James @TTJamesG
The fact that you spent 7 years memorizing dates and the culmination of that is arguing semantics on X is depressing. Is it too late for a refund? You wrote an entire thread addressing a point I never made, a point you intentionally misconstrued.Another thing that has come up a fair bit here recently is the idea that historical training consists of “spend[ing] 7 years memorizing dates” which is a severe misunderstanding of what historians do.
It confuses the job of reading history books for the job of writing them.
While any historian is going to end up knowing a lot of names and dates simply as a byproduct of teaching and working with their material, raw memorization is not a significant part of the PhD training process.
Instead, the focus is on research skills and analysis.
In practice, we can divide a lot of historical training into three components: the historical method, “theory”, and then field-specific training.
The historical method is the process and heuristics we use to assess historical sources.
While history students work from history books that are “pre-chewed” as it were, historians work with their evidence in its raw, unprocessed form: archives of documents, ancient texts, inscriptions, memoirs, archaeological remains and so on.
The historical method is how we approach that raw material: who produced it? What information would they have had (eyewitness? second hand?), what sources might they have had? What might their own aims have been?
And how can we most plausibly fill in gaps in our evidence?
Then there is historical theory. No good historian is a doctrinaire follower of a single theory of history — rather these are toolboxes of ideas we use to frame the research questions we’re asking.
But to use those ideas, you must know and understand them first.
So “critical theory” is interested in power relationships, while an Annales framework is interested in long-term structures and cultural assumptions, while a materialist framework focuses on material conditions and so on.
Each would imply different questions of the evidence.
Part of the point of learning theory, of course, is that each theory lens is, in and of itself, incomplete. Cultural structures matter, individual choices matter, material conditions matter, etc. etc.
You learn and think about a bunch of these to know the blindspots of each.
Finally, historians are going to learn a bunch of research skills specific to our period and place. For ancient Roman history, that’s Latin, Greek, epigraphy, paleography, some philology and a lot of archaeology.
For a more modern field, archive research methods are huge.
On top of that, you’re also going to develop knowledge in other disciplines — sciences, social sciences — that touch on your topic of interest. I work on the costs of warfare, so military science and theory, along with economics and a bit of demographics, matter to me.
What the historian is actually doing is taking that skillset to the raw evidence of the past — sometimes asking new questions of old material, frequently asking old questions of material no one has studied intensively before — to discover new information about the past.
Of course we also assemble a broad knowledge of the societies we study (like how Roman citizenship works), which we’d need to understand our sources and our evidence.
Roman citizenship, for instance, matters a lot for understanding the Roman army!
That broad knowledge is what we’re drawing on in teaching and for that we are relying on the work of our colleagues in the discipline: each historian is doing their own original discovering-the-past work, but also keeping up-to-date on our colleagues’ work.
The end result is both a steadily improving understanding of the past but also the ability, as our own conditions and interests change, to ask new questions, rather than simply endlessly rehash old questions and old (potentially flawed) answers.
“Online Rent-a-Sage” Bret Devereaux, Twitter, 2025-08-05.
November 9, 2025
QotD: Historical training is not “spending 7 years memorizing dates”
November 3, 2025
QotD: Was Alexander “the Great”?
Finally, I think we need to talk briefly about Alexander’s character and his immediate impact in all of this. As I noted above, Alexander was charismatic and even witty and so there are a number of very famous anecdotes of him doing high-minded things: his treatment of Darius’ royal household, his treatment of the Indian prince Porus, his refusal to drink water in Gedrosia when his soldiers had none, and so on. These anecdotes get famous, because they’re the kind of things that fit into documentaries and films very neatly and making for arresting, memorable moments. But there is a tendency to reduce Alexander’s character to just these moments and then end up making him out – in a very Droysen-and-Tarn sort of way – into the “Gentleman Conqueror”.
And that’s just not a reading of Alexander which can survive reading all of any of our key sources on him. The moment you read more than just the genteel anecdotes (“for he, too, is Alexander”, – though note that Alexander’s gentle words do not keep him from trying to use Darius’ family to extort Darius out of his kingdom, Arr. Anab. 2.14.4-9), I think one must concede that Alexander was quite ruthless, a man of immense violence. I mean, and I want to stress this, he killed one of his closest companions with a spear in a drunken rage. I do not think there is a collection of polite-but-witty one-liners to make up for that. But Cleitus was hardly the only person Alexander killed.
Alexander had Bessus, the assassin of Darius, mutilated by having his nose and ears cut off before being executed (Arr. Anab. 4.7.3). He has 2,000 survivors of the sack of Tyre crucified on the beach (Q. Curtius Rufus 4.4.14-17). Because he resisted bravely and wouldn’t kneel, Alexander had the garrison commander at Gaza dragged to death by having his ankles pierced and tied to a chariot (Q. Curtius Rufus 4.4.29). Early in his reign, Alexander sacks Thebes and butchers the populace, as Arrian notes, “sparing neither women nor children” (Arr. Anab. 1.8.8; Arrian tries, somewhat lamely, to distance Alexander from this saying it was is Boeotian allies who did most – but not all – of the killing). Of the Greek mercenaries enrolled in the Persian army at Granicus – a common thing for Greek soldiers to do in this period – Arrian (Anab. 1.16.6) reports that he enslaved them, despite, as Plutarch notes, the Greeks holding in good order and attempting to surrender under terms before they were engaged (Plut. Alex. 16.13). Not every opponent of Alexander gets Porus’ reward for bravery and pride.
Meanwhile, Alexander’s interactions, as noted above, with the civilian populace were self-serving and generally imperious. That’s not unusual for ancient armies, but I should note that Alexander’s conduct towards civilians was also no better than the (dismally bad) norm for ancient armies: he foraged, looted what he wanted, occasionally burned things (including significant parts of Persepolis, the Persian capital), seized land and laborers for his colonies and so on. Alexander’s operations in Central Asia seem to have been particularly brutal: when the populace fled to fortified settlements, Alexander’s orders were to storm each one in turn, killing all of the men and enslaving all of the women and children (Arr. Anab. 4.2.4, note also 4.6.5, doing the same in Marakanda).
And this, at least, brings back to our original question: Was Alexander “Great”? In a sense, I think the expectation in this question is to deliver a judgment on Alexander, but I think its actual function is to deliver a judgment on us.
The Alexander we have in our sources – rather than in the imperialistic hagiographies of him that still condition so much popular memory – seems to have been a witty, charismatic, but arrogant, paranoid and violent fellow. As I joke to my students, “Alexander seems to have enjoyed two things in life, killing and drinking and he was only good at the former”. He could be gentle and witty, but it seems, especially towards the end of his reign, was more often proud, imperious and murderous.
He was at best an indifferent administrator and because he was so indifferent to that task, most of his rule amounted to questions of the men he chose to do the job for him, and those choices were generally quite poor. He made no meaningful preparations for the survival of his empire, his family or his friends upon his death; Arrian (Anab. 7.26.3) reports famously that his last words were, when pushed by his companions to name a successor, τῷ κρατίστῳ (toi kratistoi), “to the strongest”. Translation: kill each other for it. And they did, killing every member of Alexander’s family in the process.1
He was not a great judge of men – for every Perdiccas, there is a Harpalus – or a great military innovator. He largely used the men and the army that his father gave him, and where he deviated from the men, the replacements were generally inferior. That said, he was an astounding commander on campaign and on the battlefield, managing the complex logistics of a massive operation excellently (until his pride got the better of him in Gedrosia) and managing his battles with unnatural calm, skill and luck. He was also, fairly clearly, a good fighter in the personal sense. Alexander was a poor ruler and a lack-luster king, but he was extremely good at destroying, killing and enslaving things.
To the Romans – who first conferred the title “the Great” on Alexander, so far as we know (he is Alexander Magnus first in Plautus’ Mostellaria 775 (written likely in the late 200s)) – that was enough for greatness. And of course it was enough for his Hellenistic successors, who patterned themselves off of Alexander; Antiochus III even takes the title megas (“the Great”) in imitation of Alexander after he reconquers the Persian heartland. Evidently by that point, if not earlier, the usage had slipped into Greek (it may well have started in Greek, of course; Plautus’ comedies are adapted from Greek originals). It should be little shock that, for the Romans, this was enough: this was a culture that reserved their highest honor, the triumph, for military glory alone. And it was clearly enough for Droysen and Tarn too: to be good at killing things and then hamfistedly attempt – and mostly fail – to civilize them, after all, was what made the German and British Empires great. It had to be enough, or else what were all of those Prussian officers and good Scottish gentlemen doing out there with all of that violence? To question Alexander might mean questioning the very system those men served.
What is greatness? Is it pure historical impact, absent questions of morality, or intent? If that is the case, Alexander was Great, because he killed an exceptionally large number of people and in so doing set off a range of historical processes he hadn’t intended (the one he did intend, fusing the Macedonian and Persian ruling class, didn’t really happen) which set off an economic boom and created the vibrant Hellenistic cultural world, outcomes that Alexander did not intend at all. This is a classic “great, but not good” formulation: we might as well talk of “Chinggis the Great”, “Napoleon the Great” or (more provocatively) “Hitler the Great” for their tremendous historical impact. Yet this is a definition that can be sustained, but which robs “greatness” of its value in emulation.
One cannot help but suspect in many of these circumstances, “greatness” is about killing larger numbers of people, so long as they are strange people who live over yonder and dress and pray differently than we here do. It is ironic that Tarn credited Alexander with imagining the unity of mankind, given that Alexander was in the process of butchering however many non-Macedonians was required to set up a Macedonian ethnic ruling class over all other peoples. One suspects, for Droysen and Tarn, it was “greatness”, to be frank, because they understood the foot inside the boot Alexander was planting on the necks of the world, was European and white and so were they. In that vision, greatness is “our man” as opposed to “their man”. But that is such a small-minded, petty form of greatness, “our killer and not your killer”.
Does greatness require something more? The creation of something enduring, perhaps? Alexander largely fails this test, for it is not Alexander but the men who came after him, who exterminated his royal line and built their kingdoms on the ashes of his, who constructed something enduring. Perhaps greatness requires making the world better? Or some kind of greatness of character? For these, I think, it is hard to make Alexander fit, unless one is willing, like Tarn was, to bend and break the narrative to force it. Had Alexander, in fact, been Diogenes (Plut. Alex. 14.1-5), rather than Alexander, but with his character – witty, charismatic, but imperious, arrogant and quick to violence – I do not think we would admire him. As for making the world better, Alexander mostly served to destroy a state he does not seem to have had the curiosity or cultural competence to understand, as Reames puts, it, “not King of Asia, but a Macedonian conqueror in a long, white-striped purple robe” (op. cit. 212). He surely did not understand their religions.2
In a sense, Alexander, I think, serves as a mirror for us. We question the greatness of Alexander and what is revealed are the traits, ideals, and actions we value. Alexander’s oversized personality is as captivating and charismatic now as it was then, and his record as a killer and conqueror is nearly unparalleled. But what is striking about Alexander is that beyond that charisma and military skill there is almost nothing else, which is what makes the test so discerning.
And so I think we continue to wrestle with the legacy and value of Alexander III of Macedon.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Reign of Alexander III of Macedon, the Great? Part II”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-05-24.
- I thus find it funny that every few years another “inspiring” anecdote about Alexander’s wise last words filters around the internet that Alexander’s actual reported last words were so grim and heartless.
- On this, see F. Naiden, Soldier, Priest and God (2018).
October 28, 2025
QotD: Pyrrhus after his bloody defeat of the Romans at Heraclea
On Pyrrhus’ side, his army had been bloodied, but was mostly intact and was almost immediately bolstered by the arrival of his Italian allies, including the Lucanians and Samnites, along with the Tarantines. On the Roman side, Laevinius’ army was battered, but still extant; he fell back to Roman-controlled Campania, eventually taking up a position at Capua, the chief city of that region. Pyrrhus then marched north, entering Campania, bypassing the Roman force at Capua (which had been reinforced with two legions pulled from Etruria) and entering Latium, apparently getting within about 60 kilometers (c. 37 miles) of Rome (Plut. Pyrrh. 17.5). And here the question students as is why not take Rome?
And there is an easy answer: because he couldn’t.
The first thing to remember here is the natural of the human-created terrain Pyrrhus has to operate in: functionally all of the cities of any significant size in third-century Italy were likely to be fortified and their populations – thanks to Rome’s recruitment system – experienced and armed. Consequently, if the locals didn’t voluntarily switch sides, Pyrrhus would have been forced to take their settlements either by siege or storm. Pyrrhus might well have hoped that the Campanians would go over to him, but here the problem is the human geography of Italy: his army is full of Samnites, whose emnity with the Campanians is what started the Samnite wars. This is a feature of Rome’s alliance system noted by M.P. Fronda in Between Rome and Carthage (2010): because Rome extended its alliance system by intervening in local rivalries, both sets of new “allies” had long-standing grudges against the other, which makes it hard to dismantle Rome’s alliance network, since any allies you peel away will push others closer to Rome.
In the case of Campania, Capua might have felt strong enough to try their luck without Rome, but that’s why Laevinius was sitting on it with a large army. But the other Campanian cities (of which there were about a dozen) might well fear exposure to Samnite raiding without Rome’s protection. Meanwhile, the Latins – the people of Latium, the region immediately to Rome’s south (technically Rome is in Latium, on its edge) – seem to have been pretty profoundly uninterested in siding against Rome either at this juncture or later when Hannibal tries to dismantle Rome’s alliance system.
So after Heraclea, Pyrrhus has fairly limited options: he can start the slow process of reducing the cities of Campania one by one to open the logistics necessary to permit him to operate long-term in Latium or he can conduct a lightning raid through Roman territory to try to maximize the psychological effect of his victory and perhaps get a favorable peace. He opts for the second choice and when the Romans opt not to take the deal – though they do consider it – he has to pull back to southern Italy (where he focuses on consolidating control, pushing out the last few Roman positions there).
Why not attack Rome directly? Well, Rome itself was fortified, of course. Moreover, the Romans had raised a fresh levy of troops for its defense (Plut. Pyrrh. 18.1), while dispatching Tiberius Corucanius with his army to reinforce Laevinius in Capua. So as Pyrrhus enters Latium, he has a well-defended fortified city in front of him and a Roman army of, conservatively, 30,000 men (Corucanius’ 20,000 men, plus whatever was left of Laevinius’ army) behind him. I don’t usually quote movie tactics, but Ridley Scott’s Saladin has the right wisdom for this problem: “One cannot maintain a siege with the enemy behind“. Had Pyrrhus stopped to besiege Rome, his supply situation would have quickly become hopeless as the Roman army behind him could have easily prevented him from foraging to feed his army during the long process setting up for an assault on the city, which might then simply fail, since the city was well-fortified and defended.
If Plutarch (Pyrrh. 18.4-5) is correct about the terms Pyrrhus offered – an alliance with Rome, a recognition of their hegemony over Italy outside of his new clients in southern Italy (who would of course, fall under Pyrrhus’ control now) – Pyrrhus may have hoped at this juncture to consolidate southern Italy and turn back towards the East or perhaps head on to Sicily. But the Romans refused the deal and so Pyrrhus seems to have set above clearing out the last Roman strongholds (Venusia and Luceria) in Apulia to consolidate his hold. The Romans responded in the following year by sending a new army, under the command of Publius Sulpicius Saverrio and Publius Decius Mus to challenge him and they met at Asculum, in northern Apulia.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph, Part IIIb: Pyrrhus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-03-08.
October 22, 2025
QotD: The supposed land crisis Tiberius Gracchus wanted to solve
What they assume is taking place is that the wealthiest Romans – who have, in fact, grown fantastically wealthy from Rome’s overseas wars – have used that wealth to acquire most of the land, either buying up the small freeholds of smaller Roman farmers or getting the leases for that public land. Meanwhile, the Roman small farmer class does most of Rome’s fighting and so the assumption – by Appian – is that these guys are being ground underfoot by heavy military deployments, although as best we can tell, military deployments in the 150s, 140s and 130s are substantially lighter than those from 218-168 (but they’re also in less profitable, more difficult places like Spain, put a pin in that). Those wealthy Romans then work the land not with free laborers, but with slaves, because Roman conquests – remember, we’re at the tail end of Rome’s “iron century” of conquests from 264 to 148 – have brought enormous numbers of enslaved laborers to Italy. Those poor Romans, now displaced, have no land and flock to Rome and are no longer liable for the Roman census.
Except notice the data points being used to come up with this story: the visible population of landless men in Rome and the Roman census returns. But, as we’ve discussed, the Roman census is self-reported, and the report of a bit of wealth like a small farm is what makes an individual liable for taxes and conscription.
In short the story we have above is an interpretation of the available data but not the only one and both our sources and Tiberius Gracchus simply lack the tools necessary to gather the information they’d need to sound out if their interpretation is correct.
All of which now, at last, brings us to the scholarship of the last several decades which has, by and large, concluded that Tiberius Gracchus probably misunderstood the nature of Roman social and economic problems in the late second century and as a result applied the wrong solution.2 The initial problem is that the above model assumes a basically stagnant Italian population: you’re just shifting people around, not generating new people. But survey archaeology shows growing urban centers and new land coming under cultivation, suggesting a modestly rising population, a conclusion reinforced by demographic modeling which recognizes the likely marked decline in military mortality in the back half of the second century. Moreover, the vast expansion of villa estates we ought to be seeing in this period really only comes later, in the first century BC and the first two centuries AD; there’s some expansion (and these patterns are very regionalized) but not enough to explain what we’re being told is happening.3 Those observations, emerging in the 90s and early 2000s, provided the necessary evidence to vindicate the theory advanced by J.W. Rich in the 1980s that the problem was quite different than Tiberius Gracchus understood, in part to explain the one curious fact we could always see about Tiberius’ land reforms, which is that they happened, they went ahead as planned and also they didn’t fix the problem.
Instead what is happening is this: Roman military deployments had, for a long time, been massive. Rome had careened from the major Samnite Wars (343–341, 326–304, and 298–290) to the high-casualty Pyrrhic War (280-275) to the much higher casualty First (264-241) and Second (218-201) Punic Wars. But the big wars of the early second century had involved a lot more winning and thus somewhat less dying (deaths from disease always outweighed combat losses, but Roman armies are smaller from 201-168, so less disease death too), while after the Third Macedonian War (171-168), Rome doesn’t have any more peer-opponent wars left to fight and so the number of men under arms declines again after 168 and especially after 148. Roman society was thus structured to sustain itself in a situation where military mortality for males was high. And then it dropped.
But recall the average Roman farm is small, so what you have now are suddenly a whole bunch of second and third sons who between 350 and 201 would have gone off to fight and died (or their elder brother would have) but are now alive, but can’t possibly inherit the family farm because they have a living brother and the farm is much too small to split further (or to support an entire second nuclear family unit). Where do they go? Well, to Rome, of course, where they want what Rome has done in the past to deal with this sort of problem: the foundation of new Roman communities (colonies) where they can have land. But there isn’t any Italy left to conquer (Rome controls all of it) and we aren’t yet to founding Roman colonies overseas, so not only is the mortality much lower (and so you have more of these guys) the traditional release valve is stuck. So they’re piling up in the one place that there is meaningful amount of wage labor available (the city of Rome), where they are very visible to the Roman ruling elite.
Meanwhile, Elder Brother-Who-Lived is back on the farm and should, in theory, still be eligible for call-up. But whereas in previous decades he could hope to get sent to fight in places like Greece or Italy or against Carthage where the rewards in loot from defeating wealthy enemies were substantial, in the 130s, the main problem was Numantia: a Celtiberian community perched in a particularly troublesome hillfort in a relatively poor, difficult part of Spain. Campaigns to take the place often failed (see above) but even if they succeeded, there would be little real loot. Moreover, a lack of success made the wars deeply unpopular. Elder Brother doesn’t want to get drafted to go fight in Spain, it’s just not a good bargain for him (unlike earlier wars).
But he has a solution: the census is self-reported. While his younger brothers are in Rome looking for work, he can just not report the farm on the census (or not report his military aged son), understating his wealth to drop below the qualifying requirement for military service. Because the Roman census pays functionally no attention to such men – the capite censi (those counted by their heads) – Elder Brother’s household almost seems to vanish in the census returns and the number of men liable for conscription ticks down by one.
And so you have falling census returns, combined with crowds of poor Romans in the city of Rome, but without it necessarily having anything to do with ager publicus or lost farms. And this is, we think, probably what is happening: surely there is some elite villa-estate expansion and some replacement of freeholding farmers with enslaved workers on that land but in fact the problem the Romans are facing is classic land scarcity with a growing population, but they don’t know that’s the problem because draft-resistance appears in the census as population decline and the census is all they have.
But you can see immediately the problem for Tiberius Gracchus’ land reform: while there is certainly some ager publicus to redistribute (to the great annoyance of the elites holding it), there’s not enough, because the core of this problem isn’t changing land use patterns (more villas, less small farms) but rising population creating economic strain at the bottom (while, it is true, imperial expansion creates vast almost unimaginable amounts of wealth at the top).
But we’re actually not quite done with problems, there’s one more: not all of the ager publicus was being farmed by Romans. Quite a lot of it seems, instead, to have been in the hands of local Italians – the socii. This is another convenient simplification by Appian and Plutarch, a product of them both writing in the imperial period long after citizenship had been extended across Italy. But that hasn’t happened yet. So any law to redistribute ager publicus would mean taking land from the socii who were currently using it for a land-giveaway in which only Roman citizens will be eligible.
You may well imagine that doing something like that might really damage relations with the socii and also fundamentally change the “bargain” by which the Roman alliance system functioned, as before Tiberius Gracchus, the socii seem to have been eligible to settle in Roman colonial foundations on conquered land, but they will not be eligible to get land in Tiberius Gracchus’ land reform bill.
You can quickly flip ahead to the year 91 to see how that turns out in the long run.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Gracchi, Part I: Tiberius Gracchus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-01-17.
- To pause for a second: for the sake of making this understandable, I am using the relatively simple category of ager publicus. However, as Gargola (op. cit.) notes, in actual Roman law, ager publicus was a messy super-category of lands governed by an exciting range of different rules and conditions (some leased, some sold, some held by the state, etc.) – ager censorius, ager quaestorius, ager occupatorius, ager diuisus et adsignatus, the ager Campanus and ager in trientabulis. Simplifying this and treating all of these lands as if they had been governed under the same rubric which Tiberius is merely now enforcing is one of Appian’s deceptive simplifications.
- For the scholarship, this reaction begins with J.W. Rich, “The Supposed Roman Manpower Shortage of the Later Second Century B.C.” Historia 32 (1983). The next major phase comes out of the high-count/low-count population debates around Roman demography because older demographic models, like those of PA Brunt (Italian Manpower (1971)) had assumed a static Roman population, but as noted we increasingly had evidence for a modestly increasing population. The implications of that get worked out in books like N. Rosenstein, Rome at War: Farms, Families and Death in the Middle Republic (2004) and L. De Ligt, Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers (2012). Finally, you also have a recognition that while the wars in Spain were unpopular, they didn’t have massive manpower demands, e.g. Taylor, “Goodbye to All That: The Roman Citizen Militia After the Great Wars” in A Community in Transition, eds. M. Balbo and F. Santangelo (2023).
- In Italy, I should be clear: the pervasiveness and speed with which rich Romans seem to accumulate Sicilian estates suggests a lot of the land acquisition may be happening outside of the ager Romanus.
October 16, 2025
QotD: The Roman proclivity to accept changes that “go back to the way things used to be”
What I will say is that the Romans were very conservative in their outlook, believing that things ought to be done according to the mos maiorum – “the customs of [our] ancestors”. The very fact that the way you say “ancestors” in Latin is maiores, “the greater ones” should tell you something about the Roman attitude towards the past. And so often real innovations in Roman governance were explained as efforts to get back to the “way things were”, but of course “the way things were” is such a broad concept that you can justify pretty radical changes in some things to restore other things to “the way they were”.
The most obvious example of this, of course, is Augustus with his PR-line of a res publica restituta, “a republic restored”. Augustus made substantial changes (even if one looked past his creation of an entire shadow-office of emperor!) to Roman governance on the justification that this was necessary to “restore” the Republic; exactly what is preserved tells you a lot about what elements of the Roman (unwritten) constitution were thought to be essential to the Republic by the people that mattered (the elites). And Augustus was hardly the first; Sulla crippled the tribunate, doubled the size of the Senate and made substantial reforms to the laws claiming that he was restoring things to the way they had been – that is, restoring the Senate to its position of prominence.
And one thing that is very clear about the Greeks and Romans generally is that they had at best a fuzzy sense of their past, often ascribing considerable antiquity to things which were not old but which stretched out of living memory. Moreover there is a general sense, pervading Greek and Latin literature that people in the past were better than people now, more virtuous, more upright, possibly even physically better. You can see this notion in authors from Hesiod to Sallust. This shouldn’t be overstressed; you also had Aristotelian/Polybian “cyclical” senses of history along with moments of present-triumphalism (Vergil, for instance, and his imperium sine fine). But still there seems to have been a broad sense of the folk system that things get worse over time and thus things must have been better in the past and thus returning to the way things were done is better. We’ve discussed this thought already where it intersects with Roman religion.
And the same time, here we run into the potential weakness of probing elite mentalités in trying to understand a society. Some Romans seem quite aware of positive change over time; Pliny the Elder and Columella are both aware of improving agricultural technology in their own day, particularly as compared to older economic writing by Cato the Elder. Polybius has no problem having the Romans twice adopt new and better ship designs during the First Punic War (though both are “just-so” stories; the ancients love “just-so” stories to explain new innovations or inventions). And sometimes Roman leaders did represent things as very much new; even Augustus combined his res publica restituta rhetoric with the idea that he was ushering in a saeculum novum, a “new age” (based on the idea of 110 year cycles in history).
So there is complexity here. The Romans most certainly did not have our strong positive associations with youth and progress. Their culture expected deference to elders and certainly didn’t expect “progress” most of the time; things, they thought, generally ought to be done as they had “always been done”. Consequently, framing things as a return to the mos maiorum or as a means to return to it was always a strong political framing and presumably many of the folks doing those things believed it. On the other hand the Romans seem well aware that some of the things they did were new and that not all of these “firsts” were bad and that some things had seemed to have gotten better or more useful since the days of their maiores. And some Romans, particularly emperors, are relatively unabashed about making dramatic breaks with tradition and precedent; Diocletian comes to mind here in particular.
Bret Devereaux, “Referenda ad Senatum: January 13, 2023: Roman Traditionalism, Ancient Dates and Imperial Spies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-01-13.
October 10, 2025
QotD: Cleopatra’s reign in Egypt
These are related but disconnected questions. While we’ll get to the evidence for Cleopatra’s relationship with the people of Egypt, the broader legacy of the Ptolemies itself is very clear: the Ptolemaic dynasty and the Greek-speaking settlers it brought were an ethnically distinct ruling strata installed above native Egyptian society, an occupying force. None of Cleopatra’s royal ancestors, none of them had ever even bothered to learn the language of the people they ruled, whose taxes sustained their endless wars (initially foreign, later civil). Top administrative posts remained restricted to ethnic Greeks (though the positions just below them, often very important ones, might be held by Egyptians), citizenship in Alexandria, the capital, remained largely (but not entirely) restricted to Greeks and so on. It’s clear these designations were not entirely impermeable and I don’t want to suggest that they were, but it is also clear that the Greek/Macedonian and Egyptian elite classes don’t begin really fusing together until the Roman period (when they were both equally under the Roman boot, rather than one being under the boot of the other).
Consequently, the interest of the Ptolemaic dynasty could be quite a different thing from the interests of Egypt.
And I won’t bury the lede here: Cleopatra, it seems to me, chose the interests of her dynasty (and her own personal power) over those of Egypt whenever there was a choice and then failed to secure either of those things. Remember, we don’t have a lot in the way of sketches of Cleopatra’s character (and what we have is often hostile); apart from a predilection to learn languages and to value education, it’s hard to know what Cleopatra liked. But we can see her strategic decisions, and I think those speak to a ruler who evidently was unwilling or unable to reform Egypt’s ailing internal governance (admittedly ruined by generations of relatively poor rule), but who shoveled the resources she had into risky gambles for greater power outside of Egypt, all of which failed. That doesn’t necessarily make Cleopatra a terrible ruler, or even the worst Ptolemaic ruler, but I think it does, on balance, make her a fairly poor ruler, or at best a mediocre one.
But before we jump into all of that, I think both a brief explanation of the structure of this kingdom and brief timeline of Cleopatra’s life would be good just so we’re clear on what happens when.
For the structure of the kingdom, we need to break up, to a degree, the peoples in Egypt. Ptolemaic Egypt was not even remotely an ethnically uniform place. Most of the rural population remained ethnically Egyptian but there were substantial areas of “Macedonian” settlement. Ptolemaic subjects were categorized by ethne, but these ethnic classifications themselves are tricky. At the bottom were the Egyptians and at the top were the “Macedonians” (understood to include not just ethnic Macedonians but a wide-range of Greeks). The lines between these groups were not entirely impermeable; we see for instance a fictive ethnic grouping of “Persians” who appear to be Hellenized Egyptians serving in the military. At some point, this group is seems to be simply rolled into the larger group of “Macedonians”. nevertheless it seems like, even into the late period the “Macedonians” were mostly ethnic Greeks who migrated into Egypt and we don’t see the Egyptian and Macedonian elites begin to fuse until the Roman period (when they both shared an equal place under the Roman hobnailed boot). Nevertheless, this was a status hierarchy; “Macedonian” soldiers got paid more, their military settlers got estates several times larger than what their native Egyptian equivalents (the machimoi) got, the tippy-top government posts were restricted to Macedonians (though the posts just below them were often held by Egyptian elites) and so on. And while there was some movement in the hierarchy, for the most part these two groups did not mix; one ruled, the other was ruled.
To which we must then add Alexandria, the capital, built by Alexander, which had a special status in the kingdom unlike any other place. Alexandria was structured as a polis, which of course means it had politai; our evidence is quite clear that all of the original politai were Greek and that new admission to the politai did happen but was very infrequent. Consequently the citizen populace of Alexandria was overwhelmingly Greek and retained a distinctive Greek character. But Alexandria was more than just the politai: it was a huge, cosmopolitan city with large numbers of non-Greek residents. The largest such group will have been Egyptians, but we know it also had a large Jewish community and substantial numbers of people from basically everywhere. So while there were, according to Polybius, three major groups of people (Greek citizens, Egyptian non-citizens and large numbers of mercenaries in service to the king, Polyb. 34.14), there were also lots of other people there too. I do want to stress this: Alexandria was easily one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the ancient world; but for the most part only the Greeks (and not even all of them) were citizens there.
That’s in many ways a shamefully reductive summary of a very complex kingdom, but for this already overlong essay, it will have to do. On to the timeline.
Cleopatra was born in 69 BC, the middle of three daughters of Ptolemy XII Auletes, then ruler of Egypt (he also had two sons, both younger than Cleopatra). In 58 BC (Cleopatra is 11) her father, by all accounts an incompetent ruler, was briefly overthrown and his eldest daughter (Berenice IV) made queen; Cleopatra went into exile with her father. In 55 BC, with Roman support, Ptolemy XII returned to power and executed Berenice. Ptolemy XII then died in 51, leaving two sons (Ptolemy XIII and XIV, 11 and 9 years old respectively) and his two daughters; his will made Cleopatra queen as joint ruler-wife with Ptolemy XIII (a normal enough arrangement for the Ptolemies).
Before the year was out, Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIII (or perhaps more correctly, his court advisors) were at odds, both trying to assert themselves as sole monarch, though by 49 Ptolemy XIII’s faction (again, it seems to mostly have been his advisors running it) had largely sidelined Cleopatra in what had become a civil war. Cleopatra travels to Syria to gather an army and invades Egypt with it in 48, but this effort fails. She is able, however, to ally with Julius Caesar (lately arrived looking for Pompey, who supporters of Ptolemy XIII had killed, to Caesar’s great irritation). Caesar’s army – Cleopatra’s military force is clearly a non-factor by this point – defeats Ptolemy XIII in 47. Caesar appoints Cleopatra as joint ruler with her youngest brother, Ptolemy XIV (he’s 12) and Cleopatra bears Caesar’s son, Ptolemy XV Caesar in 47, who we generally call “Caesarion”.
Cleopatra then journeys to Rome late in 46 and seems to have stayed in Rome until after Caesar’s assassination (March, 44) and the reading of Caesar’s will (April, 44). Ptolemy XIV (the brother) also dies in this year and Cleopatra then co-rules with her son, Caesarion. Cleopatra returns to Egypt, attempts to dispatch troops to aid the Caesarian cause against Brutus and Cassius, but fails and loses all of the troops in 43. She is saved from being almost certainly steamrolled by Brutus and Cassius by their defeat in 42 at Philippi. Cleopatra meets with Marcus Antonius in 41 and they form an alliance, as well as (at some point) a romantic relationship. Cleopatra has three children by Antonius: Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios (twins, born in 40) and Ptolemy Philadelphus (born in 36).
With Cleopatra’s resources, Antonius launches an invasion of Parthia in 38 BC which goes extremely poorly, with him retreating back to Roman territory by 36 having lost quite a fair portion of his army (Cleopatra is back in Egypt ruling). In 34, Antonius embarks on a massive reorganization of the Roman East, handing over massive portions of Rome’s eastern territory – in name at least – to Cleopatra’s children, a move which infuriated the Roman public and cleared the way politically for Octavian to move against him. Through 33 and 32, both sides prepare for war which breaks out in 31. Cleopatra opts to go with Antonius’ combined land-sea military force and on the 2nd of September 31 BC, solidly outmaneuvered at Actium, she and Antonius are soundly defeated. They flee back to Egypt but don’t raise a new army and both die by suicide when Octavian invades in the following year. Octavian reorganizes Egypt into a Roman province governed by an equestrian prefect. Octavian and subsequent Roman emperors never really adopted the title of pharaoh, though the Egyptian priesthood continued to recognize the Roman emperors as pharaohs into the early fourth century – doubtless in part because the religion required a pharaoh, though Roman emperors could never be bothered to actually do the religious aspects of the role and few ever even traveled to Egypt.
So ended the 21-year reign of Cleopatra, the last heir of Alexander.1
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Reign of Cleopatra”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-05-26.
- Except not really, as Cleopatra’s three children by Antonius survived their mother (though the two boys vanish from our sources fairly quickly, though we’re told they were spared by Octavian) and Cleopatra Selene actually ended up a queen herself, of the kingdom of Mauretania. There’s a recent book on what we know of her life, J. Draycott, Cleopatra’s Daughter: From Roman Prisoner to African Queen which I have not yet had a chance to read.
October 4, 2025
QotD: Roman … democracy?
And today we’re going to look at why it is that the assemblies never roar quite so often as you’d expect and in the process begin developing the arguments of perhaps the central scholarly debate currently about the Roman Republic: how democratic was it really?
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Roman Republic 101, Part II: Romans, Assemble!”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-07-28.
September 28, 2025
QotD: Pre-modern armies on friendly territory
But first, we need to talk about the lay of the land. As we’ve discussed, the pre-industrial countryside is not just a uniform blanket of farms; instead settlements are “nucleated” – farms cluster in villages and villages “orbit” (in a sense) towns (which may “orbit” yet larger towns), which usually administer those villages. The road and path system that the locals themselves have created will in turn connect fields to village centers, one village to the next and all of the villages to the town. This makes everything easier on our army which is also using those roads and paths to move – even if the paths are rudimentary, without modern location-finding data, armies use paths and settlements to know where they are. The main body of the army, with its large train of wagons, supplies and troops is going to generally move along major roads (which typically connect towns with other towns) but smaller detachments can move along the pathways between smaller settlements. That means what we have access to is not a vast field of possible maneuver but a spider’s web of pathways which meet and cross at settlements.
Moving through this pathway network, in friendly territory the army can lean on the likely compliance of the local population and the local administrative apparatus, which makes everything easier. Moreover, with control of the area, the army can send out messengers and riders who move faster than the army on its direction of march, making arrangements in advance for what the army needs, drawing supplies from the populace and (maybe) making arrangements to pay them either at the time or in the future. Doing so in hostile territory is much trickier as those messengers would be vulnerable and might reveal the army’s location and direction of march, things it might really rather want to conceal. So assuming the populace and local administration are “friendly”, how do we manage the complexity of getting the food and other supplies they have into the hands of the army?
The simplest method was some form of “billeting”, in use in various forms through antiquity to the early modern, though it seems particularly prominent in the Middle Ages and the first two centuries of the early modern period. Clifford Rogers (Soldiers’ Lives through History: The Middle Ages (2007), 76-78) provides a good “standard practices” overview of the process for a medieval European army. Once drawn up the army was organized into smaller units (often called “banners” because they marched behind a banner); we’ll come back to this again when we talk about marching speeds but it also matters here. Each banner would assign one of its horsemen as a “harbinger” who would ride ahead of the army (supervised by the king or commander’s marshals), ideally a full day ahead. These harbingers (because there might be quite a few of these fellows) also acted as a limited cavalry screen. They would both designate where the army would camp next (with the marshals marking out specific encampments) and make arrangements for food and housing.
In practice “arrangements” here meant frequently that the soldiers, when they arrived the following day were quartered in the homes of the local civilians, often densely packed into small towns or farming villages. If they had the means the locals might try to provide the army a market to buy food and supplies; more often the locals who had soldiers quartered on them were often expected to feed and resupply those soldiers. Notionally this was often supposed the be compensated and notionally kings issued dire warnings against soldiers taking more than they were allowed or abusing the locals. Rogers (op. cit.) is, I think, unusually sanguine in assuming these repeated regulations meant the knights and soldiers were often restrained; in an early modern or Roman context we tend to view the same sort of repeated promulgation of the same laws to mean that abuses were common despite repeated efforts by the central government to stamp them out. In practice reimbursements seem to have often been at best incomplete, where they happened at all and abuses were common.
Certainly as we see these practices more clearly in the early modern period, having soldiers quartered on your village could be economically devastating (see Parker, op. cit. 79-81); having to feed a half-dozen soldiers for a few days plus marching provisions could easily tip a small peasant household into shortage. And we should also be pretty clear-eyed here about what it would mean for a local population to have a large body of armed men (many in the hot-headed years of their youth) functionally turned loose on an unarmed civilian population and told that they could demand to be given whatever they needed; far more disciplined and better controlled armies still left a trail of theft and rape behind them as they moved. Nevertheless, this solution was simple and so for armies with very limited administrative capacity and rulers anxious to shift the burden of military activity away from their own coffers, billeting remained an attractive solution. It was still common enough in the 1700s to have been a major complaint by British colonists in North America, the bulk of whom upon achieving their independence promptly wrote an amendment in their constitution effectively banning the practice (the third amendment for the curious).
A better option for a town or city was instead to establish a market outside the town and arrange for the army to resupply and camp there and not in the town itself, with only small groups of soldiers permitted inside the walls at any given time. Needless to say, it is typically only fortified towns that really have the bargaining power to pull this off. The provision of a market for the gathering mass of crusaders outside of Constantinople in 1097 was a key diplomatic sticking point, with Alexios Komnenos I (the Byzantine Emperor) using his control over both the market and passage over the straits to Asia Minor as bargaining chips to get concessions out of the Crusaders. Likewise towns in Roman provinces seem to have fairly regularly paid exorbitant sums to avoid having armies quartered on them, as Cicero documents in his time in Cilicia (e.g. Cic. Ad Att. 5.21), sometimes in cash and other times in kind (e.g. Plut. Luc. 29.8). It speaks to how destructive billeted soldiers could be that towns that could went to extraordinary lengths to keep even friendly armies outside of the town walls.
Armies might also rely on local contractors to provide supplies, especially if they were going to operate in the region at some length. We’ve already mentioned the Army of Flanders’ pan de munición, provided by contractors. There’s also some evidence for the use of private contractors in supporting Roman armies, though the trend in current scholarship (particularly Erdkamp but also Roth op. cit.) has tended to stress the limited and often marginal role of such contractors. Given the evidence I think Erdkamp has it right here; contractors for supplies existed in the Roman world, but were fairly small supplements to a system (detailed below) that mostly ran on taxation and requisition; most of what we see in the Roman world are just normal sutlers selling luxury foods to soldiers who want to spice up their rations.
As armies grow larger and more complex in the early modern period, we see an effort to move away from destructive “billeting”, often hindered by the weak administrative apparatus of the state and limited financial resources; armies won’t move into permanent barracks on the regular in Europe until the early 1700s. One solution was to take those market towns and their lodgings and turn them from an ad hoc response to a permanent network, as Spain did along the “Spanish Road”, a network of routes taken by Spanish troops traveling overland from the Mediterranean coast in Savoy to the Low Countries during the Eighty Years War.
The way this worked was: To avoid having their reinforcements pillage their way across their own lands or alienate key friends on the way to the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) in the Low Countries, the Spanish government established a standard system for the supply of troops en route – key market towns were designated as étapes or “staples”, standard stop-over and stockpile points. These tended to be key trade towns on the roads (indeed as I understand it étape in this sense originally meant “market town”) which already had some of the infrastructure required. These étapes would then be directed in advance of a movement of troops to stockpile provisions and prepare lodgings for a specific number of advancing soldiers and paid (in theory) in advance. Householders who incurred costs (typically lodgings, sometimes food) could present receipts (billets de logement) to their local tax collector which would count against future liability.
Yet the system here is incomplete and it is striking that when given the opportunity of setting up étapes in Spain itself the crown declined, citing the cost and administrative burden of organization. The greater diplomatic difficulties and consequent stronger bargaining position of communities on the Spanish Road may have a lot to do with the different decisions. The real impetus for the structure of the étapes on the Spanish road was diplomatic: the route was a patchwork, with some territories controlled by the Spanish crown, some by the friendly German Habsburgs and others by the various small statelets of the Holy Roman Empire, any of whom if sufficiently offended might refuse Spanish reinforcements transit (the Holy Roman Emperor could shut the whole route down himself). Consequently the disruption that Spanish troops caused on the route had to be limited for the route to be sustainable at all.
States with a bit more administrative capacity, on the other hand, generally tried to avoid billeting at all, even in regularized form. We’ll see this again when talking about army movement, but control is a key concern in campaigns. Soldiers, after all, are not automatons and so keeping an army together and moving towards a single objective is difficult. Soldiers get bored, wander off, decide to steal or break things (or people) and so on. It is easier to keep an eye on soldiers if they are all in a central camp or barracks and keeping an eye on everyone in turn makes it a lot easier to ensure that everyone shows up promptly to muster in the morning with the minimum of hassle. So if a general can, he really would want to keep everyone out of towns and villages and in a regular marching camp. Doing so demands yet more discipline because of course the soldiers would rather sleep in houses than in tents, but it has substantial advantages.
But an army that can lean on the local administrative capacity can simply demand that local administrative apparatus, whatever its form, coordinate the collection and transport of supplies (over short distances) to the army, enabling the army to camp out in a field and get its grain DoorDashed to it. Thus the Romans, when in friendly territory, for instance first identify the local government – usually a town but it could also be a tribal government in non-state regions – and then requisition food from that government, transmitting their demands in advance and letting that local administration figure out the details of getting the required food to the required place. That lets Roman armies camp in their fortified camps away from civilian centers, with attendant advantages for discipline; and indeed, Roman armies typically avoid permanent or even temporary bases in towns, instead using the threat of billeting to get the supplies they needed to stay in regular camps and later permanent forts.
While the elites who run these local systems of government could provide such requisitions themselves (and might in extremis to avoid retaliation by their superiors; the Romans interpret failure to provide requested supplies as “rebellion” and respond accordingly), in practice they’re going to pass along as much of the costs as they can to the little guy. In some cases, requisition demands are so intense we hear of towns having to buy or import grain to meet the demands of passing armies; Athens had to do this in 171 during the Third Macedonian War to avoid the wrath of Rome (Liv. 43.6.1-4). Caesar likewise relied heavily on food supplies contributed by either allied or recently defeated communities in Gaul (Caesar, BG 1.16, 1.23, 1.40, 1.37, 2.3, 3.7, 5.20, 6.44; he does this a lot) to supplement regular foraging operations. Those sources of supply in turn influence his campaigning, as Caesar is forced to move where the grain is in order to resupply (e.g. Caes. BG 1.23). And I want to be clear even these systems of requisition could mean real hardship on a population as a large army could easily eat all of the surplus grain in a province and then some.
The exact structure of that requisition could vary; in some cases it was a extraordinary tax (which is to say, it was just seized), but in many cases it was organized as a forced sale (often at below market prices) or even rebated against future tax obligations. In the Roman Empire we know that in many provinces, initially ad hoc systems of food requisition from conquered or “allied” (read: subordinated) communities were first regularized so that the demands were set at a steady amount, then monetized as military operations moved further away, until eventually being formalized as a taxation system. Thus the primary Roman tax system of the imperial period grew not out of the tax system the Romans had in Italy (which was mostly dismantled in the second century as the tremendous wealth of the provinces made it unnecessary) but as a regularization of systems of requisition and extortion meant to support armies. The Romans also took advantage of the Mediterranean (where naval transport could break the tyranny of the wagon equation) to ship food from one theater to another (so long as operations were fairly close to coastal ports); this was in the Republic coordinated by the Senate which could direct Roman officials (typically governors of some sort) or non-Italian allies in one region to obtain supplies by whatever means and send them another active military theater (Plb. 1.52.5-8, Liv. 25.15.4-5, 27.3.9, 31.19.2-4, 32.27.2, 36.3-4), in some cases even establishing transit depots which could support operations in a large naval theater (e.g. Chios, Liv. 37.27.1). In particular, grain taxed in Sicily was frequently redirected to support Roman military operations across the Mediterranean.
All of this of course assumes that the army enjoys either the use of the local administrative system or the compliance of the local population. But of course in enemy territory – which is where your army wants to go – you cannot rely on that.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part II: Foraging”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-07-29.
September 22, 2025
QotD: Tactical combat on the pre-modern battlefield
In a fight, after all, a combatant is extremely vulnerable to attacks from behind or in their peripheral vision, especially if they are focused forward on the foe in front of them. A confused melee would thus produce extreme casualties and produce them extremely quickly. But fighters want to survive their combats and their leaders would like not only to win the battle but to have an army at the end of it. Remember: the purpose of the battle is to deliver a siege: if you win the battle but with only a pathetic handful of survivors, you haven’t really won much of anything.
The battle line is the obvious solution: each fighter is only responsible for a few feet of frontage directly in front of them, a small enough area that they can focus on it visually and direct whatever shield or armor or weapons they have towards it, giving them a greater margin of safety. Adding depth to the formation (that is, increasing the number of ranks, that is a row of fighters right to left) both secures each fighter against the possibility of being flanked due to the death of the fellows to their right or left (as now they’ll just be replaced by the next rank moving up) and adds a morale reinforcement which we’ll come back to […] But now you have a formation that consists essentially of a large number of files (that is, a single row of fighters front-to-back) which need to move together to create that unbroken, mutually supporting front line so that no one is being attacked from many sides at once. Again, all of this is before we start adding fighting styles like pike-formations or shield-walls that are designed to excel in this environment (and fare poorly out of it).
As an aside, this is one dynamic that I find games like Mount and Blade or the Total War series that simulate individual soldiers struggle to get quite right. In most games the line of formation either remains almost perfectly rigid (think units on “pike phalanx” in Rome: Total War) or units the moment they come into contact form rough blobs of models all pushing forward. But actually you are going to have men in the rear ranks trying to keep their relative position to the front ranks so the formation neither holds rigidly steady nor dissolves but is going to almost flex and bend (and if you are lucky, not tear or break). This is only an aside though because we’re not well informed about these sorts of dynamics, so it is hard to speak about them in-depth.
But to fight this way now means that all of your soldiers (really here we are talking about infantry; cavalry must also be coordinated but in different ways and because they are often composed of elites that coordination may be produced through different training methods) need to move in the same direction at the same speed in order to retain that front line where they can support each other. Again, we are not yet to something like a shield-wall or a sarisa-phalanx which demands tight coordination; even in a rough skirmish line you need to get everyone moving together just to maintain that unbroken front. A break in the front, after all, would be dangerous: enemies filtering into it uncontrolled could then flank and defeat individually the members of the broader line (two-on-one contests in melee combat typically end in seconds and are very lopsided), causing collapse.
Now the good news is that if all you need an army to do is form up in a rough line a few ranks deep and then move more or less forward, the coordination demands are not insurmountable. We’ve already discussed using marching formations to create the line of battle so all you need is a way to regulate speed (since forward is a fairly easy direction for everyone). It isn’t quite ideal for everyone to simply self-regulate their speed by looking around (at least not for a contact infantry line; for missile-skirmish troops moving in a “cloud” rather than a line they can absolutely do that) because that will produce a lot of stagger-start-stopping and accordioning which at best will slow you down and at worst will eventually turn your neat line into a rough crowd – one easily defeated if it is opposed by a line of infantry in good order. Keeping everyone in the same speed can be handled with music: the regular beat regulates the footsteps. That can be a marching song or it can be an instrument (ideally one easy to hear).
We’ve talked about armies – or components of armies – like this. I’ve described hoplite phalanxes through much of the classical periods, for instance, as essentially unguided missiles for this reason: the general hits “go” and the line moves forward. Likewise a shield-wall formation like the early English fyrd doesn’t need to do complex maneuvers. And for many armies, that was enough: a body of infantry which either held a position or moved forward in a single line, in some cases with a body of aristocratic cavalry which might be capable of more complex maneuvers (that the aristocrats had trained in since a young age). And you can see, if your culture has armies like this, why the general might be focused on either leading the cavalry in particular or else being the motivating “warrior-hero” general – such an army isn’t capable of much command once the advance starts in any event. They haven’t trained or prepared for it.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part IIIa”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-06-17.
September 16, 2025
QotD: The Dictatorship in the late Roman Republic
For Sulla, the purpose of using the dictatorship was to offer his reforms to the Republic some degree of legitimacy (otherwise why not just force them through purely by violence without even the fig leaf of law). Sulla was a reactionary who quite clearly believed in the Republic and seems to have been honestly and sincerely attempting to fix it; he was also a brutal, cruel and inhuman man who solved all of his problems with a mix of violence and treachery. While we can’t read Sulla’s mind on why he chose this particular form, it seems likely the aim here was to wash his reforms in the patina of something traditional-sounding in order to give them legitimacy so that they’d be longer lasting, so that Sulla’s own memory might be a bit less tarnished and to make it harder for a crisis like this to occur again.
And it failed at all three potential goals.
When it comes to the legitimacy of Sulla’s reforms and the memory that congealed around Sulla himself, it is clear that he was politically toxic even among many more conservative Romans. A younger Cicero was already using Sulla’s memory to tarnish anyone associated with him in 80, casting Chrysogonus, Sulla’s freedman, as the villain of the Pro Roscio Amerino, delivered in that year. In the sources written in the following decades at best Sulla is a touchy subject best avoided; when he is discussed, it is as a villain. Our later sources on Sulla are uniform in seeing his dictatorship as lawless. Moreover, his own reforms were picked apart by his former lieutenants, with key provisions being repealed before he was even dead (in 78 BC so that’s not a long time).
Finally, of course, far from securing the Republic, Sulla’s dictatorship provided the example and opened the door for more mayhem. Crucially, Sulla had not fixed the army problem and in fact had made it worse. You may recall one benefit of the short dictatorship is that no dictator – indeed, no consul or praetor either – would be in office long enough to secure the loyalty of his army against the state. But in the second and early first century that system had broken down. Gaius Marius had been in continuous military command from 107 to 100. Moreover, the expansion of Rome’s territory demanded more military commands than there were offices and so the Romans had begun selecting proconsuls and propraetors (along with the consuls and praetors) to fill those posts. Thus Sulla was (as a result of the Social War in Italy) a legate in 90, a propraetor in 89, and consul in 88 and so had been in command for three consecutive years (albeit the first as a legate) when he decided to turn his army – which had just, under his command, besieged the rebel stronghold of Nola – against Rome in 88, precisely because his political enemies in Rome had revoked his proconsular command for 87 (by roughing up the voters, to be clear). And then Sulla has that same army under his command as a proconsul from 87 to 83, so by the time he marches on Rome the second time with the intent to mass slaughter his enemies, his soldiers have had more than half a decade under his command to develop that ironclad loyalty (and of course a confidence that if Sulla didn’t win, their service to him might suddenly look like a crime against the Republic).
Sulla actually made this problem worse, because one of the things he legislated by fiat as dictator was that the consuls were now to always stay in Italy (in theory to guard Rome, but guard it with what, Sulla never seems to have considered). That, along with Sulla having butchered quite a lot of the actual experienced and talented military men in the Senate, left a Senate increasingly reliant on special commands doled out to a handful of commanders for long periods, leading (through Pompey‘s unusual career, holding commands in more years than not between 76 and 62) to Julius Caesar being in unbroken command of a large army in Gaul from 58 to 50, by which point that army was sufficiently loyal that it could be turned against the Republic, which of course Caesar does in 49.
For Caesar, the dictatorship seems to have been purely a tool to try to legitimate his own permanent control over the Roman state. Caesar is, from 49 to 44, only in Rome for a few months at a time and so it isn’t surprising that at first he goes to the expedient of just having his appointment renewed. But it is remarkable that his move to dictator perpetuo comes immediately after the “trial balloon” of making Caesar a Hellenistic-style king (complete with a diadem, the clear visual marker of Hellenistic-style kingship) had failed badly and publicly (Plut. Caes. 61). Perhaps recognizing that so clearly foreign an institution would be a non-starter in Rome – unpopular even among the general populace who normally loved Caesar – he instead went for a more Roman-sounding institution, something with at least a pretense of tradition to it.
And if the goal was to provide himself with some legitimacy, the effort clearly catastrophically backfired. The optics of the dictatorship were, at this point, awful; as noted, the only real example anyone had to work with was Sulla, and everyone hated Sulla. Many of Caesar’s own senatorial supporters had probably been hoping, given Caesar’s repeatedly renewed dictatorship, that he would eventually at least resign out of the office (as Sulla had done), allowing the machinery of the Republic – the elections, office holding and the direction of the Senate – to return. Declaring that he was dictator forever, rather than cementing his legitimacy clearly galvanized the conspiracy to have him assassinated, which they did in just two months.
It is striking that no one after Caesar, even in the chaotic power-struggle that ensued, no one attempted to revive the dictatorship, or use it as a model to institutionalize their power, or employ its iconography or symbolism in any way. Instead, Antony, who had himself been Caesar’s magister equitum, proposed and passed a law in 44 – right after Caesar’s death – to abolish the dictatorship, make it illegal to nominate a dictator, or for any Roman to accept the office, on pain of death (App. BCiv, 3.25, Dio 44.51.2). By all accounts, the law was broadly popular. As a legitimacy-building tool, the dictatorship had been worse than useless.
So what might we offer as a final verdict on the dictatorship? As a short-term crisis office used during the early and middle republic, a tool appropriate to a small state that had highly fragmented power in its institutions to maintain internal stability, the dictatorship was very successful, though that very success made it increasingly less necessary and important as Rome’s power grew. The customary dictatorship withered away in part because of that success: a Mediterranean-spanning empire had no need of emergency officials, when its military crises occurred at great distance and could generally be resolved by just sending a new regular commander with a larger army. By contrast, the irregular dictatorship was a complete failure, both for the men that held it and for the republic it destroyed.
The real problem wasn’t the office of dictator, but the apparatus that surrounded it: the short duration of military commands, the effectiveness and depth of the Roman aristocracy (crucially undermined by Sulla and Marius) and – less discussed here but still crucial in understanding the collapse of the Republic – the willingness of the Roman elite to compromise in order to maintain social cohesion. Without those guardrails, the dictatorship became dangerous, but without them any office becomes dangerous. Sulla and Caesar, after all, both marched on Rome not as dictators, but as consuls and proconsuls. It is the guardrails, not the office, that matter.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Roman Dictatorship: How Did It Work? Did It Work?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-18.
September 10, 2025
QotD: “The [western Roman Empire] did not drift hopelessly towards its inevitable fate. It went down kicking, gouging and screaming”
But if you want to actually try to say something intelligent about the whole thing, you need to grapple with what actually happened, rather than the classroom black-box model designed for teaching efficiency rather than detail. We are … not going to do that today … though I will have some bibliography here for those who want to. The key thing here is that the “Fall of Rome” (in the West) is not an event, but a century long process from 376 to 476. Roman power (in the West) contracts for a lot of that, but it expands in periods as well, particularly under the leadership of Aetius (433-454) and Majorian (457-461); there are points where it would have really looked like the Romans might actually be able to recover. Even in 476 it was not obvious to anyone that Roman rule had actually ended; Odoacer, who had just deposed what was to be the last Roman emperor in the west promptly offered the crown to Zeno, the Roman emperor in the East (there is argument about his sincerity but James O’Donnell argues – very well, though I disagree on some key points – that this represented a real opportunity for Rome to rise from defeat in a new form yet again).
Glancing even further back historically, this wasn’t even the first time the Roman Empire had been on the brink of collapse. Beginning in 238, the Roman Empire had suffered a long series of crippling civil wars and succession crises collectively known as the Crisis of the Third Century (238-284). At one point, the empire was de facto split into three, with one emperor in Britain and Gaul, another in Italy, and the client kingdom of Palmyra essentially running the Eastern half of the empire under their queen Zenobia. Empires do not usually survive those kinds of catastrophes, but the Roman Empire survived the Crisis, recovered all of its territory (save Dacia) and even enjoyed a period of relative peace afterwards, before trouble started up again.
The reason that empires do not generally survive those kinds of catastrophes is that generally when empires weaken, they find that they contain all sorts of people who have been waiting, sometimes patiently, sometimes less so, for any opportunity to break away. The rather sudden collapse of the (Neo-)Assyrian Empire (911-609 BC) is a good case study. After having conquered much of the Near East, the Assyrians fell into a series of succession wars beginning in 627; their Mesopotamian subjects smelled blood and revolted in 625. That was almost under control by 620 when the Medes and Persians, external vassals of the Assyrians, smelled blood too and invaded, allying with the rebelling Babylonians in 616. Assyria was effectively gone by 612 with the loss and destruction of Ninevah; they had gone from the largest empire in the world at that time or at any point prior to non-existent in 15 years. While the Assyrian collapse is remarkable for its speed and finality, the overall process is much the same in most cases; once imperial power begins to wane, revolt suddenly looks more possible and so the downward slope of collapse can be very steep indeed (one might equally use the case study of decolonization after WWII as an example: each newly independent country increased the pressure on all of the rest).
Yet there is no great rush to the doors for Rome. Instead, as Guy Halsall puts it in Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West (2007), “The West did not drift hopelessly towards its inevitable fate. It went down kicking, gouging and screaming”. Among the kicked and gouged of course were Attila and his Huns. Fought to a draw at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, his empire disintegrated after his death two years later under pressure from both Germanic tribes and the Eastern Roman Empire (and the standard tendency for Steppe empires to fragment); of his three sons, Ellac was killed by revolting Germanic peoples who had been subject to the Huns, Dengizich by the (Eastern) Romans (we’re told his head was put on display in Constantinople) and the last, Ernak just disappears in our narrative after the death of Dengizich. The Romans, it turns out, did eventually get down to business to defeat the Huns. But the Romans doing all of that kicking, gouging and screaming were not the handful of old families from the early days of the Repulic; most of those hard-fighting Romans were people who in 14 AD would have been provincials. And indeed, the Roman Empire would survive, in the East, where Rome wasn’t, making for a Roman Empire that by 476 consisted effectively entirely of “provincial” Romans.
Instead what we see are essentially three sets of actions by provincial elites who in any other empire would have been leading the charge for the exits. There were the kickers, gougers and screamers, as Halsall notes. There were also, as Ralph Mathisen, Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul (1993) has noted, elites who – seeing the writing on the wall – made no effort to hasten the collapse of the empire but instead retreated into their estates, their books and their letters; these fellows often end up married into and advising the new “barbarian” kings who set up in the old Roman provinces (which in turn contributes quite a bit to the preservation and continued influence of Roman law and culture in the various fragmented successor states of the early Middle Ages). Finally, there were elites so confident that the empire would survive – because it always had! – that they mostly focused on improving their position within the empire, even at the cost of weakening it, not because they wanted out, but because “out” was inconceivable to them; both Halsall and also James O’Donnell, The Ruin of the Roman Empire (2009) document many of these. If I may continue my analogy, when the exit door was yawning wide open, almost no one walked through; some tried to put out the burning building they were in, others were content to be at the center of the ruins. But no one actually left.
During the Crisis of the Third Century, that set of responses had been crucial for the empire’s survival and for brief moments in the 400s, it looked like they might even have saved it again. For all of the things that brought the Roman Empire down, it is striking that “internal revolts” of long-ruled peoples weren’t one of them. And that speaks to the power of Rome’s effective (if, again, largely unintentional) management of diversity. The Roman willingness to incorporate conquered peoples into the core citizen body and into “Roman-ness” meant that even by 238 to the extent that the residents of the Empire could even imagine its collapse, they saw that potentiality as a disaster, rather than as a liberation. That gave the empire tremendous resiliency in the face of disaster, such that it took a century of unremitting bad luck to bring it down and even then, it only managed to take down half of it.
(As an aside, those provincial Romans were correct in the judgement that the collapse of the empire would mean disaster. The running argument about the fall of the Roman Empire is generally between the “decline and fall” perspective, which presents the collapse of the Roman Empire as a Bad Thing and the “change and continuity” perspective, which both stresses continuity after the collapse but also tends to try minimize the negative impacts of it, even to the point of suggesting that the average Roman peasant might have been better off in the absence of heavy Roman taxes. That latter view is particularly common among many medievalists, who are understandably quite tired of the unfairly poor reputation their period gets. This is an argument that for some time lived in the airy space of narrative and perspective where both sides could put an argument out. Unfortunately for some of the change-and-continuity arguments about living standards, archaeology has a tendency to give us data that is somewhat less malleable. That archaeological data shows, with a high degree of consistency, that while there is certainly some continuity between the Late Antique and the early Middle Ages the fall of Rome (in the West) killed lots of people (precipitous declines in population in societies without reliable birth control; probably this is mostly food scarcity, not direct warfare) and that living standards also declined to a degree that the results are archaeologically visible. As Brian Ward-Perkins notes in The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005), the collapse causes cows to shrink, speaking to sudden scarcity of winter fodder (which in turn likely speaks to a general reduction in available nutrition). Some areas were worse hit than others; Robin Flemming, Britain After Rome (2010) notes, for instance, that in post-Roman Britain, pot-making technology was lost (because ceramic production had been focused in cities which had been largely depopulated out of existence). The fall of Rome might have been good for some people, but the evidence is, I think, at this point inescapable that it was quite bad for most people. Especially, one assumes, all of the people who got depopulated.)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing and Empire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-07-30.
September 4, 2025
QotD: The development of the “halftrack” during the interwar period
What drove the differences in tank development between countries were differences between how each of those countries imagined using their tanks, that is differences in tank doctrine. Now we should be clear here that there were some fundamental commonalities between the major schools of tank thinking: in just about all cases tanks were supposed to support infantry in the offensive by providing armor and direct fire support, including knocking out enemy tanks. Where doctrine differed is exactly how that would be accomplished: France’s doctrine of “Methodical Battle” generally envisaged tanks moving at the speed of mostly foot infantry and being distributed fairly evenly throughout primarily infantry formations. That led to tanks that were fairly slow with limited range but heavily armored, often with just a one-man turret (which was a terrible idea, but the doctrine reasoned you wouldn’t need more in a slow-moving combat environment). Of course this worked poorly in the event.
More successful maneuver warfare doctrines recognized that the tank needed infantry to perform its intended function (it has to have infantry to support) but that tanks could now move fast enough and coordinate well enough (with radios) that any supporting arms like infantry or artillery needed to move a lot faster than walking speed to keep up. Both German “maneuver warfare” (Bewegungskrieg) and Soviet “Deep Operations” (or “Deep Battle”) doctrine saw the value in concentrating their tanks into powerful striking formations that could punch hard and move fast. But tanks alone are very vulnerable and in any event to attack effectively they need things like artillery support or anti-air protection. So it was necessary to find ways to allow those arms to keep up with the tanks (and indeed, a “Panzer divsion” is not only or even mostly made up of tanks!).
At the most basic level, one could simply put the infantry on trucks or other converted unarmored civilian vehicles, making “motorized” infantry, but […] part of the design of tanks is to allow them to go places that conventional civilian vehicles designed for roads cannot and in any event an unarmored truck is a large, vulnerable tempting target on the battlefield.
The result is the steady emergence of what are sometimes jokingly called “battle taxis” – specialized armored vehicles designed to allow the infantry to keep up with the tanks so that they can continue to be mutually supporting, while being more off-road capable and less vulnerable than a truck. In WWII, these sorts of vehicles were often “half-tracks” – semi-armored, open-topped vehicles with tires on the front wheels and tracks for the back wheels, though the British “Universal Carrier” was fully tracked. Crucially, while these half-tracks might mount a heavy machine gun for defense, providing fire support was not their job; being open-topped made them particularly vulnerable to air-bursting shells and while they were less vulnerable to fire than a truck, they weren’t invulnerable by any means. The intended use was to deposit infantry at the edge of the combat area, which they’d then move through on foot, not to drive straight through the fight.
The particular vulnerability of the open-top design led to the emergence of fully-enclosed armored personnel carriers almost immediately after WWII in the form of vehicles like the M75 Armored Infantry Vehicle (though the later M113 APC was eventually to be far more common) and the Soviet BTRs (“Bronetransporter” or “armored transport”), beginning with the BTR-40; Soviet BTRs tended to be wheeled whereas American APCs tend to be tracked, something that also goes for their IFVs (discussed below). These vehicles often look to a journalist or the lay observer like a tank, but they do not function like tanks. The M113 APC, for instance, has just about 1.7 inches of aluminum-alloy armor, compared to the almost four inches of much heavier steel armor on the contemporary M60 “Patton” tank. So while these vehicles are armored, they are not intended to stick in the fight and are vulnerable to much lighter munitions than contemporary tank would be.
At the same time, it wasn’t just the infantry that needed to be able to keep up: these powerful striking units (German Panzer divisions, Soviet mechanized corps or US armored divisions, etc.) needed to be able to also bring their heavy weaponry with them. At the start of WWII, artillery, anti-tank guns and anti-air artillery remained almost entirely “towed” artillery – that is, it was pulled into position by a truck (or frequently in this period still by horses) and emplaced (“unlimbered”) to be fired. Such systems couldn’t really keep up with the tanks they needed to support and so we see those weapons also get mechanized into self-propelled artillery and anti-air (and for some armies, tank destroyers, although the tank eventually usurps this role entirely).
Self-propelled platforms proved to have another advantage that became a lot more important over time: they could fire and then immediately reposition. Whereas a conventional howitzer has to be towed into position, unlimbered, set up, loaded, fired, then limbered again before it can move, something like the M7 Priest can drive itself into position, fire almost immediately and then immediately move. This maneuver, called “shoot-and-scoot” (or, more boringly, “fire-and-displace”) enables artillery to avoid counter-battery fire (when an army tries to shut down enemy artillery by returning fire with its own artillery). As artillery got more accurate and especially with the advent of anti-artillery radars, being able to shoot-and-scoot became essential.
Now while self-propelled platforms were tracked (indeed, often using the same chassis as the tanks they supported), they’re not tanks. They’re designed primarily for indirect fire (there is, of course, a sidebar to be written here on German “assault guns” – Sturmgeschütz – and their awkward place in this typology, but let’s keep it simple), that is firing at a high arc from long range where the shell practically falls on the target and thus are expected to be operating well behind the lines. Consequently, their armor is generally much thinner because they’re not designed to be tanks, but to play the same role that towed artillery (or anti-air, or rocket artillery, etc.) would have, only with more mobility.
So by the end of WWII, we have both tanks of various weight-classes, along with a number of tank-like objects (APCs, self-propelled artillery and anti-air) which are not tanks but are instead meant to allow their various arms to keep up with the tanks as part of a combined arms package.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: When is a ‘Tank’ Not a Tank?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-05-06.
August 29, 2025
QotD: The early “Motte and Bailey” castles
But as noted, the personal manor home of a significant noble (the rank in this case is often a “castellan”, literally the keeper of a castle, so entrusted by one of the more powerful nobles who holds sway over a larger territory; the castellan has the job of holding the castle and administering the countryside around it) is also an administrative center, managing the extraction of agricultural surplus from the countryside and also a military base, housing the physical infrastructure for that noble’s retinue, which again is the fundamental building block of larger armies. Which means that it is going to need more structures to house those functions: stables for horses, storehouses for food, possibly food processing facilities (bakeries, mills) and living space both for retainers (be they administrators or military retainers) and for the small army of servants such a household expects. Those structures (to the degree they can’t exist in the keep) are put in the bailey, a wider enclosed part of the settlement constructed at the base of the motte. As with the motte, the bailey is typically enclosed only by a wooden palisade; naturally that means the most valuable things (the physical treasury, the lord’s family) go in the keep on the motte, while the more space-demanding but less valuable things go in the bailey. There is a lot of room for variation in this basic type, but for now the simple version will serve.
The resulting fortification seems almost paradoxically vulnerable. The bailey, after all, is protected only by a ditch and a wooden palisade which a determined work-party could breach with just iron axes and an afternoon to kill. The core defensive motte with its keep adds perhaps only one more palisade and a steep climb. But in fact, these relatively modest defenses have greatly increased the cost of attacking this settlement. The motte and bailey castle, at least in its early wooden form, won’t stand up to a determined assault by a large and well-coordinated enemy, but that isn’t its purpose. Instead, the purpose of the motte and bailey castle is to raise the cost of an assault such that a potential opponent must bring a significant force and make a careful, well-planned assault; this the motte and bailey accomplishes quite well, which explains the long durability of the basic design, with stone versions of the motte and bailey persisting into the 15th century.
The quick mounted raid is now impossible; precisely because it will take a solid afternoon to breach the defenses, there is little hope of surprising the defenders. At the same time, the ditches will make any such work party vulnerable to missile fire (arrows, yes, but also javelins or just large rocks) from the palisade. And most of all, taking the place now demands you coordinate a work party, with some of your attackers splitting up to suppress the defenders, some making sure to block the exits so the defenders don’t rush out and attack your work party directly, and still more of your attackers in the work party itself. These very basic defenses have suddenly taken you from a position where a bit of surprise and rough numerical parity was enough to contemplate an assault to a position where you need several times as many attackers (for each of those divisions needs to be large enough to confidently win against the defenders if assailed).
Perhaps most importantly, the basic structure of this defense demands that you do this multiple times in sequence. We’ve already discussed the value of defense-in-depth, but in brief, every attack is at its strongest in the moment after it jumps off: everyone is alive, in the right positions, at the right time, coordinated and at least in theory clear on their objectives. Every movement and action beyond this point diminishes the power of the effort as coordination breaks down, attackers are killed and things break; this is what Clausewitz terms (drink!) friction – the unpredictable interaction of probabilities takes their toll on any plan, no matter how carefully designed. This is, by the by, more true in real warfare, where coordination is limited by communications technology, than it is in film or video games, where armies appear to mostly communicate by some form of instantaneous telepathy (it is amazing just how many clever sounding movie or game assault plans fall apart once you imagine trying to coordinate them with nothing more than shouting, or even a radio). As more and more things turn out unexpectedly or have to be improvised, the plan slowly shakes apart until eventually all of the momentum is lost.
The basic structure of a motte and bailey castle exploits this feature of warfare, forcing an attacker to overcome a series of obstacles in sequence, all while in contact with the enemy. Recall that this is a defense which really doesn’t envisage enemy artillery (because armies with lots of effective siege artillery were not common in the often small-scale warfare of the period; that’s not to say they didn’t exist, but if your motte and bailey castle forces the enemy to only attack with a big, expensive army that can build catapults, it has done its job, not the least because most possible enemies won’t have that capability at all), so an attacker is going to have to breach each layer in sequence while in contact with the defense and to pierce them all more or less “in one go”. Consequently, taking the castle by storm means crossing (and probably filling in) at least one deep ditch, breaching a palisade under fire, then moving up a steep hill under fire, then breaching another palisade, at the end of all of which, the attacker must arrive at the keep with enough force and cohesion to take it. All of that is going to take a substantial attack and a lot of coordination and most potential attackers, the defender may hope, will lack either the resources or the determination to go through so much effort, especially as they are likely to have to do it multiple times: being entirely wooden, motte and bailey castles were fairly cheap and so a large territory could have quite a lot of them (note on the Bayeux Tapestry how William has to take several such castles in order to capture Conan II of Britanny). Each motte and bailey castle thus raises the cost of trying to seize control of the territory; collectively they make that cost prohibitive.
Of course our principle of “antagonistic co-evolution” is not done and the vulnerabilities of a wooden motte and bailey castle are fairly clear and easy to exploit. For one, the wooden palisade is mostly a blocking element, rather than a fighting position; attackers that reach the wall can actually use it as cover while tearing it down or setting it on fire. The entire setup, being made of wood, is vulnerable to fire but also to any kind of even-quite-modest catapult. And quite naturally, any military leader (which is to say, the military aristocracy which was emerging at the very same time as these castles) is going to want to build the kind of capabilities which will allow for successful castle assaults because, as we’ve already noted, castles function more or less as the “nails” on the map which hold down the canvas of revenue extraction and military power.
Which in turn means evolving castle design to resist the methods by which a motte and bailey castle might fall. The most immediate change is in building material: wooden walls can only be so high, so thick and so resistant to fire. Stone, though far more expensive, offers advantages on all three fronts. And so, already in the late 10th century, we start to see stone keeps and gatehouses (supporting still wooden palisades); full stone castles would soon follow.
As an aside, one solution to this problem which doesn’t much appear in the Middle Ages but was very well-used in Iron Age Europe was what the Romans called the murus Gallicus, a hybrid wood-and-stone wall system. Gallic hillforts (called oppida) were built on hills, as the name suggests; their outer walls could be built by using earth fill to construct what was essentially a retaining wall, faced in stone, with transverse reinforcing wood beams every few feet. That created, in turn, a vertical stone surface, supported by the hillside itself, on which could be additionally built a wooden palisade for added height. The result was a very formidable fortification, assuming one had the hill to work with initially. You couldn’t knock it over or really undermine it effectively and the stone face was nearly vertical; the height of the hill meant that effective escalade meant coming up with a mole, tower or ladder taller than the hill (a thing, naturally, that the Romans ended up doing). That this style of fortification didn’t really reemerge in the Middle Ages speaks to the degree of path dependence in fortification design. Because fortification design tends to be evolutionary, it is possible in similar conditions to get very different responses as different designers try to meet the same threats by modifying different preexisting systems of fortification.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part III: Castling”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-12-10.
August 23, 2025
QotD: The background of Tiberius Gracchus
Meanwhile, as D.J. Gargola has noted, Appian is also bending his account of Tiberius Gracchus’ reforms, in particular by presenting the Lex Sempronia Agraria as an entirely traditional, conventional response to a pressing crisis.1 But in fact, the provisions of the Lex Sempronia Agraria were not traditional: no similar law (save for a re-enactment by Gaius Gracchus) – had ever or would ever be passed in Rome and the legal precedent that Appian presents as providing the foundation for Tiberius’ law appears to be at least substantially an anachronistic invention. Meanwhile, the crisis Appian thinks Tiberius Gracchus thought he was addressing probably didn’t exist in the form he understood it.
But that’s what we have, so it is what we must work with. And we should note that both Plutarch and Appian are quite favorable to the Gracchi, even though both men were clearly very controversial in their day. So in a sense this is a reverse of the situation we had with Cleopatra, where we had to contend with relentlessly negative sources: here the sources are broadly positive.
So, on with what we know.
Tiberius Gracchus was elected tribune in 133. His election was already unusual in that he seems to have run on something like a program (land reform, which we’ll get to); Romans generally ran on character and background rather than promising specific political actions if elected, so this was unusual. Part of the reason for it was doubtless that Tiberius Gracchus’ political fortunes were in difficulties. Now we should note here that while Tiberius Gracchus was a plebian (that is, not a patrician) that doesn’t make him a political outsider: Tiberius Gracchus was not remotely a political outsider or poor man or lacking in influence. His father (also Ti. Sempronius Gracchus) had been consul in 177 and 163 and censor in 169; his father (or grandfather) was consul in 215 and 213. Our Tiberius Gracchus’ mother, Cornelia, was the daughter of P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus, the man who defeated Hannibal. Tiberius Gracchus was born into substantial wealth and influence, the sort of man whose eventual political ascent was almost guaranteed.
(Indeed, it was so guaranteed that he gets to bend the rules and hold many of his offices early. He’s quaestor at just 26, which implies that he started his military service at 15 or 16 instead of the normal 17, doing so as a military tribune, not a common soldier. I do think this is relevant to understanding Tiberius Gracchus: this was a man born with a silver spoon and a carefully paved, flat-and-easy road to power and influence laid out for him by his family and his political backers, the most notable among whom was his key supporter Scipio Aemilianus (destroyer of Carthage and shortly Numantia).)
Except. Except he got wrapped up in something of a nasty foreign policy scandal during his year as quaestor, when he was assigned to the amazingly named but less amazingly capable C. Hostilius Mancinus who as consul in 137 was supposed to deal with Numantia in Spain. Mancinus blew it and got his army effectively trapped and sent Tiberius – his quaestor and the next highest ranking Roman present – to negotiate to get his army out. Tiberius did this, but the whole thing caused a great stink and a scandal at Rome (Roman armies are supposed to go down fighting, not negotiate shameful retreats!). Indeed, the Senate was so enraged they rejected the treaty and instead sent Mancinus, bound in chains, to the Numantines as part of a ritual process by which his treaty was disowned. Tiberius doesn’t get packed off to Numantia, but some of the political stink does rub off on him, so while he’s connected enough to get elected as a plebeian tribune in 133, he must know he needs a big second act to get his political career back on track, or he may never reach the consulship. That context – a political insider who had a golden ticket but must now win it back, rather than an outsider without connections – is important for understanding the reaction he is going to get.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Gracchi, Part I: Tiberius Gracchus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-01-17.
- 1. D.J. Gargola, “The Gracchan Reform and Appian’s Representation of an Agrarian Crisis” in People, Land and Politics, eds. L. De Ligt and S.J. Northwood (2008).
August 17, 2025
QotD: The benefits of using auxilia units to the Roman Empire
The most obvious of these is manpower. Especially with a long-service professional army, capable and qualified recruits are in limited supply. The size of the Roman army during the imperial period ranged from around 300,000 to around 500,000, but in 14 AD (the year of Augustus‘ death) there were only 4,937,000 Roman citizens (Res Gestae 8.11), a figure which probably (a word I am using to gloss over one of the most technical and complex arguments in the field) includes women and children. Needless to say, keeping something close to a fifth of the adult male citizen population under arms continually, forever was simply never going to be feasible. After his victory in 31 BC at Actium, Octavian (soon to be Augustus) had acted quickly to pare down the legions, disbanding some, merging others, until he reached a strength of just 28 (25 after the three legions lost in 9 AD were not replaced). It was a necessary move, as the massive armies that had been raised during the fever-pitch climax of the civil wars simply could not be kept under arms indefinitely, nor could a short-term service conscript army be expected to garrison the hundreds of miles of Roman limes (“frontier, border”) in perpetuity.
Harnessing the manpower of the provinces was simply the necessary solution – so necessary that almost every empire does it. By their very nature, empires consist of a core which rules over a much larger subject region, typically with far greater population; securing all of that territory almost always requires larger forces than the core’s population is able or willing to provide, leading to the recruitment of auxiliaries of all kinds. But whereas many imperial auxiliaries, as noted above, turn out to be potential dangers or weaknesses, Rome’s auxilia seem to have been fairly robustly “bought in” on the system, allowing Rome to access motivated, loyal, cohesive and highly effective manpower, quite literally doubling the amount of military force at their disposal. Which in turn mattered a great deal because the combat role of the auxilia was significant, in stark contrast to many other imperial armies which might use auxiliaries only in subsidiary roles.
The auxilia also served to supply many of the combat arms the Romans themselves weren’t particularly good at. The Romans had always performed very well as heavy infantry and combat engineers, but only passably as light infantry and truly poorly as shock cavalry; they generally hadn’t deployed meaningful numbers of their own missile cavalry or archers at all. We’ve already talked a lot about how social institutions and civilian culture can be important foundational elements for certain kinds of warfare, and this is no less true with the Romans. But by recruiting from subject peoples whose societies did value and practice the kinds of warfare the Romans were, frankly, bad at, the Roman skill-set could be diversified. And early on, this is exactly what we see the auxilia being used for (along with also providing supplemental heavy infantry), with sagitarii (archers), funditores (slingers), exploratores (scouts) and cavalry (light, heavy and missile), giving the Romans access to a combined arms fighting force with considerable flexibility. And the system clearly works – even accounting for exaggerated victories, it is clear that Roman armies, stretched over so long a frontier, were both routinely outnumbered but also routinely victorious anyway.
As Ian Haynes notes, the ethnic distinctiveness of various auxilia units does not seem to have lasted forever, though in some cases distinctive dress, equipment and fighting styles lasted longer. Most auxilia were posted far from their regions of origin and their units couldn’t rely on access to recruits from their “homeland” to sustain their numbers over the long haul (although some number of recruits would almost certainly come from the military families of veterans settled near the forts). But that didn’t mean the loss of the expertise and distinctive fighting styles of the auxilia. Rather skills, weapons and systems which worked tended to get diffused through the Roman army (particularly in the auxilia, but it is hard not to notice that eventually the spatha replaces the gladius as the sword of the legions). As Ovid quips, Fas est et ab hoste doceri, “It is right to learn, even from the enemy” (Met. 4.428); the Romans do that a lot. The long-service professional nature of these units presumably made a lot of this possible, with individual cohortes and alae becoming their own pockets of living tradition in the practice of various kinds of fighting and acclimating new recruits to it. Consequently, not only did the Roman army get access to these fighting-styles, because the auxilia were actually integrated into the military system rather than merely attached to it, they also got the opportunity to adopt or imitate the elements of the fighting styles that worked.
Finally, the auxilia system also minted new Romans. We’ve already mentioned that auxilia veterans received Roman citizenship on retirement, but that wasn’t the extent of it. We can see in inscriptions that the degree of cultural fluency that soldiers in the auxilia gained with Roman culture was high; they often adopted Roman or Romanized names and seem to have basically always learned Latin (presumably because their Roman officers wouldn’t have spoken their language). While some units of the auxilia kept distinctive national dress as a sort of uniform, most of the auxilia seem to have adopted a style of dress that, while distinct from the legions, was generally in keeping with the Roman tradition of military dress (which was not quite the same as Roman civilian dress). They also partook of the Roman military diet (Roman soldiers kept a similar diet all over the empire, even if that meant shipping thousands of amphora of olive-oil and sour wine to northern England) which would have given them a diet in common with many work-a-day Romans too. Once retired, auxilia soldiers tended to settle where they served (rather than returning to their “home” provinces), which meant settling in frontier provinces where their citizenship set them apart as distinctively Roman, wherever they may have come from.
Exactly how many auxilia would have retired like this requires a degree of number crunching. Given a 20-year tour of service and zero mortality, we might expect around 7,500 men to pass through the auxilia each year. But of course, mortality wasn’t zero and so we have to expect that of our c. 20-year-old recruits, some number are going to die before retirement. Using some model life tables (following B. Frier, “Demography” in CAH^2 XI (2000)), we should figure that very roughly one third of our recruits will have died before reaching discharge. We then we need to adjust our recruitment figures to retain the same total strength and we get something like 9,000 new recruits each year to keep a strength of c. 150,000 with mortality counted for and 20 year tours. That gives us roughly 6,000 auxilia living to retirement each year. That may seem a small number, but that gradual accretion matters when it runs for decades and centuries and the newly enfranchised family units (recall that the citizenship grant covers children and sort-of-kind-of his spouse1) tend to settle on the frontiers, which is a really handy place to have communities of citizens. If we assume that these new citizen families mostly reproduced themselves (or more correctly that they went extinct or split with multiple children at roughly the same rate with no natural population growth), then we’d expect this process to produce perhaps something like 1.5 million new citizen households up until the Constitutio Antoniniana. Being very back of the envelope then, we might – once we account for women and children descendants of those soldiers – assume that on the eve of the general grant of citizenship in 212, there were perhaps 4 million Romans whose citizenship status was a product of service in the auxilia somewhere in their history; perhaps representing something like 7% of the entire population (including non-free persons). Were we to assume larger households (which seems wise, given that retired auxiliaries are probably more likely than average to be in an economic position to have a larger family), that figure would be even higher.
That is a very meaningful number of new Romans. And those figures don’t account for some of the other ways Roman citizenship tended to expand through communities both through manumission but also the political networks citizenship created (your Latin-speaking former-auxiliary citizen neighbors are a lot more likely to be able to help intercede to get you citizenship or get your community recognized as a municipia with that attendant citizenship grant). And not only are those new Romans by legal status, but new Romans who have, by dint of military training and discipline, absorbed quite a lot of Roman culture. As best we can tell, they tended to view the Roman Empire as their polity, rather than as a foreign or oppressive entity. They were “bought in” as it were. Again, this does not seem to have been the Roman intent, but rather an opportunistic, self-serving response to the need to maintain the loyalty of these troops; citizenship was, after all, a free benefit the emperor might bestow at no cost to the treasury (since citizens who lived outside of Italy still owed taxes) or himself.
Of course that fits the auxilia in to a later pattern in the provinces which becomes perhaps most apparent as the Roman Empire begins to collapse …
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing and Empire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-07-30.
- Note on the coverage of the spouse. The grant of citizenship covered any biological children of the discharged auxiliary but did not extend citizenship to his wife. It did however, give an auxiliary the right to contract a lawful marriage with effectively any free woman, including non-citizens and the children resulting from such a union would be citizens themselves. Consequently, it extended one of the core privileges of citizenship to the non-citizen wife of a discharged auxiliary: the right to bear citizen children. Since the wife would be part of the retired auxiliary’s household (and then later, if he predeceased her, potentially in the household of her male citizen children) she’d be legally covered in many cases because a legal action against her would generally be an action against her husband/child. Given that a number of the rights of citizens simply didn’t apply to women in the Roman world (e.g. office holding), this system left the wife of a retired auxiliary with many, but not all, of the privileges of citizenship, so long as her husband and her marriage survived. That said, the legal status remained vested in her husband or her children, which made it more than a little precarious. One of these days, we can talk more about the structure of the Roman familia.
