… Spartan operational capabilities were extremely limited, even by the already low standards of its peers, meaning very large Greek poleis (like Athens or Syracuse).
Greek logistics in this period in general were very limited compared to either Macedonian or Roman logistical capabilities in subsequent centuries, or contemporary Persian logistics capabilities. Ironically, the most sustained study of classical Greek logistics concerns the campaigns of Xenophon (J.W. Lee, A Greek army on the March (2008)), meaning that it concerns not polis amateurs but an army of mercenary professionals, and yet compared to what the Macedonians would be able to do (see D.W. Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army (1978)) half a century later in the same terrain, even these Greek logistics – probably the gold standard of their time – are astoundingly underdeveloped.
Put very briefly: Greek armies seem to have had relatively little carrying or logistics capacity. They did not seem to have generally moved with sufficient engineering tools or materials for effective field fortification or siege warfare. This is compounded by their inability to mill grain on the move (something Macedonian and Roman armies could do), which compounds problems of using local supply. You can eat unmilled grain (it can be roasted or boiled into porridge, but this is less than ideal. What they do tend to have is a high number of non-combat personal servants (precisely the sort of fellows good Roman or Macedonian generals drive out of the camp as soon as possible), who impose additional logistics burdens without much increasing the operational range or endurance of the army. Consequently, Greek armies struggled to stay out in the field throughout the year, whereas Roman and Macedonian armies were routinely capable of year-round campaigning.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
July 12, 2022
QotD: Greek city-state logistics in the time of the Peloponnesian War
July 8, 2022
QotD: Sparta’s vaunted hoplite phalanx differed little from hoplite armies from other Greek cities
That comes with all sorts of implications. The Spartans used the same military equipment as all of the other Greeks: a thrusting spear (the dory), a backup sword (a xiphos or kopis; pop-culture tends to give Spartans the kopis because it looks cool, but there is no reason to suppose they preferred it), body armor (either textile or a bronze breastplate), one of an array of common Greek helmet styles, and possibly greaves. We might expect the Spartiates – being essentially very wealthy Greeks – to have equipment on the high end of the quality scale, but the Perioikoi, and other underclasses who fought with (and generally outnumbered) the Spartiates will have made up the normal contingent of “poor hoplites” probably common for any polis army.
Xenophon somewhat oddly stops to note that the Spartiates were to carry a bronze shield (kalken aspida; Xen. Lac. 11.3 – this is sometimes translated as “brass” – it is the same word in Greek – but all Greek shield covers I know of are bronze). This is not the entire shield, as in [the movie] 300 – that would be far too heavy – but merely a thin (c. 0.25mm) facing on the shield. It’s odd that Xenophon feels the need to tell us this, because this was standard for Greek shields. Perhaps poorer hoplites couldn’t afford the bronze facing and used a cheaper material (very thin leather, essentially parchment, is common in many other shield traditions) and Xenophon is merely noting that all of the Spartiates were wealthy enough to afford the fancy and expensive sort of shield (it has also been supposed that elements of this passage have dropped out and it would have originally included a complete panoply, in which case Xenophon is just uncharacteristically belaboring the obvious).
The basics of the formation – spacing, depth and so on – also seem to have been essentially the same. The standard depth for a hoplite phalanx seems to have been eight (-ish; there’s a lot of variation). The Spartans seem to have followed similar divisions with a fairly wide range of depths, perhaps trending towards thinner lines in the fourth century than in the fifth, though certainty here is difficult. The drop in depth may be a consequence of manpower depletion, but it may also indicate a greater faith held by Spartan commanders of their line’s ability to hold. Depth in a formation is often about morale – the deeper formation feels safer, which improves cohesion.
It’s hard to say if the Spartan phalanx was more cohesive. It might have been, at least for the Spartiates. The lifestyle of the Spartiates likely created close bonds which might have aided in holding together in the stress of combat – but then, this was true of essentially every Greek polis to one degree or another. The best I can say on this point is that the Spartan battle record – discussed at length below – argues against any large advantage in cohesion.
That said, the Spartan battle order does seem to have been notably different in two respects:
First: it had a much higher ratio of officers to regular soldiers. This was clearly unusual and more than one ancient source remarks on the fact (Thuc. 5.68; Xen. Lac. 11.4-5, describing what may be slightly different command systems). Each file was under the command of the man in front of it (Xen. Lac. 11.5). Six files made an enomotia (commanded by an enomotarchos); two of these put together were commanded by a pentekonter (lit: commander of fifty, although he actually had 72 men under his command); two of those form a lochos (commanded by a lochagos) and four lochoi made a mora, commanded by a polemarchos (lit: war-leader) – there were six of these in Xenophon’s time. Compared to most Greek armies of the time, that’s a lot of officers, which leads to:
Second: it seems to have been able to maneuver somewhat more readily than a normal phalanx. This follows from the first. Smaller tactical subdivisions with more command personnel made the formation more agile. Xenophon clearly presents this ability as exceptional, and it does seem to have been (Xen. Lac. 11.4). Hoplite armies victorious on one flank often had real trouble reorganizing those victorious troops and wheeling them to flank and roll up the rest of the line (e.g. the Athenians at Delium, Thuc. 4.96.3-4). The Spartans were rather better at this (e.g. at Mantinea, Thuc. 5.73.1-4). They also seem to have been better at marching and moving in time.
Now, I do not want to over-sell this point. We’re comparing the Spartans to other hoplite forces which – in the fifth century especially – were essentially dumbfire missiles. The general (or generals) point the phalanx at the enemy, hit “go” and then hope for the best. Really effective command – what Everett Wheeler refers to as the general as “battle manager” – really emerges in the fourth century, mostly after Spartan power was already broken (E. Wheeler, “The General as Hoplite” in Armies of Classical Greece, ed. Wheeler (2007)). While “right wing, left wheel” is hardly the most complicated of maneuvers (especially given that the predictable rightward drift of hoplite armies in battle meant that it could be planned for), compared to the limitations of most hoplite forces, it marked the Spartans out as unusually adept.
More complicated Spartan maneuvers often went badly. Spartan forces at Plataea (479 – Hdt. 9.53) failed to effectively redeploy under orders, precipitating an unintended engagement. Plugging a gap in the line once the advance was already underway, but before battle was joined (something Roman armies did routinely) was also apparently beyond the capabilities of a Spartan army (Thuc. 5.72). While the Spartans are often shown in popular culture with innovative tactical formations – like the anti-cavalry wedge or anti-missile shield-ball (both of which, to be clear, are nonsense) formations in 300 – in practice the Spartan army was tactically uncreative. Like every other hoplite army, the Spartans formed a big rectangle of men and smashed it into the front of the enemy’s big rectangle of men. Notably, as we’ll see, the Spartans made limited and quite poor use of other arms, like light infantry or cavalry, even compared to other Greek poleis (and the bar here is very low, Greek combined arms, compared to say, Roman or Macedonian or Persian combined arms, was dismal). If anything, the Spartans were less adaptable than other hoplites.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VI: Spartan Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-20.
July 4, 2022
QotD: The French solution to trench warfare
On the defensive, the French had adopted many of the same principles of the German defense-in-depth we’ve already discussed. On the offense, they came to favor (particularly under the influence of Philippe Pétain and […] Ferdinand Foch) an offensive doctrine designed to maximize France’s position in an attritional contest: that is to limit losses and maximize enemy casualties while still taking and holding ground. The system favored limited “bite-and-hold” attacks, ideally limited such that the attack stopped before triggering the inevitable German counter-attack. Remember that it was when the attacker ran out of steam and the defender’s counter-attack came that the casualty ratios tended to shift to favor the defender. In French thinking, the solution was just to not reach that point.
Instead, the French came to favor – and the British and Americans picked up the same method by the end – elaborately prepared small offensives. The elaborate preparation meant planning out the attack carefully, using shorter but carefully planned hurricane barrages (all of this planning, of course took time) and then seizing the enemy’s forward positions and just their forward positions. Instead of then trying to push through – the old French notion of assault brutal et continu (“brutal and continuous” – a “keep up the pressure till they break” method) which Robert Nivelle had favored – methodical battle focused on “bite-and-hold”.
Once you hit your limited objectives in that first rush where enemy resistence is disoriented (from the short, hurricane barrage) and weaker – and thus where the casualty ratio favors you – you stop and begin fortifying your position. You dig those communications trenches, move up your artillery and brace for the counter-attack. By the time the enemy realizes you aren’t going to attack his second or third line positions (and trigger his devastating counter-attack), you are dug in and prepared for his attack (the hold part of “bite-and-hold”). To reestablish defense in depth, the defender now has to back up to establish new lines to the rear (or launch his own fresh offensive, but by late 1918, the Germans were too weak for this). A long series of such attacks – with significant intervals for fresh careful planning and stockpiling resources – could slowly but surely lever your opponent off of key positions, one by one. It would also preserve a favorable balance of casualties, ensuring that in the end, the enemy runs out of men and shells before you do (that is the “rupture” that Joffre had always hoped for, but which arrived but two years too late for his career).
Such a slow, expensive, bloody and unglamorous strategy was in some ways only politically possible once, by 1918, it had become apparent that all other options were exhausted. That said, to argue that this bite-and-hold operational doctrine broke the trench stalemate is probably not fair either. The progress of allied offensives in 1918 was extremely slow by even the standards of 1914. The German Spring Offensive was well and truly done in July and the Allied offensive picked up in August and ran through November as fast as it could (with Foch doing everything short of getting out and pushing the offensive to try to speed it up) and yet the final allied positions by November were not even in Germany. Even at its greatest distance in 100 days of unbroken victories by a force with materiel and numerical superiority, the front moved less than 100 miles and the overall casualty ratio was roughly even (around a million on both sides).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
June 30, 2022
QotD: Sparta had Lycurgus, while Athens had Solon … who at least actually existed
Once upon a time … there was a Spartan named Lycurgus, and he was the very best Spartan …
Lycurgus had been the younger brother of one of Sparta’s two kings, but had left Sparta to travel when his brother died, so that he would be no threat to his young nephew.
After a time, the Spartans begged Lycurgus to come back and reorganize society, and Lycurgus – with the blessing of the Oracle at Delphi – radically remade Spartan society into the form it would have for the next 400 years. He did not merely change the government, but legislated every facet of life, from child-rearing to marriage, to the structure of households, the economic structure, everything. Once he had accomplished that, Lycurgus went back to Delphi, but before he left he made all the Spartans promise not to change his laws until he returned. Once the Oracle told him his laws were good, he committed suicide, so that he would never return to Sparta, thus preventing his laws from ever being overturned. So the Spartans never changed Lycurgus’ laws, which had been declared perfect by Apollo himself. Subsequently, the Spartans accorded Lycurgus divine honors, and within Sparta he was worshiped as a god.
And that’s how Lycurgus remade Sparta. The End.
The role Lycurgus serves in the sources is as the perfect, infallible founder figure. No less than the Oracle at Delphi – the divine word of Apollo – declared Lycurgus a god (Hdt. 1.65.3). For later sources who, we must stress – believe their own religion (as people everywhere are wont to do) – that means, essentially a priori that Lycurgus’ “constitution” must be practically flawless and all flaws must stem from its imperfect implementation.
But – wait a second – what is our evidence for the actual person of Lycurgus or the character of the state he set up?
Remember how I said Lycurgus is dated to the late 9th century – specifically the 820s B.C. or so. That’s a huge problem. The earliest Greek literature comes from around (very roughly – there is deep scholarly debate here that I’m glossing over) the mid-8th century (c. 750 or so) and is entirely mythological in nature. The first actual history is Herodotus, writing in the mid-400s. The earliest historical event we have evidence for is the Lelantine War (c. 700ish), at least a century after the life of Lycurgus. None of our sources have anything to go on about Lycurgus – save for what the Spartans – who already worship this figure as a god – tell them. Crucially, Tyrtaeus, writing in the 650s B.C., while he does mention the rhetra (an oracle the Spartans received concerning the arrangement of their government) does not mention Lycurgus (although Plutarch is quick to connect the two, Plut. Lyc. 6.5), meaning that the earliest source for Lycurgus’ existence is Herodotus.
Wait, it gets even better – the one thing we do know about Lycurgus’ laws is that they were not written down (Plut. Lyc. 13.1). Also, Lycurgus supposedly took steps to prevent his remains from returning to Sparta (Plut. Lyc. 29.5-6, but cf. 31.4) and no continued family line, which seems like exactly the sort of explanation you put at the end of a good campfire story for why there was absolutely no trace of such an important man save his legend. So not only the details of Lycrugus’ life, but also the society he created will have lived as oral tradition – potentially changing from one telling to the next, being embellished or expanded – for generations before being committed to the permanent, unchanging memory of written history.
In short, our only evidence for Lycurgus are the campfire stories told about him by people who worshiped him as a god, as related to individuals centuries later. Which is to say that, by historical standards, there is no reliable evidence at all that Lycurgus existed.
[…]
Lycurgus is often set against Solon – the early 6th century Athenian reformer. It is true that Athenians also tend to attribute things to Solon that were later developments, but we need to note the key differences: Solon comes two centuries after Lycurgus (thus, unlike Lycurgus, in the historical period), didn’t receive divine honors and most importantly writes to us (he wrote poetry, some of which survives), so that we can know he was an actual real person. Asking students – as I have seen done – to compare a real, flawed reformer with an idealized, semi-mythical demi-god without any kind of guidance as to the nature of these two figures is, quite frankly, educational malpractice.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part III: Spartan Women”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.
June 26, 2022
QotD: Breaking the trench stalemate with strategic air power
What no one could have known in WWI was not merely that the technology for effective conventional strategic bombing wasn’t ready, but that it would probably never be ready. Interwar air-power theorists, seeing the potential of strategic airpower to bypass the trench stalemate by flying over it began to try to work out how this would be done. Giulio Douhet (1869-1930) argued that future wars would be fought and won in the air, with fleets of bombers using high explosives and chemical weapons to massacre enemy civilian centers, until civilians forced their governments to surrender. Douhet was not alone; his vision of airpower as shared, for instance, by the “father of the RAF”, Hugh Trenchard (1873-1956).
This concept, “morale bombing” as it is sometimes called, probably deserves its own post discussing its failures. But in brief, the concept was tested, with far larger amounts of bombs than Douhet or any other interwar theorist could have ever dreamed of, during WWII. The argument by air theorists that high altitude bombers could not be stopped was proved false when the British did exactly this, stopping German bombers over Britain in 1940. Moreover, terror bombing against civilian targets in Britain didn’t lead to surrender, but hardened resolve. Likewise, “morale” bombing against German targets by the allies didn’t lead to surrender, but hardened resolve. Later efforts to demoralize the North Vietnamese through a American bombing campaign in the Vietnam War didn’t lead to surrender, but hardened resolve. More recent efforts to demoralize or destroy terrorists and the Taliban through the use of airpower hasn’t lead to surrender, but rather hardened resolve. Likewise, efforts by the Syrian regime to defeat various opposition groups in Syria through the use of chemical weapon-based terror bombing didn’t lead to surrender (siege-and-starve tactics did), but hardened resolve.
It turns out the fundamental premise of the entire idea of morale bombing – that being bombed will make people want to stop fighting – was flawed. Morale bombing has been, depending on how hard you squint at the US air campaign over Japan in WWII (including the use of nuclear weapons) successful either once (out of many attempts) or never. In most cases, the sustained bombing of civilian centers has been shown to increase a population’s willingness to resist, making the strategy worse than useless.
The case for strategic bombing against industrial targets is marginally better, but only marginally. While airpower advocates, particularly in the United States promised throughout WWII that bombing campaigns against German industry could lead to the collapse of the German war machine, in the end many historians posit that the real achievement of the campaign was to lure the Luftwaffe into the air where it could be destroyed, thus denying the German army of air cover and close air support, particularly on the Eastern Front. Some dimunition of German industrial capabilities was accomplished (though it is not clear that this ever approached the vast resources poured into producing the large numbers of extremely expensive bombers used to do it, though the allies had such an industrial advantage over Germany, forcing the Germans to fight in expensive ways in the sky was a winning trade anyway), but the collapse of German industry never happened. As Richard Overy notes, German industrial output continued to rise during strategic bombing and only began to fall as a result of the loss of territory on the ground. Needless to say, “strategic bombing can sucker the enemy into wasting their close air support” was not the result that airpower advocates had promised, nor could it have broken the stalemate.
I don’t want to oversimplify the continued debate over the efficacy of strategic airpower here too much so let’s just say that the jury is still very much out as to if strategic airpower works even with modern technology; it certainly wouldn’t have worked with WWI era technology.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
June 22, 2022
QotD: Sparta without the helots could not have existed
And in sheer numerical terms, the helots were Sparta. If we want to talk about drawing boxes, the box we ought to draw is not around the spartiates, but around the helots. The helots so decisively outnumber the spartiates that any assessment of this society has to be about the quality of helot life (which is terrible). To draw boxes as Burns wants would be like putting a box around Jeff Bezos and declaring that America was the first all-billionaire society. In actual fact, American millionaires represent roughly the same percentage of America as the spartiates represent of Sparta, roughly six percent.
This is a fundamental flaw in how we teach Sparta – in high schools and in college. We teach Sparta like it was a free citizen society with a regrettable slave population that, while horrific, was typical for its time – something more like Rome. But it wasn’t: Sparta was a society that consisted almost entirely of slaves, with a tiny elite aristocracy. The spartiates were not the common citizens of Sparta, but rather the hereditary nobility – the knights, counts and dukes, as it were. We should as soon judge 17th century France by the first two estates as judge Sparta only by the spartiates.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part II: Spartan Equality”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-23.
June 17, 2022
QotD: The work of the blacksmith
(I should note that all of these factors are, in fact, very complex – far more complex than we are going to discuss. In particular, as I understand it, some of what I am using “hardness” to describe also falls under the related category of yield strength. Hopefully you will all pardon the necessary simplification; if it makes you feel any better, ancient blacksmiths didn’t understand how any of this worked either, only that it worked.)
Of course these are not binaries but a spectrum. Materials have a degree of hardness or ductility; as we’ll see, these are not quite opposed, but changing one does change the other – increasing hardness often reduces ductility.
The sort of things that pre-modern people are going to want to be made in iron are going to have fairly tight tolerances for these sorts of things. Objects that had wide tolerances (that is, things which could be weak or a little bendy or didn’t have to take much force) got made out of other cheaper, easier materials like ceramics, stone or wood; metals were really only used for things that had to be both strong and relatively light for precisely the reasons we’ve seen: they were too expensive for anything else. That means that a blacksmith doesn’t merely need to bring the metal to the right shape but also to the right characteristics. Some tools would need to finish up being quite hard (like the tip of a pick, or the edge of a blade), while others needed to be able to bend to absorb strain (like the core of a blade or the back of a saw).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Iron, How Did They Make It, Part III: Hammer-time”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-10-02.
June 13, 2022
QotD: Helot women in Sparta
And I want to stress the importance of this question, because there are more helot women in Sparta than there are free humans in Sparta (as from last time, around 15% of Sparta is free – men and women both included – but 42.5% of Sparta consists of enslaved helot women). If we want to say absolutely anything about the condition of life in Sparta, we simply cannot ignore such a large group of human beings living in Sparta.
And our sources here let us down catastrophically. There are, to my knowledge, no passages anywhere in the corpus of ancient literature which are actually about helot women, and every passage that mentions them could be included on a single typed page with space to spare. But that is no excuse to pretend they do not exist, and we are going to talk about them.
As far as we can tell, family structure and labor roles among the helots approximated what we see in the rest of Greece. Once freed, the Messenian helots establish a fairly normal polis in Messenia, so it hardly seems like they had some radically different social makeup. That gives us the beginnings of sketching out what life might have been like for a helot woman: we can then take the handful of things we know that are peculiar about their circumstances and combine them with what we know about the normal structure of life for ancient Greek peasant families.
The primary economic occupation of helot women was probably in food preparation and textile production. And if I know my students, I know that the moment I start talking about the economic role of women in ancient households, a very specific half of the class dozes off. Wake Up. There is an awful tendency to see this “women’s work” as somehow lesser or optional. These tasks I just listed are not economically marginal, they are not unimportant. Yes, our ancient sources devalue them, but we should not.
First: let’s be clear – women in ancient households (or early modern households, or modern households) were not idle. They had important jobs every bit as important as the farming, which had to get done for the family to survive. I’ve estimated elsewhere that it probably takes a minimum of something like 2,220 hours per year to produce the minimum necessary textile goods for a household of five (that’s 42 hours a week spinning and weaving, every week). Most of that time is spent spinning raw fibers (either plant fibers from flax to make linen, or animal fibers from sheep to make wool). The next step after that is weaving those threads into fabric. Both weaving and spinning are slow, careful and painstaking exercises.
Food preparation is similarly essential, as you might imagine. As late as 1900, food preparation and cleanup consumed some 44 hours per week on average in American households, plus another 14 hours dedicated to laundry and cleaning (Lebergott, Pursuing Happiness (1993)). So even without child rearing – and ask any parent, there is a TON of work in that – a small peasant household (again, five members) is going to require something like 100 hours per week of “woman’s work” merely to sustain itself.
Now, in a normal peasant household, that work will get split up between the women of the house at all ages. Girls will typically learn to spin and weave at very young ages, at first helping out with the simpler tasks before becoming fully proficient (but of course, now add “training time” as a job requirement for their mothers). But at the same time (see Erdkamp, The Grain Market in the Roman Empire (2005) on this) women often also had to engage in agricultural labor during peak demand – sowing, harvesting, etc. That’s a lot of work to go around. Remember, we’re positing a roughly five-individual household, so those 100 hours may well be split between only two people (one of whom may be either quite old or quite young and thus not as productive).
In short: these tasks, when combined with all of the other demands, is very much a full time job and then some. It’s also a job that someone very much needs to do if the family is to survive.
We can assume that these demands, along with marriage, the bearing and raising children, and religious rituals and festivals, likely shaped the contours of the lives of helot women, much as they would have for many poor women in the Greek (or Roman) countryside. But the Spartan system also shapes these contours and it does so in almost entirely negative ways.
Let’s start [with] textiles. Spartiate women do not engage in textile manufacture (Xen. Lac. 1.4) as noted previously, nor do they seem (though the evidence here is weaker) to engage in food preparation. In the syssitia, at least, the meals are cooked and catered by helot slaves (Plut. Lyc. 12.5, 12.7). In the former case, we are told explicitly by Xenophon that it is slave labor (he uses the word doule, “female slave”, which clearly here must mean helot women) which does this. So helot women now have an additional demand on their time and energy: not only the 2,200 hours for clothing their own household, but even more clothing the spartiate household they are forced to serve. If we want to throw numbers at this, we might idly suppose something like five helot households serving one spartiate household, suggesting something like a 20% increase in the amount of textile work. We are not told, but it seems a safe bet that they were also forced to serve as “domestics” in spartiate households. That’s actually a fairly heavy and onerous imposition of additional labor on these helot women who already have their hands full.
We also know […] that helot households were forced to turn over a significant portion of their produce, perhaps as high as half. I won’t drag you all through the details now – I love agricultural modeling precisely because it lets us peek into the lives of folks who don’t make it into our sources – but I know of no model of ancient agriculture which can tolerate that kind of extraction without bad consequences. And I hear the retort already coming: well, of course it couldn’t have been that bad, because there were still helots, right? Not quite, because that’s not how poor farming populations work. It can be very bad and still leave you with a stable – but miserable – population.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part III: Spartan Women”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.
June 9, 2022
QotD: Cicero and the end of the Roman Republic
De legibus is more aggressively forward looking. Set in Cicero’s own time (it is a dialogue between Cicero, his brother Quintus and their friend Atticus), De legibus first sets out a theory for the general foundation of law […] to use as the basis for a reformed model of the Roman Republic, which is summarized in the third book. Damage to the text means that De legibus cuts off in book three, and there are smaller gaps and fragments in the earlier books as well.
It’s important to get a sense of the situation in the 50s B.C. when Cicero is writing to understand why he feels this is necessary. The previous round of civil wars had ended in 82 B.C., with the victor, the arch-conservative L. Cornelius Sulla, imposing a revised republic with shocking brutality and bloodshed. By the 50s, it would have been clear to anyone paying attention that the peace and apparent stability of the Sullan reforms had been a mirage – the disruptions of the 60s (including the Catilinarian conspiracy, foiled by Cicero) were not one-offs, but merely the first rattlings of the wheels coming off the cart entirely. I don’t want to get too deep into the woods of how exactly this happened; there are any number of good books on the collapse of the Republic which deal with this period (Scullard’s From the Gracchi to Nero (1959) is a venerable and straight-forward narrative of the period; Syme, The Roman Revolution (1939) is probably the most influential – reading both can serve as a foundation for getting into the more recent and often more narrowly directed literature on the topic, note also Flowers, Roman Republics (2011)).
It’s in this context – as the Republic is clearly shaking apart – that Cicero is ruminating on the nature of the Republic, how it functions, what it is for, and how it might be set right. Despite this, Cicero should not be taken for a radical, or even really for much of a reformer; Cicero is a staunch conservative looking to restore the function of the old system, in many cases by a return to tradition as much as the renovation of it. Cicero’s corpus is a plea to save the Republic as it was, not to bury it; it was a plea, of course, that would go unanswered. In a real sense, the Republic died with Cicero.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: A Trip Through Cicero (Natural Law)”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-12-12.
June 6, 2022
QotD: Eisenhower’s D-Day speech to the troops
Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!
You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.
But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-1. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man to man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!
I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!
Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, June 6th, 1944
I’ve highlighted an image of the signed document itself to show the various components of the ancient battle speech (following my numbering above): [https://acoupdotblog.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/breaking-down-the-speech.png?w=689]
Apart from a slight alteration of the order, it is not hard to assign this speech to the same genre as Sallust’s Catiline speech or even Thucydides’ speeches at Delium (Thuc. 4.92-95). As we’ll see, it is certainly not the case that there is no other way to structure a pre-battle exhortation (although, I should note that the standard text of the other famous pre-D-Day General’s speech, Patton’s speech to the Third Army, hits the same notes, but with more words – mostly profanity). But this is the standard structure of a battle speech in the Western literary canon, and speeches with this standard structure, or variations of it, appear frequently.
I think a reader might particularly be caught by the emphasis on a section stressing how formidable the enemy is and how great the danger is (“He will fight savagely”). That seems an odd thing to stress! But it is an important part of the structure of these speeches; it is almost never left out. When paired with the general’s own cause for hope, acknowledging the fearsome nature of the enemy and the general terror of battle is a way to inoculate the soldiers against the seizing fear of battle. The Greeks saw the fear of battle as two distinct elements, deimos (δεῖμος) – the creeping dread before a battle, and phobos (φόβος) – the sudden paralyzing panic in combat, the sharp fear that causes men to flee. If the encouragement of the speech (and the general’s presence) is meant to defuse deimos, openly discussing the fearfulness of the enemy (but couching it in terms of how it may be overcome) is meant to rob phobos of his sting. You do your soldiers no favors by concealing from them the terror they will experience regardless.
Now the bulk of Eisenhower’s D-Day order is dedicated to the fourth part, stating the ground for encouragement, generally framed by the reasons the general is confident despite how fearsome the enemy is. One form of encouragement is a recounting of the noble deeds of the soldiers themselves. One of the marks of good generalship for the Romans was if a general could go up and down the line, calling out individual soldiers and reminding them of great deeds they had performed (Caesar does this, for instance; note Catiline’s opponent, Marcus Petreius encourages his soldiers this way, calling out each one – his is an army of veterans – by name, 59.4). Alternately – especially for a fairly green army where no one has done any great deeds yet – the general might stress the great valor of their forefathers, or the honor of their city or state. The emotion being touched here is pretty clearly pride, tapping into a desire not to let one’s self, one’s community or one’s comrades down. That’s an effective rhetorical tactic; as we’ve discussed, the fear of shame is an effective combat motivator (where so many other motivations fail). Appealing to pride is a good way to arouse that fear of shame, as the two emotions are deeply connected. Alternately, a general may not a superiority in numbers, materiel, tactical position; he may discuss his battle-plan and how it is likely to bring victory. For forces defending on their own ground, the home-field advantage may be stressed.
You want to understand the “fearsome enemy” motif and the “grounds for encouragement” motif working best as a pair.
Consider it this way: you are about to take a very important test. If I, having already taken the test, tell you “oh, don’t worry, the test is easy,” that will help dispel your dread (deimos) before it, but when you sit down with the test paper and read the (quite difficult) questions, the seizing fear (phobos) hits you, and your overall performance is reduced. That seizing panic clouds your thoughts and costs you vital time; in a battle, it might cause you to flee or get you killed. But if I tell you “the test is hard, but (you’ve studied effectively/you can pick up points on XYZ section/etc.)” it not only diminishes the dread before the test, but serves to mentally prepare you for the shock of seeing the real thing. Indeed, I turn your fearful mind into my friend – when the real thing fails to live up to your worst nightmares, you’ll draw confidence from that. When the test turns out to be exactly like I said, the encouragement carries more weight because of the reliability of the warning. I am not dispelling your fear – because this is battle and everyone is afraid and no words can take that away – I am mentally preparing you for your fear. There’s an element of CBT in this: validate the emotion, suggest more helpful ways to think about it, and direct the mind towards behavioral solutions.
Finally, I think it is worth noting what is not generally here. While the speaker is likely to reflect on glorious deeds of the soldiers, or other soldiers like them, or their ancestors, there is generally not a focus on how fearsome or scary or strong they are because no one feels scary or strong when they are terrified. “You’ve done this before” is a good line (so is “our people have always beaten their people”) but “Remember, we are lions” is not. No one feels like a lion when they are receiving indirect fire and cannot fire back; no one feels like a lion when their buddy just went down next to them and there’s nothing they can do about it. Remember: the purpose of the speech isn’t to pump someone up before the charge, it is to emotionally prepare them for the moment when the emotional momentum of the charge is spent and the fear of death comes crashing in to replace it.
Likewise, while “the cause” often figures into such speeches, it does so as a subordinate element; some kind of group membership – the nation, the polis, the legion, comrades-in-arms – is often more prominent (note how Eisenhower’s speech crafts concentric circles of groups that the listener belongs to, watching and depending on the listener; “liberty-loving people everywhere” -> “the United Nations” and “our Allies” -> “our homefront” -> finally “us” and “we”). While it took until the late 1940s for group-cohesion-theory to really emerge on its own, these sorts of speeches show an awareness of what seems to be a timeless truth: the cause may get you to the battle, but only comrades will hold you in it when the dying starts (on this, note especially J. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades (1997)).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part VII: Hanging by a Thread”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-06-12.
June 1, 2022
QotD: Spartiate Women
Sparta has obtained a reputation in the popular culture – derived from the sources – for affording a greater degree of freedom and importance to its women than any other Greek polis (I should stress this is a very low bar) and, so long as we are talking about spartiate women there is some truth to this.
Spartiate girls went through a similar “rearing” to spartiate boys, although they were not removed from the home as their brothers were. Spartiate girls ran races and were encouraged to be physically active (Plut. Lyk. 14.3; Mor. 227; Xen. Lac. 1.4). The evidence is thin, but points fairly strongly to the suggestion that spartiate women were generally literate, in quite the contrast (again, as the evidence permits) to the rest of Greece. Now our sources make clear that this is in part a product of the leisure that spartiate women had, since the primary domestic tasks of Greek women – textile manufacture and food preparation – were done entirely by slave labor forced upon helot women (Xen. Lac. 1.3; Plato, Laws. VII; Plut. Mor. 241d).
Whereas the sources paint a portrait of elite citizen Athenian women as practically cloistered, spartiate women had significantly more freedom of movement, in part because they appear to have been the primary managers of their households. Male spartiates didn’t live at home until thirty and were likely frequently away even after that (Plut. Lyc. 14.1; Mor. 228b). Spartiate women could also inherit and hold property in their own name to a greater degree than in Athens or elsewhere in Greece (note for instance Plut. Agis 7.3-4). The strong impression one gets from the sources is that this gave spartiate women quite a bit more sway; our largely male sources, especially Aristotle, disapprove, but we don’t need to (and shouldn’t!) share their misogyny. The sources are also very clear that spartiate women and girls felt much freer to speak their minds in public than Greek women in most poleis, although they were still completely and universally excluded from formal politics.
But – and you knew there would be a but (surprise! there are two) – but the role of women in Spartan society as we can observe it remains fundamentally instrumental: in the Spartan social order, spartiate women existed to produce spartiate boys. The exercise that spartiate girls undertook was justified under the assumption that it produced fitter (male) children (Plut. Lyc. 14.2; Xen. Lac. 1.4). Plutarch implies that the age of marriage for spartiate women was set in law, though generally older than in the rest of Greece (Plut. Lyc. 15.3; Mor. 228a).
Spartiate women appear to have had no more say in who they married than other Greek women, which is to say effectively none. Marriages seem to have been arranged and the marriage ceremony itself as it it related to us was a ritualized abduction (Plut. Lyc. 15.3-5; Hdt. 6.65) without even a fig-leaf of (largely illusory) consent present in some other ancient marriage rituals. Husbands apparently also “lent out” their wives to other spartiate men (Plut. Lyc 15.7; Xen. Lac. 1.7-8); descriptions of this passage stress the consent of the men involved, but completely omit the woman’s consent, although Xenophon implies that the woman involved will “want to take charge of two households” and thus presumably be in favor; I have my doubts.
Everything we have about the Spartans (honestly, just read Plutarch’s Sayings of Spartan Women, but also Xen. Lac. 1.4, 7-8, Plut. Lyc. 15, etc.) reinforces the impression that spartiate women were viewed primarily as a means towards producing spartiate boys. Gorgo’s retort that spartiate women “are the only women that are mothers of men” (Plut. Mor. 240e), her husband’s command that she in turn (when he died), “Marry a good man and bear good children” (Plut. Mor. 240e), the anonymous spartiate woman who shames an Ionian woman for being good at weaving because raising children “should be the employments of the good and honorable woman” (Plut Mor. 241d) and on and on. Most of the sayings that don’t involve the bearing of children, either involve spartiate women being happy that their sons died bravely, or disowning them for not doing so.
Now, there is a necessary and very important caveat here: this is the role of spartiate women as viewed by men. It is striking that the one of the largest things we can be reasonable sure that spartiate women did do – they seem to have had the full management of the household most of the time – doesn’t figure into these sayings or our sources hardly at all (save, to a degree, to Aristotle’s polemic in Book 2 of the Politics). We should not be surprised that our – elite, aristocratic and exclusively male sources pick out the roles that seem most important to them. The average spartiate woman may well have felt differently – for my part, I can hardly imagine many spartiate mothers were overjoyed to hear their sons had fallen in battle, whatever brave face they put on in polite society. And I have to imagine that many spartiate women were likely shrewd managers of their households, and probably took some pride in that skill.
All of that said, I think it is fair to say that, on the whole, spartiate women seem to have had a relatively better condition than free citizen women in other poleis in Greece. Where they were sharply constrained – and to be clear, by modern standards, spartiate women were still very sharply constrained – they were constrained in ways that were mostly typical in Greek society. Quite frankly, ancient Greek poleis did quite poorly by their women, even by the low, low standards of other pre-modern societies. But given that low bar, the life of spartiate women does seem quite a bit better and our sources reflect this fairly openly.
But – and this is the other “but” I alluded to above – a huge part of this is that spartiate women were freed from the demand to do hours and hours of difficult labor preparing and serving food and producing textiles. And here we circle back to last week’s problem: spartiate women probably represented around 6% of Spartan (including the helots) women. If we want to talk about the condition of women in Sparta, we need to talk about helot women.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part III: Spartan Women”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.
May 28, 2022
QotD: Breaking the trench stalemate with tactical air power
But how much airpower does it take to really move a division out of position? In 1944, at the start of Operation Cobra as part of the Normandy breakout, it was necessary for US forces to move the powerful armored division Panzer Lehr out of its prepared positions outside of St. Lo. Over the course of an hour and a half, the U.S. Eighth Air Force hit Panzer Lehr with approximately three thousand aircraft, including 1,800 heavy bombers (each of which might have had bomb-loads of c. 2-3,500kg; the attack would have been the equivalent of about 13,000 Farman F.50s (of which only a hundred or so were built!)). By this point, even medium bombers carried bomb loads in the thousands of pounds, like the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber, with a bomb load of 3000lbs (1360kg). This was followed by a hurricane artillery barrage! Despite this almost absurdly awesome amount of firepower (which, to be clear, inflicted tremendous damage; by the end of Operation Cobra, Panzer Lehr – the heaviest and most powerful Panzer division in the west – had effectively ceased to exist), Panzer Lehr, badly weakened was still very capable of resisting and had to be pushed out of position by ground attack over the next three days.
Needless to say, nothing on offer in 1918 or for a decade or more after, was prepared to offer that kind of offensive potential from the air. That kind of assault would have required many thousands of aircraft with capabilities far exceeding what even the best late-war WWI bombers could do. Once again, while close air support doctrine was developed with one eye on the trench stalemate and the role airpower could play in facilitating a breakthrough and restoring maneuver (either by blasting the breakthrough or – as in Soviet Deep Battle doctrine – engaging enemy rear echelon units to bog down reinforcements). But the technology wasn’t anywhere near the decisive point by 1918. Instead, the most important thing aircraft could do was spot for the artillery, which is mostly what aircraft continued to do, even in late 1918.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
May 23, 2022
QotD: The adoption of Astrology by the Greeks and Romans
This portability is not restricted merely to divination. Herodotus’ suspicion that quite a bit of Greek religion might have come from somewhere else has merit, though Anatolia, not Egypt, appears to be the main source (see: M.L. West, The East Face of Helicon (1999); and for the person already writing this comment, yes I am aware of Bernal’s Black Athena and no I am not convinced, nor are many specialists in the field). The Romans were open about importing gods from Greece and make a clear distinction between gods worshiped in traditional Roman manner and those imported from Greece (a quite small number) and thus whose rituals followed ritus graecus – rituals in Greek fashion.
In other cases, the foreign practice was modified to fit the culture it arrived in. The Romans adopted the cult of Cybele, an Anatolian goddess, during the dark days of the Second Punic War (the Senate made that decision based on a consultation with the Sibylline books, a written source of oracular prophecy we can talk about another day). Cybele was called Magna Mater (“Great Mother”) in Rome, and it seems made some modifications to her rituals, in particular possibly limiting the role of the Galli (eunuch priests) whose rituals and style seemed decidedly “unRoman” (though I should note that the scholarship here is contested and the issue and evidence complex).
The normal technical term for this kind of religious borrowing is syncretism, and it is a sort of interweaving of religious traditions that polytheisms both ancient and modern are exceptionally capable of. It is simply not hard to add one more god or one more ritual into a religious system that already assumes the existence of innumerable gods.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part III: Polling the Gods”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-08.
May 18, 2022
QotD: Sparta’s excellent military reputation was not matched by actual battlefield excellence
That is one of the core things we can learn from Sparta: a reputation for military excellence can often be more valuable than the excellence itself – real or imagined. A powerful army can only fight one battle at a time, but the idea of a powerful army can intimidate any number of enemies all at once. […] when Sparta was forced to turn from intimidation to force, it ran out of force with frightening speed.
Those who have been here for a while may already be wondering, “Wait, though – this is the guy who is always telling us that winning battles isn’t as important as achieving strategic objectives and who is always on about logistics and operations! What about that?” I think that actually goes a long way to explaining how an army with a modest advantage in tactics and organization ends up without a winning record. […] I want to stress something here: the horrors of Spartan society cannot be justified on the grounds they produced superior soldiers, because they quite evidently did not. Sparta’s actual military record was, in fact, depressingly average. Only the reputation was special; the men were just men.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VI: Spartan Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-20.
May 14, 2022
QotD: The farming cycle in pre-modern Mediterranean cultures
The seasonal patterns vary a bit depending on the conditions and the sort of wheat being sown. In much of the Mediterranean, where the main concern was preserving a full year’s moisture for the crop, planting was done in autumn (November or October) and the crop was harvested in early summer (typically July or August). In contrast, the Han agricultural calendar for wheat planted in the spring, weeded over the summer and harvested in fall. The Romans generally kept to the autumn-planting schedule, except our sources note that on land which was rich enough (and wet enough) to be continuously cropped year after year (without a fallow), the crop was sown in spring; this might also be done in desperation if the autumn crop had failed. In Egypt, sowing was done as the Nile’s flood waters subsided at the beginning of Peret (in January), with the harvest taking place in Shemu (summer or early fall).
(As an aside on the seasons: we think in terms of four seasons, but many Mediterranean peoples thought in terms of three, presumably because Mediterranean winters are so mild. Thus the Greeks have three goddesses of the seasons initially, the Horae (spring, summer and fall) and Demeter’s grief divides the year into thirds not fourths in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. In ancient Egypt, there were three seasons: Akhet (Flood); Peret (Emergence [of fertile lands as the waters recede]) and Shemu (Low Water). The perception of the seasons depended on local climate and local cycles of agriculture.)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!”, A collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-24.
