret Devereaux, In a footnote to “Collections: The Philosophy of Liberty – On Liberalism”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-07-05.
January 29, 2025
QotD: Did the customary Dictatorship work in the Roman Republic?
Of the roughly 85 dictatorships in the “customary” period from 501 to 202, 0% of them seized control of the state, led or participated in a major violent insurrection. […]
How could an office with such extensive powers be so apparently stable? Dictators under the customary system simply lacked the tools necessary to overthrow the state even if they wanted to. As noted, all of the other magistrates remained in office and while they were notionally subordinate to the dictator, they didn’t need to be cooperative (and surely wouldn’t be if a dictator announced he was staying on after the end of his term). Dictators couldn’t legislate on their own and so couldn’t alter the constitutional structure of the Republic itself. Moreover, one key magistracy, that of the tribunes of the plebs, remained distinctly outside of the dictator’s power and by the third century were equipped with a range of highly disruptive powers and a mandate to protect the interests of the Roman people which would justify them blocking a dictator’s efforts to seize power.
The dictator’s command of the army was likewise not an effective tool to dominate the state. The Roman army of the early and middle republics was a citizen militia, so the dictator would need to convince the Roman voting assemblies to abolish themselves. Moreover, with a mere six-month command, no dictator was likely to remain in command of his army long enough to foster the kind of iron-clad loyalty he would need to then direct that army against the rest of the state.
In terms of allowing rapid and unified response to a fast-moving crisis, the dictatorship also seems generally to have worked well, allowing the Romans to temporarily suspend whatever political gridlock might exist, but in a context that rarely allowed for one side to win the gridlock by suspending it, since the causa [the specific, named problem that triggered the appointment] of the dictator was limited and generally externally directed. In cases where a dictator was appointed to deal with internal dissent, they often still had to compromise in the face of popular discontent because they lacked the tools to coerce the political system; P. Manlius Capitolinus (dict. 368) had to push a major compromise in order to get the plebs back on board after the previous dictator, M. Furius Camillus, had attempted to strong-arm the issue. On the flipside, Manius Valerius (dict. 494), being appointed dictator in 494 to deal with a military crisis and a successio plebis, defeated the external enemy and then suggested the senate compromise internally, which it refused to do. He simply resigned his dictatorship, to the acclaim of the people.
While the powers of the dictator are often stated as being “absolute” or “extreme” (and were, compared to the power of a consul), the customary dictatorship was essentially just a unitary executive, something that quite a lot of modern governments have. Customary Roman dictators were, if anything, less powerful than most modern Prime Ministers or the modern President of the United States. Like many ancient civic governments, the Roman Republic was constructed with a lot of worry about monarchy and thus tended to keep its offices short in duration and institutionally weak and the dictatorship was no exception.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Roman Dictatorship: How Did It Work? Did It Work?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-18.
January 23, 2025
QotD: The origins of strategic airpower
Fighting aircraft, as a technology in WWI, were only in their very infancy. On the one hand the difference between the flimsy, unarmed artillery scout planes of the war’s early days and the purpose-built bombers and fighters of the war’s end was dramatic. On the other hand the platforms available at the end of the war remained very limited. Once again we can use a late-war bomber like the Farman F.50 – introduced too late to actually do much fighting in WWI – as an example of the best that could be done. It has a range of 260 miles – too short to reach deep into enemy country – and a bomb load of just 704lbs. Worse yet it was slow and couldn’t fly very high, making it quite vulnerable. It is no surprise that bombers like this didn’t break the trench stalemate in WWI or win the war.
However, anyone paying attention could already see that these key characteristics – range, speed, ceiling and the all-important bomb-load – were increasing rapidly. And while the politicians of the 1920s often embraced the assumption that the War to End All Wars had in fact banished the scourge of war from the Earth – or at the very least, from the corner of it they inhabited such that war would now merely be a thing they inflicted on other, poorer, less technologically advanced peoples – the military establishment did not. European peace had always been temporary; the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and the Congress of Vienna (1815) had not ended war in Europe, so why would the Treaty of Versailles (1919)? There had always been another war and they were going to plan for it! And they were going to plan in the sure knowledge that the bombers the next war would be fought with would be much larger, faster, longer ranged and more powerful than the bombers they knew.
One of those interwar theorists was Giulio Douhet (1869-1930), an Italian who had served during the First World War. Douhet wasn’t the only bomber advocate or even the most influential at the time – in part because Italy was singularly unprepared to actually capitalize on the bomber as a machine, given that it was woefully under-industrialized and bomber-warfare was perhaps the most industrial sort of warfare on offer at the time (short of naval warfare) – but his writings exemplify a lot of the thinking at the time, particularly The Command of the Air (1921). But figures like Hugh Trenchard in Britain or Billy Mitchell in the United States were driving similar arguments, with similar technological and institutional implications. But first, we need to get the ideas.
Like many theorists at the time, Douhet was thinking about how to avoid a repeat of the trench stalemate, which as you may recall was particularly bad for Italy. For Douhet, there was a geometry to this problem; land warfare was two dimensional and thus it was possible to simply block armies. But aircraft – specifically bombers – could move in three dimensions; the sky was not merely larger than the land but massively so as a product of the square-cube law. To stop a bomber, the enemy must find the bomber and in such an enormous space finding the bomber would be next to impossible, especially as flight ceilings increased. In Britain, Stanley Baldwin summed up this vision by famously quipping, “no power on earth can protect the man in the street from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.” And technology seemed to be moving this way as the possibility for long-range aircraft carrying heavy loads and high altitudes became more and more a reality in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Consequently, Douhet assumed there could be no effective defense against fleets of bombers (and thus little point in investing in air defenses or fighters to stop them). Rather than wasting time on the heavily entrenched front lines, stuck in the stalemate, they could fly over the stalemate to attack the enemy directly. In this case, Douhet imagined these bombers would target – with a mix of explosive, incendiary and poison gas munitions) the “peacetime industrial and commercial establishment; important buildings, private and public; transportation arteries and centers; and certain designated areas of civilian population”. This onslaught would in turn be so severe that the populace would force its government to make peace to make the bombing stop. Douhet went so far as to predict (in 1928) that just 300 tons of bombs dropped on civilian centers could end a war in a month; in The War of 19– he offered a scenario where in a renewed war between Germany and France where the latter surrendered under bombing pressure before it could even mobilize. Douhet imagined this, somewhat counterintuitively, as a more humane form of war: while the entire effort would be aimed at butchering as many civilians as possible, he thought doing so would end wars quickly and thus result in less death.
Clever ideas to save lives by killing more people are surprisingly common and unsurprisingly rarely turn out to work.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Strategic Airpower 101”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-10-21.
January 17, 2025
QotD: Foraging for supplies in pre-modern armies
We should start with the sort of supplies our army is going to need. The Romans neatly divided these into four categories: food, fodder, firewood and water each with its own gathering activities (called by the Romans frumentatio, pabulatio, lignatio and aquatio respectively; on this note Roth op. cit. 118-140), though gathering food and fodder would be combined whenever possible. That’s a handy division and also a good reflection of the supply needs of armies well into the gunpowder era. We can start with the three relatively more simple supplies, all of which were daily concerns but also tended to be generally abundant in areas that armies were.
For most armies in most conditions, water was available in sufficient quantities along the direction of march via naturally occurring bodies of water (springs, rivers, creeks, etc.). Water could still be an important consideration even where there was enough to march through, particularly in determining the best spot for a camp or in denying an enemy access to local water supplies (such as, famously at the Battle of Hattin (1187)). And detailing parties of soldiers to replenish water supplies was a standard background activity of warfare; the Romans called this process aquatio and soldiers so detailed were aquatores (not a permanent job, to be clear, just regular soldiers for the moment sent to get water), though generally an army could simply refill its canteens as it passed naturally occurring watercourses. Well organized armies could also dig wells or use cisterns to pre-position water supplies, but this was rarely done because it was tremendously labor intensive; an army demanded so much water that many wells would be necessary to allow the army to water itself rapidly enough (the issue is throughput, not well capacity – you can only lift so many buckets of so much water in an hour in a single well). For the most part armies confined their movements to areas where water was naturally available, managing, at most, short hops through areas where it was scarce. If there was no readily available water in an area, agrarian armies simply couldn’t go there most of the time.
Like water, firewood was typically a daily concern. In the Roman army this meant parties of firewood forages (lignatores) were sent out regularly to whatever local timber was available. Fortunately, local firewood tended to be available in most areas because of the way the agrarian economy shaped the countryside, with stretches of forest separating settlements or tended trees for firewood near towns. Since an army isn’t trying to engage in sustainable arboriculture, it doesn’t usually need to worry about depleting local wood stocks. Moreover, for our pre-industrial army, they needn’t be picky about the timber for firewood (as opposed to timber for construction). Like water gathering, collecting firewood tends to crop up in our sources when conditions make it unusually difficult – such as if an army is forced to remain in one place (often for a siege) and consequently depletes the local supply (e.g. Liv. 36.22.10) or when the presence of enemies made getting firewood difficult without using escorts or larger parties (e.g. Ps.-Caes. BAfr. 10). Sieges could be especially tricky in this regard because they add a lot of additional timber demand for building siege engines and works; smart defenders might intentionally try to remove local timber or wood structures to deny an approaching army as part of a scorched earth strategy (e.g. Antioch in 1097). That said apart from sieges firewood availability, like water availability is mostly a question of where an army can go; generals simply long stay in areas where gathering firewood would be impossible.
Then comes fodder for the animals. An army’s animals needed a mix of both green fodder (grass, hay) and dry fodder (barley, oats). Animals could meet their green fodder requirements by grazing at the cost of losing marching time, or the army could collect green fodder as it foraged for food and dry fodder. As you may recall, cut grain stalks can be used as green fodder and so even an army that cannot process grains in the fields can still quite easily use them to feed the animals, alongside barley and oats pillaged from farm storehouses. The Romans seem to have preferred gathering their fodder from the fields rather than requisitioning it from farmers directly (Caes. BG 7.14.4) but would do either in a pinch. What is clear is that much like gathering water or firewood this was a regular task a commander had to allot and also that it often had to be done under guard to secure against attacks from enemies (thus you need one group of soldiers foraging and another group in fighting trim ready to drive off an attack). Fodder could also be stockpiled when needed, which was normally for siege operations where an army’s vast stock of animals might deplete local grass stocks while the army remained encamped there. Crucially, unlike water and firewood, both forms of fodder were seasonal: green fodder came in with the grasses in early spring and dry fodder consists of agricultural products typically harvested in mid-summer (barley) or late spring (oats).
All of which at last brings us to the food, by which we mostly mean grains. Sources discussing army foraging tend to be heavily focused on food and we’ll quickly see why: it was the most difficult and complex part of foraging operations in most of the conditions an agrarian army would operate. The first factor that is going to shape foraging operations is grain processing. [S]taple grains (especially wheat, barley and later rye) make up the vast bulk of the calories an army (and it attendant non-combatants) are eating on the march. But, as we’ve discussed in more detail already, grains don’t grow “ready to eat” and require various stages of processing to render them edible. An army’s foraging strategy is going to be heavily impacted by just how much of that processing they are prepared to do internally.
This is one area where the Roman army does appear to have been quite unusual: Roman armies could and regularly did conduct the entire grain processing chain internally. This was relatively rare and required both a lot of coordination and a lot of materiel in the form of tools for each stage of processing. As a brief refresher, grains once ripe first have to be reaped (cut down from the stalks), then threshed (the stalks are beaten to shake out the seeds) and winnowed (the removal of non-edible portions), then potentially hulled (removing the inedible hull of the seed), then milled (ground into a powder, called flour, usually by the grinding actions of large stones), then at last baked into bread or a biscuit or what have you.
It is possible to roast unmilled grain seeds or to boil either those seeds or flour in water to make porridge in order to make them edible, but turning grain into bread (or biscuits or crackers) has significant nutritional advantages (it breaks down some of the plant compounds that human stomachs struggle to digest) and also renders the food a lot tastier, which is good for morale. Consequently, while armies will roast grains or just make lots of porridge in extremis, they want to be securing a consistent supply of bread. The result is that ideally an army wants to be foraging for grain products at a stage where it can manage most or all of the remaining steps to turn those grains into food, ideally into bread.
As mentioned, the Romans could manage the entire processing chain themselves. Roman soldiers had sickles (falces) as part of their standard equipment (Liv. 42.64.2; Josephus BJ 3.95) and so could be deployed directly into the fields (Caes. BG 4.32; Liv. 31.2.8, 34.26.8) to reap the grain themselves. It would then be transported into the fortified camp the Romans built every time the army stopped for the night and threshed by Roman soldiers in the safety of the camp (App. Mac. 27; Liv. 42.64.2) with tools that, again, were a standard part of Roman equipment. Roman soldiers were then issued threshed grains as part of their rations, which they milled themselves (or made into a porridge called puls) using “handmills”. These were not small devices, but roughly 27kg (59.5lbs) hand-turned mills (Marcus Junkelmann reconstructed them quite ably); we generally assume that they were probably carried on the mules on the march, one for each contubernium (tent-group of 6-8; cf. Plut. Ant. 45.4). Getting soldiers to do their own milling was a feat of discipline – this is tough work to do by hand and milling a daily ration would take one of the soldiers of the group around two hours. Roman soldiers then baked their bread either in their own campfires (Hdn 4.7.4-6; Dio Cass. 62.5.5) though generals also sometimes prepared food supplies in advance of operations via what seem to be central bakeries. This level of centralization was part and parcel of the unusual sophistication of Roman logistics; it enabled a greater degree of flexibility for Roman armies.
Greek hoplite armies do not seem generally to have been able to reap, thresh or mill grain on the march (on this see J.W. Lee, op. cit.; there’s also a fantastic chapter on the organization of Greek military food supply by Matthew Sears forthcoming in a Brill Companion volume one of these years – don’t worry, when it appears, you will know!). Xenophon’s Ten Thousand are thus frequently forced to resort to making porridge or roast grains when they cannot forage supplies of already-milled-flour; they try hard to negotiate for markets on their route of march so they can just buy food. Famously the Spartan army, despoiling ripe Athenian fields runs out of supplies (Thuc. 2.23); it’s not clear what sort of supplies were lacking but food and fodder seems the obvious choice, suggesting that the Spartans could at best only incompletely utilize the Athenian grain. All of which contributed to the limited operational endurance of hoplite armies in the absence of friendly communities providing supplies.
Macedonian armies were in rather better shape. Alexander’s soldiers seem to have had handmills (note on this Engels, op. cit.) which already provides a huge advantage over earlier Greek armies. Grain is generally (as noted in our series on it) stored and transported after threshing and winnowing but before milling because this is the form in which has the best balance of longevity and compactness. That means that granaries and storehouses are mostly going to contain threshed and winnowed grains, not flour (nor freshly reaped stalks). An army which can mill can thus plunder central points of food storage and then transport all of that food as grain which is more portable and keeps better than flour or bread.
Early modern armies varied quite a lot in their logistical capabilities. There is a fair bit of evidence for cooking in the camp being done by the women of the campaign community in some armies, but also centralized kitchen messes for each company (Lynn op. cit. 124-126); the role of camp women in food production declines as a product of time but there is also evidence for soldiers being assigned to cooking duties in the 1600s. On the other hand, in the Army of Flanders seems to have relied primarily on external merchants (so sutlers, but also larger scale contractors) to supply the pan de munición ration-bread that the army needed, essentially contracting out the core of the food system. Parker (op. cit. 137) notes the Army of Flanders receiving some 39,000 loaves of bread per day from its contractors on average between April 1678 and February of 1679.
That created all sorts of problems. For one, the quality of the pan de munición was highly variable. Unlike soldiers cooking for themselves or their mess-mates, contractors had every incentive to cut corners and did so. Moreover, much of this contracting was done on credit and when Spanish royal credit failed (as it did in 1557, 1560, 1575, 1596, 1607, 1627, 1647 and 1653, Parker op. cit. 125-7) that could disrupt the entire supply system as contractors suddenly found the debts the crown had run up with them “restructured” (via a “Decree of Bankruptcy”) to the benefit of Spain. And of course that might well lead to thousands of angry, hungry, unpaid men with weapons and military training which in turn led to disasters like the Sack of Antwerp (1576), because without those contractors the army could not handle its logistical needs on its own. It’s also hard not to conclude that this structure increased the overall cost of the Army of Flanders (which was astronomical) because it could never “make the war feed itself” in the words of Cato the Elder (Liv 34.9.12; note that it was rare even for the Romans for a war to “feed itself” entirely through forage, but one could at least defray some costs to the enemy during offensive operations). That said this contractor supplied bread also did not free the Army of Flanders from the need to forage (or even pillage) because – as noted last time – their rations were quite low, leading soldiers to “offset” their low rations with purchase (often using money gained through pillage) or foraging.
Of course added to this are all sorts of food-stuffs that aren’t grain: meat, fruits, vegetables, cheeses, etc. Fortunately an army needs a lot less of these because grains make up the bulk of the calories eaten and even more fortunately these require less processing to be edible. But we should still note their importance because even an army with a secure stockpile of grain may want to forage the surrounding area to get supplies of more perishable foodstuffs to increase food variety and fill in the nutritional gaps of a pure-grain diet. The good news for our army is that the places they are likely to find food (small towns and rural villages) are also likely to be sources of these supplementary foods. By and large that is going to mean that armies on the march measure their supplies and their foraging in grain and then supplement that grain with whatever else they happen to have obtained in the process of getting that grain. Armies in peacetime or permanent bases may have a standard diet, but a wartime army on the march must make do with whatever is available locally.
So that’s what we need: water, fodder, firewood and food; the latter mostly grains with some supplements, but the grain itself probably needs to be in at least a partially processed form (threshed and sometimes also milled), in order to be useful to our army. And we need a lot of all of these things: tons daily. But – and this is important – notice how all of the goods we need (water, firewood, fodder, food) are things that agrarian small farmers also need. This is the crucial advantage of pre-industrial logistics; unlike a modern army which needs lots of things not normally produced or stockpiled by a civilian economy in quantity (artillery shells, high explosives, aviation fuel, etc.), everything our army needs is a staple product or resource of the agricultural economy.
Finally we need to note in addition to this that while we generally speak of “forage” for supplies and “pillage” or “plunder” for armies making off with other valuables, these were almost always connected activities. Soldiers that were foraging would also look for valuables to pillage: someone stealing the bread a family needs to live is not going to think twice about also nicking their dinnerware. Sadly we must also note that very frequently the valuables that soldiers looted were people, either to be sold into slavery, held for ransom, pressed into work for the army, or – and as I said we’re going to be frank about this – abducted for the purpose of sexual assault (or some combination of the above).
And so a rural countryside, populated by farms and farmers is in essence a vast field of resources for an army. How they get them is going to depend on both the army’s organization and capabilities and the status of the local communities.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part II: Foraging”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-07-29.
January 11, 2025
QotD: “Composite” pre-gunpowder infantry units
This is actually a very old concept. The Neo-Assyrian Empire (911-609 BC) is one of the earliest states where we have pretty good evidence for how their infantry functioned – there was of course infantry earlier than this, but Bronze Age royal records from Egypt, Mesopotamia or Anatolia tend to focus on the role of elites who, by the late Bronze Age, are increasingly on chariots. But for the early Iron Age Neo-Assyrian empire, the fearsome effectiveness of its regular (probably professional) infantry, especially in sieges, was a key component of its foreign-policy-by-intimidation strategy, so we see a lot more of them.
That infantry was split between archers and spear-and-shield troops, called alternately spearmen (nas asmare) or shield-bearers (sab ariti). In Assyrian artwork, they are almost always shown in matched pairs, each spearman paired off with a single archer, physically shielding the archer from attack while the archer shoots. The spearmen are shown with one-handed thrusting spears (of a fairly typical design: iron blade, around 7 feet long) and a shield, either a smaller round shield or a larger “tower” shield. Assyrian records, meanwhile, reinforce the sense that these troops were paired off, since the number of archers and spearmen typically match perfectly (although the spearmen might have subtypes, particularly the “Qurreans” who may have been a specialist type of spearman recruited from a particular ethnic group; where the Qurreans show up, if you add Qurrean spearmen to Assyrian spearmen, you get the number of archers). From the artwork, these troops seem to have generally worked together, probably lined up in lines (in some cases perhaps several pairs deep).
The tactical value of this kind of composite formation is obvious: the archers can develop fire, while the spearmen provide moving cover (in the form of their shields) and protection against sudden enemy attack by chariot or cavalry with their spears. The formation could also engage in shock combat when necessary; the archers were at least sometimes armored and carried swords for use in close combat and of course could benefit (at least initially) from the shields of the front rank of spearmen.
The result was self-shielding shock-capable foot archer formations. Total War: Warhammer also flirts with this idea with foot archers who have their own shields, but often simply adopts the nonsense solution of having those archers carry their shields on their backs and still gain the benefit of their protection when firing, which is not how shields work (somewhat better are the handful of units that use their shields as a firing rest for crossbows, akin to a medieval pavisse).
We see a more complex version of this kind of composite infantry organization in the armies of the Warring States (476-221 BC) and Han Dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD) periods in China. Chinese infantry in this period used a mix of weapons, chiefly swords (used with shields), crossbows and a polearm, the ji which had both a long spearpoint but also a hook and a striking blade. In Total War: Three Kingdoms, which represents the late Han military, these troop-types are represented in distinct units: you have a regiment of ji-polearm armed troops, or a regiment of sword-and-shield troops, or a regiment of crossbowmen, which maneuver separately. So you can have a block of polearms or a block of crossbowmen, but you cannot have a mixed formation of both.
Except that there is a significant amount of evidence suggesting that this is exactly how the armies of the Han Dynasty used these troops! What seems to have been common is that infantry were organized into five-man squads with different weapon-types, which would shift their position based on the enemy’s proximity. So against a cavalry or chariot charge, the ji might take the front rank with heavier crossbows in support, while the sword-armed infantry moved to the back (getting them out of the way of the crossbows while still providing mass to the formation). Of course against infantry or arrow attack, the swordsmen might be moved forward, or the crossbowmen or so on (sometimes there were also spearmen or archers in these squads as well). These squads could then be lined up next to each other to make a larger infantry formation, presenting a solid line to the enemy.
(For more on both of these military systems – as well as more specialist bibliography on them – see Lee, Waging War (2016), 89-99, 137-141.)
Bret Devereaux, “Collection: Total War‘s Missing Infantry-Type”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-04-01.
January 5, 2025
QotD: The customary Dictatorship in the Roman Republic before 82BC
Consequently, as historians, we adopt the formulation that the Republic is what the Republic does – that is that one determines the rules of offices and laws based on how they are implemented, not through a hard-and-fast firm legal framework. Thus “how does the dictatorship work?” is less a question of formal rules and more a question of, “how did the eighty-odd Roman dictatorships work?”
The basic idea behind the office was that the dictator was a special official, appointed only in times of crisis (typically a military crisis), who could direct the immediate solution to that crisis. Rome’s government was in many ways unlike a modern government; in most modern governments the activities of the government are carried out by a large professional bureaucracy which typically reports to a single executive, be that a Prime Minister or a President or what have you. By contrast, the Roman Republic divided the various major tasks between a bunch of different magistrates, each of whom was directly elected and notionally had full authority to carry out their duties within that sphere, independent of any of the other magistrates. In crude analogy, it would be as if every member of the United States cabinet was directly elected and none of them reported to any of the rest of them but instead all of them were advised by Congress (but in a non-binding manner). Notionally, the more senior magistrates (particularly the consuls) could command more junior magistrates, but this wasn’t a “direct-report” sort of relationship, but rather an unusual imposition of a more senior magistrate on a less senior one, governed as much by the informal auctoritas of the consul as by law.
In that context, you can see the value, when rapid action was required, of consolidating the direction of a given crisis into a single individual. This is, after all, why we have single executive magistrates or officials in most countries. So, assuming you have a crisis, how does this process work?
The typical first step is that the Senate would issue its non-binding advice, a senatus consultum, suggesting that one or both of the consuls appoint a dictator. The consuls could ignore this direct, but almost never did (save once in 431, Liv. 4.26.5-7). The consuls would then have to nominate someone; they might agree on the choice (which would make things simple) or one of them might be indisposed (out of the city, etc.), which would leave the choice to the one that remained. If both consuls were present and did not agree, they’d draw lots to determine who got to pick (which happens in the aforementioned instance in 431 after the tribunes got the consuls of that year to relent and pick someone, Liv. 4.26.11).
The nominating consul could pick anyone except himself; if you, as consul, wanted to be dictator, you would need your co-consul to so nominate you. There were no formal requirements; of course nominations tended to go to experienced commanders, which tended to mean former consuls, but this was not a requirement. Publius Claudius Pulcher (cos. 249), enraged when the Senate directed him to appoint a dictator (because of his own bungled military command) infamously nominated his own freedman, Claudius Glicia, as dictator (Liv. Per. 19.2; Seut. Tib. 2.2), which was apparently a bridge too far; Glicia was forced to abdicate but his name was duly entered onto the Fasti because the appointment was valid, if ill-advised (despite the fact that, as a freedman, Glicia would have been ineligible to run for any [office]). Nevertheless, dictators were usually former consuls.
Once the name was picked, in at some cases the appointment may have been confirmed by a vote of the Comitia Curiata, Rome’s oldest voting assembly, which was responsible for conferring imperium (the power to command armies and organize law courts; essentially “the power of the kings”) on magistrates; not all magistrates had imperium (consuls, praetors, proconsuls, propraetors, dictators and their magistri equitum did; quaestors, aediles, tribunes, both plebeian and military, and censors did not). We do not know of any instance where the Comitia Curiata put the kibosh on the appointment of a dictator, so this step was little more than a rubber-stamp, and may have been entirely optional (Lintott, op. cit., 110, n. 75), but it may have also reflected the notion that all imperium had to be conferred by the people through a voting assembly. It is often hard to know with clarity about pro forma elements of Roman politics because the sources rarely report such things.
The dictator was appointed to respond to a specific issue or causa, the formula for which are occasionally recorded in our sources. The most common was rei gerundae causa, “for the business to be done” which in practice meant a military campaign or crisis. In cases where the consuls were absent (out on campaign), a dictator might also be nominated comitiorum habendorum causa, “for having an assembly”, that is, to preside over elections for the next year’s consuls, so that neither of the current consuls had to rush back to the city to do it. Dictators might also be appointed to do a few religious tasks which required someone with imperium. Less commonly but still significantly, a dictator might be appointed seditionis sedenae causa, “to quell sedition”; only one instance clearly under this causa is known, P. Manlius Capitolinus in 368, but several other instances, e.g. L. Quinctius Cincinnatus in 439, also dealt with internal matters. Finally, once in 216, Marcus Fabius Buteo held the office of dictator senatus legendi causa, “to enroll the Senate”, as the Battle of Cannae, earlier that year, had killed so many Senators that new inductions were needed (Liv. 23.23).
The dictator then named a subordinate, the magister equitum (“master of the horse”). The magister equitum was a lieutenant, not a colleague, but interestingly once selected by a dictator could not be unselected or removed, though his office ended when the dictator laid down his powers. We should note Marcus Minucius, magister equitum for Q. Fabius Maximus in 217 as an exception; his selection was forced by the people via a law and his powers were later made equal to Fabius’ powers. This turned out to be a substantial mistake, with Fabius having to bail the less prudent Minucius out at Geronium – the undermining of Fabius generally during 217 was, in retrospect viewed as a disaster, since the abandonment of his strategy led directly to the crushing defeat at Cannae in 216.
One of the ways that legal power was visually communicated in Rome was through lictors, attendants to the magistrates who carried the fasces, a bundle of rods (with an axe inserted when outside the sacred bounds of the city, called the pomerium). More lictors generally indicated a greater power of imperium (consuls, for instance, could in theory give orders to the praetors). Praetors were accompanied by six lictors; consuls by 12. The dictator had 24 lictors when outside of the pomerium to indicate his absolute power in that sphere (that is, in war), but only 12 inside the city. The magister equitum, as the dictator’s subordinate, got only six, like the praetors.
It also seems fairly clear that while dictators had almost complete power within their causa, those powers didn’t necessarily extend beyond it (e.g. Liv. 2.31.9-11, the dictator Manius Valerius, having been made dictator to resolve a military problem, insists to the Senate that he cannot resolve internal strife through his dictatorial powers and instead lays down his office early). The appointment of a dictator did not abolish the other offices (Cicero thinks they do, but he is clearly mistaken on the matter, Cic. De Leg. 3.9, see Lintott, 111). In essence then, the dictator was both a supreme military commander and also expected to coordinate the other magistrates with his greater degree of imperium, though of course in practice the ability to do that is going to substantially depend on the individual dictator’s ability to get cooperation from the other magistrates (but then, on the flip side, the dictator has just been designated as the leader in the crisis, so the social pressure to conform to his vision must have been intense). Notably, dictators could not make a law (a lex) on their own power or legislate by fiat outside of their causa; they could and did call assemblies which could by vote approve laws proposed by a dictator, however.
The dictator served for six months or until the task for which he was appointed was resolved, whichever came first. There is a tendency in teaching Roman history to represent a figure like Cincinnatus, who laid down his dictatorship after just fifteen days in 458, as exceptional but while the extreme shortness of term was exceptional, laying down power was not. Indeed, Cincinnatus (or perhaps a relative) served as dictator again in 439 and again laid down his power, this time in merely 21 days. In practice, the time-limited nature of the dictatorship meant there were few incentives to “run out the clock” on the office since it was so short anyway – better, politically, to solve the crisis quickly and lay down power ostentatiously early and “bank” the political capital than try to run out the period of power, accomplish relatively little and squander a reputation for being public-spirited.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Roman Dictatorship: How Did It Work? Did It Work?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-18.
December 30, 2024
QotD: The auxilia troops of the Imperial Roman armies
But almost immediately we see the emergence of a new system for incorporating non-Romans, this time provincial non-Romans, into the Roman army. These troops, called auxilia (literally, “helpers”) first appear in the Civil Wars, particularly with Caesar‘s heavy reliance on Gallic cavalry to support his legions (which at this time seem not to have featured their own integrated cavalry support, as they had earlier in the republic and as they would later in the empire). The system is at this point very ad hoc and the auxiliaries here are a fairly small part of Roman armies. But when Augustus sets out to institutionalize and stabilize the Roman army after the Battle of Actium (31BC) and the end of the civil wars, the auxilia emerge as a permanent, institutional part of the Roman army. Clearly, they were vastly expanded; by 23 AD they made up half of the total strength of the Roman army (Tac. Ann. 4.5) a rough equivalence that seems to persist at least as far as the Constitutio Antoniniana in 212.
Of course it was no particular new thing for the Romans to attempt to use their imperial subjects as part of their army. The Achaemenid army had incorporated a bewildering array of subject peoples with their own distinctive fighting styles, a fact that Achaemenid rulers liked to commemorate […] The Seleucid army at Magnesia (189) which the Romans defeated also had numerous non-Macedonian supporting troops: Cappadocians, Galatians, Carians, Cilicians, Illyrians, Dahae, Mysians, Arabs, Cyrtians and Elamites. At Raphia (217) the Ptolemaic army incorporated Egyptian troops into the phalanx for the first time, but also included Cretans, Greek mercenaries, Thracians, Gauls and Libyans, inter alia. Most empires try to do this.
The difference here is the relative performance that Rome gets out of these subject-troops (both the socii and the auxilia). Take those examples. Quite a number of the ethnicities on Xerxes monument both served in the armies of Darius III fighting against Alexander but then swiftly switched sides to Alexander after he won the battles – the Ionians, Egypt, and Babylon greeted Alexander as a liberator (at least initially) which is part of why the Achaemenid Empire could crumble so fast so long as Alexander kept winning battles. Apart from Tyre and Gaza, the tough sieges and guerilla resistance didn’t start until he reached the Persian homeland. The auxiliaries in the Seleucid army at Magnesia famously fell apart under pressure, whereas the Roman socii stuck in the fight as well as the legions; our sources give us no sense at any point that the socii were ever meaningfully weaker fighters than the legions (if anything, Livy sometimes represents them as more spirited, though he has an agenda here, as discussed). And the Ptolemaic decision to arm their Egyptian troops in the Macedonian manner won the battle (turns out, Egyptians could fight just as well as Greeks and Macedonians with the right organization and training) but their subsequent apparent decision not to pay or respect those troops as well as their Macedonians seems to have led quite directly to the “Great Revolt” which crippled the kingdom (there is some scholarly argument about this last point, but while I think Polybius’ pro-Greek, anti-Egyptian bias creeps in to his analysis, he is fundamentally right to see the connection (Plb. 5.107). Polybius thinks it was foolish to arm non-Greeks, but the solution here to saving the Ptolemaic kingdom would have been arming the Egyptians and then incorporating them into the system of rule rather than attempting to keep up the ethnic hierarchy with a now-armed, angry and underpaid underclass. The Greek-speakers-only-club system of Ptolemaic rule was unsustainable in either case, especially with Rome on the horizon).
By contrast, the auxilia were mostly very reliable. The one major exception comes from 69 AD – the “Year of the Four Emperors” to give some sense of its chaos – when the Batavian chieftain Julius Civilis (himself an auxiliary veteran and a Roman citizen) revolted and brought one ala and eight cohorts drawn from the Batavi (probably around 4,500 men or so) with him, out of an empire-wide total of c. 150,000 auxilia (so maybe something like 3.3% of the total auxilia). Indeed, the legions had worse mutinies – the mutiny on the Rhine (Tac. Ann. 1.16ff in 14AD) had involved six legions (c. 30,000 troops, nearly a quarter of Rome’s 25 legions at the time). This despite the fact that the auxilia were often deployed away from the legions, sometimes in their own forts (you’ll see older works of scholarship suggest that the auxilia were kept logistically dependent on the legions, but more recent archaeology on exactly where they were has tended to push against this view). Indeed, the auxilia were often the only military forces (albeit in small detachments) in the otherwise demilitarized “senatorial” provinces (which comprised most of the wealthy, populous “core” of the empire); they could be trusted with the job, provided they weren’t the only forces in their own home provinces (and after 69, they never were). And the auxilia fought hard and quite well. The Romans occasionally won battles with nothing but the auxilia, was with the Battle of Mons Graupius (83 AD, Tac. Agricola 35ff) where the legions were held in reserve and never committed, the auxilia winning the battle effectively on their own. Viewers of the Column of Trajan’s spiral frieze have long noted that the auxilia on the monument (the troop-types are recognizable by their equipment) do most of the fighting, while the legions mostly perform support and combat engineering tasks. We aren’t well informed about the training the auxilia went through, but what we do know points to long-service professionals who were drilled every bit as hard as the famously well-drilled legions. Consequently, they had exactly the sort of professional cohesion that we’ve already discussed.
Why this difference in effectiveness and reliability? The answer is to be found in the difference in the terms under which they served. Rather than being treated as the disposable native auxiliaries of other empires, the Romans acted like the auxilia mattered … because they did.
First of all, the auxilia were paid. Our evidence here is imperfect and still much argued about, but it seems that auxilia were paid 5/6ths of the wages of the legionary counterparts, with the cavalry auxilia actually paid more than the infantry legionaries. While it might sound frustrating to be systematically paid 1/6th less than your legionary equivalent, the legions were paid fairly well. The auxilia probably made in wages about as much as a normal day-laborer, but the wage was guaranteed (something very much not the case for civilian laborers) and while the cost of their rations was deducted from their pay, that deduction was a fixed amount that seems to have been set substantially below the market value of their rations, building in another subsidy. Most auxiliaries seem to have been volunteers, because the deal in being an auxiliary was good enough to attract volunteers looking to serve a full tour of duty (around 20 years; this was a long-service professional army now so joining it meant making a career out of it).
And most importantly, eventually (perhaps under Tiberius or shortly thereafter) the auxilia began to receive a special grant of citizenship on finishing that tour of duty, one which covered the soldier, and any children he might have had by his subsequent spouse (including children had, it seems, before he left the army; Roman soldiers in this period were legally barred from contracting legal marriages while serving, so the grant is framed so that it retroactively legitimizes any children produced in a quasi-marriage when the tour of service is completed). Consequently, whereas a soldier being dragooned or hired as a mercenary into other multi-ethnic imperial armies might end his service and go back to being an oppressed subject, the Roman auxiliary, by virtue of his service, became Roman and thus essentially joined the ruling class at least in ethnic status. Auxiliaries also clearly got a share of the loot when offensive warfare happened and while there is a lot of debate as to if they also received the praemia (the large retirement bonus legionaries got), epigraphically it is pretty clear that auxiliaries who were careful with their money could establish themselves fairly well after their service. I should also note that what we see of auxiliaries suggests they were generally well armed (with some exceptions, which may have more to do with stereotyped depictions of certain kinds of “barbarians” than anything else): metal helmets, mail shirts (an expensive and high quality armor for the period), oval shields, a spear and the spatha – a Roman version of the classic Gallic one-handed cutting sword – are the standard visual indicator in Roman artwork for generic “auxiliaries”. That is actually a fairly high-end kit; it is no surprise that the auxilia could win battles with it.
The attentive should already be noting many of the components of the old socii system now in a new form: the non-Roman troops serve under similar conditions with the Romans, get similar pay and rations (forts occupied by the auxilia show no deviation from the standard Roman military diet), a share of loot and glory and can finally be rewarded for loyal service by being inducted into the Roman citizen body itself (which could mean their sons might well enroll in the legions, a thing which does seem to have happened, as we do see a fair bit of evidence for “military families” over multiple generations).
(For those looking for more detail on the auxilia, a lot of this is drawn from a book I have already recommended, Ian Haynes, Blood of the Provinces: The Roman auxilia and the Making of Provincial Society from Augustus to the Severans (2013). Also still useful for the history of the development of the auxilia is D.B. Saddington, The Development of the Roman auxiliary Forces from Caesar to Vespasian (1982); this is, alas, not an easy book to find as it is – to my knowledge – long out of print, but your library may be able to track down a copy.)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing and Empire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-07-30.
