Quotulatiousness

August 19, 2024

Bret Devereaux on Nathan Rosenstein’s Rome at War (2004)

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Although Dr. Devereaux is taking a bit of time away from the more typical blogging topics he usually covers on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, he still discusses books related to his area of specialty:

For this week’s book recommendation, I want to recommend N. Rosenstein, Rome at War: Farms, Families and Death in the Middle Republic (2004). This is something of a variation from my normal recommendations, so I want to lead with a necessary caveat: this book is not a light or easy read. It was written for specialists and expects the reader to do some work to fully understand its arguments. That said, it isn’t written in impenetrable “academese” – indeed, the ideas here are very concrete, dealing with food production, family formation, mortality and military service. But they’re also fairly technical and Rosenstein doesn’t always stop to recap what he has said and draw fully the conclusions he has reached and so a bit of that work is left to the reader.

That said, this is probably in the top ten or so books that have shaped me as a scholar and influenced my own thinking – as attentive readers can no doubt recall seeing this book show up a lot in my footnotes and citations. And much like another book I’ve recommended, Landers, The Field and the Forge: Population, Production and Power in the Pre-Industrial West (2003), this is the sort of book that moves you beyond the generalizations about ancient societies you might get in a more general treatment (“low productivity, high mortality, youth-shifted age profile, etc.”) down to the actual evidence and methods we have to estimate and understand that.

Fundamentally, Rome at War is an exercise in “modeling” – creating (fairly simple) statistical models to simulate things for which we do not have vast amounts of hard data, but for which we can more or less estimate. For instance, we do not have the complete financial records for a statistically significant sample of Roman small farmers; indeed, we do not have such for any Roman small farmers. So instead, Rosenstein begins with some evidence-informed estimates about typical family size and construction and combines them with some equally evidence-informed estimates about the productivity of ancient farms and their size and then “simulates” that household. That sort of approach informs the entire book.

Fundamentally, Rosenstein is seeking to examine the causes of a key Roman political event: the agrarian land-reform program of Tiberius Gracchus in 133, but the road he takes getting there is equally interesting. He begins by demonstrating that based on what we know the issue with the structure of agriculture in Roman Italy was not, strictly speaking “low productivity” so much as inefficient labor allocation (a note you will have seen me come back to a lot): farms too small for the families – as units of labor – which farmed them. That is a very interesting observation generally, but his point in reaching it is to show that this is why Roman can conscript these fellows so aggressively: this is mostly surplus labor so pulling it out of the countryside does not undermine these households (usually). But that pulls a major pillar – that heavy Roman conscription undermined small freeholders in Italy in the Second Century – out of the traditional reading of the land reforms.

Instead, Rosenstein then moves on to modeling Roman military mortality, arguing that, based on what we know, the real problem is that Rome spends the second century winning a lot. As a result, lots of young men who normally might have died in war – certainly in the massive wars of the third century (Pyrrhic and Punic) – survived their military service, but remained surplus to the labor needs of the countryside and thus a strain on their small households. These fellows then started to accumulate. Meanwhile, the nature of the Roman census (self-reported on the honor system) and late second century Roman military service (often unprofitable and dangerous in Spain, but not with the sort of massive armies of the previous centuries which might cause demographically significant losses) meant that more Romans might have been dodging the draft by under-reporting in the census. Which leads to his conclusion: when Tiberius Gracchus looks out, he sees both large numbers of landless Romans accumulating in Rome (and angry) and also falling census rolls for the Roman smallholder class and assumes that the Roman peasantry is being economically devastated by expanding slave estates and his solution is land reform. But what is actually happening is population growth combined with falling census registration, which in turn explains why the land reform program doesn’t produce nearly as much change as you’d expect, despite being more or less implemented.

Those conclusions remain both important and contested. What I think will be more valuable for most readers is instead the path Rosenstein takes to reach them, which walks through so much of the nuts-and-bolts of Roman life: marriage patterns, childbearing patterns, agricultural productivity, military service rates, mortality rates and so on. These are, invariably, estimates built on estimates of estimates and so exist with fairly large “error bars” and uncertainty, but they are, for the most part, the best the evidence will support and serve to put meat on the bones of those standard generalizing descriptions of ancient society.

August 17, 2024

QotD: Sheep and wool in the ancient and medieval world

Filed under: Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Our second fiber, wool, as readers may already be aware, comes from sheep (although goat and horse-hair were used rarely for some applications; we’re going to stick to sheep’s wool here). The coat of a sheep (its fleece) has three kinds of fibers in it: wool, kemp and medullated fibers. Kemp fibers are fairly weak and brittle and won’t accept dye and so are generally undesirable, although some amount of kemp may end up in wool yarn. Likewise, medullated fibers are essentially hair (rather than wool) and lack elasticity. But the wool itself, composed mostly of the protein keratin along with some lipids, is crimped (meaning the fibers are not straight but very bendy, which is very valuable for making fine yarns) and it is also elastic. There are reasons for certain applications to want to leave some of the kemp in a wool yarn that we’ll get to later, but for the most part it is the actual wool fibers that are desirable.

Sheep themselves probably descend from the wild mouflon (Ovis orientalis) native to a belt of uplands bending over the northern edge of the fertile crescent from eastern Turkey through Armenia and Azerbaijan to Iran. The fleeces of these early sheep would have been mostly hair and kemp rather than wool, but by the 4th millennium BC (as early as c. 3700 BC), we see substantial evidence that selective breeding for more wool and thicker coats has begun to produce sheep as we know them. Domestication of course will have taken place quite a bit earlier (selective breeding is slow to produce such changes), perhaps around 10,000 BC in Mesopotamia, spreading to the Indus river valley by 7,000 BC and to southern France by 6,000 BC, while the replacement of many hair breeds of sheep with woolly sheep selectively bred for wool production in Northern Mesopotamia dates to the third century BC.1 That process of selective breeding has produced a wide variety of local breeds of sheep, which can vary based on the sort of wool they produce, but also fitness for local topography and conditions.

As we’ve already seen in our discussion on Steppe logistics, sheep are incredibly useful animals to raise as a herd of sheep can produce meat, milk, wool, hides and (in places where trees are scarce) dung for fuel. They also only require grass to survive and reproduce quickly; sheep gestate for just five months and then reach sexual maturity in just six months, allowing herds of sheep to reproduce to fill a pasture quickly, which is important especially if the intent is not merely to raise the sheep for wool but also for meat and hides. Since we’ve already been over the role that sheep fill in a nomadic, Eurasian context, I am instead going to focus on how sheep are raised in the agrarian context.

While it is possible to raise sheep via ranching (that is, by keeping them on a very large farm with enough pastureland to support them in that one expansive location) and indeed sheep are raised this way today (mostly in the Americas), this isn’t the dominant model for raising sheep in the pre-modern world or even in the modern world. Pre-modern societies generally operated under conditions where good farmland was scarce, so flat expanses of fertile land were likely to already be in use for traditional agriculture and thus unavailable for expansive ranching (though there does seem to be some exception to this in Britain in the late 1300s after the Black Death; the sudden increase in the cost of labor – due to so many of the laborers dying – seems to have incentivized turning farmland over to pasture since raising sheep was more labor efficient even if it was less land efficient and there was suddenly a shortage of labor and a surplus of land). Instead, for reasons we’ve already discussed, pastoralism tends to get pushed out of the best farmland and the areas nearest to towns by more intensive uses of the land like agriculture and horticulture, leaving most of the raising and herding of sheep to be done in the rougher more marginal lands, often in upland regions too rugged for farming but with enough grass to grow. The most common subsistence strategy for using this land is called transhumance.

Transhumant pastoralists are not “true” nomads; they maintain permanent dwellings. However, as the seasons change, the transhumant pastoralists will herd their flocks seasonally between different fixed pastures (typically a summer pasture and a winter pasture). Transhumance can be either vertical (going up or down hills or mountains) or horizontal (pastures at the same altitude are shifted between, to avoid exhausting the grass and sometimes to bring the herds closer to key markets at the appropriate time). In the settled, agrarian zone, vertical transhumance seems to be the most common by far, so that’s what we’re going to focus on, though much of what we’re going to talk about here is also applicable to systems of horizontal transhumance. This strategy could be practiced both over relatively short distances (often with relatively smaller flocks) and over large areas with significant transits (see the maps in this section; often very significant transits) between pastures; my impression is that the latter tends to also involve larger flocks and more workers in the operation. It generally seems to be the case that wool production tended towards the larger scale transhumance. The great advantage of this system is that it allows for disparate marginal (for agriculture) lands to be productively used to raise livestock.

This pattern of transhumant pastoralism has been dominant for a long time – long enough to leave permanent imprints on language. For instance, the Alps got that name from the Old High German alpa, alba meaning which indicated a mountain pasturage. And I should note that the success of this model of pastoralism is clearly conveyed by its durability; transhumant pastoralism is still practiced all over the world today, often in much the same way as it was centuries or millennia ago, with a dash of modern technology to make it a bit easier. That thought may seem strange to many Americans (for whom transhumance tends to seem very odd) but probably much less strange to readers almost anywhere else (including Europe) who may well have observed the continuing cycles of transhumant pastoralism (now often accomplished by moving the flocks by rail or truck rather than on the hoof) in their own countries.

For these pastoralists, home is a permanent dwelling, typically in a village in the valley or low-land area at the foot of the higher ground. That low-land will generally be where the winter pastures are. During the summer season, some of the shepherds – it does not generally require all of them as herds can be moved and watched with relatively few people – will drive the flocks of sheep up to the higher pastures, while the bulk of the population remains in the village below. This process of moving the sheep (or any livestock) over fairly long distances is called droving and such livestock is said to be moved “on the hoof” (assuming it isn’t, as in the modern world, transported by truck or rail). Sheep are fairly docile animals which herd together naturally and so a skilled drover can keep large flock of sheep together on their own, sometimes with the assistance of dogs bred and trained for the purpose, but just as frequently not. While cattle droving, especially in the United States, is often done from horseback, sheep and goats are generally moved with the drovers on foot.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part I: High Fiber”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-03-05.

    1. On this, note E. Vila and D. Helmer, “The Expansion of Sheep Herding and the Development of Wool Production in the Ancient Near East” in Wool Economy in the Ancient Near East and the Aegean, eds. C. Breniquet and C. Michel (2014), which has the archaeozoological data).

August 11, 2024

QotD: Greek and Roman notions of courage

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

That understanding of courage [of First Nations tribes of the Great Plains] was itself almost utterly alien to, for instance, the classical Greeks. While Greek notions of military excellence had their roots in Homer (on this, see J.E. Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity (2005)) and an ethic of individual combat where honor was gained by killing notable enemies, by the fifth century this had been replaced by an ethic almost entirely focused on holding position in a formation. As Tyrtaeus, a Spartan poet, writes (trans. M.L. West):

    I would not rate a man worth mention or account
    either for speed of foot or wrestling skill,
    not even if he had a Cyclops’ size and strength
    or could outrun the fierce north wind of Thrace;
    I would not care if he surpassed Tithonus’ looks,
    or Cinyras’ or Midas’ famous wealth,
    or were more royal than Pelops son of Tantalus,
    or had Adrastus’ smooth persuasive tongue,
    or fame for everything save only valour: no,
    no man’s of high regard in time of war
    unless he can endure the sight of blood and death,
    and stand close to the enemy and fight.
    This is the highest worth, the finest human prize
    and fairest for a bold young man to win.
    It benefits the whole community and state,
    when with a firm stance in the foremost rank
    a man bides steadfast, with no thought of shameful flight,
    laying his life and stout heart on the line,
    and standing by the next man speaks encouragement
    This is the man of worth in time of war.

This is not a daring courage, but a stoic (in the general sense) courage – the courage of standing a place in the line. And note for Tyrtaeus, that courage is more important than skill, or strength or speed; it matters not how well he fights, only that he “bides steadfast” “with a firm stance”. There is no place for individual exploits here. Indeed, when Aristodemus (another Spartan), eager to regain his honor lost by having survived the Battle of Thermopylae, recklessly charged out of the phalanx to meet the Persian advance at the Battle of Plataea, Herodotus pointedly notes that he was not given the award for bravery by the Spartans who instead recognized those who had held their place in line (Hdt. 9.71; Herodotus does not entirely concur with the Spartan judgement).

This was a form of courage that was evolving alongside the hoplite phalanx, where either shameful retreat or a reckless charge exposed one’s comrades to danger by removing a shield from the line. While, as Lendon is quick to note, there was still a very important aspect of personal competition (seeking to show that you, personally, had more bravery to hold your position than others), this is a fundamentally collective, not individual style of combat and it has values and virtues to match. Indeed, the Greeks frequently disparaged the fighting style of “barbarians” who would advance bravely but retreat quickly as cowardly.

And so the man who holds his place in the group and does not advance recklessly is the bravest of Greeks, but among the Crow Native Americans would seem a coward, while the bravest Crow who cleverly and daringly attacked, raided and got away before the enemy could respond would in turn be regarded by the Greeks as a reckless coward, unworthy of honor. These notions of courage aren’t merely different, they are diametrically opposed demanding entirely different actions in analogous circumstances!

The translator will call both of these ideas “courage”, but clearly when one gets down to it, they demand very different things. And these are just two examples. As Lendon notes (op. cit.), the virtus of the Roman was not the same as the andreia of the Greek, though both words might well be translated as “courage” or “valor” (and both words, etymologically mean “manliness”, lest we forget that these are very gender-stratified societies). Roman virtus was often expressed in taking individual initiative, but always restrained by Roman disciplina (discipline), making that system of military values still different from either the Crow or the Greek system.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIa: The Many Faces of Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.

August 5, 2024

QotD: George R.R. Martin’s Dothraki rank with the lazy racial sterotypes of Hollywood’s “Golden Age” westerns

Filed under: Americas, Asia, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As I’ve noted in each of these posts, the fundamental claim we are evaluating here is this one, made baldly by George R.R. Martin:

    The Dothraki were actually fashioned as an amalgam of a number of steppe and plains cultures … Mongols and Huns, certainly, but also Alans, Sioux, Cheyenne, and various other Amerindian tribes … seasoned with a dash of pure fantasy.

We may, I think, now safely dismiss this statement as false. What we have found is that the Dothraki do not meaningfully mirror either Steppe or Plains cultures. They do not mirror them in dress, nor in systems of subsistence, nor in diet, nor in housing, nor in music, nor in art, nor in social structures, nor in leadership structures, nor in family structures, nor in demographics, nor in economics, nor in trade practices, nor in laws, nor in marriage customs, nor in attitudes towards violence, nor in weapons, nor in armor, nor in strategic way of war, nor in battle tactics.

We might say he has added “dashes” of pure fantasy until the “dash” is the entire soup, but the truth is clearly the reverse: Martin has sprinkled a little bit of water on a barrel of salt and called it just a dash of salt. There is no historical root source here, but instead pure fantasy which – because racist stereotypes sometimes connect, in thin and useless ways, to actual history – occasionally, in broken-clock fashion, manages to resemble the real thing.

It seems as though the best we might say of what Martin has right is that these are people who are nomads that ride horses and occasionally shoot bows. The rest – which as you can see from the list above there, is the overwhelming majority – has functionally no connection to the actual historical people. And stunningly, somehow, the show – despite its absolutely massive budget, despite the legions of scrutiny and oversight such a massive venture brings – somehow is even worse, while being just as explicit in tying its bald collection of 1930s racist stereotypes to real people who really exist today.

Instead, the primary inspiration for George R.R. Martin’s Dothraki seems to come from deeply flawed Hollywood depictions of nomadic peoples, rather than any real knowledge about the peoples themselves. The Dothraki are not an amalgam of the Sioux or the Mongols, but rather an amalgam of Stagecoach (1939) and The Conqueror (1956). When it comes to the major attributes of the Dothraki – their singular focus on violent, especially sexual violence, their lack of art or expression, their position as a culture we primarily see “from the outside” as almost uniformly brutal (and in need of literally the whitest of all women to tame and reform it) – what we see is not reflected in the historical people at all but is absolutely of a piece with this Hollywood legacy.

But Martin has done more damage than simply watching The Mongols (1961) would today. He has taken those old, inaccurate, racially tinged stereotypes and repackaged them, with an extra dash of contemporary cynicism to lend them the feeling of “reality” and then used his reputation as a writer of more historically grounded fantasy (a reputation, I think we may say at this point, which ought to be discarded; Martin is an engaging writer but a poor historian) to give those old stereotypes the air of “real history” and how things “really were”. And so, just as Westeros became the vision of the Middle Ages that inhabits the mind of so many people (including quite a few of my students), the Dothraki become the mental model for the Generic Nomad: brutal, sexually violent, uncreative, unartistic, uncivilized.

And as I noted at the beginning of this series, Martin’s fans have understood that framing perfectly well. The argument given by both the creators themselves, often parroted by fans and even repeated by journalists is that A Song of Ice and Fire‘s historical basis is both a strike in favor of the book because they present a “more real” vision of the past but also a flawless defense against any qualms anyone might have over the way that the fiction presents violence (especially its voyeuristic take on sexual violence) or its cultures. No doubt part of you are tired of seeing that same “amalgam” quote over and over again at the beginning of every single one of these essays, but I did that for a reason, because it was essential to note that this assertion is not merely part of the subtext of how Martin presents his work (although it is that too), but part of the actual text of his promotion of his work.

And it is a lie. And I want to be clear here, it is not a misunderstanding. It is not a regrettable implication. It is not an unfortunate blind-spot of ignorance. It is a lie, made repeatedly, now by many people in both the promotion of the books and the show who ought to have known better. And it is a lie that has been believed by millions of fans.

One thing that I hope is clear from this treatment is just how trivial the amount of research I’ve done here was. Certainly, it helped that I was familiar with Steppe nomads already and that I knew who to ask to be pointed in the direction of information. Nevertheless, everything I’ve cited here is available in English and it is all relatively affordable (I actually own all of the books cited here; thanks to my Patrons for making that possible, especially since getting materials from the library is slower in the days of COVID-19; nevertheless, the point here is that they are not obscure tomes). Much of it – Ratchnevsky on Chinggis Khan, Secoy and McGinnis on Great Plains warfare – were already available well before the 1996 publication of A Game of Thrones. 1996 was not some wasteland of ignorance that might have made it impossible for Martin to get good information! For an easy sense of what a dedicated amateur with film connections might have learned in 1996, you could simply watch Ken Burns’ The West, which came out the same year. I am not asking Martin to become a historian (though I am asking him to stop representing himself as something like one), I am asking him to read a historian.

Instead of doing that basic amount of research, or simply saying that the peoples of Essos were made up cultures unconnected with the real thing, Martin and the vast promotional apparatus at HBO opted to lie about some real cultures and then to put hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting that lie.

And I want to be clear, these are real people! I know, depending on where you live, “Mongols” and “Sioux” and “Cheyenne” may feel as distant and fanciful as “Rohirrim” or “Hobbits” or else they may feel like “long-lost” peoples. But these were real people, whose real descendants are alive today. And almost all of them face discrimination and abuse, sometimes informally, sometimes through state action, often as a result of these very lingering racist stereotypes.

In that context, declaring that the Dothraki really do reflect the real world (I cannot stress that enough) cultures of the Plains Native Americans or Eurasian Steppe Nomads is not merely a lie, but it is an irresponsible lie that can do real harm to real people in the real world. And that irresponsible lie has been accepted by Martin’s fans; he has done a grave disservice to his own fans by lying to them in this way. And of course the worst of it is that the lie – backed by the vast apparatus that is HBO prestige television – will have more reach and more enduring influence than this or any number of historical “debunking” essays. It will befuddle the valiant efforts of teachers in their classrooms (and yes, I frequently encounter students hindered by bad pop-pseudo-history they believe to be true; it is often devilishly hard to get students to leave those preconceptions behind), it will plague efforts to educate the public about these cultures of their histories. And it will probably, in the long run, hurt the real descendants of nomads.

But this is exactly why I think it is important for historians to engage with the culture and to engage with depictions like this. Because these lies have consequences and someone ought to at least try to tell the truth. With luck, even with my only rudimentary knowledge, I have done some of that here, by presenting a bit more of the richness and variety of historical (and in some cases, present-day) horse-borne nomadic life, in both North America and Eurasia.

Because there is and was a lot more to nomads than just “that Dothraki horde”.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: That Dothraki Horde, Part IV: Screamers and Howlers”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-01-08.

July 30, 2024

QotD: The Roman Republic and the Social War

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Rome’s tremendous run of victories from 264 to 168 (and beyond) fundamentally changed the nature of the Roman state. The end of the First Punic War (in 241) brought Rome its first overseas province, Sicily which wasn’t integrated into the socii-system that prevailed in Italy. Part of what made the socii-system work is that while Etruscans, Romans, Latins, Samnites, Sabines, S. Italian Greeks and so on had very different languages, religions and cultures, centuries of Italian conflict (and then decades of service in Rome’s armies) had left them with fairly similar military systems, making it relatively easy to plug them in to the Roman army. Moreover, being in Rome’s Italian neighborhood meant that Rome could simply inform the socii of how many troops they were expected to supply that year and the socii could simply show up at the muster at the appointed time (which is how it worked, Plb. 6.21.4). Communities on Sicily (or other far-away places) couldn’t simply walk to the point of muster and might be more difficult to integrate into core Roman army. Moreover, because they were far away and information moves slowly in antiquity, Rome was going to need some sort of permanent representative present in these places anyway, in a way that was simply unnecessary for Italian communities.

Consequently, instead of being added to the system of the socii, these new territories were organized as provinces (which is to say they were assigned to the oversight of a magistrate, that’s what a provincia is, a job, not a place). Instead of contributing troops, they contributed taxes (in money and grain) and the subordination of these communities was much more direct, since communities within a province were still under the command of a magistrate.

We’ll get to the provinces and their role in shaping Roman attitudes towards identity and culture a bit later, but for the various peoples of Roman Italy, the main impact of this shift was to change the balance of rewards for military service. Whereas before most of the gains of conquest were in loot and land – which the socii shared in – now Roman conquests outside of Italy created permanent revenue streams (taxes!) which flowed to Rome only. Roman politicians began attempting to use those revenue streams to provide public goods to the people – land distribution, free military equipment, cheap grain – but these benefits, provided by Rome to its citizens, were unavailable to the socii.

At the same time, as the close of the second century approached, it became clear that the opportunity to march up the ladder of status was breaking down, consumed by the increasingly tense maelstrom of the politics of the Republic. In essence while it was obvious as early as the 120s (and perhaps earlier) that a major citizenship overhaul was needed which would extend some form of Roman citizenship to many of the socii, it seems that everyone in Rome’s political class was conscious that whoever actually did it would – by virtue of consolidating all of those new citizens behind them as a political bloc – gain immensely in the political system. Consequently, repeated efforts in the 120s, the 100s and the 90s failed, caught up in the intensifying gridlock and political dysfunction of Rome in the period.

Consequently, just as Rome’s expanding empire had made citizenship increasingly valuable, actually getting that citizenship was made almost impossible by the gridlock of Rome’s political system gumming up the works of the traditional stepwise march up the ladder of statuses in the Roman alliance.

Finally in 91, after one last effort by Livius Drusus, a tribune of the plebs, failed, the socii finally got fed up and decided to demand with force what decades of politics had denied them. It should be stressed that the motivations behind the resulting conflict, the Social War (91-87), were complex; some Italians revolted for citizenship, some to get rid of the Romans entirely. The sudden uprising by roughly half of the socii at last prompted Rome to act – in 90, the Romans offered citizenship to all of the communities of socii who had stayed loyal (as a way of keeping them so). That offer was quickly extended to rebellious socii who laid down arms and rejoined the Romans. The following year, the citizenship grant was extended to communities which had missed the first one. The willingness to finally extend citizenship won Rome the war, as the socii who had only wanted equality with the Romans, being offered it, switched sides to get it, leaving only a handful of the hardest cases (particularly the Samnites, who never missed an opportunity to rebel against Rome) isolated and vulnerable.

The consequence of the Social War was that the slow process of minting new citizens or of Italian communities slowly moving up the ladder of status was radically accelerated in just a few years. In 95 BC, out of perhaps five million Italians, perhaps one million were Roman citizens (including here men, women and children). By 85 BC, perhaps four million were (with the remainder being almost entirely enslaved persons); the number of Roman citizens had essentially quadrupled overnight. Over time, that momentous decision would lead to a steady cultural drift which would largely erase the differences in languages, religion and culture between the various Italic peoples, but that had not happened yet and so confronted with brutal military necessity, the Romans had once again chose victory through diversity, rather than defeat through homogeneity. The result was a Roman citizen body that was bewilderingly diverse, even by Roman standards.

(Please note that the demographic numbers here are very approximate and rounded. There is a robust debate about the population of Roman Italy, which it isn’t worth getting in to here. For anyone wanting the a recent survey of the questions, L. de Ligt, Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers: Studies in the Demographic History of Roman Italy 225 BC – AD 100 (2012) is the place to start, but be warned that Roman demography is pretty technical and detail oriented and functionally impossible to make beginner-friendly.)

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part II: Citizens and Allies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-06-25.

July 24, 2024

QotD: The “strategic defensive” approach to the attrition battles of WW1

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Well, perhaps you say, that is a bit simplistic; what if we go on a strategic defensive – adopting a strategy of attrition? Note we are fairly far now from the idea that the easy solution to trench warfare was “don’t attack”, but this is the first time we reach what appears on its face to be a workable strategy: accept that this is a pure war of attrition and thus attempt to win the attrition.

And here is where I, the frustrated historian, let out the primal cry: “They did that! Those ‘idiot’ generals you were bashing on a moment ago did exactly this thing, they did it in 1916 and it didn’t work.”

As Robert Doughty (op. cit.) notes quite effectively, after the desperate search in 1915 for ways either around the trench stalemate or through it (either way trying to restore a war of maneuver), Joseph Joffre, French chief of the army staff, settled on a strategic plan coordinating British, Italian, French and Russian actions designed around a strategy of “rupture” by which what was meant was that if all of the allies focused on attrition in each of their various theaters, eventually one theater would break for lack of resources (that’s the rupture). He was pretty damn explicit about this, writing about the war as a “struggle of attrition” in May, 1915 and setting a plan of action in December of 1915 to “do everything they can to attrit the adversary”.

Joffre’s plan did not go perfectly (the German offensive at Verdun upset the time-tables) but it did, in fact mean lower French losses in 1916 than in 1915 or 1914 and more severe German losses. Meanwhile, the German commander, Erich von Falkenhayn would at least subsequently claim to have been trying to do the same thing: achieve favorable casualty ratios in a war of attrition, with his set piece being the Battle of Verdun, designed to draw the French into bloody and useless repeated counter-attacks on ground that favored the Germans (there remains a lot of argument and uncertainty as to if that attritional strategy was the original plan, or merely Falkenhayn’s excuse for the failure to achieve meaningful strategic objectives at Verdun). In the end, the Verdun strategy, if that was the strategy, failed because while the Germans could get their favorable ratio on the attack, it slipped away from them in the inevitable French counter-attacks.

But as Clausewitz reminds us (drink!) will – both political and popular – is a factor in war too (indeed, it is one of the factors as part of the Clausewitzian trinity!). Both Joffre and Falkenhayn had to an extent seen that the war was going to run until one side ran out of soldiers and material and aimed to win that long, gruelling war; for which they were both promptly fired! The solution to the war which said that all one needed to do was sacrifice a few more million soldiers and wait 2, or perhaps 3 or maybe even 4 more years for the enemy to run out first was unacceptable to either the political leaders or the public. 1917 came around and both sides entrusted the war to generals who claimed to be able to produce victories faster than that: to Robert Nivelle and Erich Ludendorff, with their plans of bold offensives.

And to be clear, from a pure perspective of “how do we win the war” that political calculation is not entirely wrong. Going to the public, asking them to send their sons to fight, to endure more rationing, more shortages, more long casualty lists with the explanation that you had no plans to win the war beyond running Germany out of sons slightly faster than you ran France out of sons would have led to the collapse of public morale (and subsequent defeat). Telling your army that would hardly be good for their morale either (the French army would mutiny in 1917 in any event). Remember that in each battle, casualties were high on both sides so there was no avoiding that adopting an attrition strategy towards the enemy meant also accepting that same attrition on your own troops.

And, as we’ve discussed endlessly, morale matters in war! “Wait for the British blockade to win the war by starving millions of central Europeans to death” was probably, in a cold calculus, the best strategy (after the true winning strategy of “don’t have a World War I”), but it was also, from a political perspective, an unworkable one. And a strategy which is the best except for being politically unworkable is not the best because generals must operate in the real world, not in a war game where they may cheerfully disregard questions of will. In short, both sides attempted a strategy of pure attrition on the Western Front and in both cases, the strategy exhausted political will years before it could have borne fruit.

And so none of these easy solutions work; in most cases (except for “recruit a lost Greek demi-god”) they were actually tried and failed either due to the dynamics (or perhaps, more truthfully, the statics) of trench warfare or because they proved impossible implement from a morale-and-politics perspective, violating the fundamental human need to see an end to the war that didn’t involve getting nearly everyone killed first.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part I: The Trench Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-17.

July 18, 2024

QotD: Culture in the late western Roman Empire

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This vision of the collapse of Roman political authority in the West may seem a bit strange to readers who grew up on the popular narrative which still imagines the “Fall of Rome” as a great tide of “barbarians” sweeping over the empire destroying everything in their wake. It’s a vision that remains dominant in popular culture (indulged, for instance, in games like Total War: Attila; we’ve already talked about how strategy games in particular tend to embrace this a-historical annihilation-and-replacement model of conquest). But actually culture is one of the areas where the “change and continuity” crowd have their strongest arguments: finding evidence for continuity in late Roman culture into the early Middle Ages is almost trivially easy. The collapse of Roman authority did not mark a clean cultural break from the past, but rather another stage in a process of cultural fusion and assimilation which had been in process for some time.

The first thing to remember, as we’ve already discussed, is that the population of the Roman Empire itself was hardly uniform. Rather the Roman empire as it violently expanded, had absorbed numerous peoples – Celtiberians, Iberians, Greeks, Gauls, Syrians, Egyptians, and on and on. Centuries of subsequent Roman rule had led to a process of cultural fusion, whereby those people began to think of themselves as Romani – Romans – as they both adopted previously Roman cultural elements and their Roman counterparts adopted provincial culture elements (like trousers!).

In particular, by the fifth century, the majority of these self-described Romani, including the overwhelming majority of elites, had already adopted a provincial religion: Christianity, which had in turn become the Roman religion and a core marker of Roman identity by the fifth century. Indeed, the word paganus, increasingly used in this period to refer to the remaining non-Christian population, had a root-meaning of something like “country bumpkin”, reflecting the degree to which for Roman elites and indeed many non-elites, the last fading vestiges of the old Greek and Roman religions were seen as out of touch. Of course Christianity itself came from the fringes of the Empire – a strange mystery cult from the troubled frontier province of Judaea in the Levant which had slowly grown until it had become the dominant religion of the empire, receiving official imperial favor and preference.

The arrival of the “barbarians” didn’t wipe away that fusion culture. With the exception of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who eventually ended up in England, the new-comers almost uniformly learned the language of the Roman west – Latin – such that their descendants living in those lands, in a sense still speak it, in its modern forms: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, etc. alongside more than a dozen local regional dialects. All are derived from Latin (and not, one might note, from the Germanic languages that the Goths, Vandals, Franks and so on would have been speaking when they crossed the Roman frontier).

They also adopted the Roman religion, Christianity. I suspect sometimes the popular imagination – especially the one that comes with those extraordinarily dumb “Christian dark age” graphs – is that when the “barbarians invade” the Romans were still chilling in their Greco-Roman temples, which the “barbarians” burned down. But quite to the contrary – the Romans were the ones shutting down the old pagan temples at the behest of the now Christian Roman emperors, who busied themselves building beautiful and marvelous churches (a point The Bright Ages makes very well in its first chapter).

The “barbarians” didn’t tear down those churches – they built more of them. There was some conflict here – many of the Germanic peoples who moved into the Roman Empire had been converted to Christianity before they did so (again, the Angles and Saxons are the exception here, converting after arrival), but many of them had been converted through a bishop, Ulfilias, from Constantinople who held to a branch of Christian belief called “Arianism” which was regarded as heretical by the Roman authorities. The “barbarians” were thus, at least initially, the wrong sort of Christian and this did cause friction in the fifth century, but by the end of the sixth century nearly all of these new kingdoms created in the wake of the collapse of Roman authority were not only Christian, but had converted to the officially accepted Roman “Chalcedonian” Christianity. We’ll come back later to the idea of the Church as an institution, but for now as a cultural marker, it was adopted by the “barbarians” with aplomb.

Artwork also sees the clear impact of cultural fusion. Often this transition is, I think, misunderstood by students whose knowledge of artwork essentially “skips” Late Antiquity, instead jumping directly from the veristic Roman artwork of the late republic and the idealizing artwork of the early empire directly to the heavily stylized artwork of Carolingian period and leads some to conclude that the fall of Rome made the artists “bad”. There are two problems: the decline here isn’t in quality and moreover the change didn’t happen with the fall of the Roman Empire but quite a bit earlier. […]

Late Roman artwork shows a clear shift into stylization, the representation of objects in a simplified, conventional way. You are likely familiar with many modern, highly developed stylized art forms; the example I use with my students is anime. Anime makes no effort at direct realism – the lines and shading of characters are intentionally simplified, but also bodies are intentionally drawn at the wrong proportions, with oversized faces and eyes and sometimes exaggerated facial expressions. That doesn’t mean it is bad art – all of that stylization is purposeful and requires considerable skill – the large faces, simple lines and big expressions allow animated characters to convey more emotion (at a minimum of animation budget).

Late Roman artwork moves the same way, shifting from efforts to portray individuals as real-to-life as possible (to the point where one can recognize early emperors by their facial features in sculpture, a task I had to be able to perform in some of my art-and-archaeology graduate courses) to efforts to portray an idealized version of a figure. No longer a specific emperor – though some identifying features might remain – but the idea of an emperor. Imperial bearing rendered into a person. That trend towards stylization continues into religious art in the early Middle Ages for the same reason: the figures – Jesus, Mary, saints, and so on – represent ideas as much as they do actual people and so they are drawn in a stylized way to serve as the pure expressions of their idealized nature. Not a person, but holiness, sainthood, charity, and so on.

And it really only takes a casual glance at the artwork I’ve been sprinkling through this section to see how early medieval artwork, even out through the Carolingians (c. 800 AD) owes a lot to late Roman artwork, but also builds on that artwork, particularly by bringing in artistic themes that seem to come from the new arrivals – the decorative twisting patterns and scroll-work which often display the considerable technical skill of an artist (seriously, try drawing some of that free-hand and you suddenly realize that graceful flowing lines in clear symmetrical patterns are actually really hard to render well).

All of the cultural fusion was effectively unavoidable. While we can’t know their population with any certainty, the “barbarians” migrating into the faltering western Empire who would eventually make up the ruling class of the new kingdoms emerging from its collapse seem fairly clearly to have been minorities in the lands they settled into (with the notable exception, again, of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes – as we’re going to see this pattern again and again, Britain has an unusual and rather more traumatic path through this period than much of the rest of Roman Europe). They were, to a significant degree, as Guy Halsall (op. cit.) notes, melting into a sea of Gallo-Romans, or Italo-Romans, or Ibero-Romans.

Even Bryan Ward-Perkins, one of the most vociferous members of the decline-and-fall camp, in his explosively titled The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005) – this is a book whose arguments we will come back to in some detail – is forced to concede that “even in Britain the incomers [sic] had not dispossessed everyone” of their land, but rather “the invaders entered the empire in groups that were small enough to leave plenty to share with the locals” (66-7). No vast replacement wave this, instead the new and old ended up side by side. Indeed, Odoacer, seizing control of Italy in 476, we are told, redistributed a third of the land; it’s unclear if this meant the land itself or the tax revenue on it, but in either case clearly the majority of the land remained in the hands of the locals which, by this point in the development of the Roman countryside, will have mostly meant in the hands of the local aristocracy.

Instead, as Ralph Mathisen documents in Roman aristocrats in barbarian Gaul: strategies for survival in an age of transition (1993), most of the old Roman aristocracy seems to have adapted to their changing rulers. As we’ll discuss next week, the vibrant local government of the early Roman empire had already substantially atrophied before the “barbarians” had even arrived, so for local notables who were rich but nevertheless lived below the sort of mega-wealth that could make one a player on the imperial stage, little real voice in government was lost when they traded a distant, unaccountable imperial government for a close-by, unaccountable “barbarian” one. Instead, as Mathisen notes, some of the Gallo-Roman elite retreat into their books and estates, while more are co-opted into the administration of these new breakaway kingdoms, who after all need literate administrators beyond what the “barbarians” can provide. Mathisen notes that in other cases, Gallo-Roman aristocrats with ambitions simply transferred those ambitions from the older imperial hierarchy to the newer ecclesiastical one; we’ll talk more about the church as an institution next week. Distinct in the fifth century, by the end of the sixth century in Gaul, the two aristocracies: the barbarian warrior-aristocracy and the Gallo-Roman civic aristocracy had melded into one, intermarried and sharing the same religion, values and culture.

In this sense there really is a very strong argument to be made that the “Romans” and indeed Roman culture never left Rome’s lost western provinces – the collapse of the political order did not bring with it the collapse of the Roman linguistic or cultural sphere, even if it did fragment it.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part I: Words”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-01-14.

July 12, 2024

QotD: Membership in the Senate during the Roman Republic

Filed under: Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This week, we’re looking at the Roman Senate, an institution so important that it is included alongside the people of Rome in the SPQR formulation that the Romans used to represent the republic, and yet also paradoxically it is an institution that lacks any kind of formal legal powers.

Despite that lack of formal powers, the Senate of the Roman Republic largely directed the overall actions of the republic, coordinating its strategic policy (both military and diplomatic), setting priorities for legislation, handling Rome’s finances and assigning and directing the actions of the various magistrates. The Senate – not the Pontifex Maximus1 – was also the final authority for questions of religion. The paradox exists because the Senate’s power is almost entirely based in its auctoritas and the strong set of political norms and cultural assumptions which push Romans to defer to that auctoritas [the Mos maiorum].

[…]

We should start with who is in the Senate. Now what you will generally hear in survey courses is this neat summary: the Senate had 300 members (600 after Sulla) and included all Romans who had obtained the office of the quaestorship or higher and its members were selected by the censors. And for a basic summary, that actually serves pretty well, but thinking about it for a few minutes one quickly realizes that there must be quite a bit of uncertainty and complexity underneath those neat easy rules. And indeed, there is!

First we can start with eligibility by holding office. We know that in the Sullan constitution, holding the quaestorship entitled one into entrance into the Senate. Lintott notes that the lex repetundarum of 123/4 lumped every office aedile-and-above together in a phrasing “anyone who has or shall have been in the Senate” when setting eligibility for the juries for the repetundae courts (the aim being to exclude the magistrate class from judging itself on corruption charges), and so assumes that prior to Sulla, it was aediles and up (but not quaestors) who were entitled to be in the Senate.2 The problem immediately occurs: these higher offices don’t provide enough members to reach the frequently attested 300-Senator size of the Senate with any reasonable set of life expectancies.

By contrast, if we assume that the quaestors were enrolled in the Senate, as we know them to have been post-Sulla (Cicero is a senator for sure in 73, having been quaestor in 75), we have eight quaestors a year elected around age 30 each with roughly 30 years of life expectancy3 we get a much more reasonable 240, to which we might add some holders of senior priesthoods who didn’t go into politics and the ten sitting tribunes and perhaps a few reputable scions of important families selected by the censors to reach 300 without too much difficulty. The alternative is to assume the core membership of the Senate was aediles and up, which would provide only around 150 members, in which case the censors would have to supplement that number with important, reputable Romans.

To which we may then ask: who might they choose? The obvious candidates would be … current and former quaestors and plebeian tribunes. And so we end up with a six-of-one, half-dozen of the other situation, where it is possible that quaestors were not automatically enrolled before Sulla, but were customarily chosen by the censors to “fill out” the Senate. Notably, when Sulla wants to expand the Senate, he radically expands (to twenty) the number of quaestors, which in turn provides roughly enough Senators for his reported 600-person Senate.

That leads us to the role of the censors: if holding a sufficiently high office (be it the quaestorship or aedileship) entitles one to membership for life in the Senate, what on earth is the role of the censors in selecting the Senate’s membership? Here the answer is in the sources for us: we repeatedly see the formula that the meetings of the Senate were attended by two groups: the Senators themselves and “those who are permitted to state their opinion in the Senate”. Presumably the distinction here is between men designated as senators by the censors and men not yet so designated who nevertheless, by virtue of office-holding, have a right to speak in the Senate. It’s also plausible that men who were still iuniores might not yet be Senators (whose very name, after all, implies old age; Senator has at its root senex, “old man”) or perhaps men still under the potestas of a living father (who thus could hardly be one of the patres conscripti, a standard term for Senators) might be included in the latter group.

In any case, the censors seem to have three roles here. First, they confirm the membership in the Senate of individuals entitled to it by having held high office. Second, they can fill out an incomplete Senate with additional Roman aristocrats so that it reaches the appropriate size. Finally, they can remove a Senator for moral turpitude, though this is rare and it is clear that the conduct generally needed to be egregious.

In this way, we get a Senate that is as our sources describe: roughly 300 members at any given time (brought to the right number every five years by the censors), consisting mostly of former office holders (with some add-ons) who have held offices at or above the quaestorship and whose membership has been approved by the censors, though office holders might enter the Senate – provisionally, as it were – immediately pending censorial confirmation at a later date. If it seems like I am giving short shrift to the “filling the rank” add-ons the censors might provide, it is because – as we’ll see in a moment – Senate procedure combined with Roman cultural norms was likely to render them quite unimportant. The role of senior ex-magistrates in the Senate was to speak, the role of junior ex-magistrates (and certainly of any senator who had not held high office!) was to listen and indicate concurrence with a previously expressed opinion, as we’re going to see when we get to procedure.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Roman Republic 101, Part IV: The Senate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-09-22.

    1. I stress this point because this is a common mistake: assuming that the Pontifex Maximus as Rome’s highest priest was in some way the “boss” of all of Rome’s other priests. He was not; he was the presiding officer of the college of Pontiffs and the manager of the calendar (this was a very significant role), but the Pontifex Maximus was not the head of some priestly hierarchy and his power over the other pontifices was limited. Moreover his power over other religious officials (the augures, haruspices, the quindecimviri sacris faciundis and so on) was very limited. Instead, these figures report to the Senate, though the Senate will generally defer to the judgment of the pontifices.

    2. With sitting tribunes able to attend meetings of the Senate, but not being granted lifelong membership.

    3. A touch higher than the 24 years a L3 Model West life table (what we generally use to simulate Roman populations) leads us to expect, but then these are elites who are likely to be well nourished and not in hazardous occupations, so they might live a bit longer.

July 6, 2024

QotD: The Roman Republic at war … many wars … many simultaneous wars

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

With the end of the Third Samnite War in 290 and the Pyrrhic War in 275, Rome’s dominance of Italy and the alliance system it constructed was effectively complete. This was terribly important because the century that would follow, stretching from the start of the First Punic War in 264 to the end of the Third Macedonian War in 168 (one could argue perhaps even to the fall of Numantia in 133) put the Roman military system and the alliance that underpinned it to a long series of sore tests. This isn’t the place for a detailed recounting of the wars of this period, but in brief, Rome would fight major wars with three of the four other Mediterranean great powers: Carthage (264-241, 218-201, 149-146), Antigonid Macedon (214-205, 200-196, 172-168, 150-148) and the Seleucid Empire (192-188), while at the same time engaged in a long series of often quite serious wars against non-state peoples in Cisalpine Gaul (modern north Italy) and Spain, among others. It was a century of iron and blood that tested the Roman system to the breaking point.

It certainly cannot be said of this period that the Romans always won the battles (though they won more than their fair share, they also lost some very major ones quite badly) or that they always had the best generals (though, again, they tended to fare better than average in this department). Things did not always go their way; whole armies were lost in disastrous battles, whole fleets dashed apart in storms. Rome came very close at points to defeat; in 242, the Roman treasury was bankrupt and their last fleet financed privately for lack of funds (Plb. 1.59.6-7). During the Second Punic War, at one point the Roman censors checked the census records of every Roman citizen liable for conscription and found only 2,000 men of prime military age (out of perhaps 200,000 or so; Taylor (2020), 27-41 has a discussion of the various reconstructions of Roman census figures here) who hadn’t served in just the previous four years (Liv. 24.18.8-9). In essence the Romans had drafted everyone who could be drafted (and the 2,000 remainders were stripped of citizenship on the almost certainly correct assumption that the only way to not have been drafted in those four years but also not have a recorded exemption was intentional draft-dodging).

And the military demands made on Roman armies and resources were exceptional. Roman forces operated as far east as Anatolia and as far west as Spain at the same time. Livy, who records the disposition of Roman forces on a year-for-year basis during much of this period (we are uncommonly well informed about the back half of the period because those books of Livy mostly survive), presents some truly preposterous Roman dispositions. Brunt (Italian Manpower (1971), 422) figures that the Romans must have had something like 225,000 men under arms (Romans and socii) each year between 214 and 212, immediately following a series of three crushing defeats in which the Romans probably lost close to 80,000 men. I want to put that figure in perspective for a moment: Alexander the Great invaded the entire Persian Empire with an army of 43,000 infantry and 5,500 cavalry. The Romans, having lost close to Alexander’s entire invasion force twice over, immediately raised more than four times as many men and kept fighting.

These armies were split between a bewildering array of fronts (e.g. Liv 24.10 or 25.3): multiple armies in southern Italy (against Hannibal and rebellious socii now supporting him), northern Italy (against the Cisalpine Gauls, who also backed Hannibal) and Sicily (where Syracuse threatened revolt) and Spain (a Carthaginian possession) and Illyria (fighting the Antigonids) and with fleets active in both the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian Sea supporting those operations. And of course a force defending Rome itself because did I mention Hannibal was in Italy?

If you will pardon me embellishing a Babylon 5 quote, “Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts.” And apparently, only the Romans would then win that war anyway.

(I should note that, for those interested in reading up on this, the state-of-the-art account of Rome’s ability to marshal these truly incredible amounts of resources and especially men is the aforementioned, M. Taylor, Soldiers & Silver (2020), which presents the consensus position of scholars better than anything else out there. I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that my own book project takes aim at this consensus and hopes to overturn parts of it, but seeing as how my book isn’t done, for now Taylor holds the field (also it’s a good book which is why I recommended it)).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part II: Citizens and Allies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-06-25.

June 30, 2024

QotD: The use of pictorial and archaeological evidence in studying the ancient world

Filed under: Europe, History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What about pictures? We call this representational evidence. Representational evidence can be quite good at telling you what something looked like (but beware of artistic conventions!), but is of course little help for the names-and-dates kind of historical work. The larger problem though is that representational evidence especially becomes difficult to interpret without literary or archaeological evidence backing it up. The problem of correlating an image to a specific person or object can be very hard (by way of example, the endless debates about what is meant by kotthybos in the Amphipolis military regulations). Representational evidence gets a lot more useful if you can say, “Ah, X depicts Z events from B-literary-source” but obviously to do that you need to have B-Literary-Source and B is going to do most of the heavy lifting. To see just how hard it can be to use representational evidence without a robust surviving literary tradition, one merely needs to look at work on pre-historic Gaul (it’s hard!).

Which brings us at last to the big dog, archaeological evidence (although all of the aforementioned also show up in the archaeological record). Archaeology is wonderful, easily the biggest contributor to the improvement in our knowledge of the ancient world over the last century; my own research relies heavily on archaeological evidence. And the best part of it is we are getting more and better archaeological evidence all the time. Some archaeological finds are truly spectacular, like the discovery of the remains of the wrecks from the Battle of the Aegates Islands (241), the decisive engagement that ended Rome’s first war with Carthage (underwater archaeology in general in a young part of archaeology, which is itself a young field so we may well expect more marvels to come).

But (you knew there would be a but), archaeological evidence is really only able to answer certain specific questions and most research topics are simply not archaeologically visible. If your research question is related to what objects were at a specific place at a given time (objects here being broad; “pots” or “houses” or “farms” or even “people” if you are OK with those people being dead), good news, archaeology can help you (probably). But if your research question does not touch on that, you are mostly out of luck. If your object of study doesn’t leave any archaeological evidence … then it doesn’t leave any evidence. Most plagues, wars, famines, rulers, laws simply do not have archaeologically visible impacts, while social values, opinions, beliefs don’t leave archaeological evidence in any case.

Take, for instance, our evidence for the Cult of Mithras in the Roman Empire. This religion leaves us archaeological evidence in the form of identifiable ritual sanctuaries (“mithraeums“). Archaeology can tell us a lot about the normal size and structure of these places, but it can’t tell us much about what people there believed, or what rituals they did, or who they were, with only a handful of exceptions, which is why so much of what we think we might know about Mithraism is still very speculative.

Moreover, archaeology only works for objects that leave archaeological remains! Different materials preserve at different rates. Ceramic and stone? Great! Metals? Less great; these tend to get melted down when they don’t rust. Wood or textiles? Worse, almost never survives. This is why we have so much data on loom weights (stone, ceramic) but less on looms (wood, textile), and so much data on spindle whorls (stone, ceramic) but less on spindle-sticks or distaffs (wood). Compounding this are preservation accidents, in that things that survive tend to be things thrown away or buried with bodies and those practices will impact your archaeological record.

But the best part about archaeology is that it has network effects, which is to say that the more archaeology we do, the more useful each find becomes. New discoveries help to date and understand old discoveries and with lots of archaeological evidence, you can do really neat things like charting trade networks or changing land-use patterns. The problem is that you really do need a lot to generate a representative sample so you know you aren’t wrongly extrapolating from exceptions, and for right now, only the best excavated regions (Italy, to a lesser extent Greece and Egypt) are at the point where we can talk about, for instance, changing patterns of land use and population with any detail. And even then, uncertainties are huge.

Finally, archaeology, like everything else, works best with literary evidence. Take, for example, pre-Roman Gaul. The Gauls, due to their deposition practices are very archaeologically visible. Rich burial assemblages, large ritual deposits and archaeologically visible hill-fort settlements mean that the archaeological record for pre-Roman Gaul is very robust (in some cases more robust that the equivalent Roman context; we can be far more confident about the shape and construction of Gallic weapons than contemporary Roman ones, for instance). But effectively no literary sources for Gaul until contact with the Romans and Greeks. Consequently, almost everything about their values, culture, social organization in the pre-Roman period is speculative, with enormous numbers of questions and few answers.

If you want to ask me, “When did the Gauls shift to using longer swords” I can tell you with remarkable precision, in some cases, region by region (but generally c. 250 BC, with the trend intensifying in the late second century). But if you want to ask, “what was it like to rule a Gallic polity in c. 250 BC?” The best we can do is reason from what we see Caesar describing in c. 50 BC and hope that was typical two hundred years earlier.

Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: March 26, 2021 (On the Nature of Ancient Evidence”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-03-26.

June 24, 2024

QotD: Raid warfare on the Eurasian Steppes and on the Great Plains

Filed under: Americas, Asia, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The other strategic aim nomads might fight over is for the acquisition of some kind of movable good, which is to say raiding for stuff. Because all of the warriors (which is generally to say all of the free adult males) of these societies are mounted and because they have a subsistence system which allows rapid, relatively along distance movements (often concealed; remember that Mongols need not light any camp fires), nomads make fearsome raiders, able to strike, grab the things they are looking for and quickly retreat before a counterattack can be mobilized. That goes just as well for raiding each other as it does for raiding the farmers at the edges of the grasslands.

But what are the things here that they are aiming to get? It depends on the targets; nomadic raids into the settled zone generally aim to capture the goods that agrarian societies produce which nomadic societies do not: stocks of cereal crops, metal goods and luxury goods. But most nomadic raiding was directed against other nomads, seeking to acquire either people or animals.

On the Great Plains, the animals in question were invariably horses; the act of stealing, or “cutting out” a horse gives McGinnis part of the title of his book (Counting Coup and Cutting Horses) and raids for horses dominate both McGinnis and Secoy’s discussion of Plains Native American warfare. Horses were, after all, a scarce commodity which only percolated into the Great Plains from the South (and which could only be raised in quantity in its southern reaches), but which all tribes required both to hunt and fight effectively. Stealing enemy horses thus both strengthened your tribe while weakening your enemies, both in military and subsistence terms. The Mongols also engaged in quite a lot of raiding for horses, but also – in a pastoral subsistence system – a lot of simple cattle rustling as well (e.g. Ratchnevsky, op. cit., 28-31).

Raiding for people is more complex, but undeniably part of this system of warfare. But crucially this raiding was generally not for slave-trading (though there are exceptions which I discussed last time), but instead incorporative raiding. What I mean by that is that the intent in gaining captives in the raid was to incorporate those captives, either as full or subordinate members, into the nomadic community doing the raiding. Remember: the big tribe is the safe tribe, so incorporating new members is a good way to improve security in the long run.

On the Eurasian Steppe, incorporated captives became the ötögus bo’ol “bonded serfs” that we mentioned previously (Ratchnevsky, op. cit., 12-4). Unlike warfare on the Great Plains, it seems possible for the bo’ol to include adult men, either captured or sold (by destitute parents) as children or else taken as prisoners when their tribe or clan was essentially dissolved by being conquered in war. Indeed, in his own conquests, Chinggis only decreed the annihilation of one tribe, the Mongols’ traditional enemies, the Tatars – there he ordered the death of any Tatar male taller than the linchpin of an oxcart (May, Mongols, 12). In other cases, it is clear that the incorporation of defeated nomad warriors into the successful tribe was fairly normal, though raids to capture women and children (also for incorporation) were just as common. Bride abduction in particular was very common on the Steppe, as Ratchnevsky notes (op. cit., 34-5).

The incorporation of males was far less common in Great Plains Native American warfare, but the capture of women and children to enhance tribal strength in the long term was a core objective in raiding. McGinnis (op. cit., 42-3) notes how the Crow, after suffering a massive defeat in the early 1820s which resulted in the deaths of many warriors and the capture of perhaps several hundred women and children, steadily built their tribe back up over the following decades with an intentional strategy of capturing women and children from their enemies. As McGinnis (op. cit., 24) notes, women captured in this way might be married into the capturing tribe, adopted into it, or sometimes kept as an enslaved laborer (under quite bad conditions). Adult males, by contrast, were almost always killed; unlike on the Steppe, the incorporation of formerly hostile warriors doesn’t seem to have been considered possible (though one wonders if this would have become cultural practice given enough time; both McGinnis and Secoy note how the increasing lethality of warfare post-gun/horse led to slow population decline overall, which may, had the system run without outside interference long enough, led to the emergence of norms more closely resembling the Eurasian Steppe. We should keep in mind that the Eurasian horse-system had many centuries to sort itself out, whereas the North American horse-system was essentially strangled in its crib).

Of course, taken together with the previous discussion of territorial warfare, we can see that all of these raids have a double purpose: they both aim to acquire resources (horses, sheep, humans) and at the same time inflict damage on an opponent with the long-term goal of forcing that enemy to move further away, opening their pastures or hunting grounds for exploitation by the victorious tribe. Thus in the long-term, each successful raid is intended to build a sense of threat which eventually results in territorial gains (though in cases of real power asymmetry, the long term could come very rapidly; people aren’t stupid and if you are being raided by a clearly superior opponent, you are likely to move on before you lose everything of value).

Squaring the ugly reality of nomadic raiding with [George R.R.] Martin’s depiction [of his nomadic Dothraki] is tricky. On the one hand, a raid in which exceptional victory results in enemy women and children taken captive and fit adult males slain fits within either the Great Plains Native American or Steppe nomad military tradition. On the other hand, the immediate declaration by Drogo’s men that female captives taken this way are not marriageable (AGoT, 559; the idea is treated as laughable) and the killing of all of the very valuable livestock (which, even if the Dothraki are not herdsmen, these animals could be eaten, or quite easily driven to a place where they could be sold or traded for other resources, like metalwork) suggests that Martin has not understood why those raids happened. Instead, it seems like his imagination is only able to view these raids from the perspective of the settled people on the receiving end.

Instead, Martin’s understanding of Native American warfare seems not conditioned by any actual Native Americans, but rather by Hollywood depictions of Native Americans during the Hollywood “Golden Age” which were in turn conditioned by sensational accounts of Western settlers who themselves didn’t understand how Native American warfare worked on the Great Plains. As we will see, the Game of Thrones showrunners took that unfortunate subtext when making the show itself, and turned it into actual text.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: That Dothraki Horde, Part IV: Screamers and Howlers”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-01-08.

June 18, 2024

QotD: The peoples incorporated or “allied” to Rome in the Republic’s Italian expansion

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Italy, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In one way, pre-Roman Italy was quite a lot like Greece: it consisted of a bunch of independent urban communities situated on the decent farming land (that is the lowlands), with a number of less-urban tribal polities stretching over the less-farming-friendly uplands. While pre-Roman urban communities weren’t exactly like the Greek polis, they were fairly similar. Greek colonization beginning in the eighth century added actual Greek poleis to the Italian mix and frankly they fit in just fine. On the flip side, there were the Samnites, a confederation of tribal communities with some smaller towns occupying mostly rough uplands not all that dissimilar to the Greek Aetolians, a confederation of tribal communities and smaller towns occupying mostly rough uplands.

In one very important way, pre-Roman Italy was very much not like Greece: whereas in Greece all of those communities shared a single language, religion and broad cultural context, Roman Italy was a much more culturally complex place. Consequently, as the Romans slowly absorbed pre-Roman Italy into the Roman Italy of the Republic, that meant managing the truly wild variety of different peoples in their alliance system. Let’s quickly go through them all, moving from North to South.

The Romans called the region south of the Alps but north of the Rubicon River Cisalpine Gaul and while we think of it as part of Italy, the Romans did not. That said, Gallic peoples had pushed into Italy before and a branch of the Senones occupied the lands between Ariminum and Ancona. Although Gallic peoples were always a factor in Italy, the Romans don’t seem to have incorporated their communities as socii; indeed the Romans were generally at their most ruthless when it came to interactions with Gallic peoples (despite the tendency to locate the “unassimilable” people on the Eastern edge of Rome’s empire, it was in fact the Gauls that the Romans most often considered in this way, though as we will see, wrongly so). That’s not to say that there was no cultural contact, of course; the Romans ended up adopting almost all of the Gallic military equipment set, for instance. In any event, it wouldn’t be until the late first century BCE that Cisalpine Gaul was merged into Italy proper, so we won’t deal too much with the Gauls just yet. I do want to note that, when we are thinking about the diversity of the place, even to speak of “the Gauls” is to be terribly reductive, as we are really thinking of at least half a dozen different Gallic peoples (Senones, Boii, Inubres, Lingones, etc) along with the Ligures and the Veneti, who may have been blends of Gallic and Italic peoples (though we are more poorly informed about both than we’d like).

Moving south then, we first meet the Etruscans, who we’ve already discussed, their communities – independent cities joined together in defensive confederations before being converted into allies of the Romans – clustered on north-western coast of Italy. They had a language entirely unrelated to Latin – or indeed, any other known language – and their own unique religion and culture. The Romans adopted some portions of that culture (in particular the religious practices) but the Etruscans remained distinct well into the first century. While a number of Etruscan communities backed the Samnites in the Third Samnite War (298-290 BC) culminating in the Battle of Sentinum (295) as a last-ditch effort to prevent Roman hegemony over the peninsula, the Etruscans subsequently remained quite loyal to Rome, holding with the Romans in both the Second Punic and Social Wars. It is important to keep in mind that while we tend to talk about “the Etruscans” (as the Romans sometimes do) they would have thought of themselves first through their civic identity, as Perusines, Clusians, Populinians and so on (much like their Greek contemporaries).

Moving further south, we have the peoples of the Apennines (the mountain range that cuts down the center of Italy). The people of the northern Apennines were the Umbri (that is, Umbrian speakers), though this linguistic classification hides further cultural and political differences. We’ve met the Sabines – one such group, but there were also the Volsci and Marsi (the latter particularly well known for being hard fighters as allies to Rome; Appian reports that the Marsi had a saying prior to the Social War, “No Triumph against the Marsi nor without the Marsi”). Further south along the Apennines were the Oscan speakers, most notably the Samnites (who resisted the Romans most strongly) but also the Lucanians and Paelignians (the latter also get a reputation for being hard fighters, particularly in Livy). The Umbrian and Oscan language families are related (though about as different from each other as Italian from Spanish; they and Latin are not generally mutually intelligible) and there does seem to have been some cultural commonality between these two large groups, but also a lot of differences. Their religion included a number of practices and gods unknown to the Romans, some later adopted (Oscan Flosa adapted as Latin Flora, goddess of flowers) and some not (e.g. the “Sacred Spring” rite, Strabo 5.4.12).

Also Oscan speakers, the Campanians settled in Campania (surprise!) at some early point (perhaps around 1000-900 BC) and by the fifth century were living in urban communities politically more similar to Latium and Etruria (or Greece, which will make sense in a moment) than their fellow Oscan speakers in the hills above, to the point that the Campanians turned to Rome to aid them against the also-Oscan-speaking Samnites. The leading city of the Campanians was Capua, but as Fronda (op. cit.) notes, they were meaningful divisions among them; Capua’s very prominence meant that many of the other Campanians were aligned against it, a division the Romans exploited.

The Oscans struggled for territory in Southern Italy with the Greeks – told you we’d get to them. The Greeks founded colonies along the southern part of Italy, expelling or merging with the local inhabitants beginning in the seventh century. These Greek colonies have distinctive material culture (though the Italic peoples around them often adopted elements of it they found useful), their own language (Greek), and their own religion. I want to stress here that Greek religion is not equivalent to Roman religion, to the point that the Romans are sticklers about which gods are worshipped with Roman rites and which are worshipped with the ritus graecus (“Greek rites”) which, while not a point-for-point reconstruction of Greek rituals, did involve different dress, different interpretations of omens, and so on.

All of these peoples (except the Gauls) ended up in Rome’s alliance system, fighting as socii in Rome’s wars. The point of all of this is that this wasn’t an alliance between, say, the Romans and the “Italians” with the latter being really quite a lot like the Romans except not being from Rome. Rather, Rome had constructed a hegemony (an “alliance” in name only, as I hope we’ve made clear) over (::deep breath::) Latins, Romans, Etruscans, Sabines, Volsci, Marsi, Lucanians, Paelignians, Samnites, Campanians, and Greeks, along with some people we didn’t mention (the Falisci, Picenes – North and South, Opici, Aequi, Hernici, Vestini, etc.). Many of these groups can be further broken down – the Samnites consisted of five different tribes in a confederation, for instance.

In short, Roman Italy under the Republic was preposterously multicultural (in the literal meaning of that word) … and it turns out that’s why they won.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part II: Citizens and Allies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-06-25.

June 14, 2024

QotD: European “megacorporations” in the east

Filed under: Asia, Britain, Europe, History, India, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The great (and terrible) chartered trading companies offer a more promising historical parallel for the megacorporation, with much larger scope. The largest of these were the British East India Company (EIC, 1600-1874) and the Dutch East India Company (the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC, 1594-1800). The EIC at one point accounted for something close to half of the the world’s trade and the VOC at points had total or near-total monopolies on the trade of important and valuable spices. Both companies were absolutely massive and exercised direct, state-like authority over territory and people.

And the structure of these massive trading companies mirrors some of the elements of a megacorp. While both companies were, in theory, shipping companies, in practice they were massive vertically integrated conglomerates. Conquering the production areas (particularly India for the EIC and Java for the VOC), they essentially controlled the production chain from start to finish. That complete vertical integration meant that the companies also had to supply employees and colonial subjects, which in turn meant controlling trade and production in everything from food and clothes to weapons. Both companies had their own armies and fleets (the EIC boasted more than 25,000 company soldiers at its height, the VOC more than 10,000) and controlled and administered territory.

In short, they were the colonial Dutch and British governments for many millions of colonial subjects. For the people living in territory dominated by these companies, they really would have resembled the megacorps of speculative fiction, operating with effectively impunity and using their vast profits to field armies and navies capable of defeating local states and compelling them to follow the interests of the company (which remained profit-oriented).

(I feel the need to stop and note that “company rule” in India and even more so in the Dutch East Indies was brutally exploitative, living up to – and in many cases quite surpassing – the normal dystopian billing of science fiction megacorporations. At the same time, it seems equally worth noting that the shift to direct colonial rule by the state was not always much better.)

So in one sense, the speculative fiction megacorp has already existed, but in the other, the limits of these historical entities are informative too. First, it seems relevant that none of these companies were creatures of the markets, rather, they were created by state action – they were chartered companies, state monopolies, or both. These massive imperial trading companies (of which the EIC and VOC were the most successful, but not the only ones) were all created by their respective governments, armed with substantial privileges and typically given exclusive rights to certain trade – they were state-sanctioned monopolies (echoes of this also in the Japanese Zaibatsu state-sanctioned vertical monopolies; note that the Roman publicani [tax-farming “companies” of the middle and late Republic] were also state-sanctioned monopolies) whose monopolies were backed by state power to the point that their states (that is, Britain, the Dutch Republic, France and so on) would and did go to war to protect the trading rights of their monopoly trading companies.

Second, these megacorporations, far from being in a position to usurp the states that formed them (as fictional megacorporations often do), turn out to be extremely vulnerable to those states. The EIC was effectively nationalized by an act of parliament in 1858 (after the Indian Mutiny of 1857 discredited company rule in the eyes of the British government) and disbanded in 1874. The VOC was likewise nationalized by its parent government in 1796 and then dissolved in 1799. No effort was made by either company to resist being disbanded with any sort of force; it would have been a pointless gesture in any case. While the resources of the EIC were vast, the military capabilities of the British Empire were far greater. Moreover, the companies simply didn’t have the legitimacy to operate absent their state backing.

This is of course also true for the not-quite-megacorporations, like the great trusts of America’s gilded age (Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, etc.), or the Japanese zaibatsu or even modern super-sized corporate entities. Of the 10 largest companies in the world, four are straight up state-owned enterprises. Even for the private modern massive company, by and large when they try to fight their “home” state, they lose, or at least are badly damaged without seriously inconveniencing the far greater power of the state (just ask AT&T or Microsoft).

Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: January 1, 2021”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-01-01.

June 8, 2024

QotD: Teaching military history

Filed under: Education, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In addition to the low regard that military history is sometimes held in from outside of the field, there is also an odd tension in being a life-long civilian who studies and teaches on military history. It often means teaching military topics to students (or readers) who have personal military experience. I have, of course, heard it suggested that military history ought not be studied by non-veterans, or that a civilian academic simply cannot provide any useful perspective on military activity without military experience (though I should note, I have never heard that opinion expressed by someone I knew to be a combat veteran themselves). And while obviously I do not find this argument persuasive, or I wouldn’t do the job I do, I also have to admit that on a fundamental level I will always be on the civilian side of the “civilians do not understand” gap that is discussed so frequently, particularly in the experience of veterans coming home.

At the same time, in the context of the discipline of history, this complaint is patently absurd. No Roman historian has ever bought garum at the market with sestertii, nor voted in the Roman comitia centuriata, or any experienced any of a nearly infinite number of the daily activities of life in ancient Rome. The same is obviously fundamentally true of literally any history that takes place before living memory. The closest we can ever come is something like experimental archaeology, trying out historical methods and objects and while that method is an important tool, especially for the pre-modern period, it is far from the only way to do history and not necessarily the best. So of course historians study things they have no personal experience of. That’s what history is.

Teaching military history to students either bound for the military or who have military experience is actually one of the most rewarding things I have gotten to do as an academic. In this sense I have been remarkably fortunate in a lot of my teaching, which has been at large state universities in North Carolina and Florida. Both states are well above the United States population-adjusted average for the percentage of veterans in the state and I get the sense that – though I have no hard data on this (so I may be wrong) – veterans tend to matriculate through public universities at higher rates than at smaller private liberal arts college. Moreover, every university I have taught at this far has a significant ROTC program.

Consequently, I am pretty accustomed to having both veterans back from abroad in my class, as well as students who expect to commission at the end of their college experience, along with some students who are active-duty military personnel while they are taking my classes. This is especially true (no surprise) in military history classes, as one might guess. It was not uncommon, in a 45 or 55 student section of a Global Military History survey to have the complete military-career-cycle present (though of course the ROTC students would be commissioning as officers, while the active-duty and veteran students were enlisted personnel and that is a meaningful difference). Of course those students were then side-by-side with students who have no plans to ever be in the military.

It is true that there is sometimes a higher bar of “proving” yourself to the students in those situations before they begin to trust you (as anyone who so much as looks at me knows I have never served in a military), though I would note that the hardest students to reach in this regard have always been the ROTC students (rather than active duty or veteran students), who ironically have no more experience of combat than I do. At the same time, those students are choosing to be in your class because they think you have something to say on the topic and clearing the bar of “this guy knows what he’s talking about” has never been a real problem for me. If you know your business and show that you take the subject seriously, the matter resolves itself.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Military History?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-11-13.

June 2, 2024

QotD: The Spartans do not deserve the admiration of the modern US military

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Media, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Athenian historian Thucydides once remarked that Sparta was so lacking in impressive temples or monuments that future generations who found the place deserted would struggle to believe it had ever been a great power. But even without physical monuments, the memory of Sparta is very much alive in the modern United States. In popular culture, Spartans star in film and feature as the protagonists of several of the largest video game franchises. The Spartan brand is used to promote obstacle races, fitness equipment, and firearms. Sparta has also become a political rallying cry, including by members of the extreme right who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Sparta is gone, but the glorification of Sparta — Spartaganda, as it were — is alive and well.

Even more concerning is the U.S. military’s love of all things Spartan. The U.S. Army, of course, has a Spartan Brigade (Motto: “Sparta Lives”) as well as a Task Force Spartan and Spartan Warrior exercises, while the Marine Corps conducts Spartan Trident littoral exercises — an odd choice given that the Spartans were famously very poor at littoral operations. Beyond this sort of official nomenclature, unofficial media regularly invites comparisons between U.S. service personnel and the Spartans as well.

Much of this tendency to imagine U.S. soldiers as Spartan warriors comes from Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire, still regularly assigned in military reading lists. The book presents the Spartans as superior warriors from an ultra-militarized society bravely defending freedom (against an ethnically foreign “other”, a feature drawn out more explicitly in the comic and later film 300). Sparta in this vision is a radically egalitarian society predicated on the cultivation of manly martial virtues. Yet this image of Sparta is almost entirely wrong. Spartan society was singularly unworthy of emulation or praise, especially in a democratic society.

To start with, the Spartan reputation for military excellence turns out to be, on closer inspection, mostly a mirage. Despite Sparta’s reputation for superior fighting, Spartan armies were as likely to lose battles as to win them, especially against peer opponents such as other Greek city-states. Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War — but only by accepting Persian money to do it, reopening the door to Persian influence in the Aegean, which Greek victories at Plataea and Salamis nearly a century early had closed. Famous Spartan victories at Plataea and Mantinea were matched by consequential defeats at Pylos, Arginusae, and ultimately Leuctra. That last defeat at Leuctra, delivered by Thebes a mere 33 years after Sparta’s triumph over Athens, broke the back of Spartan power permanently, reducing Sparta to the status of a second-class power from which it never recovered.

Bret Devereaux, “Spartans Were Losers”, Foreign Policy, 2023-07/22.

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