Perhaps the most important form of divination in Rome was haruspicy (which spell-check insists is not a word, but is). Performed by a haruspex, haruspicy was the art of determining the will of the gods by examining the entrails of animals – particularly sacrificed animals and most commonly (but not exclusively) the liver. The most common thing haruspicy might tell you is if the sacrifice was accepted: a malformed or otherwise ill-omened liver might indicate that the ritual had failed and that the god had refused the sacrifice.
Remember that the do ut des system is essentially one of bargaining with the gods, and the god you are bargaining with always has the option of simply refusing the bargain. This might mean some failure in the mechanics of the ritual (necessitating it be performed again), or that the god had been offended in some way, but it might also mean something more. A lot of sacrificial rituals were done at the outset of important tasks – before battles, political events, etc. What the god might be telling you then with a failed sacrifice is “DO NOT PROCEED”.
The practitioner is given a bit of wiggle room on how to interrupt a failed sacrifice in this way: it might mean “don’t attack at all”, but it might also mean “don’t attack now”. Roman generals, ready to attack, might repeat the same ritual over and over again, like a runner at the start of a race waiting for the “go” signal.
But more information was potentially available, because the exact nature of the liver and its quality might signal more things. In Rome, it was understood that the very best knowledge in this regard came from the Etruscans (an example of how antiquity lends credibility to ritual – Etruscan religion was old even to the Romans, and thus had acquired a strong reputation). The reading of a liver could be complex: we find “liver models” from both Italy and the Near East with guidance on how to interpret different parts of the liver of a sacrificed animal. This could be fairly specific: famously, it was haruspex who warned Caesar about the danger of the Ides of March (Seut. Caes. 81.2).
Another key system for divining the will of the gods in Rome was augury, the reading of the flights of birds (mostly, there are actually other categories of auspicia); doing so is called taking the auspices, and the men who do so are the augurs. Augurs were particularly important in political matters, taking the auspices for elections and the like. Unfavorable auspices could invalidate even a consular election: the gods get a vote too.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part III: Polling the Gods”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-08.
April 6, 2022
QotD: Haruspicy and Augury in Roman religious observances
April 2, 2022
QotD: The pre-modern farming household
At the same time that households were large (by modern standards), the farms they tilled were, by modern standards, very small. The normal size of a Roman household small farm is generally estimated between 5 and 8 iugera (a Roman measurement of land, roughly 3 to 5 acres); in pre-Han Northern China (where wheat and millet, not rice, were the staple crops), the figure was “one hundred mu (4.764 acres)” – essentially the same. In Languedoc, a study of Saint-Thibery in 1460 showed 118 households (out of 189) on farms of less than 20 setérée (12 acres or so; the setérée appears to be an inexact unit of measurement); 96 of them were on less than 10 setérée (about 6 acres). So while there is a lot of variation, by and large it seems like the largest cluster of household farms tend to be around 3 to 8 acres or so; 5 acre farms are a good “average” small farm.
This coincidence of normal farm size and family size is not an accident, but essentially represents multi-generational family units occupying the smallest possible farms which could support them. The pressures that produce this result are not hard to grasp: families with multiple children and a farm large enough to split between them might do so, while families without enough land to split are likely to cluster around the farm they have. Pre-modern societies typically have only limited opportunities for wage labor (which are often lower status and worse in conditions than peasant farming!), so if the extended family unit can cluster on a single farm too small to split up, it will (with exception for the occasional adventurous type who sets off for high-risk occupations like soldier or bandit).
Now to be clear that doesn’t mean the farm sizes are uniform, because they aren’t. There is tremendous variation and obviously the difference between a 10 acre small farm and a 5 acre small farm is half of the farm. Moreover, in most of the communities you will have significant gaps between the poor peasants (whose farms are often very small, even by these measures), the average peasant farmer, and “rich peasants” who might have a somewhat (but often not massively so) larger farm and access to more farming capital (particularly draft animals). […] Nevertheless, what I want to stress is that these fairly small – 3-8 acres of so – farms with an extended family unit on it make up the vast majority of farming households and most of the rural population, even if they do not control most of the land (for instance in that Languedoc village, more than half of the land was held by households with more than 20 setérée a piece, so a handful of those “rich peasants” with larger accumulations effectively dominated the village’s landholding […]).
This is our workforce and we’re going to spend this entire essay talking about them. Why? Because these folks – these farmers – make up the majority of the population of basically all agrarian societies in the pre-modern period. And when I say “the majority” I mean the vast majority, on the order of 80-90% in many cases.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!”, A collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-24.
March 25, 2022
QotD: Herodotus as Spartan propagandist
Herodotus seems to be at the start of it, at least in our sources – he relates a story where, after an embarrassing failure in an effort to reduce tiny Tegea to helotage (the Tegeans kicked the Spartans’ asses) in the mid-sixth century, the Spartans supposedly stole the bones of the hero Orestes. Consequently, Herodotus notes, the Spartans were from that point on able to always beat Tegea and subdued the Peloponnese (Hdt. 1.68), resulting in the creation of the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League. The unbeatable Spartans thus appear. It’s possible the Spartan reputation predated this, but – as we’ll see – Herodotus will be the one who codifies that reputation and cements it.
Except, hold on a minute – how hard was it to subdue the Peloponnese? It seems to have been done with a fairly adept mix of diplomacy and military force (champion one side in a local dispute, beat the other, force both into your alliance, repeat, see Kennell (2010), 51-3 for details). But it is little surprise that Sparta would be dominant in the Peloponnese. Messenia and Laconia together was around 2,600 square miles or so. This is – if you’ll pardon the expression – flippin’ massive by the standards of Greek poleis. More than twice as large as the next largest polis in all of Greece (Athens). Sparta is fully one-third of the Peloponnese (the peninsula Sparta is located on). The remaining two-thirds is home to many other poleis – Corinth, Argos, Elis, Tegea, Mantinea, Troezen, Sicyon, Lepreum, Aigeira and on and on. Needless to say, Sparta was several times larger than all of them – only Corinth and Argos came even remotely close in size. The population differences seem to have roughly followed land area. Sparta was just much, MUCH larger and more powerful than any nearby state by the start of the fifth century.
Sparta thus spends the back half of the 500s as the teenager beating up all of the little kids in the sandbox and making himself leader. When you are upwards of three times larger (and in some cases, upwards of ten times larger) than your rivals, a reputation for victory should not be hard to achieve. And, in the event, it turns out it wasn’t.
Which brings us back to Herodotus […] because he isn’t just observing the Spartan reputation, Herodotus is manufacturing the Spartan reputation. Herodotus is our main source for early Greek history (read: pre-480) and for the two Persian invasions of Greece. Herodotus’ Histories cover a range of places and topics – Persia, Greece, Scythia, Egypt – and contain a mixture of history, ethnography, mythology and straight up falsehoods. But – as François Hartog famously pointed out in his The Mirror of Herodotus (originally in French as Le Miroir d’Hérodote), Herodotus is writing about Greece, even when he is writing about Persia – those other cultures and places exist to provide contrasts to the things that Herodotus thinks bind all of the fractious and fiercely independent Greek poleis. And he is perfectly willing to manufacture the past to make it fit that vision.
Sparta has a role to play in that narrative: the well-governed polis, a bastion of freedom, ever opposed to tyranny, be it Greek or Persian. We’ll come back to Sparta’s … let’s say relationship … with Persian “tyranny” next week. But for Herodotus, Sparta is the expression of an ideal form of “Greekness” and in Herodotus’ logic, being well-governed (eunomia is the Greek term) results primarily in military excellence. For the story Herodotus is telling to work, Sparta – as one of the leading states resisting Persia – must be well governed and it must be militarily excellent. That’s what will make a good story – and Herodotus never lets the facts get in the way of a good story.
(Sidenote: Athens – at least post-Cleisthenic Athens – gets this treatment too. Athens ends up embodying a different set of “Greek” virtues and where Sparta shows its prowess on land, the Athenians do so at sea.)
And so, Herodotus – the myth-maker – talks up the Spartiates at Thermopylae (you know, the brave 300) and quietly leaves out the other Laconians (who, if you scrutinize his numbers, he knows must be there, to the tune of c. 900 men), downplaying the other Greeks. Spartan leadership is lionized, even when it makes stupid mistakes (Thermopylae, to be clear, was a military disaster and Spartan intransigence nearly loses the battle of Plataea, but Herodotus represents this as boldness in the face of the enemy; even more fantastically inept was the initial Spartan plan to hold on the Isthmus of Corinth as if no one had ever seen a boat before).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VI: Spartan Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-20.
March 18, 2022
QotD: Tactics, operations, and strategy
We break these layers into tactics, operations and strategy. Put very simply, tactics is the layer of military thinking that concerns how an army fights; […] Operations is the layer of thinking that is concerned with getting the army to the fight – large-scale coordination and logistics live here. Strategy is concerned with bigger picture questions: what wars are worth fighting and for what objectives? Grand strategy extends this thinking to cover not only the military, but also political, cultural and economic institutions.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
March 12, 2022
QotD: Defining an empire
That definition goes back to the root of the word in Latin: imperium, literally meaning a command or control; imperium comes from the Latin verb imperio (lit: “to order or command”). Thus imperium was a sphere of command over others. In Roman politics, this could mean an individual had the authority to command an army or to set up courts (consuls, praetors and dictators had this sort of imperium), but the Romans understood their empire as a sort of command exercised by the Senate and People of Rome over non-Roman people, thus they called that too imperium – an imperium of the Roman people (imperium populi Romani), crucially over the non-Roman people; once cannot, after all, have imperium over one’s self. An imperium of the Roman people must be an imperium over someone else.
Contrary to the venerable Wikipedia, empire does not require a monarchy. Rome was an empire while it was still a Republic, and France continued to hold an empire after it stopped being a monarchy. Athens, famously, converted the Delian League into an Athenian Empire (the Greek word used is ἀρχή (“arche“, pronounced ar-KHAY) while it was still, internally, a democracy. Often, when discussing the internal politics of these states (especially for Rome and France) we will distinguish between a period of “empire” and “republic” to note the shift from a republic to a monarchy or vice-versa, but that sort of nomenclature should not be taken to disguise the fact that, for instance, the Roman Republic in 150 B.C. was very much possessed of an empire, while still functioning as a republic.
Empire, I should note, seems to be one of – if not the – dominant form of large-scale human social organization since at least the bronze age (which is to say: since as far back as our sources let us see clearly). Ideas like loose federations of states (e.g. the EU) or nation-states are relatively new; in many cases, our modern nation-states are merely the consolidated form of what were originally empires of various sizes (e.g. China, Russia, but also France (see: Crusade, Albigensian), etc.). We don’t think about them that way anymore, because the steady application of state power created the shared culture that subsequently formed the foundation for the nation […] In many respects, empire is normal (which, please note, does not mean it is good), whereas this modern world composed primarily of nation-states is an unusual aberration.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-22.
March 7, 2022
QotD: Historical fiction and fantasy works usually leave out the vast majority of the people who did all the work
But the actual human landscape of the pre-modern period was defined – in agrarian societies, at least – by vast numbers of farms and farmers. Their work proceeded on this cyclical basis, from plowing to sowing to weeding to harvesting and threshing to storage and then back again. Religious observances and social festivals were in turn organized around that calendar (it is not an accident how many Holy Days and big festivals seem to cluster around the harvest season in late Autumn/early Winter, or in Spring). The uneven labor demands of this cycle (intense in plowing and reaping, but easier in between) in turn also provided for the background hum of much early urban life, where the “cities” were for the most part just large towns surrounded by farmland (where often the folks living in the cities might work farmland just outside of the gates). People looked forward to festivals and events organized along the agricultural calendar, to the opportunities a good harvest might provide them to do things like get married or expand their farms. The human drama that defines our lives was no less real for the men and women who toiled in the fields or the farmhouses.
And of course all of this activity was necessary to support literally any other kind of activity.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part III: Actually Farming”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-08-06.
March 3, 2022
QotD: Diversity was Rome’s strength … as is true of almost every empire in history
Quite a few people look at a map like that, classify most of Rome’s territories as “Italian” and assume there is a large, homogeneous ethnic core there (except, I suspect, anyone who has actually been to Italy and is aware that Italy is hardly homogeneous, even today!). But Roman Italy in 218 B.C. was nothing like that.
Peninsular Italy (which doesn’t include the Po River Valley) contained a bewildering array of cultures and peoples: at least three distinct religious systems (Roman, Etruscan, Greek), half a dozen languages (some completely unrelated to each other) and many clearly distinct cultural and ethnic groups divided into communities with strong local identities and fierce local rivalries (if you want more on this, check out Salmon, The Making of Roman Italy (1982), Fronda, Between Rome and Carthage (2010), and Keaveney, Rome and the Unification of Italy (2005)).
The Roman army was by no means entirely Roman – it was split between Roman citizens and what the Romans called the socii (lit: “allies”) – a polite term for the communities they had subjugated in Italy (a periphery!). Rome demanded military service – this was the resource they would extract – from these communities; the socii pretty much always made up more than half of the army. Diversity was literally the Roman strength, in terms of total military force. Without it, Rome would have remained just one city-state in Italy, and not a particularly important one besides.
(As an aside: while citizenship is extended to nearly all of Italy in the 80s B.C., by then Rome is making extensive use of non-Italian troops in its armies. by the early empire, half of the army – the auxilia – were non-Roman citizens recruited from the provinces. Roman armies were essentially never majority “Roman” in any period, save possibly for the third century. And before anyone asks what about even earlier than my snapshot – it is quite clear – both archaeologically and in the Romans’ own foundation myths – that Rome was a fusion-society, culturally diverse from the city’s foundation. Indeed, sitting at the meeting point of Latin and Etruscan cultural zones as well as upland and coastal geographic zones was one of the great advantages Rome enjoyed in its early history, as near as we can tell.)
Outside of Italy, narrowly construed, the diversity only increases. Sicily’s population included Greeks, Punic (read: Carthaginian) settlers, and the truly native non-Greeks. Sardinia and Corsica had their own local culture as well. Cisalpine Gaul – the Po River Valley – was, as the name implies, mostly Gallic! As the Romans expended into Spain during the Second Punic War, they would add Iberians, Celt-Iberians, and yet more Punic settlers to their empire. And even those descriptions mask tremendous diversity – Iberians and Celt-Iberians were about as diverse among themselves as the Italians were; a quick read of Strabo reveals a wonderful array of sub-groups in all of these regions, with their own customs, languages, and so on.
Even if the Romans didn’t raise military force directly from any one of these groups, they do need to raise revenue from them – remember, the entire point of having the empire is to raise revenue from it, to make other people do the farming and mining and other labor necessary to support your society from the proceeds of their tribute. To keep that revenue flowing – revenue that, as the Roman army professionalized in the late second century B.C., increasingly paid for Roman military activity which held the empire together – you need to be good at managing those groups. Empires that are bad at handling a wide array of different cultures/religions/languages do not long remain empires.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-22.
February 27, 2022
QotD: Tactics, operations, strategy, grand strategy … let’s call the whole thing off
That in turn leads him to under-emphasize the massive difference between the two definitions of strategy he presents (though he seems aware of its significance, a viewer might not be): one of which confines itself to how to achieve policy ends by military force and the other of which includes the decision not to use force to achieve those ends. I very much prefer the latter definition of strategy, to the point that I am fond of saying that “any game which doesn’t let you declare peace is merely Real Time or Turn Based Tactics.” A definition of strategy that includes only “how to use military force to achieve policy ends” risks fading rapidly into operations and […] mistaking operations for strategy is a classic and disastrous planning blunder.
It’s still a very useful video, especially as a starting point for thinking about these terms, but those are points I think could have done with a touch more clarification; again, not a critique per se – nothing MHnV says is wrong, just a preference.
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: August 14th, 2020”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-08-14.
February 23, 2022
QotD: Debunking the “Spartan one-man-army” myth
Well, ok, perhaps they fought in groups, but were individually better at it. There is something to this. Multiple sources – most notably Xenophon stresses the greater degree of physical fitness that the Spartiates display (Xen. Lac. 4.5, 5.9). The Spartiates were rich after all, so they were well fed and able to build muscle accordingly; they also had a pretty active life-style (mostly things like sport-hunting) and kept athletically active. Chances are the average Spartiate was thus larger and fitter than the average hoplite – although again, the other Lakedaemonians in the phalanx (perioikoi, hypomeiones, mothakes, neodamodes, even helots fighting as hoplites) would probably balance out this effect to at least some degree (more strongly as time went on and the number of Spartiates shrunk!)
But what about martial skills and combat expertise? The fact is, there isn’t much evidence for a Spartan military training regime – certainly nothing like what the Romans had, or even what later Hellenistic Greek poleis set up. We’ve already discussed the agoge and you will note that at no point did swordsmanship, spear use, shield use, or anything of the like come up. There is, to be fair, some mock battles with fennel stalks in place of spears and some war-dances which may have served to mimic combat, but the agoge isn’t a training program, it’s an indoctrination program. Plutarch and Xenophon – who describe it – are quite clear on this: the point is to produce men who are obedient to the laws and subservient to the community (Xen. Lac. 2.10-11; Plut. Lyc. 25.3). Any advantages to military quality are evidently secondary (e.g. Xen. Lac. 2.7).
Xenophon himself notes – in the words of Cyrus (who he presents as an ideal ruler) – that hoplite-style warfare in close-combat required little practice (Xen. Cyrop. 2.1.9-16). And I want to stress two things about this statement: first that Xenophon had seen a lot of hoplite battle when he knew this and was in a position to know and second that he had also seen a lot of Sparta. It is hard to imagine Xenophon – with his Laconophilia – saying that practice for hoplites was unimportant if the Spartans had relied on it heavily. Nevertheless, there he is, saying that all of the movements a hoplite actually needed to perform – blocking with the shield, striking with spear or sword – were instinctive and did not need to be taught or practiced.
Plato provides our first solid evidence for the hoplomachia – practice drills in hoplite warfare – but immediately suggests through the person of Laches that the Spartans, specifically do not practice it (Plat. Lach. 182d-183a), because they think it doesn’t work. There is clearly some practicing with arms in Sparta as elsewhere in Greece (see J. K. Anderson, Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon (1970), 84-93 for the best discussion of the evidence; note also Wheeler, “Hoplomachia and Greek Dances in Arms” (1982)), but it never approaches the formal weapons drills we see from the Romans, or the complex fighting systems of the late Middle Ages. Nor does Sparta appear to be meaningfully exceptional in this regard; they seem to be exactly as tutored – or untutored – as all the other Greeks.
Nor may we rely on the assumption that the Spartan has more battle experience than his foes. The fact is that Greek poleis went to war fairly regularly and that they tended to bring most of their hoplite class out to battle when they did and as such most Greeks of the hoplite class from anywhere will have likely experienced combat. The Spartans are not unique in this and it is not clear that Sparta fights more often – they murder helots more often, sure, but this is hardly effective preparation for open battle.
(The contrast with Rome is again instructive. Sparta is intermittently at war, but the Roman Republic is continuously at war for all but six years out of five centuries, with the average Roman citizen probably spending upwards of seven years under arms – and this is before the professionalization of the legion. The average Roman free-holding farmer (the technical term is assidui) of the Middle Republic might truthfully have considered Leonidas and his 300 as amateurish by comparison.)
So what can we conclude? Well, the Spartiates are probably, on the whole, better nourished and fitter than their average opponent. If they have an edge in weapons training, it is fairly small – some sort of martial arts experts or superlative weapon-masters they are not. Which, of course they aren’t; the way they fight doesn’t require them to be. Hoplite fighting was never about individual martial excellence or skill, but about holding a position in the formation, supporting and being supported in turn by the shields of the men around you. The hoplite didn’t need to be a spear-master and evidently – we must agree with Xenophon – gained little from becoming so.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VI: Spartan Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-20.
February 19, 2022
QotD: Army marching speed in the pre-industrial era
So let’s think about – in very general terms – what needs to happen and in what order for a large body of infantry to march. Everyone wakes up and starts to get moving (probably around 5am). Breakfast needs to happen, which may require making fires. Tents need to be struck and stowed along with all of the gear in the baggage train and individual soldiers need to stow their own equipment. All sorts of small tasks add up to eat away parts of the morning. Then everyone needs to get gathered and ready to march.
And now – because you are a large body of infantry, you wait. Let me explain – let’s take a nominally full strength (c. 3,000 men) American Civil War brigade, marching on a road 13ft or so wide. You can get five men (a little cramped) into a single row on that road, meaning that the infantry itself stretches 600 ranks deep. Unlike in the movies (which love ultra-compact marching formations because it looks cool) you need a few feet of separation between rows for best effect (WW2 US Army guidelines specified 2-5 yards), let’s assume each soldier occupies about 5 feet in the marching order. So the infantry is 3,000ft long (914m; nine football fields). We also need unit separation (between the regiments, it’s important to avoid “accordioning” on the march and facilitate control; WW2 army regs suggested 100 yards between companies, 50 yards between platoons, so these could be quite large), so let’s round up to 4,000 ft (1219m; 13 football fields).
But we also have tents, food supplies, spare ammunition and all sorts of other of what the Romans would have called impedimenta (sidenote: if you are thinking, “well, but a pre-gunpowder army doesn’t need this; 1) arrows take up space and 2) camp entrenching supplies – the Romans marched heavy). How many wagons, pack animals or porters you need varies – the Romans seem to have often moved with a mule for every six-to-eight men, plus the army’s siege train. A good rule-of-thumb I’ve seen for American Civil War estimates is around 20 wagons per thousand, so 60 wagons. Rule of thumb in the ACW is 80 wagons to a mile of road, so our wagon train ought to take up around another 4,000ft.
(Sidenote: you can see why logistics gets complicated fast. Even in explaining a rule of thumb, I have to resort to rules of thumb, or else we have to inventory all of the stuff an infantry brigade needs, and all of the food they need and then parcel it out by wagons (and then figure for the mule-or-horse teams for the wagons) and on and on. Fortunately for the historians, this sort of work was done by the armies at the time and written down, so we tend to use their staff-work.)
So the entire force is probably a bit more than 8,000 ft long – 1.5 miles. In practice, there’s actually a lot more space eaten up in separation (between wagons, between men) so it would be longer, but I don’t want to get lost in the details. And this is for just 3,000 infantry – we have no cavalry with their many spare horses (three per man as a typical minimum) or god forbid a siege train which might involve hundreds of wagons.
Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How Fast Do Armies Move?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-10-06.
February 15, 2022
QotD: Breaking the trench stalemate with tanks
In theory, a good tank ought to be effectively immune to machine-gun fire, able to cross trenches without slowing and physically protect the infantry (who could advance huddled behind the mass of it), all while bringing its own firepower to the battle. Tracked armored vehicles had been an idea considered casually by a number of the pre-war powers but not seriously attempted. The British put the first serious effort into tank development with the Landship Committee, formed in February of 1915; the first real tanks, 49 British Mark I tanks, made their first battlefield appearance during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Reliability proved to be a problem: of the 49 tanks that stepped off on the attack on September 15th, only three were operational on the 16th, mostly due to mechanical failures and breakdowns.
Nevertheless there was promise in the idea that was clearly recognized and a major effort to show what tanks could do what attempted at Cambrai in November of 1917; this time hundreds of tanks were deployed and they had a real impact, breaking through the barbed wire and scattering the initial German defenses. But then came the inevitable German counter-attacks and most of the ground taken was lost. It was obvious that tanks had great potential; the French had by 1917 already developed their own, the light Renault FT tank, which would end up being the most successful tank of the war despite its small size (it is the first tank to have its main armament in a rotating turret and so in some sense the first “real” tank). This was hardly an under-invested-in technology. So did tanks break the trench stalemate?
No.
It’s understandable that many people have the impression that they did. Interwar armored doctrine, particularly German Maneuver Warfare (bewegungskrieg) and Soviet Deep Battle both aimed to use the mobility and striking power of tanks in concentrated actions to break the trench stalemate in future wars (the two doctrines are not identical, mind you, but in this they share an objective). But these were doctrines constructed around the performance capabilities of interwar tanks, particularly by two countries (Germany and the USSR) who were not saddled with large numbers of WWI era tanks (and so could premise their doctrine entirely on more advanced models). The Panzer II, with a 24.5mph top speed and an operational range of around 100 miles, depending on conditions, was actually in a position to race the train and win; the same of course true of the Soviet interwar T-26 light tank (19.3mph on roads, 81-150 mile operational range). Such tanks could have radios for coordination and communication on the move (something not done with WWI tanks or even French tanks in WWII).
By contrast, that Renault FT had a top speed of 4.3mph and an operational range of just 37 miles. The British Mark V tank, introduced in 1918, moved at only 5mph and had just 45 miles of range. Such tanks struggled to keep up with the infantry; they certainly were not going to win any race the infantry could not. It is little surprise that the French, posed with the doctrinal problem of having to make use of the many thousands of WWI tanks they had, settled on a doctrine whereby most tanks would simply be the armored gauntlet stretched over the infantry’s fist: it was all those tanks could do! The sort of tank that could do more than just dent the trench-lines (the same way a good infiltration assault with infantry could) were a decade or more away when the war ended.
Moreover, of course, the doctrine – briefly the systems of thinking and patterns of training, habit and action – to actually pull off what tanks would do in 1939 and 1940 were also years away. It seems absurd to fault World War I era commanders for not coming up with a novel tactical and operational system in 1918 for using vehicles that wouldn’t exist for another 15 years and yet more so assuming that they would get it right (since there were quite a number of different ideas post-war about how tanks ought to be used and while many of them seemed plausible, not all of them were practical or effective in the field). It is hard to see how any amount of support into R&D or doctrine was going to make tanks capable of breakthroughs even in the late 1920s or early 1930s (honestly, look at the “best” tanks of the early 1930s; they’re still not up to the task in most cases) much less by 1918.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
February 10, 2022
QotD: Classical Greek Polis governance
The standard ingredients of a Greek polis are an assembly of all adult citizen males (often called an ekklesia, meaning “assembly”), a smaller advisory committee (frequently called a boule), and then a set number of elected officials who carried out the laws of the other two (magistrates). I’ve given the common names for these components, but they often have different names in different poleis.
Those basic units don’t change from a democracy (like Athens) to an oligarchy (like Corinth) or even a tyranny (like Syracuse) – the type of government just reflects the division of power between them, and the method of selection. In a democracy, like Athens, the ekklesia will have most of the power, being able to overrule the boule or the magistrates. Often the members of the boule can come from a wide range of wealth classes or even be randomly selected.
In an oligarchy, power is generally focused in the magistrates – drawn from the upper-crust of society – and a smaller boule, with the ekklesia having much less power to restrain them. Alternately, the ekklesia may be restricted in size to only a wealthy subset of the citizenry. In a tyranny, a single person (the tyrant) is able to gain control of the system, through a mix of demagoguery, charisma and well-placed cronies. Even under a tyranny, the basic three-part system still exists, it is simply subverted and controlled by one person (much like how some modern dictatorships have all of the institutions of a democracy – courts, elections, etc – but all of the power is still in one set of hands and the elections are shams).
I want to note this up front because it is important to recognize that the existence of a popular assembly does not make a Greek polis a democracy, nor does the existence of a powerful magistrate make it a tyranny. As we’ll see, Sparta has an assembly, it is just laughably weak; it also has two very powerful magistrates, but their power is strongly checked. What matters is the division of power between these parts. I also wanted to start here because Sparta follows this basic model, but with some interesting variations. Knowing what the normal model looks like will make it easier to spot the variations that are unique to Sparta.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part V: Spartan Government”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.
February 6, 2022
QotD: Marcus Tullius Cicero
Cicero was a key politician in the Late Republic, but it was his misfortune that his life was spent in an era where words meant less than weapons. He sided with Pompey against Caesar, but was granted clemency after Pompey’s defeat. He was not involved in Caesar’s assassination – he was still too much an outsider for some of the stuck-up Roman elitists who made up the conspiracy (though he correctly pointed out at the time that leaving Antony alive would be a fatal mistake). In the aftermath of the assassination, he identified (correctly) Antony as the key threat to the Republic and worked to discredit him politically in a devastating series of speeches named the Philippics (in honor of a similar set of speeches made by the Athenian Demosthenes against Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander). Cicero’s political assault on Antony succeeded – his reputation was ruined and his popularity in Rome never recovered – but it cost Cicero his life when Antony, in league with Octavian, moved into the capital and had Cicero murdered. Cicero’s literary legacy survived him, however, in part because it was useful for Augustus’ own political ends (e.g. Plut. Cic. 49.5-6).
Cicero’s position as the most eloquent orator of the Latin language – and probably its best prose stylist – is largely uncontested. It was his speaking skills – honed in the courts – that made him so politically successful. He was also a prolific writer and a tremendous amount of his writings survive, including both legal and political speeches, private letters, handbooks on oratory, and a set of philosophical works. As anyone who has read Cicero can tell you, he also has a deserved reputation for pride and self-aggrandizement. While many of Cicero’s contemporaries and readers down to the modern era have been impressed by Cicero’s thinking and eloquence, I feel confident in asserting no one – alive or dead – will ever be more impressed by Cicero than Cicero was impressed by himself.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: A Trip Through Cicero (Natural Law)”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-12-12.
February 2, 2022
QotD: Breaking the trench stalemate with Stormtroopers (Stoßtruppen)
The mature form of this tactical framework is often called “Hutier” tactics, after German general Oskar Emil von Hitier, though he was hardly the sole or even chief inventor of the method. In its mature form, the technique went thusly: instead of attacking with large waves of infantry which cleared each objective in sequential order, attacks ought to be proceeded by smaller units, carefully trained with the layout of the enemy positions. Those units, rather than having a very rigid plan of attack, would be given those general objectives and left to figure for themselves how to accomplish them (“mission tactics” or Auftragstaktik), giving them more freedom to make decisions based on local conditions and the ground.
These elite spearhead units, called Stoßtruppen or “Stormtroopers” were well equipped (in particular with a higher amount of automatic firearms and hand grenades, along with flamethrowers). Importantly, they were directed to bypass enemy strong-points and keep moving forward to meet their objectives. The idea here was that the follow-up waves of normal infantry could do the slow work of clearing out points where enemy resistance was strong, but the stormtroopers should aim to push as deeply as possible as rapidly as possible to disorient the defenders and rapidly envelop what defenses remained.
These sets of infantry tactics were in turn combined with the hurricane barrage, a style of artillery use which focused on much shorter but more intense artillery barrages, particularly associated with Colonel Georg “Breakthrough” Bruchmüller. Rather than attempting to pulverize defenses out of existence, the hurricane barrage was designed merely to force enemies into their dugouts and disorient the defenders; much of the fire was directed at longer ranges to disrupt roads and artillery in the enemy rear. The short barrage left the ground relatively more intact. Meanwhile, those elite infiltration units could be trained to follow the creeping barrage very closely (being instructed, for instance, to run into the shell explosions, since as the barrage advantages, no gun should ever strike the same spot twice; a fresh shell-hole was, in theory, safe). Attentive readers will recognize the basic foundations of the “move fast, disorient the enemy” methods of the “modern system” here.
So did infiltration tactics break the trench stalemate? No.
First, it is necessary to note that while infiltration tactics were perhaps most fully developed by the Germans, they were not unique to them. The French were experimenting with many of the same ideas at the same time. For instance, basic principles of infiltration were being published by the French General Headquarters as early as April, 1915. André Laffargue, a French infantry captain, actually published a pamphlet, which was fairly widely distributed in both the French and British armies by the end of 1915 and in the American army in 1916, on exactly this sort of method. In many cases, like at the Second Battle of Artois, these French tactics bore significant fruit with big advances, but ran into the problem that the gains were almost invariably lost in the face of German counter-attacks. The Russians, particularly under Aleksei Brusilov, also started using some of these techniques, although Brusilov was as much making a virtue of necessity as the Russians just didn’t have that much artillery or shells and had to make due with less and Russian commanders (including Brusilov!) seem to have only unevenly taken the lessons of his successes.
The problem here is speed: infiltration tactics could absolutely more efficiently overrun the front enemy lines and even potentially defeat multiple layers of a defense-in-depth. But after that was done and the shock of the initial push wore off, you were still facing the same calculus: the attacker’s reinforcements, shells, artillery and supplies had to cross broken ground to reach the new front lines, while the defender’s counter-attack could ride railways, move over undamaged roads and then through prepared communications trenches. In the race between leg infantry and trains, the trains always won. On the Eastern Front or against the Italians fighting under the Worst General In History at Caporetto (1917), the already badly weakened enemy might simply collapse, producing massive gains (but even at Caporetto, no breakthrough – shoving the enemy is not a breakthrough, to qualify as a breakthrough, you need to get to the “green fields beyond” that is open ground undefended by the enemy), but against a determined foe, as with the 1918 Spring Offensives, these tactics, absent any other factor, simply knocked big salients in the line. Salients which were, in the event, harder to defend and brought the Germans no closer to victory. Eventually – often quite rapidly – the front stabilized again and the deadlock reasserted itself. Restoring maneuver, the actual end-goal of these tactics, remained out of reach.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
January 28, 2022
Spartan glossary
As part of a multi-post series at A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry on explaining (and debunking) the modern day mythology of classic-era Sparta, Bret Devereaux compiled a useful glossary of terms that will be of use as I’ll be excerpting several sections of his series for today’s and several future QotD entries. I’ve added a few entries that seem necessary and expanded some others, but these are enclosed in square brackets “[ ]” to show they’re not directly from Bret’s original post.
Leonidas at Thermopylae by Jacques-Louis David, 1814.
Wikimedia Commons.
Acclamation. A vote held by acclamation (sometimes called a “voice vote”) is a vote where, instead of getting an exact count of yes and no votes, the outcome is judged by the volume of people calling out yes or no. Obviously it would be very hard to tell who had really won a close vote. This is used in modern democracies only for very lopsided (typically unanimous) votes; in Classical Sparta, this was the only voting system, votes were never counted.
[Agoge. The Spartan education system for boys (ἀγωγή, pronounced ah-go-GAY). “Spartan boys were, at age seven, removed from their families and grouped into herds (agelai) under the supervision of a single adult male Spartan – except for the heirs to the two hereditary kings, who were exempt. Order was kept by allowing the older boys to beat and whip the younger boys (Xen. Lac. 2.2). The boys were intentionally underfed (Plut. Lyc. 17.4; Xen. Lac. 2.5-6). They were thus encouraged to steal in order to make up the difference, but severely beaten if caught (Plut. Lyc. 17.3-4; Xen. Lac. 2.6-9). … We are not told, but it seems unavoidable that in a system that intentionally under-feeds groups of boys to force them to steal, that the weakest and smallest boys will end up in a failure spiral where the lack of food leads to further weakness and further victimization at the hands of other boys. I should note that while ancient parenting and schooling was certainly more violent than what we do now – the Spartan system was recognized as abnormally violent towards these boys, even by the standards of the time.”]
Apella. The Apella was the popular assembly of Sparta, consisting of all adult male Spartiates over the age of thirty. The Apella was presided over by the Ephors and all votes were by acclamation. The Apella did not engage in debate, but could only vote “yes” or “no”. The Gerousia had the power to ignore the decisions of the Apella. [In most other Greek poleis the equivalent body would be called the ekklesia.]
Ephor. The Ephors were a board of five officials in Sparta, elected annually by the Apella (technically plus the two kings). The Ephors oversaw the two hereditary Spartan kings and could even bring a king up on charges before the Gerousia. In practice, the Ephors – not the kings – wielded the most political power in Sparta. The Ephors were also responsible for ritually declaring war on the helots every year. The institution as a whole is sometimes collectively referred to as the Ephorate.
Gerousia. The Gerousia – literally a council of old men (the members were “Gerontes” – literally “old men”) which consisted of thirty members, 28 elected (by acclamation in the Apella) plus the two hereditary kings. The elected members all had to be over the age of 60. Gerontes were elected for life. The Gerousia decided what motions could be voted on by the Apella and had the power to cancel any decision of the Apella. It also functioned as a court, with the power to try Spartiates and even the kings. In practice, with the Ephors, the Gerousia wielded the real political power in Sparta.
Helot. The subjugated slave class of Sparta, which made up the overwhelming majority of its residents, the Helots did the agricultural labor which kept the Spartan state running. Helots can be further subdivided into the Laconian helots (those living in Sparta proper) and the Messenian helots (the populace of Messenia which had been reduced to helotry after being conquered by Sparta in the 7th century B.C.). Helots often fought in Sparta’s armies, apparently as screening light-infantry forces (and also as camp followers and servants).
Homoioi. See: Spartiates.
Hoplite. Hoplites were Greek heavy infantry soldiers who fought with a heavy round shield (sometimes called a “hoplon” but more correctly an “aspis“) and a spear, typically in armor.
Hypomeiones. One of several sub-citizen underclasses in Sparta, the Hypomeiones (literally “the inferiors”) were former Spartiates who had fallen off the bottom of the Spartan social system, either through cowardice or (more likely) being unable to pay the contribution to the Syssitia. Though free, they had no role in government.
[Kings. Sparta had two royal lines and two kings at all times. The kings were drawn from the Agaids and the Eurypontid families. In theory, both kings had the same set of powers. The kings’ wealth was derived from lands allocated from territory taken from the perioikoi, and the eldest son of the current king in each line was the presumptive heir. On this basis, the kings were almost always the two wealthiest men in Sparta.]
[Kleroi (sing. kleros). The (theoretically) equal plots of land allocated to each Spartiate, worked on his behalf by Helots to generate the contributions to the individual Spartiate‘s Syssitia. Up to half of the production of the kleros had to be paid to the Spartiate by the Helots who worked that land. At some point, the kleroi became inheritable property, which facilitated the accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, contributing to the demographic collapse of the Spartiate class.]
Lycurgus. [The name of the (almost certainly) mythical founder figure of Sparta.] 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 over turned. 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.
Mothax. One of several sub-citizen underclasses in Sparta, the Mothakes were non-citizen men, generally thought to have been the children of Spartiate fathers and helot mothers, brought up alongside their full-citizen half-siblings. Mothakes fought in the Spartan army alongside spartiates, but had no role in government. A surprising number of innovative Spartan commanders – Gylippus and Lysander in particular – came from this class.
Neodamodes. One of several sub-citizen underclasses in Sparta, the Neodamodes were freed helots, granted disputed land on the border with Elis. Though they served in the Spartan army, the Neodamodes lacked any role in government. We might consider the helots who served in Brasidas’ army, the Brasideioi as a type of the Neodamodes (they did settle in the same place).
Peers: See: Spartiates.
Perioikoi (sing. Perioikos). The perioikoi (literally the “dwellers around”) were one of several sub-citizen underclasses in Sparta. The perioikoi were residents of communities which were subjected to the Spartan state, but not reduced to helotry. They lived in their own settlements under the control of the Spartan state, but with limited internal autonomy. The perioikoi seem to have included Sparta’s artisans, producing weapons, armor and tools; they were also made to fight in Sparta’s armies as hoplites.
Polis (pl. poleis). A complicated and effectively untranslatable term, polis most nearly means “community” and is often translated as “city-state”. However, there were poleis in Greece without cities (Sparta being one – a fact often concealed by translators rendering polis as city). Instead a polis consists of a body of citizens, their state, and the territory it controls (including smaller villages but not other subjugated poleis), usually but not always centered on a single urban center. Poleis are almost by definition independent and self-governing (that is, they have eleutheria and autonomia).
Skiritai. The Skiritai were one of several sub-citizen underclasses in Sparta. Dwellers in Skiritis, the mountains between Laconia and Arcadia, they were mostly rural people who were free, but subject to the Spartan state, similar to the perioikoi. The main difference between the two was that the Skiritai – perhaps because of their mountainous homes – served not as hoplites, but as an elite corps of light infantry in the Spartan army.
Spartiates, also called peers or homoioi. The citizen class at Sparta, the Spartiates were a closed ethnic aristocracy. Membership required both a Spartiate father and a Spartiate mother, as well as successful completion of the Agoge and membership in a Syssitia. Spartiate males over thirty were the only individuals in Sparta who could participate in government, although the political power of the average Spartiate was extremely limited.
Syssitia (sing. syssition). The Syssitia were the common mess-groups into which all adult Spartiates were divided. Each member of the Syssitia contributed a portion of the mess-group’s food; the contribution was a condition of citizenship. Spartiates who could not make the contribution lost citizenship and became Hypomeiones.
